Simon Parkin - Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession from the Virtual Frontline

Simon Parkin is an award winning critic and journalist. His articles exploring the vibrant culture that has grown up around video games have featured in the New Yorker, New Scientist, New Statesman and the Guardian.

Praise for Death by Video Game

Parkin guides us with grace, intelligence and without judgment through the shades and the dark levels of our medium Martin Hollis, director of Goldeneye 007 and Perfect Dark

Simon Parkins surgical story-telling reveals the humanity, beauty and truth beneath the surface of our digital adventuring Jonathan Smith, Director of the National Videogame Arcade

Death by Video Game is life by video games. Simon Parkin is gamings Jon Ronson, and his book charts the extremes of the medium to try to answer the question why the hell do we all care about video games anyway? Kieron Gillen, writer of Iron Man, Uncanny X-Men and The Wicked + The Divine, co-founder of Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The best book about video games Ive read since I wrote one Steven Poole, author of Trigger Happy

DEATH
BY VIDEO
GAME

TALES OF OBSESSION FROM THE VIRTUAL FRONTLINE

SIMON PARKIN

First published in 2015 by Serpents Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3 Holford Yard
Bevin Way
London WC1X 9HD
www.serpentstail.com

A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request

The right of Simon Parkin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Copyright 2015 Simon Parkin

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

eISBN 978 1 78283 143 3

To Christian Donlan,
vital companion through worlds
real and imagined

What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldnt that be wonderful?

Life After Life, KATE ATKINSON

Youve been playing for a while. Why not take a break?

NINTENDO

Introduction

J anuary 2012: A young man is dead and if a video game wasnt the culprit, then it was, at very least, an accessory to the crime.

This wasnt the first time that a video game was a suspect in a young persons death. Thirty years earlier, almost to the month, eighteen-year-old Peter Burkowski walked into Friar Tucks Game Room in Calumet City, Illinois, posted a high score on the arcade game Berzerk and, moments later, collapsed dead. Since then, fresh reports of death of a video gamer (as Burkowskis story was reported at the time) have been a regular fixture in the news.

With each new story the video-game mediums reputation sinks lower. No longer is the popular charge merely that video games are a tremendous waste of time (a message thats been sustained for more than three decades, since games first emigrated from the bellies of esteemed American universities and into the local bars as Pong and Space Invaders cabinets); now they are killers too. Video games apparently take not only our young peoples attention, but also, every now and again, their lives as well. And in our mortal reality, unlike that of the benevolent video game with its interminable supply of lives, there are no second chances.

The video game makes for an obvious suspect in these cautionary tales. Look at the player, sat there on the fat couch, motionless apart from the steady twitch of the hands, the unblinking eyes, the occasional grimace. This is not the lung-expanding, cheek-colouring variety of play we find on the playground or football field. Its not obviously wholesome. No, this appears to be an especially impoverished, depraved form of play, onanistic or, worse still, perhaps, infantile, as the controllers umbilical-like cord twirls and stretches between the human and the television screen.

Video games also destroy time. So too, of course, does a particularly engrossing novel or television drama series, but, unlike those examples, video games demand not only our full attention but, also our full participation. The video games appetite for human contact is insatiable and, as such, their detractors see them as little more than an antisocial distraction from reality and all the important stuff of life.

If nothing else, as the youngest form of art and entertainment, games are, accordingly, the least trusted. This is their inevitable lot.

Every new medium encounters similar resistance, a fear (usually generational) of change and its attendant loss, often capitalised on by the media of the time as a subject for easy sensationalism. For example, on 26 August 1858, the San Antonio Texan newspaper printed the following cautionary (although presumably fictional, or at least exaggerated) tale about the dangers of overindulging in novel-reading.

A whole family brought to destitution in England, has had all its misfortunes clearly traced by the authorities to an ungovernable passion for novel reading entertained by the wife and mother. The husband was sober and industrious, but his wife was indolent and addicted to reading everything procurable in the way of romance. This led her to utterly neglect her husband, herself and her eight children. One daughter in despair, fled the parental home, and threw herself into the haunts of vice. Another was found by the police chained by the legs to prevent her from following her sisters example. The house exhibited the most offensive appearance of filth and indigence. In the midst of this pollution, privation and poverty, the cause of it sat reading the last sensation work of the season, and refused to allow herself to be disturbed in her entertainment.

Indolence, addiction, neglect, vice, filth, pollution and poverty: each noun a gavel strike aimed at the unassuming romance novel. The excerpt is echoed, if not in tone then in purpose, by contemporary newspaper articles decrying the perils of video-game addiction. Stories of video games nefarious effects have followed the medium since its inception. In Martin Amiss non-fiction book Invasion of the Space Invaders we read of Anthony Hill, one of the more spectacular casualties of the bleeping sickness. (Even Amis, a staunch video-game advocate at the time, employs the language of injury and disease when discussing the video games effect on the heart and mind.) Hill was, according to Amis, an unemployed seventeen-year-old who sold sexual favours to a seventy-four-year-old pastor in exchange for money in order to fund a Space Invaders habit.

This was not an isolated report. In the early 1980s police in the south of England claimed that the Space Invader craze had doubled housebreaking figures. The mediums apparent absence of virtue was debated in the English Parliament (where Hills case was mentioned, although the boys identity was not). On 20 May 1981 the Labour MP George Foulkes (now a baron in the House of Lords) proposed a bill for the Control of Space Invaders and Other Electronic Games in the House of Commons. The Bill would have meant arcade and bar owners would require licences or even planning permission in order to install arcade machines for their customers. At the Bills proposal, Foulkes said:

I have seen reports from all over the country of young people becoming so addicted to these machines that they resort to theft, blackmail and vice to obtain money to satisfy their addiction. I use the word addiction not in its increasingly common misuse, as being generally fond of something, but in its strictly correct sense of being so attracted to an activity that all normal activity is suspended to carry it out.