Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline (7 page)

Powergaming is the pursuit of the time-rich, the domain of students and the unemployed, those who are able to dedicate the swaths of time necessary to master the game and then maintain their mastery. But this approach to playing games also demands
a certain type of player, the kind of human who can maintain focus on a single goal at the expense of all others. For Edmond, the dedication he gave reflects the part of his personality that wants to compete and to become the best.

For Boyle, however, the obsession reflects something that he views as a negative aspect of his personality.

‘It was an absolute loss of time,’ he says. ‘I took nothing good away from it. Instead I lost several years of my life I could have done something else with. It was a cause of concern and disgust for my family, like a bad drug addiction where you would sacrifice nearly everything for the monthly subscription and Internet access. Those days were far from glamorous, and what money was made from playing got dumped back into the games to fuel the addiction. It took boredom for me to finally break the cycle.’

While many powergamers set aside the pursuit of in-game excellence as they grow older and the demands of adulthood squeeze free time and energy, the inner mentality developed through these experiences is not so easily discarded.

‘To this day I still enjoy playing games at the top tier,’ says Edmond. ‘When you’re just a casual player you muddle through. When you’re at the top level, you have to experiment and truly understand the concepts. This gives you more freedom in a way. Most of us still enjoy the challenge of figuring out a game and getting to the top, but we no longer desire the stagnant gameplay of remaining there.’

Today Boyle warns others away from this mode of play. But Edmond is more pragmatic.

‘Don’t listen to all those horror stories about people who ruined their lives this way,’ he says. ‘People ruin their lives with partying. People ruin their lives by trying to be professional athletes. You can find scare stories about people destroying their lives doing
almost anything. Setting a goal and accomplishing it is one of the greatest things a person can do.’

For each of these players around the world, video games provided a clear and, crucially, an achievable goal—one that came with the promise of peer approval and kudos. Whether you’re being applauded for your performance on the
Dance Dance Revolution
machine, for your world-record-breaking high score in a thirty-year-old arcade game, or for your character’s hard-won cloak in an online game, these video games provide an accessible route to glory. In reality, success is rarely reported so straightforwardly. Virtual attainment is an illusion we willingly serve, sometimes at the cost of genuine personal, professional, financial, social, or spiritual progress and, more pertinently, as a dependable stand-in when those things prove elusive. Video games give us a sense of achievement that is, in the moment at least, indistinguishable from success outside the game.

And on the leaderboard, that semi-permanent record of a person’s achievements, there is a kind of immortality, a reassurance that, contrary to what many might believe, this wasn’t a waste of time, an endeavour that will be lost the moment the machine is switched off.

Video games record our achievements (the modern consoles even use the terminology, recording in-game achievements as part of an enduring player’s profile that, presumably, they will carry throughout their lives). We talk of ‘saving’ our progress in a game, making a permanent record of what we’ve done within their reality. Video games are perhaps a kind of immortality project, a way to save the memory of our progress in life, a way to find glory through victory in competition and, ultimately, a way to somehow endure.

3

LOST IN THE SYSTEM

The man approaches the booth, his face a scrawl of worry lines, his eyes determined. He slides papers across the desk.

‘What is the purpose of your trip?’ I ask.

‘Today is a beautiful day, my friend,’ he replies, ignoring the question with the amiable defiance of the octogenarian.

He and his wife have, he explains, fled the tyranny of their home country, Antegria. They have come to seek asylum, here in Arstotzka.

His story is affecting, but largely irrelevant. In
Papers, Please
, a video game set in a fictional (yet historically realistic) 1980s-era Eastern European communist country, would-be immigrants are assaulting the border. Many are just as deserving of refuge as this man and his bent-backed wife, who shifts her weight between her feet as she waits in line behind her husband.

My job as the immigration inspector at the Grestin Border Checkpoint is not to weigh the truth or worth of these stories. Rather, it is to check that each person’s papers are in order and, ideally, to find them lacking and deny entry. It pays to make snap decisions: the more people I process in a day, the more money I take home to my family.

But the bureaucracy is chaotic: every day a fresh set of rules and checks is sent from the capital, new knots in the red tape designed to make access that much harder for the asylum seekers at the gates.

Mistakes are costly: my pay is docked for each person I let through in error. My wages do not cover the food, heating, and medicine I need to feed, clothe, and heal my family, so the more mistakes that are made, the starker my choices become. When there’s a limited amount of money in the pot, you must decide which loved ones to care for. Who will spend today with pangs of sickness or hunger?

The man’s papers are in order.

But as I stamp them, he looks anything but relieved.

‘
Please
be kind to my wife,’ he says, shuffling off across no man’s land with its mad dogs and swivelling searchlights. ‘She is just after me.’

Moments later she approaches the window, slow with age and anxiety.

‘Did you see my husband?’ she asks. ‘He made it through, yes?’

Her passport seems in order, but when I ask to see her entry permit her face blanches.

‘They would not give me permit,’ she says. ‘I have no choice. I will be killed if I return to Antegria. Please, I beg you.’

The difficult decisions have come earlier than usual today. My choice is plain: save the bureaucracy or save the marriage and, possibly, the life.

Our world is built upon invisible rules and systems.

The natural laws govern when the sun rises and falls. They specify the tug of gravity, the timing of the seasons, the gestation of a pregnancy, the direction in which rivers flow, the way flowers are pollinated, the need for water and for love.

Then there are the human-made laws and systems. They govern our behaviour, determining the side of the road on which all cars must drive and the speed limit that drivers must adhere to. There are systems in place for when these rules are broken. There are rules that set the time at which street lights flicker to life and that dictate whether or not a person is allowed to pass from one country to the next. They specify who is allowed healthcare, how many items we are allowed in our basket at the supermarket checkout, and the amount of money and support that our state offers those in need.

We refer to the legal system, the school system, the healthcare system. We talk of broken systems, referring to when things don’t work as they should. We say, ‘The system works!’ often with disbelief, when they do.

Our own bodies function thanks to thousands of interrelated systems, the complexities of the human organism with its wending blood, churning waste, fizzing oxygen, enzymes, anti-bodies, nerve endings, and biorhythms. We exist not only within systems but
because of
systems, without which we could not live, breathe, walk, talk, or think. Systems not only govern our lives; they also facilitate them.

It is not only logical but inevitable that our video games should be built from rules and systems that reflect those of our experience. These rules might be as basic as
Pong
(1972), the primitive tennis game (with its timeless and elegantly succinct instruction: ‘avoid missing ball for high-score’), or they might be as complex as
Grand Theft Auto V
(2013), a game that attempts to recreate the American city of Los Angeles at a geographical, environmental, and sociopolitical level. But no matter how complex or straightforward, a video game is a microcosm, a virtual reality, a place governed by the sorts
of rules and systems that human beings experience in their everyday lives. You might have to plan to visit the shops during opening hours in
Animal Crossing
,
Shenmue
or
Oblivion
, or learn to abide by a strict timetable in the
Densha de Go!
series, in which you play as a harangued Japanese subway train driver, racing to keep his train on time lest his pay be docked for running late.

In laying down the systems that govern their virtual world, video-game makers are omniscient creators with the power of gods. The creator usually starts with the natural laws. They set down the mountains and arrange the valleys in their world. The creator decides upon the sky’s hue, the water’s viscosity, the pitch of birdsong, and the force of gravity’s pull. The creator types ‘Let there be light’ (or the programming equivalent) and there is light. The creator chooses how and when night falls and whether or not there will be a new dawn. The creator conjures how time works (linear, malleable, or something else entirely) and writes the strands of code that form the incumbent creatures’ DNA. Then, when everything is planned out, the creator clicks ‘RUN’ to execute a microcosmic Big Bang.

The author occupies a similar role when constructing the world in which a story will take place. They too set the rules of their fiction, lay the terrain and build the architecture that rises from it, invent the people that will inhabit these landscapes, and conjure the props that they will use. Fiction is the sphere in which the human creator can taste this kind of divine-creator power. But the video game is the only medium that forces an audience to experience firsthand the rules and systems by which the creator’s fictional worlds operate.

Naturally, video games often attempt to distinguish themselves from the mundane texture and circumstance of everyday life by
presenting us with the opportunity to enter situations (and systems) that are too dangerous or expensive for reality.

The earliest video games sent their players to dogfight in outer space (
Spacewar!
, 1962) or to hurtle around a racetrack in a Ferrari Testarossa (
Hard Drivin
’, 1989), exciting experiences that are either outside the realm of possibility or outside the reach of affordability for most people. More recent titles continue the theme. We assume the role of Marines on the Middle Eastern front line (
Call of Duty
, 2003–), an international football star (
FIFA
, 1993–) or a cheap-suited member of the Japanese mafia (
Yakuza
, 2005–).

Increasingly, video-game creators have turned their focus from obviously perilous scenarios to less extreme and yet, for most, equally alien places and systems in life.
SimCity
allows us to experience the stresses and pressures of being a city planner, while in
Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee
, we assume life as an alien slave worker born into captivity. In
Prison Architect
(2015), we are made responsible for both the architectural layout of an American prison and its day-to-day running, balancing the needs and human rights of our prisoners with the bottom line.
Smuggle Truck
(2011) casts you as the driver of a truck filled with would-be immigrants, trying to carry them across the border (Apple initially rejected the game from the App Store based on its controversial theme. When developer Owlchemy Labs changed the game’s title to
Snuggle Truck
, and changed the immigrants to cuddly toys, the game was accepted into the store).

In
Plague Inc
. (2012) we assume the role of a virus, attempting to survive, evolve and propagate till we have travelled to every country in the world and infected every living human.
Coming Out Simulator 2014
is a simple, autobiographical game about a young man’s experiences trying to tell his parents about his sexual orientation. Where else but inside the dimensions of a video game could
we have the experience of living as the pet cat of Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, the first democratically elected prime minister of Iran (
The Cat and the Coup
, 2011)?

Many video games present not only the natural and legal or municipal rules and systems of the world, but also the social ones.
Persona 4
(2008) recreates the pressures and perils of growing up in high school, with its cliques and disorienting group dynamics (even though the game is set in a Japanese high school, the idiosyncrasies of the country’s education system are less important than the universal themes of adolescence).
Coolest Girl in School
(2007) presents its player with the dilemma of how to make it through the day if you end up with a period stain on your skirt (a common, unifying experience for women that’s almost never mentioned in entertainment).

Like
Papers, Please, Cart Life
is another affecting video-game study of life inside a broken system, this time of contemporary life in America for those working on the poverty line. The game follows the lives of recent immigrants as they attempt to earn a living as street vendors. Andrus, for example, sells newspapers to make the rent. Melanie runs a coffee stand in the hope that doing so will prove to the authorities she’s responsible enough to look after her daughter.

Just as you feel something of a chemical cocktail of fear and excitement as you breach the back door of a terrorist hideout in
Call of Duty
, so
Cart Life
elicits honest empathy with its protagonists through its systems. As you experience something of their lives, you begin to feel the pain of systemic unfairness and economic failure firsthand. The pain of inequality is theirs, but as you assume their roles, it’s also somehow yours—at least until the video game is switched off and the unreality pricked. The sense of injustice when Andrus is evicted from his motel room for keeping a cat, his only friend and companion, is devastating.