Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline (30 page)

Students at universities around the country and the world began to create their own versions of
MUD
, each with its own idiosyncrasies and stories.

‘There were around twenty different games by 1989,’ says Bartle. The most influential was
AberMUD
, named after its birthplace, the University of Aberystwyth. It was created by Alan Cox, who went on to become one of the co-developers of the Linux operating system.

While, during the 1980s, most of the
MUD
games were similar, in 1989 they began to diverge with the release of
TinyMUD
, a version which stripped out all of the gameplay and was instead a virtual world oriented entirely around socialising.

‘You could move around and explore,’ says Bartle. ‘People went in there and built things, had virtual sex, and so on.’ Another group of developers reacted against this and started making
MUDs
that emphasised questing over socialising. ‘This made a kind of schism between social virtual worlds and very game-focused games,’ says Bartle. ‘Both of these branches became distinct. It’s the same difference in approach that you see between
Alice in Wonderland
and Dorothy in Oz. Alice explores and socialises; Dorothy tries to get home.’

The swift propagation of
MUD
was, in part, thanks to Bartle
and Trubshaw’s decision to give the game away for free to anyone who wanted to play. The pair did this not as a way to get famous or, obviously, to get rich. Rather, in this virtual world, Bartle saw a better blueprint for society.
MUD
was a world in which players were able to progress according to their actions and intelligence, rather than through an accident of birth into a certain social class or fortune.

‘We wanted the things that were in
MUD
to be reflected in the real world,’ he says. ‘I wanted to change the world. And, to a certain degree, it worked. There is obviously a difference in style, but nevertheless, in the same way that the latest 3D movie today is fundamentally the same thing as a Charlie Chaplin short, so today’s MMOs are
MUDs
,’ he says. ‘And
MUD
and every subsequent MMO that has adopted its designs are a political statement. I should know: I designed it that way. And if you want the world to change, then making people pay to read your message isn’t going to work. So we gave it away.’

Bartle continues to work at Essex University, offering consultancy on some MMO projects in his spare time. Trubshaw left the video-game industry to design systems for air-traffic controllers. Neither man became rich through their game and Bartle believes that he’s even less known in his home nation than in America (where, in 2005, he was awarded with the Pioneer prize at the Game Developers Choice Awards).

‘Had I been the kind of person who was doing it for monetary gain, I wouldn’t have been the person to give the code away,’ he says. ‘Sure, it would be nice if someone who had made a few millions from our ideas came along to give Roy and me some of their winnings. But, when it comes to changing the world, I think we have been successful, to a certain degree. We’ve shown that virtual worlds can affect the real world. There is progress.’

But for Bartle, that progress is sluggish.

‘I am frustrated at its slow pace,’ he says. ‘There’s so much you can do with virtual worlds. But it’s not being done. I wanted them to be places of wonder in which people could go to truly be themselves, away from societal pressure or judgement. My idea was that if you could truly find yourself in a virtual world, you might be able to then take that back into the real world. Then we could get rid of these artificial restraints of class, gender, social status, and so on that dictate that you are what you are born to be.’

It is a motivating grievance that Bartle, despite his own success, is yet to discard. He still believes in
MUD
’s utopian vision of freedom from inequality and circumstance. The MMO, as it currently stands, may not represent the full blooming of his original seed. But he remains hopeful that these virtual worlds can offer a new way for reality to follow.

‘I haven’t given up,’ he says. ‘I want to see the world change before I die.’

Even if players (and even perhaps the games’ designers) don’t recognise it, many of the video games we play today have been built in a way that not only reflects the world and its systems, but also attempts to improve its balance. Video games may have morally neutral or ambiguous storylines, and they may distract humans from true progress through the illusion of accomplishment, but at least they provide a place in which everyone who is able to view a screen and make inputs on a controller has a chance to triumph.

Some games, including, arguably,
Call of Duty
, tip into pandering. Triumph is assured. They are rigged in the player’s favour in such a way as to make a mockery of success. Other games require their players to work harder in order to prevail (everything from
Dark Souls
to the fan-made hacks of
Super Mario World
, which make the game accessible only to the spatial savant). But in these cases, they mostly play fair, and offer a clear route to triumph for the talented or hardworking. This is not guaranteed in life, where success is often the result of an inimitable recipe involving privilege, education, talent, toil, circumstance, and timing. Your chances of falling terminally ill, or starving to death, or becoming CEO of a multinational corporation are often dictated as much by your circumstances of birth as by your own work and qualities.

Is this fairness what drives people into video games and keeps them there, even to the limits of their well-being? Perhaps not. As we have seen, for some it will be the thrill of competition, for others the chance to discover new places, for still others the social element that surrounds games. Some come for the escapism—a retreat from the troubles of this world—or a place in which to better understand themselves or the systems in which they live. Many come simply because that’s where their friends are to be found.

In the early 1990s, Richard Bartle came up with a test to sort different kinds of players. The test has its roots in a discussion that
MUD
’s moderators had over why they played the game: what was it that they got from the experience, and what drew them back?

‘This question began a two-hundred-long e-mail chain over a period of six months,’ Bartle says. ‘Eventually I went through everybody’s answers and categorised them. I discovered there were four types of player. I published some short versions of them; then, when the journal of
MUD
research came out, I wrote it up as a paper.’

The so-called Bartle test classifies players as Achievers, Explorers, Socialisers, or Killers (or a mixture thereof) according to their playing style. Bartle believes that you need a healthy mix of all dominant types in order to maintain a successful MMO ecosystem. He even visits MMO creators today in order to explain his theory
to them and advise them on how to better structure their games to accommodate all types.

‘If you have a game full of Achievers (players for whom advancement through a game is the primary goal), the people who arrive at the bottom level won’t continue to play, because everyone is better than them,’ he explains. ‘This removes the bottom tier and, over time, all of the bottom tiers leave through irritation. But if you have Socialisers in the mix, they don’t care about levelling up and all of that. So the lowest Achievers can look down on the Socialisers, and the Socialisers don’t care. If you’re just making the game for Achievers, it will corrode from the bottom. All MMOs have this insulating layer, even if the developers don’t understand why it’s there.’

We’ve identified, if not different
types
of players, certainly some of the different ways in which video games appeal to different people. Ultimately, this is what makes the games so fascinating: they are a mirror in which we can discover more about ourselves and individuals and collectives. Either in the way games are designed, or in the way we choose to play them, we can understand more about our urges, and about the function that art and entertainment might have in our lives.

This is true, perhaps, of all video games, but especially of those that afford us particularly broad freedoms to express ourselves, and especially those that model their world on our own cities and societies.

For that reason, let us return, finally, to Los Santos, the virtual city that is able to accommodate the interests of the Bigfoot hunter, the bedazzled sightseer, the sportsman and the flippantly murderous. A utopia, in its own strange way.

Wait long enough down by the tracks west of the Palomino Highlands at a spot somewhere on Los Santos’s left thigh, and eventually a freight train will clack along. Some of its carriages are insurmountably tall, but others sit empty and ride low enough that, with a spirited jump, you can haul yourself up for a free trip. You won’t have the leathery comfort of a stolen German car, or the sky-rollicking freedom of a light aircraft, but there’s no better way to see the city. You’ll duck under the roaring flyovers of East Los Santos, race the freeway around the Tataviam Mountains, before wheezing through the Grand Senora Desert, where the air has an arid clarity. As you loop around the hick town of Grapeseed, you can gaze over Procopio Beach to admire the Pacific as it sets sail out to the horizon. Time it right and the sky will start its 5 p.m. bruise into dusk just as you circle back into the city, where the traffic twinkles and skyscrapers stretch with competitive ambition.

You can’t talk about
Grand Theft Auto V
without talking about the city. Los Santos exceeds the game in which it’s set.
Grand Theft Auto V
is merely something that passes through the city, one of many stories that you pick up every now and again, in between following your own sojourns and distractions.

The idea that cities have personalities is true, but only to a point. They might have an aesthetic, a combination of the manmade and the natural, and their inhabitants might have a peculiar temperament (influenced by the dominant weather or the dominant industry), but in truth, we project our own hopes and insecurities onto the cities we visit or those in which we settle. In them we find what we need to in the moment. This is true of Los Santos, an eager tribute to Los Angeles that blends the real and imagined, and a city that allows you to take from it what you want. It can be a place of both peril and
sin as you hold up petrol stations in Davis (the city’s gang-torn analogue to Compton). Or it can be a place of peace and leisure as you chase a wild deer through the thin mountain air on a bike.

Here, you can be who you need to be. Want to dress in a tailor-made suit and promenade along the Del Perro pier, with its groan and slop, or swim with sharks in Paleto Bay? Sure thing. Want to listen disapprovingly outside a teenager’s bedroom door as he watches porn? Why not? You can live the high life using the proceeds of your stock-market investments, or become a property tycoon. Or you can slum it with the poor: the Harmony town hicks, with their dusty dungarees and moonshine-rosy cheeks, or the shufflers in the projects with their frayed jeans and crack-white eyes. Los Santos, like its analogue Los Angeles, is a city of invention and reinvention: give and take what you need.

This is also true of
Grand Theft Auto V
in general, a game of such scope that it allows us to see what we need to see. You can look at Rockstar’s opus as a technological miracle, a game that recreates one of our species’s great cities in sound and light, a cathedral of pixels. Or you can look at it as a holiday destination, a place to tumble about with friends, racing mountain bikes or planning heists online. Or a sandbox in which to explore your darker fantasies—cop-killing, hooker-beating, drug-running—all within a consequence-free safe place.

You can see the game’s missions as spectacular set pieces. In one you tear down the frontage of a penthouse using a tow truck. In another you attempt to reclaim your yacht and kidnapped son from thieves in a highway chase. Or you can see these moments as failures of impersonation, which recreate the spectacle of great television shows such as
The Sopranos
or
The Wire
, but fail to capture their substance and meaningful human drama. Rockstar undeniably has a talent for mimicry and exaggeration. When it’s applied to nature (the waves, the birds, the sun) or to construction (the traffic,
the stores, the subway) their work is utterly unrivalled. When it’s applied to the movies and TV shows, the results are somewhat charmless. At least, if that’s what you choose to see.

You can look at the game as knowing satire. It often successfully skewers Western culture’s enormities and failings (even if the satire often has a certain Bansky-esque plainness to it: ‘Keep calm and carry on sharing,’ suggests a poster in the offices of Lifeinvader, Los Santos’s version of Facebook). Nevertheless, it’s a game that elegantly presents the perils of capitalism: once you’ve made your money, all that’s left to do is learn how to play tennis, race jet-skis or buy up more property. Your purpose is gone. Or maybe you don’t buy the satire, and see only weak jokes that throw punches in all directions, and land only few.

You can see the game as anti- (or at least ambivalent towards) women, who appear almost exclusively as objects of desire, ridicule, or scorn. Then again, have you met the men? Monsters, the lot of them. If
Grand Theft Auto V
dismays with its absence of women, its men dismay by their presence. Nobody is likeable here in the city; they’re all fuelled by ambition, or grown lazy and aimless with success and wealth. But is their monstrosity and moral repugnancy a problem? To contemporise Henry de Montherlant’s phrase that ‘happiness writes in white ink on a white page,’ goodness displays transparent on the screen. Its trio of protagonists, Trevor, Michael, and Franklin, are memorable precisely because of their darkness. And perhaps the fact that their (and by association our) heroism is achieved through violence is a cultural failing, rather than that of the writers. The American idea of heroism is, after all, almost always allied with violence.