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Whether it’s hazy anxiety or hair-raising terror, fear can keep you out of harm’s way—or run you over. This is one reason that humans work hard at turning fear into play. Gallows humor makes fun of death. Horror movies excite couples to romantic mating. A football game turns savage assaults into victory parties, romantic mating, and whopping purses. War games make for less harried strategy. After a war, the winners discharge their terror of death in a “baby boom.”
As these examples suggest, play turns fear into survival ecstasy and fertility behavior. We’re talking creaturely motives here: motives built into us, working on such a deep, autonomic level that we’re aware of them belatedly if at all.
Take video games: paranoia in a box. They're built around threats and survival thrills. Players fight enemies whose deadly menace is dramatized in the attacks encoded in the game’s underlying software program. As in “Whack-a-mole,” reality is infested with enemies. Even adventure games are built around survival themes. Gaming emphasizes competitive striving, with imagination tuned to Social Darwinist struggle. When the fittest individuals survive, they’re stars: “immortal” champions.
But it’s not just individual heroes. Gaming or “streaming” is a group—a species—behavior. “We spend 3 billion hours a week as a planet playing videogames.” And it can be addictive. “The brain’s craving for novelty, constant stimulation and immediate gratification creates something called a 'compulsion loop.' Like lab rats and drug addicts, we need more and more to get the same effect.” And in games as in life, there’s always more evil or death to face. In fact, the more you think about threatening gangsters or death, the larger they loom.
The popularity of video games makes sense once you appreciate that they’re play versions of really frightening behavior such as crime, terrorism, and warfare. The gamer works at killing the way military drone operators do, making split-second life-or-death decisions, hoping to zap more next time.
Of course this mindset is available to enemies too. For terrorists such as ISIS, war also has gaming qualities. They recruit through the Internet, staging strikes against cartoonish enemies, lopping off heads for the scoreboard. They play to win a sacred caliphate. And it’s addictive. If they scored a caliphate Monday, they’d wake up Tuesday morning wondering who to zap next. And all along, like other gamers, they feel they’re right and racking up immortality.
By extension, the game mindset models global competition. Already military planners on both sides are playing war games that would pit the US against its formidable economic rival China. Meanwhile, since new machinery can entirely eliminate human hands in fast food burger prep, the march of automation foretells global conflicts over employment. Seen this way, the human gamer is trying to keep up morale by beating a machine. Gaming is a quixotic replay of the man-versus-machine contests repeatedly staged in early industrialization. It’s the thumbs’ version of the mechanical chess wizard, or John Henry vs. the steam hammer that ultimately kills him.
In turning fear into fertility, gaming plays familiar patterns. Consider the qualities it shares with romance novels. Like the games, the novels are formulaic and addictive, with some readers obsessively consuming one after another, relishing experience elusive in real life. In both plays, for both genders, the goal is to overcome rivals and conflicts, and to win heroic self-esteem.
Romance brings a marriage bond, which may seem different than the autonomy in gaming. But on the four-year-old gaming site Twitch, which already has 100 million viewers, a gamer named Janet “loved the way Twitch enlarged her world. Though she would be appalled if her real name and info were available to them, ‘I love the community,’ she says. ‘You get to hear about them and their life. And you get to share things with them and share funny moments with them. And they become a part of your life, too. It’s like every day you get on stream, and the same people are there—it’s just nice to see them. It’s like, Hey, what have you done since you were gone?’” How was your day, honey?
But in the shifty real world, play can also be used to turn fertility back into fear. Jason Fagone reports that internet trolls are using Twitch to attack women gamers by “swatting.” No, that’s not kinky spanking with a fly swatter. In swatting, a hacker doxes a victim—filching her private info, maybe posting it as a document online—then uses the info to fool police into sending a paramilitary SWAT team to her address in the middle of the night.
SWAT police are terrifying. In a nation armed to the teeth with uncontrolled guns, cops have obtained military gear, especially for use in the ”war” on drugs. And in hysterical raids, as in the fog of war, SWAT squads have from time to time killed innocent bystanders. SWAT behavior epitomizes the adrenalized arms race and creeping militarization in American civilian life. You could argue that it is also an underlying trope in video games.
As virtual soldiers, hyper-militarized cops are pseudocommandos—which happens to be the psychiatrists’ term for rampage killers who storm a target in army outfits with combat weapons. The connection isn’t merely fanciful. A serial swatter stalks women he can’t know in the flesh, let alone dominate. Spying out her information, he’s a voyeur. He acts out his impotent alienation not by running amok in her apartment, but by sending in his proxy killers, the SWAT police, to intimidate and humiliate her. It’s like domestic abuse, only the bully uses a cyber fist to punch a lover by remote control. The gaming terrorist is ratcheting up the game to force virtual experience closer to life.
Jason Fagone profiles a swatter calling himself “Obnoxious.” He stalked women, escalating his demands—asking for a nude photo, say. When finally frustrated, he would send in paramilitary cops as if to a massacre, using violence to compel attention and flaunt his power over others, like a rampage killer or terrorist. Using assault cops, his word is law. Literally.
Eventually Canadian justice, with help from US investigators, did nab “Obnoxious” in a village outside Vancouver. But it’s a challenge. The swatter dispersed his I.P. identity by using virtual private networks, rather as Osama bin Laden advised terrorists to rely on dispersal.
Rather than focus on the click of the handcuffs, let’s back up to think some more about the way play turns fear into fertility equivalents—more life. Video gaming foregrounds tacitness or “as-if-ness.” The swatter’s assault, for example, is a real attack on a real person yet also for him “just” a move in a video game. And this is truer than we might think, because ordinary video gaming can affect self-esteem and social relationships even while being frivolously stereotyped and fictional. As one of Obnoxious’s victims (Hayli) says, she returned to gaming almost immediately after her swatting because “I didn’t want him to win,” as if game and life are one.
What’s more, on Twitch, the most successful gamers make money, so they’re actually working. They’re like athletes or rock stars performing for an audience of paying followers. The fans get more life from it in the form of hero-worship. For the gamers the literal payoff is the power of money—more life. It’s an economy. After the SWAT hoax, Hayli resumed gaming, “and she now has 58,000 followers and 1.8 million views. Another victim, Janet, ‘now makes a living streaming full-time.’” It’s repetitive work, without benefits, from home rather than in a factory, but Janet loves it.
Seen this way, the games imply a mentality that’s symptomatic of topical concerns in particular cultures, but also of the way we’re built. At this nervous historical moment, the gaming mentality shares in, and responds to, terrorism and berserk rampage, but also the mixing of work and entertainment, changes in ways of thinking about identity and relationships, and other wonders information tech has wrought.
A popular nightmare such as The Hunger Games plays out a sense of being trapped in a system. Like everybody in a complex society, gamers are trapped too, trying to be heroes and not victims. Video games are spellbinding because they’re self-contained. For some, they lead not outward, into the world of flesh-and-blood experience, but round and round the same thrilling paranoid circle. Of course you could say that most jobs are limiting. The donkey plods around the millwheel of civilization’s discontents. At least the gamers are having fun. But then, after having real combat weapons aimed at them in the middle of the night, feeling real terror, Hayli and Janet couldn’t wait to get back to gaming.
Seems to me there’s more to this story than a trigger finger can tell.
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In slang we talk about flipping out, running amok, losing it, etc., Berserk abandon is terrifying yet also alluring, since it promises access to extraordinary resources by overthrowing inhibitions. Berserk style has shaped many areas of contemporary American culture, from warfare and business to politics, sports, and intimate life. Focusing on post-Vietnam America and using perspectives from psychology, anthropology, and physiology, Farrell demonstrates the need to unpack the confusions in language and cultural fantasy that drive the nation’s fascination with berserk style.
<<This book amazes me with its audacity, its clarity, and its scope. We usually think of ‘berserk’ behaviors—from apocalyptic rampage killings to ecstatic revels like Burning Man—as extremes of experience, outside ordinary lives. in fascinating detail, Farrell shows how contemporary culture has reframed many varieties of abandon into self-conscious strategies of sense-making and control.
Abandon has become a common lens for organizing modern experience and an often troubling resource for mobilizing and rationalizing cultural and political action.This landmark analysis both enlightens and empowers us.>>
—Les Gasser, Professor of Information and Computer Science, U. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaigne.
