Persuasive Games: Games Phone Home - Ian Bogost
A few words about E.T. are in order for those who may be unfamiliar with the title. In 1982, Atari paid Steven Spielberg $20 million to license the right to make a game based on the popular film. To take advantage of the film’s hype, Atari persuaded Yar’s Revenge programmer Howard Scott Warshaw to complete the game in only five weeks, the deadline necessary to ship for Christmas. The result was widely panned for terrible gameplay and unintuitive controls. Many of the millions of cartridges that Atari printed came back unsold, and the company eventually had hundreds of thousands of E.T. cartridges crushed and buried in a landfill in the New Mexico desert (yes, the rumor is true). Along with the abysmal and equally over-produced VCS adaptation of Pac-Man, E.T. is often blamed for the video game crash of 1983.1 The game has become the butt of game- and pop-culture jokes, most recently in the music video for indie band Wintergreen’s song “When I Wake Up.”2 No matter their frequency, complaints about E.T. are all framed from the perspective that games must fulfill roles of power; that they must put us in shoes bigger than our own. Spielberg’s film was not about the tremendous power of aliens invading—E.T., it should be noted, was a space botanist, not a space invader. It was about the isolation of one alien who remained. In the face of a world that perceives E.T. as an a priori threat, a few children attempt to understand him on his own terms. It was a film about alienation, not about aliens.
Warshaw’s video game adaptation respected this core principle. For example, the player cannot easily predict the topology of the virtual landscape, and he often falls into wells. Once at the bottom of a well, the player can use E.T.’s ability to levitate to rise out of and continue. While this feature of the game is universally panned for breeding frustration and misery, it also brilliantly juxtaposes E.T.’s purported powers with his actual weaknesses. Levitation, an ability that another game might deploy for advantage in combat, becomes a small victory that merely allows E.T. (and the player) to realize the option of being hunted down. Once back above ground, the FBI agents and scientists give E.T. chase. As in the film, the alien has no power to combat these foes. Just like cowering as a child in Darfur is Dying, playing the role of E.T. is an expression of weakness, not of power. Perhaps in 1982 the world was not ready for a video game about the loneliness and frailty of an extraterrestrial. But, oddly, we were ready for a film about it. E.T.’s role in the video game crash of ’83 may or may not be overemphasized, but certainly we have used its failure as part of an ongoing excuse to represent only power, and never weakness in video games. Critics might argue that frail situations are not fun. They might argue that feeble characters do not wear shoes anyone wants to wear. And that may be true. But when it comes to the world we inhabit today, isn’t it the vulnerable— like E.T., or more strongly, like the Darfuri—who demand our empathy? Other Serious Games Source features by this author:
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