Forgiven?

I heard this morning that the early video game, "Space Invaders" was being inducted into the video game hall of fame. They mentioned that it spawned a line of first person shooter games even though it was more of a crude figure shooting game.

It made me think, one day, after we finally meet aliens, this was probably something we'd have to explain, the way we did slavery or the genocide of native peoples or the wholesale slaughter of millions of buffalo for fun. It seems that we, as a society or group of societies, are driven by some need to practice or "gamify" slaughter.


Perhaps this is how we demonstrate our understanding and obedience to the admonition of George Santayana. We've learned our lesson. We understand that methodically murdering large groups of people is "bad". We're sorry that we did it in the past. It was wrong, very wrong. Even if the people weren't like us and didn't look like us and didn't talk like us. It was still wrong, we see that now.

But still, within us, we wish it were OK. By "OK", we usually mean that our legitimate authorities and/or our deeply revered religions told us specifically, emphatically that killing, no, more than just killing, slaughtering, eliminating, punishing with careless destruction, was a good, a holy thing to do. That we are the righteous tool of God when we cleanse the earth of these "others". We're actually doing them a favor, releasing these "less than people" from their backward and abominable ways. Their rudimentary souls are not worthy of life, as we know it, and the sooner they are sent back the sooner they may return in our image. While it sounds like hateful and dated dogma, this was really a "beard".

In reality, the real target was never the others, never the people who were different from us. The target was always ourselves or at least everyone but our self. But what kind of abomination wants to slaughter their own village their own neighbors their own tribe? No that was never to be said out loud, except for the few that weren't afraid go carry out their plans. we all agreed they had to be stopped, they were monsters. We all know their names and make very well attended movies about them. They fascinate us, but no, never that, but we gladly accepted the substitute target of those not of our tribe. Those with skin of a different color, "people" with ways and lives and languages very different from our own. They were once found to acceptable as a prey. Back in the days before we knew better. To paraphrase Clint Eastwood's character "William Munny" in "Unforgiven", "We ain't like that no more."

So we grew as a people, we matured, we made laws and worked to get everyone to agree and abide by them. We recognized that genocidal campaigns were not a good thing for society as a whole, and maybe partly because we could never be sure to get every single one of them, and as the old saying goes, if you leave one alive, vengeance will be sought. That observation is the basis of a lot of our stories. But just like William Munny, lying to ourselves didn't change the fact that we are, deep inside, just like that, still. It's only the internal battle we fight every day and the extent that we "win" the battle that forms the veneer that we call civilization

But it's not enough to keep these thoughts and desires locked away within or to just go around stomping on ant-hills, we need to have a game which allows us to bring to vivid life our deeply held desire to go out and "get some". Sure we have our wars, but they're expensive in terms of lives and capital and inconvenient for the busy modern person who doesn't really want to risk anything more than a few hours attention per day, so we make games. Computers allow us to slake our thirst for this, but early on, the wet blankets, the walking consciences of our society saw that it was too perfectly represented, too close to what we really wanted and told us that we must hide our desire with stand-ins, surrogates. There are still plenty of "games" that allow you to kill the people you see around you, but there is a tendency to white-wash some games to make them more generally acceptable.

We searched for targets to put into the games that looked sort of like our real prey. In the beginning, we used blocky looking aliens, like Space Invaders and now we use the undead, who doesn't agree that they're a problem whenever they pop up? I'm convinced there's a large percentage of the population secretly praying for the start of the Zombie-Apocalypse so they can call in to work, load up those expensive guns and coolers, and spend the day, drinking beer and "killing" those sad, slow-moving, no-witted, disgusting ex-people. Until then, the video games will have to suffice.

In the end, it should be easy to explain to Aliens why we used images of them in our video games for targets, "It's the way we are."

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Originally Published on Rising-Gorge 5/5/2016