The Empire of the Human: Colonial Attitudes in the Electronic Frontier,
a Four-Part Series
When reports of the “New World” started to trickle into Western Europe, the witnesses who carried them rarely employed “truth” or “empirical data” as critical methodologies. As a result of grossly erroneous maps that “charted” territories that never have or will exist on the only planet the cartographers could have been referring to, and stories of “cannibal troglodytes” and “sea beasties” the land in question was, to say the least, unfairly characterized. One of the problems, of course, in relating New World phenomena to European audiences was the lack of analogues back home. A mountain lion could probably be reasonably described as “like a jaguar, except browner,” or something like that, but how do you talk about a beaver (do they have beavers in England" I’m just guessing here) without making it sound, at the very least, like an exaggeration" Another problem was that the contexts for understanding the landscape lent themselves to bizarre deductive leaps. Christianity in its most deterministic strain allowed natural phenomena to be interpreted through the lens of predestination—which meant that since the natural world constituted a divine sign-system anything at all was possible. Economic exploitation, because it depended on government investment, also depended on inflated rhetoric and fantastic promises. And “Adventuring” (to complete the familiar God, Gold, Glory triad) is certainly an occupation that has historically been full of liars.
Psychologists have promoted the idea that because unfamiliarity and fear naturally cohabitate –“fear of the unknown” is almost a maxim — people try to force a recognizable framework onto things they do not understand, or else project their discomfort into the world around them. The net result is that a host of culturally shared images and icons arise out of the void. These images are not simply “false impressions”. Like the “noble savage” icon, they take on a life and significance of their own. They constitute their own systems of meaning that simultaneously rely on and contradict the tangible system of “the real world”.
The Brave New World of the electronic was originally charted over twenty years ago. An alien and exotic landscape, it was “colonized” by those who first “discovered” it. Although it might be a bit metaphysical to presume that the world that video games inhabit somehow preexisted its appearance on the market, the analogy to New World conquests is not entirely false. North America was not discovered by Columbus in 1492, the Vikings a few hundred years earlier, or even the Afro-Phoenecians before that. “North America” was created by the conquest, assimilation, appropriation, and symbiotic codependence of the previous landscape with the internalized sign-systems the colonizers brought with them. The landscape that video games inhabit was similarly dealt with by those who first chartered its territories. The creation of video games is primarily the creation of narratives: narratives that use a specialized sign-system derived from both the world at large and an evolving semiotic praxis used by developers to “communicate” to players.
Like the sign system involved, the implicit narrative of video games is also created out of the admixture of external, conventional sources (the “Fei” story, for instance, has been used into the double digits) and more specifically landscaped ones (e.g. Brave Fencer Musashi, because of its “landscape apparatus” is organized into a narrative structure that includes formulaic action sequences that require specific results). A game, then, can be thought of as a “text” created from a different, but identifiable, paradigm than the standard novel, short story, or even hypertext. If these texts can be read in terms of the issues outlined above (landscape constraints, icons and images, and interaction with the “real world”) then they might perhaps provide some sort of heretofore missing theoretical basis for approaching the “world” that we live in so often.
I realize that a critical examination of video game semiotics might not appeal to everyone, or anyone for that matter, but I propose to look at the evolution of a few of what I think are significant icons and images in games from the mid-seventies to present. I plan to cover the evolution of sub-humans (monkeys, mostly), demi-humans (zombies, etc.), humans themselves (from Adventure to Blue Stinger), and finally aliens. My initial research indicates that there has been significant and meaningful changes in how each of these categories have been constructed throughout video game history.
“Part I—The Origin of the Species: The Evolution of Kong” will trace the history of the monkey (I know a gorilla isn’t a monkey, but really…) from Donkey Kong to Ape Escape, under the working hypothesis that the icon has undergone a colonization process—initially the ape is presented as a crude, inhuman caricature who is simply an enemy, and a function of the landscape. The next generation of games assimilated the monkey image, using it for comic relief or, again, landscape. Donkey Kong Country effectively appropriated the monkey icon and “humanized” it—a tendency that is repeated in all the iconic categories. Ape Escape, however, revolutionizes the monkey image by, first of all, moving it from an aesthetic, functional image with little reference to the external world to a mimetic, “monkeyfied” version, and, second, by changing its relationship to the central character and the landscape—from an antagonistic one to a symbiotic.
Anyway, if you’re interested, check back soon.