Sabrosa confianza

2.3.1. Remediating Game Aesthetics: Modus Operandi, Objectives and Effects

Douglas Maxwell’s Helmet is not just a play about computer games and the computer game generation. It is, perhaps more significantly, a play written in the form of a computer game. The story revolves around two characters: Sal, the owner of the Zone computer game shop, an unsuccessful businessman in his late twenties who has disappointed his father and wife; and Roddy (a.k.a. Helmet) a teenager obsessed with computer games. The play opens with the closing down of Sal’s gaming shop, and centres around Sal’s guilt and feelings of failure, and Helmet’s efforts to keep the shop open longer. Helmet, infatuated by computer games, treats the shop’s closure as another challenging ‘game’ like those he constantly plays on computers, and accordingly tries his best to stay as long as possible in the Zone, even if this means taking dramatic steps. Throughout the play, Sal tries to convince Helmet that he should go out and get a ‘real’ life like other children, whilst Helmet’s only idol is Sal and his only aim is to become the owner of the shop himself. The reason behind Helmet’s obsession with games and the shop is soon revealed to be an unhappy household and the death of his little brother due to his and his parents’ negligence. Meanwhile, Sal is obsessed with the idea that his wife is cheating on him with his successful brother and is furious that he has never achieved his dream of becoming a stand--‐up comedian. As the synopsis indicates, Helmet is a play not simply or only about games, but about the disillusionment of these two people and their escape into a virtual world. The question that emerges is whether or to what extent the plot structure is able to accommodate the issues of disillusionment, displacement, and virtual reality as an alternative world.

The plot structure of the play is formed in line with computer game design. Every scene is a level and there are five levels in total; each player/character has three lives. Every so often, the players/characters lose lives when they are defeated or their energy levels drop if they are weakened or become upset, and they also gain lives and energy when they are successful or happy. When one loses a ‘life’ the action halts, and then goes back to a few minutes earlier. The characters then pick up where they stopped as if nothing has happened. Each time the scenes are replayed, the narrative moves on a little further, but with different outcomes. There is a continual play--‐fail--‐replay--‐succeed sequence. Thus, until the characters make a successful

manoeuvre, the level remains incomplete and they cannot move onto the next one. The game/play opens with an ‘Instructions’ section, which explains that the setting is ‘The Zone’, that there are five levels to the game, some of which are for two and others for a single player. The five levels of the game/play are built within the linear framework of two hours: the first level starts at 7.05pm and the final level ends at 9.08pm. Apart from Level 4, analysed later in this section, each level contains a number of replays leading to the ‘appropriate’ instance which allows moving to the next level.

The play opens with Sal ‘performing last rites’ of closing the shop at 7.05pm on a Tuesday evening --‐ he switches off the screens, sets safety alarms and so forth. This scene is interrupted when Helmet enters, surprised at finding the screens are off. Sal tries to persuade Helmet to leave and upon Helmet’s refusal, becomes violent and kicks him out of the shop. At this point, the stage directions indicate: ‘RODDY dies. Death noise, blackout, life lost on screen.’46 What follows this scene is its replay; it is again 7.05pm, Sal carries out exactly the same closing ritual and Helmet enters and they bicker, this time with more insistence and resistance from both sides. Then, as Helmet loses energy, he asks where Sal’s wife is, which reminds Sal of something awful and he ‘dies’. The following scene shows the time as 7.11pm, and opens with Helmet’s question to Sal, this time getting a different answer and attitude, changing the direction of the action. This scene is followed by two others, the latter finishing at 7.25pm, with Sal insisting that Helmet leave and giving him ‘a long hard look of disgust as the lights go down to blackout.’47 Level 1 repeats parts of the same scene five times with different outcomes each time, leading to a different restarting point, until every replay reaches the ideal instance for the dramatic action to the predetermined ending of the level/scene before Level 2.

To give another example, Level 3 starts at 8.45pm: Sal and Helmet are having a discussion about an upcoming game where Sal criticises how the media and technologies bombard individuals with new and flashier products. Helmet, on the other hand, seems to have earned the necessary money for this new game. As the dialogue moves forward, it turns out that rather than earning it, Helmet stole it from a woman after punching her. As Helmet reveals this, ‘as if telling the punchline to the world’s funniest joke’,48 Sal freezes with confusion and phones the police. The scene halts. The pause at this instance hints at moral functions of games inculcating the players with certain values and here implies a warning about an amoral act. The next scene starts at 8.50 from the point where Helmet is about to relate how he punched a woman and stole her money, yet this time, instead of exposing the ugly truth about

46 Douglas Maxwell, Helmet (London: Oberon Books, 2002), p. 22. 47 Maxwell, Helmet, p. 29.

the source of his money, he changes his mind and moves the story in a different direction by telling a story about how his brother died in a fire when he was one year old. At this point, the level ends and the next level opens with and focuses on Helmet’s sad memory of his little brother.

To understand Maxwell’s framework and its relationship to game aesthetics requires an investigation of the temporal aesthetics of games and the play’s plotline. The game theorist, Jesper Juul, argues that ‘[g]ames are almost always chronological.’49 The computer game scholar James Newman elaborates on this idea by arguing that ‘even the most apparently ‘non--‐ linear’, branching games in fact comprise a finite number of levels.’50 In games, there is a ‘constant repetition of back and forth movement between the boundaries’,51 which often leads to different scenes, endings and thus beginnings after the replays. This leads to a kind of looping time structure in the chronological order of games that does not entirely violate linearity, yet expands the temporal dimension to the extent that the linear timeline coexists with looping time, the constant possibility of a rewind and restart.

The back and forth movements through rewinds, replays and intermissions bring about multiple variations in the game--‐narrative, as Britta Neitzel explains: ‘The plot changes in every round, which means that in case of computer games there is a multiform plot.’52 The replay format resembles ‘harbinger storytelling [...] in which the protagonist inexplicably gets the chance of a “do--‐over”’.53 Accordingly, this creates manifold possibilities for a single moment, without privileging any one over another --‐ the replays do not offer an ‘either/or’ situation or mean that one course is ‘more real’ than any other, or with a more direct and accurate reference to the real world. Nevertheless, the multi--‐plot form of games is structured within the boundaries of the rules, which, as indicated above, contain a coherent model --‐ a structured time and plot. No matter how many different plots a gamer creates, the ‘successful’ action leads to the ‘next’ point in the narrative and the game finishes in designated ways that are fundamentally similar.

This structure manifests through the sequence of scenes in Maxwell’s play, yet in a slightly different manner because here one scene is privileged over another. In Helmet replays occur when one of the characters does or says something ‘wrong’ which suggests that the

49 Jesper Juul, ‘Games Telling Stories?’ in Handbook of Computer Game Studies, ed. by Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: The MIT Press, 2005), pp. 219--‐ 226, p. 223.

50 Newman, Videogames, p. 104--‐5.

51 Britta Neitzel, ‘Narrativity in Computer Games’ in Handbook of Computer Game Studies, ed. by in Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: The MIT Press, 2005), pp. 227--‐ 245, (p. 229). 52 Neitzel, p. 241.

present scene should stop and lead to the ‘right’ one. Thus, the replays here do not simply depend on fulfilling a task as in games. They also signal ‘right’ over ‘wrong’, something that may well have an ideological and moral component with respect to the wider workings of society. As the scenes in the ‘levels’ continually start again, mostly from different beginnings and leading to different end--‐points, they generate a different plot with every replay. Rather than a linear--‐successive, one--‐dimensional plotline, there is a multi--‐plot narrative, a multi--‐ perspectival form structured through rewinds and replays. The succession of scenes does not occur in a conventional consecutive manner, whereby the initial point leads directly to the second and then to the third with complete consistency. Rather, the play is formed in a looping manner, so a scene stops, starts over, moves forward, halts, starts over again and finally moves forward. This does not, however, mean the play does not structure time and present any sense of unity. On the contrary, the story, though in a looping pattern, still evolves and time moves forward as shown in the numbered titles (levels) of the scenes, with an indication of the elapsing time continuum. The replays always lead one scene to the next, chronologically and thematically.

Considering the replay pattern, one might at first argue that the resets in Helmet undermine the fabula and thus, in a Brechtian way, make the familiar --‐ the strictly unified and chronological sequence of events – strange. In relation to this, one might consider that the replay mode draws attention to the artifice of the play, and, by extension, reflects the constructedness of the contemporary world, where multifarious views of reality have replaced any one definitive perception. However, rather than creating it, the play lacks Verfremdung. The replays here are situated essentially within a well--‐structured dramatic plot in which every resetting or mini- -‐plot serves the dramatic illusion and the dénouement, the ‘game over’ point. The coherent and stable structure represents the world as a unified, definitive totality. Therefore, the mode of representation in Helmet does not relate to contemporary culture, a landscape where absolute meaningfulness, epistemological certainty and perception are problematic due to the high- -‐speed and information--‐overloaded lives of human beings, and so forth. Accordingly, the critical capacity of the replay format to accommodate critical relations to the mediatised postmodern culture is fundamentally limited. It does not highlight the mechanics of dramatic narrative and ask the reader to think about the implied morality of the social--‐cultural conditions. As a result, the form of Helmet stops short of critically grasping the human condition in mediatised culture, its central theme (I return to the content below).

In addition to replays, Helmet remediates ‘cut--‐scenes’. Cut--‐scenes are predetermined, fixed and non--‐interactive narrative components of game design. They are ‘embedded narrative

element[s]’54 which are essential to narrative--‐based computer games. In Maxwell’s composition, cut--‐scenes can be associated with certain dramaturgical elements such as the ‘Instructions’ section at the very beginning of the play, the stage directions indicating the energy levels (projected onto the screen on stage), and the monologue--‐based narrative in the fourth level, discussed below. The Instruction part, for example, ‘fills the role of both prequel and epilogue’,55 _{and serves to guide and inform the reader/spectator about what they will}

encounter shortly. The fourth level, on the other hand, pauses and expands on the dramatic action, in the gameplay format, as it presents background information about the narrative and action. Here, Helmet narrates his childhood memory about his little brother’s death, thus revealing the underlying motive for his escapism from the real world into the virtual world of games.

The cut--‐scenes in Helmet function as descriptive tools, facilitating the flow of the dramatic narrative rather than disrupting it. Like the resets in the play, the cut--‐scenes serve to create a manageable and identifiable representation of the world with certainty and entirety. It reinforces the recognisable plot and unified characterisation, categories of traditional dramatic text. Moreover, the background story providing a clear indication of Helmet’s motives also militates against uncertainty and epistemological instability, aspects of contemporary hyperreal culture that Helmet thematically refers to. Rather, it structures the narrative through flat characterisation and storyline, and leaves them unquestioned with regards to the world it thematises. The mode of remediation here remains within the bounds of dramatic representation of a unified fictive cosmos, which is no longer able to relate to the social and perceptual reality of the postmodern media--‐driven age. Therefore, despite its direct use of the media, Helmet’s mediatised plot structure shows a limited capacity to address issues concerning mediatised culture.

The structure of Helmet and its thematic content do, however, manifest an interest in mediatised culture. Both deal with themes such as consumerism and computer games as part of cultural industry, individualisation and the culture of apathy as well as the disillusionment of the human subject in a late--‐capitalist, mediatised world. Computer games, like many other media forms and cultural products, are ‘a product of the culture industry and a way of perpetuating the dominant ideology’.56 This is not to say that all games function as ideological apparatuses. Games can be considered beyond the relations and workings of power since games are also visual cultural forms and tools for education, entertainment, management,

54 Salen and Zimmermann, Rules ofPlay, p. 408. 55 Ibid., p. 408.

socialisation or problem--‐solving. However, a predominant aspect of games is their role as replicating and reinforcing ideological positions. Games are also a key factor in building global markets through merchandising new products embellished with recent technologies, and through transferring them into products of other media, such as the film and television industries. Like other media, games also contribute to the consumer ‘update culture’, the constant release and promotion of new designs to encourage the consumer to update his/her products by buying their new versions. This pattern of marketing cultural products makes the consumer, in a Marxist and Adornian57 sense, ‘fetishise’ the commodity more than its ‘use--‐ value’ and consume whatever the culture industry launches without thought.

Maxwell thematises consumer capitalism and commodity fetishism particularly in the scene where Helmet confesses he attacked a woman and stole her bag in order to buy a new game. Helmet’s desire for a ‘new and flashier’58 game and the callousness of his attitude evokes the mindless consumerism promoted by the mass media that has become prevalent in contemporary society. The play, thus, presents an aspect of the prevailing social reality of late capitalism where a woman Christmas shopping ‘used a pepper spray on other shoppers who were around her’ or a ‘man died of a heart attack on Black Friday, and people [...] just stepped on him and didn’t even bother to call 911.’59 Helmet’s desire to own the new version of a game is not simply about a personal wish or a random juvenile act, but denotes the wider social phenomenon of consumerism. It also addresses individualisation, and in parallel, people’s indifference to one another. As consumer capitalism promotes self--‐centred progress and profit rather than collective solidarity, it inevitably leads, as Bauman argues, to a certain degree of indifference to the fate of others.60 (See Chapter 3, section 2.2.2.) Accordingly, the apathy towards others leads people to perceive even their most unethical acts as acceptable, as Helmet callously does. The problem with the play, however, is that it deals in simplistic moral categories rather than making us see consumerism in a new light.

Another thematic motif in Helmet is disillusionment and the entrance into virtual reality as an escape route. Both characters experience discontent and disenchantment for different reasons. Helmet suffers from a traumatic childhood and cannot fit into society and be ‘normal’, or do the things that other young people do. Sal, on the other hand, feels disillusioned because he failed to meet the social requirements of becoming a successful son, businessman and

57 T. W. Adorno, ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’ in The Culture Industry: Selected

Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 38.

58 Maxwell, Helmet, p. 39.

59 Both quotations are taken from the same source: http://independentword.com/2011/11/violence--‐of--‐black- -‐friday--‐ merry--‐christmas--‐everyone/

60 For more information, see: Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

husband. It is interesting that both characters are ‘failures’ seeking a refuge. However, this does not suggest that this mass phenomenon is made up of social outcasts, unsuccessful people or simply people with personal issues and excludes the rest. Rather, there is a deeper underlying circumstance that implicates large areas of contemporary society. That is, the reasons for the characters’ discontent are not just based on ‘personal’ matters; they are the consequences of the socio--‐political conditions of individualisation, bringing about a continual struggle for progress and social compatibility, and ‘effort and stress of survival in [...], and [thus a] never- -‐ending material and psychological insecurity’.61 This environment inflicts fear of personal inadequacy and leads humans to isolation, as Sal indicates:

SAL: The real world is rubbish, Helmet. [...] I’ve seen the real world and I give you my word – it’s not worth seeing. The real world is vile and horrible and boring and fatally depressing. You just play games and don’t let anyone tell you it’s wrong. It’s not wrong. It’s right. That’s my problem, that’s always been my problem, I actually pay attention to those idiots that bang on about money and jobs and relationships and responsibility. Effort and concentration!62

In response to their circumstances, Helmet (throughout the play) and Sal (towards the end), seek refuge in the virtual world. Maxwell depicts games as shelters or alternative worlds that Sal and Helmet escape into. For Helmet, this alternative world becomes an alternative reality and it is as through this world makes the real one bearable. Likewise, Sal decides to stay with Helmet and play a game. The virtual environment is a landscape away from the roles, norms and values Sal is expected to conform to. Maxwell thus depicts games not simply as leisure activities or ideological apparatuses, but also as domains beyond ideological limits, namely, personalised tools people use to cope with their social circumstances. The escapism here is not the mindless entertainment associated with an unquestioning flight from reality. Rather, it refers to ‘any