[On November 29, 1972, Atari debuted Pong, one of the earliest and most influential video games. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Pong and four other groundbreaking games—I’d love the responses and nominations of gamers and noobs alike in comments!]
On two
strikingly communal and collaborative sides to the influential
first-person shooter.
I could write a
post about id Software’s Doom (1993) very
similar to yesterday’s on Pac-Man, as
Doom was nearly as innovative
and influential in its own era and genre as the little yellow dude was in
his. (To cite one such aspect that I won’t be focusing on in this post: the
game was originally
distributed through shareware, making it a very direct predecessor to
internet gaming.) Indeed, having spent more hours than I care to admit during
my first year of college playing Doom with
and against (on which more in a moment) other residents of my dorm, I would be
even more equipped (armed, one might say) to write overall about the game’s
staggering popularity and effects. But I wanted to take a slightly different
approach for today’s post, and to focus in more closely on two distinct but
interconnected aspects of Doom, both
of which in their own ways reflect the game’s striking communal and
collaborative elements—and both of which have been frustratingly linked to
critiques of the game and its first-person shooter ilk for inspiring (whether
implicitly or even explicitly) acts of violence in the real world.
The first such
communal aspect was a main reason why I spent so much time Doom-ing during my freshman year: the multiplayer mode known as
“deathmatch.” The ostensible goal of Doom
is to defeat level after level of swarming monsters using your array of
weapons, and the game offered a “cooperative” (or “co-op”)
multiplayer mode in which 2-4 players (linked through a shared network, such
as, I dunno, in a college first-year dorm) could team up to fight those
monsters as a unit. But that was only one of the game’s two multiplayer modes,
and the other was the deathmatch, in which 2-4 players instead compete against
one another, becoming their respective targets instead of the monsters. The
deathmatch gameplay option became so popular that various corporations had
to ban Doom entirely in order to
keep their employees from devoting all their time to playing against each
other. In my experience, Doom
deathmatches were a great way to connect with my fellow dormmates and become
better friends with this important academic community; but for
critics, the chance to kill fellow humans (rather than unrealistic
monsters) brought video game violence home to the real world in dangerous
ways—a perspective that was seemingly validated when the 1999 Columbine High
School shooters were revealed
to have been avid Doom players.
That tenuous
link between one of the first prominent school shootings and Doom was mythically amplified by a
connection to the other communal and collaborative aspect of the game I want to
highlight: the ability for players
to create and play in their own custom levels, known as WAD files
(“Where’s All the Data?”). The potential for such customization was a striking
innovation, and became one of the most popular and shared aspects of the game
for many players. But this aspect also became unhappily associated with
Columbine, as one of the two shooters, Eric Harris, had apparently designed a
number of WADs of his own (which came to be known as “Harris levels”).
However, one of the key elements to how that fact was reported turned out to be
entirely false: reports
suggested that Harris had designed a level based on Columbine High and had
used it to practice for the school shooting; but that was quite simply not the
case. Here we can see quite specifically and frustratingly the way that violent
video games in general, and this innovative collaborative side to Doom in particular, can be inaccurately
turned into fodder for attacks on the games and their negative societal
effects. Like any work of art, Doom
can and should be analyzed and critiqued; but neither the WADs nor Doom overall are what gave us Columbine.
Last game
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other video games you’d highlight and analyze?
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