Of Master Chief and Men

For a videogame production class I’m currently taking, I’ve been reading the book Man, Play, Games by Roger Caillois. The book was written in 1961, but it is still incredibly, if not disturbingly relevant to modern athletic games and videogames. It’s an anthropological look at the games of men and a categorical classification of them all, while also being a smaller study of some of the similarities between the games of men and animals that emerge within nature.

When Reading Callois’s opinions on the important role of social dynamics in games, certain modern multiplayer conventions bear a striking resemblance to those of antiquity, such as Eskimos being the cosplayers of yore. In Caillois’s description of mimicry games, he says, “ [The disguise] serves to change the wearer’s appearance and to inspire fear in others.” He also adds, “ Acts of mimicry tend to cross the border between childhood and adulthood. They cover to the same degree any distraction, mask, or travesty, in which one participates, and which stresses the very fact that the play is masked or otherwise disguised, and such consequences ensue.” This observation certainly holds foreboding echoes of what is now the most popular, present-day disguise that can be used to intimidate (or at least attempt to) and obscure the act of play to the point of either borderline or imagined legitimacy; the avatar and all of its anonymity.

Play does in fact “lack something when it is reduced to a mere solitary exercise." I know this all too well. Some of my darkest, loneliest, most forlorn moments have been while playing Mario Party with me, myself, and a platter of cream cheese and pepperoni sandwiches I made. As we crawl out of the doldrums of self-imposed digital purgatories, we venture out into the wide social world of online gaming. But as Caillois posits, the social agon (competitive) game is more of a rivalry-motivated, glory-reaping exhibition than a brotherly communion. I told myself that playing Halo 3 online would strengthen long-distance friendships and maybe forge new ones. The game fulfilled this desire to an extent, but the beast quickly took over.

Suddenly, you start to see your rank go up. Your melee elbow becomes battle-hardened. You see and hear the cruel face of interactive war; teenage kids accommodating every fresh corpse with a post-mortem teabagging and guys with ‘DJ’ somewhere in their gamertag rap battling their way to victory (forfeits where the degree of annoyance was too great for our team and resident rapper, Jeff, to endure). You see your service decorations get shinier, bigger, more ornate. You enter games and see guys in the pre-game lobby that have all sorts of crazy emblems. “ A silver phoenix? A golden spatula? I don’t know what the fuck rank that spatula represents, but I’ve never seen it before and I’ll probably never want to see it again after this match,” you tell yourself.

A little bit longer and you’re thirsting for victory and that fearsome, intimidating veneer, that golden spatula to call your own. It’s fun when you’re sober as well as blood-drunk, but karma quickly comes back to you for every white, nameless, cross-shaped data archive you helped erect in the vast graveyard known as the Bungie.net stat server. With the sour taste of defeat still in your mouth, you start playing as a ‘lone wolf’ because you think your team is bringing you down. Once that adrenaline-fueled war high starts to wane, post-traumatic stress takes hold. You come full circle, become reformed, start playing by yourself again and looking for meaning, purpose, and God in the serene fields of Hyrule. But every now and then that trigger finger becomes itchy, you start hearing things, the sound of your maiden whispering into your ear. “ Say my name,” she demands. “ PWNage,” you respond… “sweet, sweet PWNage.”