Wooden Reels and the Maintenance of Virtual Life: Gaming and the Death Drive in a Digital Age

Wooden Reels and the Maintenance of Virtual Life:Gaming and the Death Drive in a Digital Age Jeffrey Douglas (bio) In his 1996 essay "Zen and the Art of Mario Maintenance: Cycles of Death and Rebirth in Video Games and Children's Subliterature," Gary Westfahl begins an examination of the compulsion to repeat the pixelated experience of simulated death with reference to what he calls "an impressive work of prediction" (211). That impressive work is Algis Budrys's Rogue Moon, published in 1960, which revolves around a plot where scientists, who discover a strange, deathtrap-filled alien structure on the moon, "employ a machine to create duplicates of a man" in order to navigate and successfully complete the "maze" constructed by what is most certainly a race of sadistic extraterrestrials. The rationale suggested for such an elaborate solution to the deathtrap quandary, as Westfahl explains, is that each "duplicate"—indeed, avatar—is linked to a human-controlled machine which "experiences what [the duplicate] is experiencing" as it negotiates the deadly terrain. Because they are controlled by an external overseer, these duplicates are disposable, and "When the duplicate inevitably dies, the man learns what should not be done, and the next duplicate can avoid that trap and move farther inside" (211). Apart from Budrys's novel sounding like a satire on the expendability of infantry in the all-too-real game of war, what Rogue Moon offers is a precursory exemplum of early video [End Page 9] gaming experiences, the now proverbial "three lives" with which to navigate deadly simulated topography, where the emulated experience of death becomes a game of mastery—and of death defiance. Connecting Budrys's novel to the Super Mario Bros. experience and the compulsion to traverse the space of death in order to return with the knowledge of its enigmas, Westfahl adds that "Literally, the more often Mario dies, the better the player becomes; in a true Zen paradox, players must repeatedly kill their Marios in order to better maintain their lives in future games" (213). In essence, one dies so that one may live. But "live" is a relative term. Rather, what is important about Westfahl's paradox is that one simulates death in order to "better maintain," to master the unknown while bettering or improving one's circumstances for "future games." In other words, games that simulate the experience of death do so as an act of amelioration projected into the future, as means of mollifying a negation, the omnipresent threat of life's absence upon which the digital gaming experience is premised. If it is truly the case that there is a brand of amelioration—dare I say, pleasure—that accompanies the idea of symbolically conquering the reaper, another paradox emerges concerning the derivation of pleasure from an unpleasurable scenario: "Noting that in these games young people are continually experiencing symbolic death, and that the games seem like repetitious and futile cycles, one might see them as psychologically damaging, as encouraging only a sense of despair" (213). Granted, interaction with virtual worlds can elicit emotional responses akin to "despair" or existential angst. For evidence of the significant pressures that accompany Mario maintenance, one need look no further than YouTube to note the anguish and intense emotion cathected when engaging virtual worlds. Thanks to the Internet we can view at a whim a highlight reel of the top video game freak-outs,1 along with strategy videos on the best ways to survive a game and the best ways to die.2 [End Page 86] Yet video games have evolved significantly from the time Westfahl was writing and have long since incorporated goal-oriented narratives (in the form of endings, for example) that destabilize his claim that video games are simply despair-inducing "repetitious and futile cycles." Some of the more repetitive and futile games to which Westfahl might be referring are products of the Atari era (approximately 1972 to the mid 1980s), which operate according to what is arguably an existential game design. As a colleague of mine once put it, Atari games are the simulacral paradigm of existential life models: they get harder and harder until you die. Because Atari-era games...

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