Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline (21 page)

But in some parts of the world, video games are not only psychological or spiritual places of refuge. In certain contexts, the hiding place isn’t metaphorical.

Yousif Mohammed is only nineteen, but he is one of the world’s top players in the online video game
Battlefield 3
. A realistic military first-person shooter that sold more than eight million copies in the months following its release in 2011, it no doubt feels closer to home for Mohammed than for the Western players it was primarily designed for—one of its missions, dubbed Operation Swordbreaker, is set within Mohammed’s adopted home city of Sulaymaniyah.

During the past two decades, life for many Iraqis has been turbulent and perilous. In 2006, while Baghdad was still experiencing the war’s aftermath, ten-year-old Mohammed was playing in a park in the city with a friend when he saw a man in a parked car lean out of the window and stare at them through a camcorder’s viewfinder. Believing that he would appear on television that night, Mohammed hurried home to tell his parents what he’d seen. His mother, Amna Mohammed, an engineer in the Iraqi Ministry of Water Resources, didn’t believe her son until, later that evening, she received a phone call from the mother of Mohammed’s friend, confirming what had happened.

‘At that time, there was a gang operating in the area that kidnapped kids and demanded money for their release—around fifty thousand dollars,’ she told me.

The gang operated in the Mansour district, a relatively wealthy neighbourhood in western Baghdad, where the family lived. Typically, the gang released the children after receiving the ransom
money, but in one notorious incident, they killed the hostage even after receiving payment.

Amna knew that boys like Mohammed were prime targets, so she sent him and his grandmother away from Baghdad later that night. The pair took a six-hour taxi ride to Kurdistan before heading into the northern city of Sulaymaniyah.

‘Any mother, believing that their child was in grave danger, would have done what I did,’ she told me. Amna stayed behind with her husband to settle the family’s affairs before joining her son. The escape had a profound effect on Mohammed: he left in such haste that he didn’t pack any of his toys, including, most distressingly, his video-game console. Alone in a new city, with no friends, the boy felt grimly isolated.

‘Gaming had been a big part of my daily activities, so when I fled to this city, I was at a loss,’ he said. ‘After a few months, I bought a computer again and, through that, met other players and began to feel settled.’

Today, Mohammed is an aspiring doctor, as well as one of the country’s top video-game players. After his family resettled, he threw himself into gaming, both as a means of escape and to make new friends. He excels at the latest blockbuster American titles, particularly first-person shooters like
Battlefield 3
, a game that he has spent seven hundred and twenty-one hours playing. He is currently ranked in the top 2 percent of players in the world.

His parents’ generation views his hobby with some distrust: like many Western parents, they worry about shooting games and the possibility that they could encourage violence. But, for the most part, Mohammed’s parents supported the hobby, because it kept him inside and safe. For the same reason, many Iraqi children are
encouraged to play as much as they like, because the country remains volatile. Video games have become a way to keep a generation away from the capricious bombings that have made the streets some of the most perilous in the world. They are a physical refuge, as well as a psychological one.

‘Video games are the only viable entertainment we have here,’ says Mohannad Abdulla, a twenty-five-year-old network administrator for Baghdad’s main Internet service provider. He’s been playing games since he was a teenager; a poster of Captain Price, a fictional British Army officer from the video game
Call of Duty
, hangs on his wall. ‘Other hobbies are just too dangerous because of terrorism. We don’t have clubs, so games are the only way to have some fun with friends and stay safe at home, where there is no risk of being killed by a suicide bomber. For many of us, video games are our only escape from these miseries.’ During Saddam Hussein’s rule, it was difficult to buy them, and only relatively well-off, professional-class families like Mohammed’s could afford to import titles from Europe. Until the advent of disc-based video games in the mid-nineties, it was too difficult to pirate game cartridges.

‘The industry is still in its infancy in Iraq,’ says Omar M. Alanseri, the owner of the Iraqi Games Centre, one of only a small number of dedicated video-game retailers in Baghdad, which had opened sixteen months earlier. ‘But each year, more people get involved. I’ve seen the audience vastly increase, especially among teenagers.’

Some of the most popular video games in Iraq, as in America, are military-themed shooters, in which the player assumes the role of a soldier and blasts through waves of virtual enemies.

‘Almost all of my friends play video games like
World of Tanks
[and]
Battlefield 3
,’ says Abdulla. ‘In fact, we have some of the top-ranked players in the world here.’

This interest in military games stems from the local environment as much as, in the case of many Western players, male vanity.

‘Growing up, my life was completely military-focused,’ Abdulla says. ‘It is the way we are raised. For example, I was taught how to use an AK-47 when I was in elementary school. Younger players who are not so affected by Saddam’s agendas play other game types more easily than we do, like
Minecraft
and other nonmilitary games.’

Many of these first-person shooters, often created with input from U.S. military advisers—a handful of Navy SEALs were punished for consulting on the 2012 video game
Medal of Honor: Warfighter
—are set against the backdrop of fictionalised real-world conflicts, often within Middle Eastern countries.

Some have entire sections set within Iraq, like the
Battlefield
series.

For Abdulla, playing these games in their real-world settings isn’t problematic.

‘Any video game that’s set within Iraq and involves killing terrorists becomes instantly famous here,’ he says. ‘Everyone wants to play it. We have been through so much because of terror. Shooting terrorists in a game is cathartic. We can have our revenge in some small way.’ Alanseri agrees: ‘Any game that has a level set in Iraq is popular. They always sell more copies than other games because they are related in some way to our lives.’ The games have even established a kind of empathy for foreign gaming partners that Alanseri said he would not otherwise have. ‘I have learned a lot of things, like Western-world values, culture, lifestyle, and even the way that they think, through video games.’

Mohammed believes that the friendships he has formed through online gaming have had a transformative effect on the way in which some people view his country.

‘Some people told me they were scared of Iraqis,’ he says, ‘thinking that they are all terrorists. But in reality, we are victims. When they got to know me, they saw the truth and changed their minds about Iraqis. It removed the fear.’

A twenty-two-year-old Norwegian, Michael Moe, is now one of Mohammed’s closest friends. The young men met online while playing
Battlefield 3
, and now speak on the phone or over Skype every few days.

‘I become worried about Mohammed if I do not hear from him for any more than two days,’ says Moe. ‘I always check up on him when that happens.’

Abdulla almost seems to prefer friends he has made playing online video games.

‘Here in our home country, most of us have lost some, if not most, of our friends,’ he says. ‘They were either killed or fled Iraq. And you can’t just trust anyone any more. So a friend across seas who you can trust is better than a friend here who might stab your back any minute.’

Video games will not solve Iraq’s ongoing challenges. But for some young Iraqis, they do provide more than a mere distraction from the terrors of life in the country. The social connections that they encourage, both within Iraq and beyond, have built empathy in ways that may have a profound effect on the way some young people view their place in the world.

For Amna, Mohammed’s mother, the effect has been less grand and more localised.

‘I used to object about video games,’ she says. ‘I wanted Mohammed to spend more time studying. But I’ve come to see the strange benefits. Video games have broadened his relationships outside of our borders, and formed new bonds. He loves his gaming friends and, from what I can tell, they love him, too.’

Battlefield
’s Swedish creators could never have known that their game, based on contemporary urban warfare, would play an active role in keeping one young player away from the risks of genuine urban warfare. There are other pastimes, of course, that could have provided the same function (fifty years ago, Mohammed might have had his nose buried in a comic book). But as we’ve seen, the video game passes the time more efficiently and in a more prolonged manner than most.
Battlefield
in particular offers Mohammed a way to feel in control of his circumstances, just as
Skyrim
offered Ferguson a way to take control of a reality, when the world outside of the game was turbulent and untethered.

In different ways but for similar reasons, Mohammed and Ferguson’s stories illustrate something crucial about the role that video games (all games, arguably) fulfil for human beings: a way to step outside reality for a fleeting moment in order to better understand ourselves and the world in which we live when, at last, we’re ready to return.

9

MYSTERY

Way out in southeastern Flint County, Back o Beyond is the most isolated area in San Andreas. The trees loom conspiratorially. Their branches knit together, as if holding down the gloom. As night falls, a fog rises, muffling sound in the air. For some, it’s a place of tranquillity, far away from the noise and fury of the cities nearby. But for others, this forsaken forest is not a place of isolation. Here, they believe, you are never alone.

In 2004, Rob Silver was driving his truck through Back o Beyond when he caught sight of something in a thicket.

‘Out of the corner of the television screen I saw a large, tall, dark figure,’ he tells me, the memory still alive. ‘It happened twice, both times during that first year. To this day, I’ve not come across the creature again.’

A decade later, Kaleb Krimmel, a teenager from Michigan, had a similar experience.

‘I have seen strange figures in the fog before, but pedestrians can sometimes appear in weird places,’ he says. ‘While this sort of computer error describes most of my encounters, this time was different. I was in Back o Beyond, walking up a hill. It was foggy out, but behind some plants I clearly saw a giant black figure. I aimed my camera to take a picture, but by the time I steadied the viewfinder it was gone.’

Silver and Krimmel are not the only players who claim to have seen Bigfoot in the virtual forests of
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
, a video game released in 2004 in which players assume the role of a young gang member, Carl Johnson, in a story that draws upon various real-life events in Los Angeles, most centrally the rivalry between the Bloods and Crips street gangs and the simmering tensions of the Rodney King riots. The game, set in 1992 within the fictional state of San Andreas, a geographical amalgam of California and Nevada, sold more than twenty-seven million copies worldwide. If its developers had included a rare occurrence of a Bigfoot character in the Back o Beyond, occasional sightings from the masses of scouring players would be inevitable. Within months of the game’s release, videos allegedly showing sightings of Bigfoot appeared on the Internet, while viewers debated their authenticity in the comments.

These discussions were muddied when some enterprising fans created a ‘mod,’ an alternative code that can be downloaded and installed, to insert a fabricated Bigfoot into the game, complicating the hunt for the ‘real’ virtual Bigfoot. Nevertheless, more than a decade after the game’s release, a number of communities continue to work to prove the authenticity of Bigfoot’s existence in the original game, and devoted users still upload photographs of unusual footprints and other pieces of circumstantial evidence to their websites. Silver runs one such site.

‘Many people make the Bigfoot myth out to be some fan-made story that’s simply gotten out of hand,’ he tells me. ‘In fact, the staff at the
Grand Theft Auto
website I contributed to at the time didn’t want anything to do with myths, and refused to have them catalogued. Last November, I set out to make the most comprehensive, informative
Grand Theft Auto
myth site on the Web.’

The Bigfoot debate in the game closely mirrors the Bigfoot debate in the real world, in which believers often clash with sceptics. Silver’s belief in the creature’s existence is absolute.

‘I one-hundred-percent believe Bigfoot exists within San Andreas,’ he says. Krimmel agrees: ‘I do believe the creature exists. I have encountered him more than once. I would say he is proven.’

But detractors say the myth’s disciples are fooling themselves.

‘Either they’re mistaken, or they’re lying,’ says a sceptical forum user. ‘Myth hunters are determined to believe in myths despite all evidence to the contrary. Perhaps they want the myths to be true so badly that they’ve managed to trick themselves into seeing things that aren’t there, or they’ve made connections between things that aren’t connected. Maybe they’re just lying or stupid, or both.’

One crucial advantage the Bigfoot hunters in the game have over their real-world counterparts is that they’re able to communicate with the game’s creators.
Grand Theft Auto
’s developer, Rockstar North, has not been silent on the issue. Speaking to an American video-game magazine shortly after the game’s release, the game’s lead level designer, Craig Filshie, said that there was ‘not a bit of truth’ to the Bigfoot rumours.