Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline (19 page)

Not all of the responses to Quinn’s game have been so negative. ‘I receive many e-mails from players telling me they are thankful that someone out there understands,’ she says. ‘
Depression Quest
’s tone is one of hope. Many players have told me they’ve tried to take steps in their life to get their illness under control. I tear up while reading my e-mail on subways a lot.’ Some therapists have even used the game as an exercise to generate empathy between a sufferer and his or her family, Quinn says.

Though Quinn continues to live with the psychological effects of the dox and the ongoing harassment she’s received (people continue to e-mail her daily to say that depression is not a real illness, or, at least, not one that a woman can experience), her belief in being understanding and empathetic remains undiminished.

‘They’re clearly hurting,’ she tells me.

Innocents caught in the crossfire of civil war, parents living with a terminally ill baby, depression sufferers: these are people with whom we naturally empathise. But what of those human beings who are less endearing, whose actions or beliefs we find revolting, rather than engaging?
Super Columbine Massacre RPG
, which attempted to generate empathy with a pair of high-school killers, was, for many, flawed in its execution (too flippant, too cutesy, too unrigorous). But others deny that any such project should have been undertaken, a point of view that, perhaps, springs from the fear that empathising with monsters undermines our ability to feel outrage and scorn.

It is a problem familiar to at least one international terrorist organisation.

In September 2006, al-Qaeda became a game developer.

The organisation’s first game release was dubbed
Night of Bush Capturing
, a game free to anyone with an Internet connection and an open mind. Its six-mission campaign is constructed from genre features familiar to any follower of video games: work your way deep into enemy territory, shoot enemy soldiers before they shoot you, assassinate the leader (in video-game parlance, the ‘final boss’). Only in this case the territory is America, the enemy soldiers are U.S. troops, and the leader in question is George W. Bush.

Programmed by a team from al-Qaeda’s Global Islamic Media Front,
Night of Bush Capturing
is a modified version of an older, U.S.-made game,
Quest for Saddam
, a game released by Petrilla Entertainment in 2003.
Quest for Saddam
was created by Jesse Petrilla, founder of the United American Committee, a (now defunct) supposedly nonpartisan organisation set up to confront Islamic extremism. Al-Qaeda’s programmers swapped out the artwork and textures of this earlier game, replacing the crude representations of Arab soldiers and anti-Islamic propaganda with equally crude versions of American soldiers and anti-American propaganda. This straightforward re-skin turned what was intended to be a rallying, pro–Iraq War game into a diametrically opposed, symmetrical attack on George Bush, his foreign policy, and the nation behind his presidency.

Neither the original game nor al-Qaeda’s transgressive remake was intended to generate empathy. Instead they act as a way for two sides in an ideological conflict to fantasise about domination of the other. There is nothing here, or for that matter in the majority of blockbuster military-themed games that dominate the sales charts, that creates much empathy or understanding—not least because the protagonists are routinely super-heroic soldiers, able to overcome comically insurmountable odds. There is no vulnerability here
to invite compassion or identification. Nevertheless, both games found themselves at the forefront of a global debate on freedom of speech, artistic expression, and the importance of story and setting in video games.

Wafaa Bilal is an Iraqi-American artist and an associate arts professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, known internationally for his online performative and interactive works that aim to provoke dialogue about international politics. In 2008, Bilal created a version of al-Qaeda’s
Night of Bush Capturing
in which he integrates himself into the game’s narrative to present his own commentary on the conflict. He renamed the game
Virtual Jihadi
before presenting it to the world as a piece to challenge viewers and inspire debate and conversation.

Bilal’s twenty-one-year-old brother, an Iraqi citizen, was killed by shrapnel during a firefight in Najaf. In the game, Bilal casts himself as a suicide bomber who, after learning of the real-life death of his brother in the war, is recruited by al-Qaeda to join the hunt for the U.S. president, George Bush. Through his work Bilal says that he intends to ‘bring attention to the vulnerability of Iraqi civilians, highlight racist generalisations and stereotypes promoted in video games, and demonstrate how British and American foreign policy is pushing Iraqi citizens into the arms of violent groups like al-Qaeda.’

It’s a bold and broad purpose, and one that saw Bilal invited by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to present a lecture and exhibit on this work in February 2008. But the exhibition was open for only an hour before city officials shut it down. According to newspaper reports, the decision came after the college Republicans called the arts department ‘a safe haven for terrorists.’

‘While I’m not a big gamer, I realise that games are now a huge part of our lives,’ Bilal tells me. ‘Video games are moving from being
reactive to more dynamic and interactive. For a long time we did not have interactive mediums but only reactive ones. I think that video games can be more effective and powerful than other mediums such as film in conveying a message, in part because they are an active experience that allows the participant to create the narrative. Video games are the medium of our time. As
Quest for Saddam
and
Night of Bush Capturing
were already out there, modifying these controversial examples added weight to my message.’

Bilal is unequivocal about the nature of that message.

‘I am trying to engage people in a conversation,’ he says. ‘We, in the United States of America, have become isolated in a comfort zone. We are so far removed from the conflict. In a way I wanted to hold a mirror to people’s faces to let them see the reality of this war’s repercussions and explore the fallacy in our culture’s denial of that disconnection and their stereotyping of other cultures. In a sense I want to reverse the role of the hunter and the hunted.’

Bilal, in other words, intends to generate empathy through role reversal.

‘The original game,
Quest for Saddam
, did not get any attention from the media and the State Department because the ideas it promoted—that all Muslims are terrorists—was the norm. Then, when the game was modified to become the
Night of Bush Capturing
, the State Department labelled the game as a piece of terrorist propaganda and a recruitment tool. I thought that was strange because the only thing al-Qaeda did is to replace the Iraqi skins with American soldiers’ skins and Saddam’s skin with Bush’s skin. What exactly made it propaganda where it wasn’t before?

‘My game reverses the roles, viewing the conflict seen in countless first-person shooters from the other side. And people in the United States do not like what they see—or rather, what they heard, since the game was open for less than one hour before it was
closed down. This reaction reinforces my belief that a “superior” culture will always impose its point of view on the rest of the world. And when someone speaks out effectively, he or she gets labelled. That is a sign of culture in trouble because it cannot accept a different point of view.’

The opportunity that video games present to an individual to experience different roles and situations to those available to us in daily life is part of their great appeal (and perhaps a part of what makes them all-consuming: there’s always another way of life to try out in these virtual dimensions when you tire of your own). Usually games act as surrogates for activities that are too expensive, demanding, dangerous, or time-consuming. But in the hands of the right designer, this same power can be used to create a different kind of insight.

While experiencing life from another person’s perspective can be challenging (it may, for example, generate empathy towards a person or situation that you would prefer to remain distanced from), it is also deeply fascinating. Humans are irrepressibly interested in other people’s lives (the soaps, the docudramas, the gossip magazines). Games offer a new way to satisfy our curiosity, one that has an entirely different texture and immediacy to television or print. And video games are not only a way for an audience to experience a life outside their own, but also a powerful way for a person to invite others into their own personal history and perspective, to not only view the story from the sidelines, but from the inside. And in becoming a soldier, an oil baron, a city planner, a disenfranchised terrorist, a teenager suffering from mental-health issues, or a displaced Syrian child, we begin to understand the world, and the other people who inhabit it, a little more.

8

HIDING PLACE

Chris Ferguson had almost given up on video games when he first visited
Skyrim
.

‘The power fantasies had worn me out,’ he tells me. ‘Whether it was pretending to be the perfect sportsman or a man changing the world through the power of guns, I was bored of the fantasy. As I began to adjust to the idea of fatherhood, I was more or less ready to leave all that behind.’

Ferguson and his wife, Sarah, had been married for seven years and, during that time, had ‘never not been trying for a baby.’ In that sense, the news that the pair was expecting a baby wasn’t unexpected, but it was still a surprise.

Like many who hear the news for the first time in their lives, the pair began to try on the idea of being parents. They bought a red and blue Babygro that said
JUST LIKE DADDY
across the chest and a pair of those implausibly tiny infant socks. They celebrated their final Christmas as two.

On New Year’s Day, Sarah was taken to a hospital, where she underwent an operation to remove the ectopic pregnancy that threatened her life. This is caused when a fertilised egg implants itself outside the womb, usually in one of the fallopian tubes. Stuck in this tubular limbo, the egg is unable to grow into a baby. About one in every hundred pregnancies is ectopic. If caught early enough, it’s treatable with few side effects. If left undetected, it can cause the tube to rupture, causing life-threatening internal bleeding and
often resulting in the loss of one of the woman’s fallopian tubes. Sarah’s tube had ruptured.

‘It felt like a miracle to get pregnant at all, and then to have that taken away …’ Chris Ferguson says. ‘But it was never a viable pregnancy at all. That’s a funny thing to have to get over. Because in your head it’s been your baby, but in truth it was never something that had a chance to become a baby. You then have to come to terms with the fact that it might have been your only chance to have a baby. The human body does make some allowances for only having one fallopian tube, but it was still devastating.’

After the operation, Ferguson wasn’t allowed into the ward to see Sarah, who needed rest. In the chaos of the emergency, no one had taken a moment to explain to him why, as he puts it, he wasn’t going to be a dad any longer. Instead, they sent him home.

‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he says. ‘There was no question of me going to sleep. I was dazed. I’m not someone who can sit and watch a film. I have the patience to read a book or refresh Twitter all day, but I can’t watch a film. But video games … I can do that.’

Ferguson had been given a video game for Christmas. He put the disc into the drive and began to play.

Skyrim is the name of a vast region set in the northern part of the fictional land of Tamriel after which the game, launched in 2011, is named. It’s a hardy, unforgiving place, home to the Nords, a people toughened by decades spent battling frost. Lines of coniferous trees, defiant and snow-dusted, surround its ice lakes. Grey mountains rise and fall in the distance, clouds draped around their necks. The wind whips up angrily, lifting with it white, swirling powder.

It is a world shared by beasts both mythical and real. Elk canter. Rabbits bound, then lift quivering noses to sniff for threats before
returning to the whisper and scurry of their busy work. Clicking, overgrown crabs patrol the shoreline. Woolly mammoths tread heavily through the snow. At night you’re just as likely to run into a cruel giant as a fox. Freeze the frame and you have a picture postcard: Iceland with the contrast turned up. Dig a little deeper and you find Iceland with a cave-troll infestation. There are friends to be made here, in the nooks and valleys, but generally Skyrim regards you as an unwanted visitor: the land and its people try to expel you.

This place of virtual cold and grim scarcity is not a typical refuge.

In
Skyrim
, you can choose to bring peace or turmoil to the land. The native Nord race want to free their land from Imperial interference, to become independent. The Imperial Legion, the military of the Empire, seeks instead to reunite and pacify the province. To a certain degree, you are free to choose with whom to side.

One of Ferguson’s frustrations with video games at the time was his own tendency to race towards the goal, rather than take time to explore and enjoy the journey.

‘Something that I’ve learned about myself is that, if a game’s story is based on saving the world, I will concentrate all of my attention on that goal,’ he says. ‘Other characters in the game might implore me to carry out side-quests, helping them with this and that, but I usually never engage in that because … well, because the world needs saving and that seems more important.’

This time, however, was different. Ferguson spent his time roaming
Skyrim
’s world, wandering and, as he puts it, exploring for exploration’s sake. For Ferguson, this freedom to set his pace and manage his destiny was key to being able to escape the turmoil in his mind and in his home.