Confident Impotence

VIDEO GAMES FLATTEN BOREDOM. They project the banality of the assembly line onto two-dimensional electronic hallucinogenics. Their garish griminess is as dipped in materialism as the somber sootiness of the factory. Like factories, they furnish the means of subsistence--a numbingly overspiced gruel of colorful flashes, bangs, whooshes, titillating, not nourishing the senses. Their predictability flexes but little the imagination. Punching in the clock; pressing the start button. Filing form A and tightening bolt C evokes the practiced and repetitive pacing of the player's dot across a screen. Punching out the clock; GAME OVER.

Those familiar two words suggest the appeal of the suicidal America provides crude, coin-operated Magic Theatres for its Steppenwolves, consolation for its lonely citizens. The letters flash by with a large and bright finality that eulogizes the machine's return to programmed peace. The ending taunts the defeated human, America's new opiate lacks the sublimity of Mozart and allows only illusory release. In its cruel and premeditated way, the finish cuts off the little bit of himself that he entrusted to the machine, and leaves only frustration in its place.

Like squires crowding around a knight before a joust, the people huddle around the guy pressing the Fire button. The cynics stand back, sipping their icy Cokes like isolated exjousters grinning in their ale. All stare at the machines, not at each other. The glare stifles even the noisy. These would-be heroes can forge only a cold camaraderie as they pursue their isolated quests. Searches for ever more tenuous shadow. People enter an arcade together. Inside, they separate.

Singelhandedly, they ward off missiles, but the cities they defend are only electronic blurs, and the missiles, figments of automated delirium tremens that cannot lose. Even Quix, the most artistic, to abuse an adjective, of video games conceals a destructive end. The player filling in the screen with colored boxes must ultimately succumb to the loneliness of electronic immolation. Video games create artless heroism. The heroes born with the plink of a quarter and the blink of a screen seek an inhuman, mechanical perfection that frustrates their humanity instead of fulfilling it. No enduring legend of the Round Table here; the top ten scores are erased each week. No Walter Mitty could emerge from this stultifying fantasy world. As Stendhal said, "One can acquire everything in solitude except character."

Schiller, long before silicon chips, believed that man could attain Mortality through Play. Man would play. He would develop his aesthetic senses and grasp Beauty, even the Sublime. The revolutions of the 19th century would not occur: "No privilege, no autocracy of any kind, is tolerable where taste rules, and the realm of aesthetic semblance extends its sway." The California hot-tub view of history.

Video games have done to play what Marx saw rapacious capitalism doing to work, the other thing that makes us human. As anyone who has lost two bits in a machine knows,

The externalization of the worker in his product implies not only that his labor becomes an object, an extra existence...but also...that the life that he has lent to the object affronts him, hostile and alien.

Marx would hate Space Invaders and its appended bourgeois junkies. It would probably alienate him.

PLAY, AMERICAN STYLE, refers less and less to a crack of a bat or even a hearty game of shuffleboard. If play provokes our spiritual development and teaches us better table manners, then we now learn the morality of snap decisions and reflexes. Painlessly, we can acquire the ethics of programmed logic and binary code. No more categorical imperatives, just capricious decisiveness and contingency plans.

Video games appeal to our love of our nation's might, a simple hedonistic picture of power to be enjoyed for it exercise rather than its direction. "Have you played that tank one? You go and blow up other tanks, it's great." The automated aimlessness present in our acquisitive appetites fosters this mindless militarism.

Lately, we have dwelt much on our impotence. Helicopters that won't fly in the desert, fly fine on a screen. Video games taste of power without purpose, like the smell of napalm in the morning. Our national naval gazing has led us to wish for more submarines, a resurgence of might that cannot remedy the defect of leadership determined to defend rights it only vaguely states. Like bigger defense budgets, video games, a projection of this shadowy pornography of power, curses rather than cures our seeming impotence.

As self-inflicted generators of will-o-wisps, video games symbolize and intensify our collective hallucinations. In a republic pasted together from factions, only the lowest common denominators can supply the glue, so the delusion runs. Video games exist to make money for their owners; their appeal made as broad and base as possible. Ironically, the simple pictures that glare so phosphorescently will sponsor only further fragmentation, not greater unity.