The video game denies our mortality. Every game is a virtual reality that reflects our own world in some way, and yet every game also eradicates the one certainty of existence: its finality. Within a video-game representation, you will often find echoes of life’s fragility. But you will never experience true extinction. There is always another life to be lived.
If, through video games, we have found a way to confound death itself, surely the video game has the capacity to correct other injustices of our world? This is, after all, the inexhaustible wonder of the medium: the capacity to make tangible any type of reality that can be imagined, whether that is a world on fire, one beset with aliens, or something more peaceful and just.
Video games are normally based on fairer and more just systems than those in the real world (or, at very least, on systems that tend to favour the player). That’s what makes them so palatable, such wonderful places to visit, even the awful virtual war zones and other theatres of human tragedy. There too you can triumph, and, on the whole, their rules and laws are dependable and always enforced by the omniscient computer.
But games have the capacity to go much further. Indeed, there are designers who want to use the medium not only to create an environment in which the player is able to triumph, but also to model a better, fairer society for everyone. Video games are exceptional machines for favouring the individual (they do, after all, exist to serve the player, revolving around their every move, responding to their every whim). But they have the capacity to model ways of living that favour everyone, not only the powerful individual. In fact, some of the most popular video games on earth today were designed to do just this.
Richard Bartle grew up in the 1960s on a council estate in Hornsea, Yorkshire. His father was a gas fitter and his mother a school cook, at a time in Britain when a person’s class defined his or her expectations. The Bartles, in short, were a working-class family with working-class prospects. After his mother wrote some short children’s stories, she sent them to a book publisher. The stories were published, scene for scene, but attributed not to his mother but to a well-known children’s author at the time. She was given no credit or remuneration. Mrs. Bartle no doubt felt the sting of injustice (she kept her original manuscripts and showed them to her son) but she was also resigned to the fact that she was a school cook and that this was to be her place in life. There was no moving up or on.
Stories and games were prevalent in the Bartle household—in addition to his mother’s literary ambition, his father was an avid player of board games.
‘I invented role-playing games when I was about twelve,’ Bartle, who is now fifty-four, tells me. ‘I’d stick pieces of paper together and draw a huge map on them. I’d design the world with lakes and mountains. I put various native tribes in the world, and I invented a character who had to get from one side of the map to the other.’
Bartle named the game after this lead character, Dr. Toddystone. The name was a play on the Victorian explorer Dr. Livingstone and the word ‘Toddy,’ British slang in the early 1970s for dog shit.
‘I thought the game was going to be dog shit, so I named it that,’ he says. ‘It was an RPG by any measure. I built a diary up of the events that happened in the game: Toddystone having to barter for a horse, being caught in an eclipse, and so on. It was … vivid.’ When he was sixteen, Bartle saw his first computer.
‘BP opened a chemical works nearby and, as a way to improve relations with the local community, they donated access to their computers to nearby schools,’ he says. Bartle’s school was allowed to use a DEC System 10 mainframe. He immediately knew that he wanted to use the machine to write a game, but the process was slow. At that time, would-be programmers would write their code out by hand. This would then be sent off to an administrator, who would type it into the computer. The turnaround for this process was two weeks.
‘If you sent something with a bug in it, you wouldn’t know for a fortnight,’ Bartle says.
His first game featured battling tanks, which could be moved around the map by entering coordinates into the computer. The DEC-10 would then print out a map, using dots to denote the landscape and bracket symbols to show the tank’s whereabouts.
‘We weren’t aware of Spacewar! or any of the other games that had been written around the world at that point,’ he says. ‘But likewise it never occurred to us that people hadn’t really written computer games before. We didn’t know what they were, but we just assumed they were out there.’
For Bartle, his goal in life was simple: find a way to get into a university.
‘Nobody in my family had ever gone before, so it would have made my parents proud,’ he says. Bartle was accepted at Essex University (‘mainly on flair’) and studied mathematics in his first year, along with computer science and physics.
‘At the end of the first year there were two students who were better than me at maths and no students better than me at computer science, so I switched course entirely,’ he says. ‘I already had a sense of the injustice of the education system, but when I arrived at university it became clearer to me: the other students were just as smart as the kids had been in my school. These students had simply been better taught and better prepped for exams.’
Bartle had the chance to recast these unjust systems when, in his first year of study, he met Nigel Roberts, president of the university’s computer society. Roberts then introduced Bartle to Roy Trubshaw, a student in the year above Bartle who, earlier that week, had written the first proof-of-concept for MUD, a primitive online adventure game.
‘He called it “Multi-User Dungeon” because he wanted to give people a sense of what kind of game it was going to be. Nowadays we call them “adventure” games, but he also thought “Dungeon” would become the genre’s name.’ With his prototype, Trubshaw had discovered a way to design a game on the DEC that was shared between multiple users. The pair, assisted by Roberts, expanded the prototype. The total amount of memory available was, at the weekends, just 70k—less than the file size of a photograph taken on a mobile phone today.
By Christmas 1978, MUD was playable. Players would sit at a teletype (a device similar to a typewriter that accessed the computer mainframe) and type in commands. There was no screen; details about the world and everyone’s actions within it were instead printed out on paper. By the following year, the machine code had become ‘too unwieldy’ to add new things.
‘We threw it away and rewrote everything,’ says Bartle. ‘Most of the game was complete by spring 1980, but Roy’s finals were coming so he passed code ownership to me. Roy was mainly interested in programming, with a mild interest in game design. I was the reverse: a slower programmer but sharper with design, so we complemented one another. I added experience points and the idea that a player’s character could “level up” and improve their attributes through accomplishments and so on.’
Originally the pair had wanted goals in the game to derive from players themselves. ‘But when you’re working on something with less computational power than a washing machine, you can’t really do that,’ he says. ‘We had to author gameplay, when originally we had hoped it would be totally emergent.’
By this point, Bartle had become clear in his broader vision for the game.
‘We thought the real world sucked,’ he says, with the righteous anger of the lifelong revolutionary. ‘The only reason I had been allowed into a university is because the country decided that it was so in need of programmers that it was prepared to tolerate people from backgrounds like mine and Roy’s in further education. We both railed against that. We wanted to make a world that was better than that. It was a political endeavour right from the start, as well as an artistic one.’
Those political aims manifested in the game through the use of levels and character classes, affording players the freedoms that hadn’t been afforded to Bartle, or, at least, to his parents.
‘We wanted the game to be pure freedom, to allow people to be themselves,’ he says. ‘We introduced character classes and levels because I wanted people to have some indication of their own personal merit based on what they did, rather than where they were born. It’s why I’m not a fan of free-to-play games in which you can simply buy progress. That’s a complete contravention of what we were trying to do with MUD. We were creating a true meritocracy. Not because I thought a meritocracy was the one true way, but if we were going to have a system in which people ranked themselves, then a meritocracy was the least worst approach.’
Bartle excelled in his studies, graduating from Essex with the highest first ever recorded at the time and, as a result, was given the university’s solitary PhD grant. MUD spread quickly.
‘Due to an accident of geography, Essex University was near to a BT research centre at Martlesham Heath,’ he explains. ‘We had access to Experimental Packet Switching Service, through which we could connect to the university of Kent. Through that we could connect to ARPA, the forerunner to the Internet. In this way, we could play MUD with, say, people from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In fact, the head of the MIT media lab was one of the first people to play.’
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.
Grand Theft Auto V, like so many video games, defies straightforward definition or critique because it is so many things at once. As with all cities, when we enter Los Santos we bring with us our own perspectives, hangups, ambitions, and fears. We embrace or reject them accordingly. Los Santos is a mirror to Los Angeles, but also to the individual. This kind of projection happens with all art and entertainment, but perhaps more so with video games, the only form in which we act. And perhaps more so still in open-world games, in which our freedoms are so broad and so accommodated. And perhaps still more so with Los Santos, city of reinvention, through which you can ride a train and see whatever it is that you need to see.
There’s an old saying: ‘Wherever you go, there you will be.’
I read it as an amiable warning: it’s no use trying to flee yourself. Even if you escape your problems, you will always be there. Video games like Grand Theft Auto V prove the point, to a certain degree. Unless you’re deliberately playing against type, or assuming a specific role, you can’t help but bring yourself into the fiction. Your interests and predilections will be reflected in your activity, be it hunting wild animals, racing jet-skis, hiring prostitutes, buying property, planning heists, or hiking first thing in the morning. If you are feeling hateful in the real world, the game provides a space in which to act hatefully. Wherever you go, there you will be.
Of course, the way a game is designed will encourage certain types of behaviour, and many interactions that you might wish to make if you were to fully and bodily enter the fiction are entirely closed off. You may only be able to interact with the world around you via a gun’s sights. In many video games, there is no option to eat, to love, to touch, to comfort, or to use any of the other crucial verbs with which we live life. Nevertheless, the medium’s greatest draw is surely the way in which it allows us to understand more about ourselves and the world, in a safe place, through the mystical act of play. Video games may be escapism, but wherever you escape to, there too you will be, and there you might just find yourself.
Back in Tainan City, in an Internet café popular with players close to the one in which Chen Rong-Yu died, there’s an attitude among players that death by gaming is something that happens to other people, people with bigger problems and deeper issues.
‘I’ve never played for longer than forty-eight hours at a time,’ says twenty-two-year-old Ding Kuo Chih, who has been playing games in Internet cafés for a decade. ‘Nowadays I rarely play for longer than ten hours at a stretch. I heard about the guy who died. My friends and I were just talking about it, actually. We all think it’s just ridiculous to play a game to death. The guy must have had some financial problems or something. Perhaps that’s what happened—he chose to spend all his money on video games, so he had no money to eat and drink properly. Something like that.’
Every player in the café has heard of the ‘death by video game’ stories, but they appear to have had little impact on behaviour.
‘It’s not really changed anything for me,’ says Chiu, a mousy girl who’s playing Starcraft. ‘Maybe he had some problem with his heart? It wouldn’t happen to me. I have a job.’
Likewise, for sixteen-year-old Shih, Rong-Yu’s death seems irrelevant.
‘It’s not changed anything for me,’ he says. ‘I am an infrequent gamer. I only come here once a week, so it’s OK for me to play for a long stretch of time. I am just killing time.’
And what better place to kill time? Video games, at times, bring comfort. Often they bring challenge, relief, glory, discovery, even a glimpse of a fairer existence. They reward you for your efforts with empirical, unflinching fairness. Work hard in a game and you advance. Take the path that’s opened to you and persevere with it and you can save the world. Every player is given an equal chance to succeed. There is a prelapsarian quality to video games that makes them irresistible, especially to people whose experiences in life have been of injustice and unfairness.
Video games are truly a metaphor for a vision of life that can be ordered, understood, and conquered. They may start off as broken places, full of conflict and violence, but they are utopias too, in that the things that are broken can be put right. Hour by hour, in most video games, our work is to restore, rescue, and perfect these virtual worlds.
But, as the experiences of Rong-Yu and all of the others demonstrate, this is not the entire story. Video games can also distract, depress, have a negative impact on health. They can enforce problematic values in profound ways and even lead people away from more effective and important support systems in their lives. Yes, video games can be a useful tool in finding refuge, but they can never replace family or friendships, the natural and fundamental supports of human beings.
Video games can inspire greatness and challenge the status quo, pointing out flaws in our systems, illustrating better ways of living and ruling. In this way they can shape our attitudes, beliefs, and values, perhaps in a more immediate, physical way than other media. But of course, this same power can be used in damaging ways. Video games also have the capacity to demoralise people, and they can vividly reinforce systems of power, privilege, and even oppression.
No, video games won’t save you—they might even kill you—and the jury is still very much out as to whether they improve or imperil the world.
But the potential—that shimmering, vivid, endlessly exciting potential—is there, fizzing on the restless screen. Therefore, so too are we.
Killing time.