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Welcome to the letter N. It stands for Nothing. As in, nothing today is actually any good. Okay, maybe one game, but it sure as shit ain't NARC. We're in War On Drugs territory here. Also Williams Arcade territory. Also Rare Ltd. programmer territory. Mother of god, these are bad lands to be in. So how do we fight the war on drugs? Kill it. Kill them all. Destroy every drug-peddling criminal scum shooting at you. They are the enemy, and you are the Law. The absolute, the champion of virtue and of right. They shot first, so it's within your rights as a gun-toting officer of peace to mow them all down. How dare anybody question otherwise. Attack dogs? Mow them down too. The powers that be have deigned them threats. There are no cute dogs in this world, only attack dogs that will gnaw your leg off. Men who throw hypodermic needles. Gun not enough? Blow them up with a rocket. Create a cascade of corrupt corpses in your wake, no remorse or worry... and then go for a round of golf.This is better. This elicits warm memories of the 1990s. Borrowing this game on the same day as art class. We had to make placemats. I made a crude drawing of the cover art of this game. Is it still here, I wonder? Let me check.
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By God in heaven. There it is. Littered with signatures from classmates. "AFA." A Friend Always. Here's the punchline; I have forgotten who some of these people are. Who the hell is Holly, or Billy, or Jennifer? Was AFA just some cool thing to say in 1995? I don't know, but somehow this game still has power over me. Somehow it's a fun golf game. Even if I can barely make par on some holes, and end up triple bogeying on others. Somehow, it's still fun. No bullshit, no nonsense, just you and a golf club and hitting the damn ball. No Jack Nicklaus, no Lee Trevino. Just Mario. And a golf club. It's the best game today, and I have nothing else to say about it. It's a golf game and it's fun.-1.png)
NES Play Action Football is a football game. It is not fun... but it's had a strange effect on me. I went in expecting very little. I got, of course, very little. It is football. Just like I've done before, and will do again and again until the end of time. It uses an isometric perspective and sometimes zooms out. Then the conspiring begins. Plays and attack patterns that I have no comprehension of. The screen zooming out as it's my turn to move, such that the tiny red man I'm controlling collides with a tiny yellow man and I lose my turn. No gain. Controls that are unintuitive. God. I know that I'm not playing it as intended. I am meant to have the instruction book with me like a bible... but I guess I'm just used to a certain level of figuring stuff out. Something simple would work. B to pass. A to tackle. Select to switch player. This is all you would need. Instead, it's B plus a direction to pass. B PLUS A to change players. This is never told on screen, of course. I had to look it up after finishing play. Good riddance. Bad rubbish.Then I thought further. I thought of Gamergate, of the faceless swarms that are descending on women in gaming and driving them right the fuck out with their virtual pitchforks and torches. All in the name of "weeding out corruption". Bullshit. Bullshit. I have yet to see an example of Gamergate doing anything of a sort. A woman has had dirty relationship laundry aired out for the world to see. Another woman has been driven out of her home by threats of rape and death. Another woman has quit writing about video games entirely. The Faceless Ones are claiming victim after victim to their crusade... and for what? To protect this? To protect their darling dear video games? Emboiting a closed space upon which nothing that is not a privileged white male can enter on pain of death? Literally fuck off. Real people, real living and feeling people on planet Earth, are being hurt by this. Hurt by the mob, in favor of protecting video games. Literally. Fuck off. Video games are not worth protecting. Even if they were, they wouldn't need it. They have survived market crashes and system changes and social upheaval. A couple of "non-games" aren't going to kill it. Get out. Video games were corrupt from the moment they were born. They exist to make money, and they will continue to make money until the end of time. The fuckwits behind Gamergate are no better than the NARC men, shooting at everything that dares to be Not Them.
Destroy all "gamers". Ruin all video games. Video games are dead. From now on, this project is a postmortem.
NARC is such a weird one. It's hard to know what the hell Eugene Jarvis intends, as his history leaves a trail of politically, socially conservative concepts. But I'm starting to wonder if his work isn't actually satirical. If you look at the arcade original, it seems to have such a huge tongue in its cheek that it's possible that it was intended as an over-the-top criticism of Regan-era drug policies. It's just... the reality of those policies is already so violently over-the-top that it's difficult to tell for sure.
ReplyDeleteI know it shouldn't matter on a design level, but on a thematic level the way that one reads the game really does change its effect. Reading it on a surface level, it is an unforgivable, culturally damaging piece of garbage. Reading it as a somewhat ineffective satire... hmm.
Hmm.
Hm.
Okay, it's still garbage. But maybe there's something brilliant in there. I just don't know.
The tip that this might in fact be satirical: Jarvis' involvement with Smash TV, which can only be read as a criticism of the violence and dehumanizing commodification of mass entertainment. Problem is, is this a progressive or a reactionary perspective? I can see an argument for either.
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