It was when we had accomplished what the cartoon loading screen hinted at and yet the hordes just kept on coming that the terrifying revelation hit us: this is basically Asteroids, only with dead fascists instead of interstellar rocks. In a way, the old videogames were much more like real life: you can’t win that either, you just hope to stave off death for a few more minutes or years. Disappointingly, real life doesn’t often give you hyperspace or nukes.
Well, some of the old games were like that; others tempted the elite player actively to seek out death in the form of the uncompletable ‘killscreens’ that occurred in Pac-Man or Donkey Kong owing to the limitations of 8bit counters. I recently got round to watching the documentary King Of Kong, which is not only a devastating emotional drama about the epic contest between competitive old-school videogaming’s Darth Vader (Billy Mitchell, stunted and twisted by having given in to the Dark Side) and its Luke Skywalker (Steve Wiebe, improbably fresh-faced, charming and normal), but also a fascinating reminder of just how different those arcade games of the late ’70s and early ’80s were from most of what we play today. Different not just stylistically, but philosophically.
Once upon a time, for a start, scores meant something. When the high-score table of the Asteroids machine at my local fish-and-chip shop had STV at number one, people looked at me in the street with a new kind of respect. (Or perhaps they were paedophiles, who knows? It was a more innocent age.) Later, scores were replaced by stories, and then pimping your unique avatar or upgraded weapon loadout across the internet. Sure, some games continued to keep score, but a period of rampant superinflation inevitably took the edge off. Nowadays, a scoring game is likely to give you a million points just for taking your clawlike hand off the joypad to wipe the drool from your mouth.
But the existence of a score implies the beautiful possibility of a maximum score, at least in a game that ends. There is something heroic, even superhuman, about the ambition that lurks implicitly beneath the high-score contest between Mitchell and Wiebe in the film: the more serious and transcendental desire not just to be better than anyone else, but to play ‘the perfect game’ of Donkey Kong. This dream – logically possible but practically unrealisable – recalls Nietzsche’s startling idea of eternal recurrence. It holds that you will live exactly the same life as you are living now, moment to moment, an infinite number of times.
Sounds appalling? You’re telling me. But Nietzsche’s devilish twist is that we should decide to embrace this fact: we should actually want our lives to repeat indefinitely in exactly the same way, and glory in this as cosmic paradise. In principle, similarly, it is possible to play the perfect game of Donkey Kong, such that no higher score could be achieved, in which case one could reasonably will that each subsequent game played out in precisely the same way, undeviating and forever, and this – paradoxically for people brought up on contemporary gaming virtues of emergence and unpredictability – would be a kind of digital nirvana.
Is it even conceivable, by contrast, that one could play ‘the perfect game’ of a contemporary big-budget product? In theory you could sit there frowning in your pizza-stained smoking jacket and complete an entire FPS campaign using only headshots. If someone did that and made a video of it, I would certainly watch a few minutes. But even that couldn’t really count as ‘the perfect game’ in the same way, given that (in the absence of scores) many choices are simply aesthetic – do you want to headshot those three guys, or instead shoot the explodey barrel to set them on fire, because you just love blowing stuff up? Remember, too, that Donkey Kong had digital inputs and relentless scripting. In our era of analogue joypads and more complex response to player action, it is impossible to play a game exactly the same way twice, because you cannot make the same inputs twice.
Perhaps, after all, it would be closer to the spirit of Nietzsche’s injunction – to will the eternal recurrence of one’s actual life – simply to be forced to watch forever a loop of one campaign-long FPS killcam, with all your banging into walls, misses, self-immolation via grenade and aimless whirling intact. But somehow it is harder to see this as a consummation devoutly to be wished. Modern games might be more like real life in this way, but does that make them better games? Perhaps not, but as I neglect the singleplayer campaign of COD:BlOps and lip-lickingly restart the co-op with my trusty comrade, I decide that there is also a lot to be said for what they never gave us in the 1980s: the awesome power to kill huge numbers of Nazi zombies in the three-dimensional face.
Steven Poole is the author of Trigger Happy: The Inner Life Of Videogames. Visit him online at stevenpoole.net