ZEN ALBATROSS

[In my latest piece on Motherboard, I’m considering the ‘game’ mechanics inherent in foreign policy, and the real reason Wikileaks threatens the players of a broken, game-like system of international diplomacy]

Remember a while ago when the World Trade Center blew up and we blamed that one guy who sent us tons of videos from his secret supervillain hideaway in the mountains of Afghanistan? And how the most powerful and thorough military forces in the world threw their arms up in the air after a couple years of failed searching? Well, they seem to be doing just fine right now at closing in on a different guy. Except this guy’s crimes are not blowing up buildings. They’re something much, much worse: Making a lot of people in high places very nervous about their reputations.

I was reading a rather scathing Glenn Greenwald rant the other day in light of the recent Wikileaks domain shut-downs and it got me to thinking — As Julian Assange & co. brace for impact amidst the throes of what is quite possibly the word’s first large-scale info war, what is the real meaning behind this desperate race to shut up the whistleblowers at any cost?

Here’s one way of thinking about it: Everyone in the world is playing a huge game, and Wikileaks is the jerk that flipped the table over and pulled all the aces out of everyone’s pockets.

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[My latest piece on Motherboard explores the many faces of the animated GIF in order to reveal the secrets behind its long history as a ubiquitous staple of internet culture.]

The internet of yesterday is no more. Long gone are the days of HTML frames, kitschy border graphics and blinking scrolly-text. But from the ashes of the anarchy that was Web 1.0, there is one flavor of imagery that has lived on long past its own expiration date. The animated GIF’s role in today’s internet isn’t steeped purely in nostalgia, however. What was once a ubiquitous embellishment on the web pages of commoners and corporations alike is now so much more. Come with me as we explore the many faces of these versatile, digital zoetropes.

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[In my latest piece on Motherboard, I draw from Simon Carless’ recent retrospective critique of Modern Warfare 2 to briefly illustrate what’s right and wrong with modern shooting games, and why they’re all still just permutations of a simple mathematical formula]

With all their fanfare, record-breaking sales numbers and accompanying controversy, it’s interesting to ponder what exactly, if anything, has really changed about shooting games in the two decades and change since videogames began to appear in arcades, pizza joints and living rooms across the globe.

According to IGF founder Simon Carless in a recent article, the answer is ‘fundamentally, not much.’ When examining last year’s action blockbuster Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Carless reveals some striking parallels that make modern shooting games seem confused; a mixed bag of painted set pieces tied together only by the barrel of a virtual gun.

“Beneath the bombast, it has everything in common with gaming’s proto-shooter Space Invaders. You take cover behind walls before peeking out to shoot aliens. Twenty-two years ago the aliens were line-dancing extra terrestrials. In 2009 they were Afghans. The metaphor changed, but the principle remains the same: avoid missing headshot for high score.”

There is a simple explanation for this: Since the earliest days of interactive entertainment, the most common principle to express within a videogame has been the elimination of elements on the screen. Not because we are a horrible and violent race of large-brained mammals who use entertainment to train our young to kill, but because the creation and ‘canceling out’ of something on a screen was one of the simplest operations one could program on an early computer.

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Where would videogames be today if it weren’t for the Nintendo Entertainment System? It’s a question that’s almost impossible to answer, considering the pivotal role that the celebrated 8-bit console had, not just in bringing videogames back into our living rooms after the great game crash of the early 1980’s, but establishing videogames as legitimate part of the cultural iconography.

This week on MOTHERBOARD, we’re celebrating the past and present history of the NES with a series of articles in honor of the console’s 25th birthday. Check it out and join in the conversation.

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Last week, videogame software giant EA made a puzzling and unsettling announcement: Due to recurring complaints from a vocal minority of friends and relatives of fallen servicemen, the company would be removing any mention of the Taliban from their new game, a reboot of the Medal of Honor franchise that focuses on the war in Afghanistan, by re-naming the terror group simply the “Opposing Force.”

The decision came after a long period of refusal to compromise the developer’s vision for the game and naturally, resulted in some considerable Internet backlash. But it also raised this nagging question that keeps coming up again and again: Will videogames, especially those about war, ever be taken seriously?

To try and answer that, let’s take a look at another piece of media — a film — that greatly influenced how stories about war are told today:

Image: Dreamworks

Saving Private Ryan marked a considerable milestone in the way Hollywood directors portray human warfare. Gone were the winsome narratives that yield to traditional “heroes” of old as they overcome seemingly insurmountable odds, winning the day for the good guys. Over the years, we had realized our foolishness in implanting these romantic elements into an un-idealistic setting like war. So instead, we are immediately thrust into an unapologetic maelstrom of death: A gritty, hellish realism that charges forward at breakneck speed, not stopping for even a second to let a viewer to reconcile with the grisly death of that one character he might’ve been fond of.

And it was successful — It was successful because that’s exactly how war is, according to the countless World War II veterans who not only praised the film for its portrayal of these events, but also helped advise the filmmakers for accuracy during production. And just like Ryan, EA’s new Medal of Honor game, like prior titles in the franchise, has received advisement and approval from veterans of the conflict it seeks to depict.

So now we arrive at the heart of this quandary: Why can a film be a serious reflection of a historic armed conflict, but a videogame can not? I could discuss at length the disturbing social taboo that seems to engulf anything and everything having to do with 9/11 and the Taliban in most parts of the United States, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. The other half has to do with videogames and the disparity between what they are and what people think they are.

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