Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline (17 page)

Despite the absurdity of the logic, a chain effect was set in action, one that’s ended up at the White House. Video games are the youngest creative medium. What literature learned in four millennia, cinema was forced to learn in a century and video games are now expected to have mastered in three decades.

The issue of game violence and its potential effects may seem like an abstract, esoteric issue, demanding scientific study to make clear what is opaque. But game violence has logic and precedence and is always an act of play, not of sincerity. The worry is, then, those who cannot tell the difference, from disturbed high-school student to the U.S. senator.

7

EMPATHY

The brittle bark of rifle fire rattled the back of Mitch Swenson’s teeth. If the guards had shot to scare rather than to wound, the warning had its intended effect. As he sprinted across a Turkish field, Swenson, a twenty-six-year-old journalism student at Columbia University, was ‘utterly terrified,’ as he puts it today. As he and his three accomplices pressed through a hole in the fence and padded into an unexpectedly peaceful Syrian pomegranate orchard, the relief was palpable, even if it was short-lived.

This was not, as Swenson puts it, his ‘first rodeo.’ Two years earlier, in 2011, the young journalist was present in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on the first day of the revolution that helped instigate the Arab Spring, the wave of revolutionary protests that spread across the Middle East, unseating rulers in its wake. Since then he’s visited a clutch of troubled nations: Libya, South Sudan, and the Congo. He’s ‘been around men with guns before.’ Even so, this autumn night, clammy with cloud and heat, saw him enter a different kind of battle. ‘Syria is a type of conflict that humanity has never really seen before,’ he says. ‘All of the rules are out of the window.’

For the next ten days Swenson and his partners (David Axe, the founder of
War Is Boring
, a blog that covers war zones; a photographer; and a local fixer) travelled with members of the Sham Falcons Brigade, a group of rebels opposed to the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and his troops, the Syrian armed forces. Few foreign journalists have remained in the country; the dangers are extreme. On
the preceding day, two Spanish journalists were kidnapped while preparing to leave the country (they were eventually released in March 2014). During his brief time reporting in the country, Swenson interviewed soldiers and smugglers and saw firsthand what he describes as an ‘all-consuming, merciless and heart-eating machine of war.’ Then, on October 4, Swenson left Syria. He was due to start at college the following week.

When he landed in New York, Swenson began to write about his experiences. But the prose failed to capture the urgency of the chaos and distress he had witnessed (or, at least, failed to stand out from other similar reports written by foreign journalists). Moreover, he shared a challenge with many an overseas news reporter: how to interest readers in a faraway nation and its remote problems, ostensibly unconnected to their own.

Swenson decided to move from written reportage to something entirely different: video-game reportage. The medium has often been used to replicate vivid historical and futuristic battlefields, but rarely to present contemporary war journalism. Swenson’s logic was sound: if readers struggle to engage with stories of the lives of ordinary people living in fear and anguish on the other side of the world, perhaps they will empathise if asked to live out a day or a week in their shoes. Maybe a video game, which moves the player from passive spectator to active protagonist, would communicate something of the urgency that he had felt there, running across that field.

The journalist describes
1,000 Days of Syria
, which is freely available to play on the Internet, as ‘part electric literature; part newscast and part choose-your-own-adventure,’ a reference to the young-adult fiction books popularised in the 1980s in which readers can
alter the direction of the plot by making simple decisions for the protagonist and turning to the applicable page. In the game, you play as three characters: a foreign photojournalist; a mother living in Daraa, a city in south-western Syria, just north of the border with Jordan; and a young rebel living in Aleppo. Each character is a fictionalised amalgam of people Swenson met on his travels. The story is delivered in disparate chunks of narrative text and, at the end of each excerpt, you make choices about what your character will do next: will you attempt to flee the country or stay put? How will you try to pass the time when you’re imprisoned in a dimly lit cell?

Each character has three possible endings and, at times, their stories intersect. Swenson attempts to weave together Syria’s story with his trio of individual, semi-fictionalised narratives. While, in his attempt to explain the first three years of the Syrian conflict, Swenson relies on lengthy exposition, the tales are at times affecting, not least because they are in part based upon his own experience, and the experience of those he interviewed firsthand in the country. In his endeavour Swenson discovered something fascinating. A televised news report in which the camera pans across a pocked Syrian street before, say, entering a building in which a huddle of displaced Syrians mourn and tremble is undeniably affecting. But a video game that casts us as one of those Syrians is moving in an entirely different sort of way. Here we are no longer spectators to the horror. We are, for a moment, its subject.

During a panel discussion at the USC School of Cinematic Arts in 2013, the film director Steven Spielberg said of video games, ‘The second you pick up the controller, something turns off in the heart. It becomes a sport.’ Spielberg’s assertion is often true. There is, as we have seen, a sporting component to most video games that can,
if focused on to the exclusion of all else, place us in a psychological mode of competition. This, in Spielberg’s phrase, turns something off in the heart.

But this is a half-truth. Video games contain challenge, but that challenge is also usually framed in the language of human drama, something that quickens the human heart. In
Super Mario
, the challenge is to reach the far end of the screen, but it’s framed as a hostage-rescue mission. In
SimCity
, the challenge is to create an elegant engine powered by a network of motors and cables, but it’s framed as an exercise in city planning.

Star Wars
director George Lucas, whose company LucasArts produced seminal story-based games throughout the 1990s and who was present on the same panel as Spielberg, had a different opinion to that of his peer.

‘The big game of the next five years will be one in which you empathise strongly with the characters through a love story,’ he said. ‘That will be the
Titanic
of the games industry, because you have actual relationships on screen instead of people being shot.’

Creating paced and plotted stories in games where the protagonist often has a degree of free will is a unique challenge, but the medium undeniably excels in its ability to recreate the environments that facilitate stories in the first place. Games are able to render in exquisite detail places and points in history, as well as, if they so choose, their societal systems. Then, by placing us in the active role of a protagonist in a story, with our own agency and limited freedoms, they allow us to experience lives, places, and circumstances that differ from our own.

Where a documentary or written piece of journalism tries to generate empathy with a character through sharing their own words, images, and stories, a video game has an additional dimension. It is able to cast us as the subject, or, at least, to position us
where we are able to experience life from that person or group’s perspective, with their unique set of privileges or setbacks. For Walt Whitman, this ability to empathise with another character’s situation was the key to powerful storytelling. ‘I do not ask the wounded person how he feels,’ he wrote, ‘I myself become the wounded person.’ Video games move this act of ‘becoming’ another from the realm of the imagination to the more tangible realm of the screen and controller. They cast us as the subject, where we cannot help but see things, in literal terms at least, from their perspective.

Swenson’s project derived from a straightforward question. If it’s possible for a video game like
Papers, Please
to generate empathy with a passport-control clerk at the borders of a fictional Eastern European country, or for a game like
Super Columbine Massacre RPG
to attempt to generate empathy with high-school killers, then surely a game can generate empathy with and understanding of those who face real-world difficulties in the same way? It’s an approach that independent studios like Molleindustria are exploring in fascinating ways, with games such as
Oiligarchy
, in which you play as the executive of an oil multinational, exploring and drilling around the world, corrupting politicians and blocking alternative energies, and
Phone Story
, which examines the plight of sweatshop workers assembling smartphones for their factory’s Western clients. (In 2012, the studio donated $6,000 to Tian Yu, a nineteen-year-old girl who suffered serious injuries after trying to commit suicide by jumping from Foxconn’s factory complex, where she was working in 2010.)

As anyone who has played an unbalanced multiplayer video game in which two factions face off against each other can attest, games are also well suited to illustrate systemic injustice. If you are assigned to the stronger faction’s side, you benefit from the systemic imbalance (for example, you might have more powerful abilities, more useful resources, or a better strategic position on the map).
You didn’t ask for this advantage (in fact, the unfairness might even annoy you, as victory isn’t necessarily founded on merit). But you benefit nonetheless—even if you find yourself losing the game. This is a useful and powerful illustration of the kind of privileges that affect the real world, giving some a great advantage over others, often through nothing more than the accident of their birth, or the family, race, or location into which they were born.

It’s not only the complex social and industrial systems of power that can be illustrated by video games. The creator of the webgame
10 Seconds in Hell
uses the medium to communicate the abject terror of the domestic-abuse victim. The game, freely available on the Internet, places you in a locked room ten seconds before your violent partner enters. You have this tiny window in which to explore your options, to find a way to evade the seemingly inevitable. The sense of horror and hopelessness in your predicament is powerfully illustrative, and it’s all communicated in a few seconds.

Actual Sunlight
is an unflinching examination of the causes of suicide, and the feelings of paralysis, self-loathing, and long-term destruction that can result from depression.
Dsy4ia
is a short interactive story about the process of undergoing hormone replacement therapy. It attempts, through the visual language of games, to replicate the confusion, fear, doubt, and societal suspicion that transgender people can experience (for example, you have to place
Tetris
blocks in a play area where none of them fit).

Shelter
is a game about a family of badgers that manages to explore the human condition better than most. It is a game about custody, about being the carer for things smaller and weaker than yourself. It draws upon those maternal or paternal anxieties that stretch down, past the conscious mind, to something deeper and more primal. Your aim is straightforward and ancient: lead your offspring to shelter, keep them safe, keep them fed. And when you
fail in that aim—when you fail as a parent in your most important duty—the grief is close to unbearable.

It’s this unique power of games to place us at the epicentre of real-world drama (one that game-makers are only just beginning to explore) that led Swenson to consider a game for his reportage, as opposed to traditional noninteractive storytelling.

‘I was able to incorporate some of the details from my notebooks into the historical nonfiction aspect of the game that were not pertinent to reporting,’ he says. ‘In that way I could tell more of a full-bodied experience of what’s going on there.’

Then, by placing the player in the role of these characters, with a certain degree of agency, empathy, and connection are built in a different way to how they are in linear media such as film and literature.

We may question the quality of
1,000 Days of Syria
’s execution (there is a large amount of exposition which can be a slog to work through), but it’s a useful early example of how interactive storytelling can be an interesting and effective way to report on real-world events and to illuminate humanity.

‘I thought if I made an interactive game that explains how things unravelled it might garner some attention to a conflict that I am concerned is being forgotten,’ he says. ‘Perhaps this will be a way for people that wouldn’t be interested to engage with the conflict. If
1,000 Days of Syria
can at least inform and perhaps motivate an otherwise naive few, the game will have been a success.’

Navid Khonsari, a forty-four-year-old Iranian developer, is no stranger to seeing his video games garner the kind of attention that
Swenson was aiming for. Between 2001 and 2005, he worked at Rockstar Games and was a director of production on a number of titles in the
Grand Theft Auto
series, a perennial bedfellow to controversy. But Khonsari’s latest project has attracted a different kind of opprobrium: he has been branded a U.S. spy by the newspapers in Iran, an accusation that prevents him from safely returning to the country he fled thirty-four years ago.

‘The Iranian revolution of 1979 is a defining story for me,’ Khonsari tells me, ‘and it’s a story that I keep coming back to.’ Khonsari left Rockstar to focus on documentary scripts that he was writing in his spare time, but after founding a development studio with his wife in 2010, he began to look for a different kind of subject for a game. ‘With the continuing tensions between the West and Iran, and the Arab Spring, the time was right to highlight the universal themes of revolution,’ he says.