Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline (8 page)

So too is the elderly woman’s plain statement back at the Arstotzka
checkpoint in
Papers, Please
as you turn her away for being unable to produce the necessary permit.

‘You have doomed me,’ she says, as she walks away, unable to join her husband.

One of the earliest games I played as a child was
Missile Command
. The game was different from the others in the compendium my grandmother bought for me on my twelfth birthday, even if there was nothing to distinguish its stark and basic graphics from the rest. Your task in the game isn’t to assume the role of an all-powerful military commander. Rather, you’re cast in the role of a regional commander charged with protecting six cities from a nuclear rain of ICBMs. As the enemy nukes streak through a black sky towards your cities, you fire rockets that, if well aimed, will blast the incoming danger from the sky, thereby protecting the citizens under your protection.

For all the game’s apparent simplicity (there are no reams of explanatory text, no characters to give voice to the unfolding horror), it had a terrible power, something that I could sense as a child, even if I couldn’t grasp its full subtleties. Where does this power originate?
Missile Command
is a nonviolent game: you don’t launch any attacks on your unknown, unseen enemy. Your task is merely to save cities and the lives within. It’s not a game that glorifies military might; it focuses on the experience of being on the receiving end of a nuclear strike.

As you play through
Missile Command
, a story riddled with moral consequence unfolds. You only have a limited supply of rockets and, as such, you are soon presented with awful choices: do you try to spread your limited resources across your cities, risking failure but knowing that you tried to save everyone equally? Or do you focus on just one location that you can more ably defend, but at the
cost of seeing the others burn to the ground (after all, you lose the game only when all six cities are destroyed)? Do you defend your missile silos, prioritising military lives over civilians’? Or do you allow your dutiful soldiers, who have been carrying out your orders unquestioningly, to die? Even as a child I understood something of the horror of the moment-to-moment choices with which I was being presented, and felt something of the dread and stress that any commander in a similar position would surely endure.

Perhaps most terribly, no matter how many stages you survive, there is no way to win the game. As in most games of the time, failure is inevitable. In the end, everyone dies. And yet here, in this context, failure seemed to carry more weight.

Missile Command
, first designed in 1980, is an early example of a video game that combines system and theme to provide commentary on the world. The power of play within systems here is apparent. In an interview, given years after
Missile Command
’s release, the game’s creator, Dave Theurer, said:

‘I’d wake up in the middle of the night from a nightmare where I’d see these streaks coming in, and I’d be up in the Santa Cruz mountains and I’d see it hit Sunnyvale and I’d know I had about forty-five seconds until the blast reached me. I had those nightmares once a month for a year after I finished
Missile Command
.’

Whether or not a game comes to haunt your dreams, the combination of its system and chosen theme almost always results in some kind of statement, either explicit or implicit. Sometimes the system is enough to speak to us:
Snakes and Ladders
is a simple game about life’s capriciousness. At other times the system must be paired with a fiction for it to become meaningful:
Risk
is a game about imperialism and the expansion of dominion, and the ensuing complications
as you protect that territory. Likewise,
Monopoly
is a game about capitalism: it encourages its players to acquire real estate with the dog-eat-dog competitiveness of the international marketplace (we begin the game all smiles and carefree ambition, and end it either grimly destroyed or monstrously victorious).

The same is true of many video games, which cannot help but cast light on our world as they borrow rules, systems, and scenarios from reality. Even those video games that appear to share few similarities with our existence are often built upon familiar systems that can, occasionally, reveal some truth about the world in which we live or, at very least, allow us to examine the world and its rules in a manageable context.
Tetris
, you might argue, is a game that replicates the sense of being overwhelmed as life’s problems and demands pile up more quickly than you are able to clear them away. Most adventure and role-playing games mimic the same consumerist loops of acquisition, as you are made to feel constantly dissatisfied with your equipment and possessions each time you reach a new shop and find a slightly better sword or cloak.
Journey
is a game in which players drift into and out of each other’s experiences trudging through a desert, able to share a moment together but not any kind of virtual touch (you cannot communicate or share names), and quietly speaks to the essential inscrutability and existential impossibility of human relationships.

Video games offer a cat’s cradle of interlocking systems, often based on those found in reality, for a player to wrestle and reckon with. And here we find something of their enduring appeal and irresistible draw, the kind of draw that inspires some to almost fully emigrate from real life to virtual. Just as humans attempt to make sense of the world around them, to find their own place within the systems both natural and human-made that control the ebb and flow of existence, so video games encourage us to wrestle with life
and our place in the world. They are a manageable, safe, and usually reliable environment in which to play with ideas about our existence or the systems in which we live.

But there’s something else, too. A game’s reality is underpinned not by the unpredictability of our world, where people who work the hardest do not necessarily triumph; most games treat the player with unflinching justice (when they don’t, it’s usually classed as a bug). The game makes its player a fair bargain: ‘Give me your time and energy and you will prevail in accordance with your effort.’ It says: ‘Work hard and victory will be yours. You will be glorious.’

And arguably, no video game has allowed more people to reach for glory than
Minecraft
.

Among the medium’s pantheon of gurus, rock stars, and auteurs, Markus Persson, the Swedish creator of
Minecraft
—a video game that has, in the few years since its initial release, become a twenty-first-century sensation, played in bedrooms and classrooms around the world—is something of a Zeus. More than twenty-five million people have paid to immigrate to his world and settle there, be it on PC, smartphone, or video-game console. Released without backing from investors or publishers,
Minecraft
is inspiring a new generation of independent game-makers to strike out on their own, and to approach their medium in new ways. Meanwhile, the profits it’s generated—$128 million in 2013, the year before Microsoft bought Persson’s company, Mojang, for $2.5 billion—rival those of the world’s largest entertainment releases.

Such incomparable success is unexpected when you consider the game itself.
Minecraft
embodies few video-game fashions. It features pixelated scenery that has nothing in common with the lifelike, polygon-stuffed characters and objects that furnish the
blockbuster video games of the day. There is a certain Lego-like charm and blunt handsomeness to the rectangular clouds that throw shadows over the game’s pea-green hills. But in an industry traditionally obsessed with chasing photorealism, its kindergarten aesthetic at first appears anachronistic.

Released long before it was finished,
Minecraft
has no in-game tutorial, no instruction pages, and few explicit goals. The basic rules are inscrutable, and, for players brought up on to-do-list play, the passage of time is largely aimless. And yet, in a few short months,
Minecraft
made Persson, who is known to many of his millions of fans by his nickname ‘Notch,’ a multimillionaire, and revealed its audience to be one of the most creatively motivated in video games.

Why? Perhaps it’s the comfort of experiencing an intelligent design that reveals a watchmaker’s precision. Or maybe the elemental freedom that
Minecraft
offers its inhabitants taps into some primal, irresistible human urge to build. Undoubtedly, here is a game that offers an accelerated form of existence—of dominion but also of stewardship. The in-game story of
Minecraft
is the story of humankind: survival, hunting, community, and, eventually, hubris. It is a video game that allows us to wrestle with humanity’s common question: what are we here for?

The story goes like this: in the beginning you’re given your own algorithmically generated world (each new game creates an expanse of blocky geology that nobody, not even Persson, has seen before). On Day One, your goal is mere exploration. You chart the terrain around you, a carefree sort of cartography as you feel out the contours of your domain, marvel at the scenery, and build a mental map of natural landmarks by which to set your bearings.

Other than this, there is little more than the game’s instructive
title to provide a clue to your task: to mine and to craft. These twin abilities—destruction and creation—are mapped to the game’s two main buttons. Press one and your stumpy arm will flail in front of you with comic speed and repetition, chipping away at whatever object you’re looking at, eventually reducing it to a floating cube of material that may be collected and stored in your inventory. The nature of the harvest is dependent on the material you ‘mine.’ Chop a tree and you will produce a block of wood. A cliff face will yield a chunk of granite. Hammer the beach and you’ll nab a cube of sand. With these raw materials you are free to build.

At first you might experiment with a waist-high wall, laying blocks side by side in a straight line. Now, emboldened by your success, you turn it into one of the four walls of a small house, blocking out the light with a flat roof before knocking into the door you neglected to account for in the original design.

Meanwhile, the sun has wheeled in the sky, its plodding arc unnoticed by the novice (
Minecraft
imitates our world’s day/night cycle, albeit in an accelerated form). Night falls and the eerie sounds of scratching monsters arise. These are the game’s dead-eyed zombies, its clinking skeletons and camouflaged creepers (a kind of weaponised hedge), whose kindergarten path-finding AI has them pursue you with nightmarish single-mindedness. At this point
Minecraft
’s ambiance shifts, and you realise that while this world is a playpen for the imagination, it is also a place of peril.

In a flash you switch from tourist to tormented. Your goal shifts to a quest for survival. You retreat into your creation or, if it remains unfinished, hurriedly hollow out a cave in the side of a mountain in which to quiver and cringe until morning, when the skeletons and zombies dissipate like Dracula in sunlight and you’re free to return to your construction.

This is the side of
Minecraft
that mimics the natural order: the
ever-present danger of being eaten by something that is larger or stronger than ourselves, the need to find shelter to hide from this threat.

Survive the night and the next day you continue with the implementation of your half-cocked ideas. The hut becomes a shack becomes a lodge becomes a house becomes a mansion becomes a castle. You soon learn that certain blocks require certain tools, and using a craft bench you begin to fashion simple utensils: a pickaxe, a shovel, a hoe, a sword. As the range of blocks you’ve harvested diversifies, so the range of domestic features you can build widens. Soon your abode is furnished with candles, paintings, elaborate stairwells, and bay windows.

The pleasure of construction is matched by the thrill of destruction, our play reflecting the very rhythms of life: birth, death, and rebirth.
Minecraft
understands that, for humans, the business of creation is closely linked to the business of survival. The threat of the monsters that click and ramble in the dark brings focus to your industry, while the richness of materials found in the world facilitates the personal touch, encouraging craftsmanship.

Minecraft
is a game that enables humans to experience an accelerated or distilled form of human life. Behind the lumpy pixels—the crude trees, the jagged mountains, the simple sun—lies a game about the systems of existence. In a post-industrialised world, it’s also (curiously enough for a game played on the latest technological devices) a game about returning to nature, to the basics of survival and perseverance.

We play
Minecraft
in our millions as a way to understand our most ancient purposes in the universe: to survive and to create. In its straightforward distillation of our world’s fundamental rules and systems, we are able to better understand who we are and why we build.

These twin urges can be found in most video games. In 1984’s
Elite
we travel through a primitive galaxy, fending off attacks from aliens while attempting to build a business as a mineral trader. In 1989’s
SimCity
we have the opportunity to build a city from the ground up, carefully placing streets, homes and industrial factories, while attempting to survive the ravages of an unexpected earthquake. In 2008’s
LittleBigPlanet
we create intricate
Super Mario
–style levels, built from a mess of ropes, pulleys, toilet rolls, fruit, footballs, and skateboards, and then attempt to guide our character, Sackboy, towards their conclusion without catching fire, or tripping off a ledge to his death.

These games, alongside
Minecraft
, demonstrate clearly the ways in which video games give a person the opportunity to survive and thrive within a system. But when more than one human being enters a multifaceted video-game system, another of those primal urges surfaces: the desire to cooperate with others, to work in community.