The lockdown has not been kind to many forms of recreation.
Swimming at the public pool, going out to the movies or a restaurant, putting on pants in the morning, all of these activities have seen a sharp decline since the beginning of our lockdown of mutual discontent.
One activity that has only seen a marked increase, however, is playing video games. According to data aggregated by Statista.com, video game usage during the pandemic has risen in the United States by 45%. That seems to conform to reporting done by other outlets, like the BBC, demonstrating that gaming has reached new highs.
That being said, video gaming as a hobby isn’t exactly the most socially acceptable of pastimes. While millions of Americans routinely spend hours a day playing video games, the practice still carries something of a stigma, being generally associated with basement-dwelling men with low social status (and sometimes poor hygiene standards). In some sense, this is a holdover from the common affiliation of video gaming with other niche hobbies like tabletop wargaming or Dungeons & Dragons.
Nevertheless, the characterization of some video game players is, unfortunately, accurate. Video game addiction is a problem that has been gaining attention as of late, and one that has been recognized by those in the health profession.
Sometimes, however, negative stereotypes come to rest not on the gamers themselves, but on the games they play. There is a not-unfounded concern that video games are, essentially, sapping the vitality of the young and turning their energies away from productive activities and careers. Such an opinion has been espoused by Joe Rogan, for example, who by all accounts runs one of, if not the most, influential podcasts in the nation.
So then we have to ask this question: are video games just wasting people’s time?
My response: usually, but not always.
At the heart of this debate is the related question of whether or not video games are a form of art. We think of entertainment like sitcoms or cheesy action movies as being fun for a minute, good for a few laughs, but ultimately not stimulating in any deeper sense. People may spend hours watching Friends, but at the end of the day is that television show really making them ponder the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?
The answer is no, and that doesn’t mean that it’s not okay to be mindlessly entertained from time to time. Lord knows that sometimes that is truly what someone needs after a long day of work. Nevertheless, when we spend so many waking hours using a particular media, like video games, we should want to be challenged and made to think. If not, we are, in some sense, anesthetizing ourselves for a time and gaining nothing of substance.
We reserve the term “art” for works that achieve this distinction: of being able to pull us out of ourselves and delight both the senses and the mind. In the abstract, video games can do that, and certainly every game has artistic qualities and merit. All the work that goes into making, for example, your typical first-person shooter takes a tremendous amount of talent, skill and artistry. Sometimes developers will spend years painstakingly designing textures, 3D models, animations, sounds, environments, story elements and so on. And yet, people are rarely being intellectually stimulated every time they boot up a match.
I don’t want to pick on any games specifically, but I will address some of the games that I think rise to the very level of art, and from two very different genres.
I will start with a genre that hits close to home for me. Since I was a kid, I have always been a big fan of strategy games. My first ever computer game was Age of Empires II, and ever since I got that game when I was 9 or so, I have been a predominantly strategy game player.
Strategy games have a tendency to be about spectacle. While most every game will have a high-level playerbase that really goes to brass tacks, learning the fundamentals of the game and becoming masters of its strategy, the games themselves are more about immersing yourself in the thrill and spectacle of conflict, whether that is watching your knights and crossbowmen dominate the field in Age of Empires or leading Romania on a very improbable quest for world domination in Hearts of Iron.
For something deeper than a gamified rendition of warfare and conquest, however, I would hold up Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri as a game with significant artistic merit. Which, to my mind, is quite surprising given that its cousins in the massively-successful Civilization series are characterized by a kind of reductive approach to human history, where all human cultures operate along fundamentally the same mechanics, towards the same goals, using the same means. Alpha Centauri, however, is a standout precisely because of its close relationship with the famous 4X series.
Many of the reasons that Alpha Centauri is a work of art, in addition to being a video game, have been spoken about more completely, and by others more competent than myself. This documentary analyzing the sociopolitics of the game from a left-leaning perspective, for example, contains many of the points I’m about to bring up.
The single key feature which I think distinguishes Alpha Centauri as art is its examination not of cultures throughout history but of ideology. The basic premise of the game is that, in the 2060s, wars and ecological disasters force the United Nations to launch a colony ship to the Alpha Centauri system where the best and brightest of humanity will ensure the survival of the species on an alien world.
Upon reaching their destination, a mutiny compromises the mission and the colonists crash-land on the planet, divided into a little over half a dozen factions with clear ideological goals. There are the technocratic, democratic optimists as represented by the UN Peacekeepers, the religious fundamentalist Lord’s Believers, the “greed-is-good” style corporate capitalist Morgan Industries, the Maoist Human Hive and so on.
The game, while being heavily dated by today’s standards, (so much so that I play a recreation of it using the Civilization IV engine) nevertheless is able to convey its rich atmosphere through voice-overs and cutscenes. One cutscene, for example, which plays whenever the player builds the Cloning Vats, juxtaposes footage of chicks being weighed and sorted at an industrial hatchery with a voice over from one of the game’s characters, the leader of the militaristic Spartan Federation, talking about the eugenic benefits that cloning would bring to warfare and scientific research. In other words, it underscores the chilling inhumanity of the technology, implying that at least one of the game’s major factions views cloned humans as livestock. To cite another, the cutscene that plays after the completion of the Bulk Matter Transmitter, a type of teleportation device, features a voice-over from Miriam Godwinson, the leader of the Lord’s Believers, who questions whether the machine can reattach a person’s immortal soul after breaking them down into subatomic particles and reassembling them.
The game touches on many anxieties that are still present today, sometimes even more pronounced than when the game released in 1999. Bioethical issues like cloning as well as genetic and cybernetic augmentation are present, as are conflicts between spirituality and atheistic materialism. The key theme that I think the game does the best job of addressing is the fundamental failure of global neoliberalism (represented by the UN Peacekeeper faction) to maintain its ideological dominance in the face of hostile external pressures. It also works as a decent commentary on the other games in the Civilization franchise, demonstrating the potential results of the exploitative systems of global control that are key to victory in other titles in the series.
Another genre that enjoys a great deal of popularity is that of the third/first person roleplaying game. One series that I have a deep aesthetic appreciation for is the Souls games, which feature lonely protagonists in bleak and hopeless, post-apocalyptic settings. Unfortunately, they are an excellent example of games with mechanics that complement and reinforce the atmospheric and setting elements. The combat is punishingly hard, and that is why I can’t say too much about them.
One roleplaying game I can talk about, however, is Fallout. Specifically the title that is generally regarded as the most popular and narratively-strongest in the 3D series, which is Fallout: New Vegas.
New Vegas, much like Alpha Centauri, is a fundamentally political game. You begin your journey in the post-apocalyptic Mojave after waking up an amnesiac. By way of the opening cutscene and first bits of dialogue, you learn this is as a result of being shot in the head and buried alive in the desert. After being rescued by a suspiciously-friendly robot and tended to by the town physician of a sleepy desert village, you are quickly drawn into a world of multifaceted political intrigue as you decide which faction in the game to side with: the charismatic but self-serving Mr. House, the democratic but imperialistic New California Republic or the barbaric but orderly Caesar’s Legion.
Of all the Fallout games, it does the best job of wrestling with the greater themes of post-apocalyptic fiction rather than spending too much time simply reveling in the aesthetics of the setting’s Forever 1950’s.
A theme that is ever-present in New Vegas is a vague sense of nostalgic melancholy surrounding the characters’ perceptions and often misconceptions about the world “before the bombs fell,” a term the game calls the “Old World Blues.” It is such a central aspect of the game that the phrase is even the title and central theme of the last DLC for New Vegas. The different factions, in their own way, represent manifestations of Old World Blues.
The NCR are held up as the successors to the pre-war American government, believing in human and minority rights, representative democracy, and consent of the governed. And yet, the various quests in the game also paint them as unscrupulously expansionistic and their political system, while outwardly democratic, is characterized by corruption and nepotism stemming from the influence of wealthy landowners and cattle merchants. Such dysfunction is considered endemic to America before the bombs fell.
Likewise Caesar’s Legion and Mr. House represent different facets of the same obsession with the Old World. Caesar believed that the old paradigm of America, especially its reliance on democracy and freedom, was an obstacle to survival in the harsh conditions of the post-apocalypse. He modeled his society off ancient Rome, treating cruelty as a virtue and committing atrocities in the name of strength. Then there is Robert House, a Howard Hughes-esque futurist business tycoon who views the conflict between NCR and the Legion as the petty squabbling of children and sees himself as a visionary, able to lead Vegas through the rigors of the post-apocalyptic world. Despite his pretensions to break with the past, his brand of technocratic futurism is also well-founded in the hypercapitalism of the pre-war America.
Ultimately, New Vegas is exploring themes and expressing hypotheses endemic to any post-apocalyptic work of fiction: the cyclical nature of history, the rise and fall of empires, the fates of the people on the margins between great powers, and the palpable influence of the past upon the outlook of the present. All of this is complemented by interesting characters, dialogue trees, a diverse set of quests, and an expansive and well-detailed open world setting.
These two games represent just two stand-outs within their respective genres, games that, while being entertaining, can also be deeply stimulating on an intellectual level. They are just two examples of how video games are not just mindless ways to kill all that extra time you have on your hands because of the lockdown, but other titles like BioShock, Shadow of the Colossus, Deus Ex, Pathologic and Papers, Please could just as easily have been included. At the end of the day, it is an exciting and praiseworthy development that in the 21st century we have an artistic medium as rich as video games, with limitless storytelling potential.
