Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

by Douglas Rushkoff

  The ambiance and approach of the Occupiers is more like a university—one of life’s great pauses—than a political movement. Both online and offline spaces consist largely of teach-ins about the issues they are concerned with. Young people teach one another or invite guests to lecture them about subjects such as how the economy works, the disconnection of investment banking from the economy of goods and services, possible responses to mass foreclosure, the history of centralized interest-bearing currency, and even best practices for civil disobedience.

  The approach is unwieldy and unpredictable but oddly consistent with the values of a postnarrative landscape. The Occupy ethos concerns replacing the zero-sum, closed-ended game of financial competition with a more sustainable, open-ended game of abundance and mutual aid. In the traditional political narrative, this sounds like communism, but to the Occupiers, it is a realization of the peer-to-peer sensibility of the social net. It is not a game that someone wins, but rather a form of play that—like a massive multiplayer online game—is successful the more people get to play, and the longer the game is kept going.

  INFINITE GAMES

  Computer games may, in fact, be popular culture’s first satisfactory answer to the collapse of narrative. Believe what we may about their role in destroying everything from attention spans and eyesight to social interactions and interest in reading, video games do come to the rescue of a society for whom books, TV, and movies no longer function as well as they used to. This is not simply because they are brighter and louder; the sounds and imagery on kids’ TV these days have higher resolution and are even more densely packed. Video games have surpassed all other forms of entertainment in market share and cultural importance because they engage with players in an open-ended fashion, they communicate through experience instead of telling, and they invite players into the creative process. While video games do occur over linear time, they are not arced like stories between a past and the future. When they are off, they are gone. When they are on, they are in the now.

  Although religious historian James Carse came up with the concept of “infinite games” well before computer games had overtaken television, music, and movies as our dominant entertainment industry, his two categories of play help explain why electronic gaming would gain such favor in an era of present shock. Finite games are those with fixed endings—winners and losers. Most every game from tennis to football works this way. Victory is the scarcity: there can be only one winner, so players compete for the win. Infinite games, on the other hand, are more about the play itself. They do not have a knowable beginning or ending, and players attempt to keep the game going simply for the sake of the play. There are no boundaries, and rules can change as the game continues. Carse’s point is to promote the open-ended, abundant thinking of infinite games. Instead of competing against one another and aching for the finality of conclusion, we should be playing with one another in order to maximize the fun for all. Instead of yearning for victory and the death of finite games, we should be actively enjoying the present and trying to sustain the playability of the moment. It’s an approach that favors improvisation over fixed rules, internal sensibilities over imposed morals, and playfulness over seriousness.

  While there is no such thing as a perfectly infinite game (except maybe for life itself), there are many increasingly popular forms of play that point the way to Carse’s ideal. For anyone but professional performers, improvisational storytelling usually ends with early childhood and is replaced with books, television, and organized play. But beginning in the mid-1970s (right around the time that TV remotes became standard features), a new form of game emerged called the fantasy role-playing game, or RPG. Inspired by the rules written for people who play war games with medieval miniature figures, Dungeons & Dragons, the first published RPG, was a simple rule set that allowed players to imagine and enact adventures on a tabletop.* Unlike conventional games with sides and rules and winners, Dungeons & Dragons was really just a starting place for interactive storytelling. Less like a performance than one of artist Allan Kaprow’s “Happenings,” D&D provided an excuse and a context for people to gather and imagine adventures together. Each player began by creating a character sheet that defined his identity and attributes. Some attributes were purely creative (a dwarf with blond hair who wears a red hat), while others determined a character’s abilities in the game, such as strength level, magical skills, or intelligence. A Dungeon Master led the proceedings and refereed interactions. Beyond that, characters went on adventures and engaged in conflicts as fanciful as they could imagine.

  The popularity of RPGs was matched only by the consternation they generated among parents and educators. Along with heavy metal music, Dungeons & Dragons was blamed for a collapse of ethics among young teens, drug abuse, and even murder. The underlying fear of RPGs, however, probably had a lot more to do with how open-ended they were. Kids went into the basement or game room for hours, became deeply involved in fantasy adventures that were sustained over months or even years, and the boundary between the game and real life seemed to erode as players wore costume pieces from the game to school, or utilized game strategies in daily activities. RPGs did not respect our notions of time boundaries. When was the game over? Who wrote the rules? How does a person win? If a game doesn’t teach winning, is it simply creating losers?

  RPG players were aficionados of presentism, not merely tolerating but delighting in stories without endings. While the adventures they invented together had little arcs and minivictories for one character or another, they were valued most for their ability to sustain themselves—and everyone’s interest—over long periods of time. Dungeon Masters measured their reputations in terms of how long they could keep a game group together. They had one terrific advantage in this regard over regular storytellers: their audience actively participated in the creation of the story. Instead of leading a passive audience through a vicarious adventure and then inserting a particular value into the climax, the Dungeon Master simply facilitates the imaginative play of a group of peers. He sets up the world in which the play takes place. In this sense, it was the purest precursor to the interactive media that was to follow.

  RPG players were a natural fit and ready audience for video games, which tend to require a similarly open and participatory approach to story. While not all video games wrestle directly with issues of narrativity, they all must contend with audience members who have the freedom to make their own, differing choices over the course of the game. Choices may be as limited as which asteroids to shoot at or as expansive as how to ally a number of raiding groups to fight in a war. Wherever in the spectrum of free will and interactivity they fall, however, video games—like RPGs—reverse the rules of Aristotelian narrative. A traditional narrative leads inevitably to its ending. That’s the whole point: the character makes the best choices possible but meets a fate that seems almost destined, at least in retrospect. The audience must conclude this is the only way things could have gone given the situation and the characters. If the hero makes a wrong choice, it’s considered a hole in the plot.

  Video games are just the opposite. While the game writer may have an ending or final level he wants everyone to get to at some point, moving through this world is supposed to feel like free will. Each scene opens up a series of choices. Instead of watching a character make the only right choice in each scene, the player is the main character, confronted with a myriad of choices. While a traditional story narrows toward the destined ending, the game branches open to new possibilities. When we read a book or watch a movie, the best choice for each character already exists; it just hasn’t been revealed. When we play a game, that choice is happening in real time.

  The many different types of video games exercise presentism differently. “Shooters,” where the player runs around and shoots monsters or other enemies, may seem the most present-tense but actually offer the least amount of player authorship. While the player can kill things on each level in any number of ways, this only bring
s him to the next predetermined level. “God” games, like SimCity and Civilization, let players build and supervise worlds. The player may be charged with planning a city, managing a civilization from its inception, or even evolving life from the beginning (as in Spore). The biases of these worlds are determined by the choices the player makes. Violent choices yield a violent world; focusing on business may create a world more dominated by economics; and so on.

  But the most compelling and still largest sector of gaming is social games. In massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs, like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars, players join groups and set out on missions together. While the world in which they play is created by game companies, and the various monsters and natural phenomena they encounter have been preprogrammed, the interactions between the characters are all up to the players. Players choose whether to go on quests, to make friends, or to form groups that go on to attack others. The games are social in that participants really are playing with other people—even if separated by computers, Internet connections, and thousands of miles of physical distance.

  Even the social games played on the Facebook platform would qualify as a crude form of this style of participatory storytelling. FarmVille and Mafia Wars have been huge successes (enough to justify a billion-dollar stock offering by the company that released them). Like a god game, FarmVille lets players create and tend a farm, sell crops, then buy special decorations with the game money. The payoff, such as it is, is that because the game is happening on a social network, friends can see one another’s farms. Similarly, Mafia Wars let players fight with and against one another over territory and status. The main way to gain status, and support the game company, is to recruit more players to be in one’s mafia gang. Though they offer a whole lot less creative latitude than true MMORPGs, these games still give people who might never have played a video game the chance to experience entertainment that unfolds in the present tense.

  These experiences needn’t be entirely devoid of meaning and values, either. Just because an experience lacks narrativity doesn’t mean it can’t communicate and do so powerfully. Serious games, named for their intended effects, are computer games that attempt to convey serious things. Instead of inserting messages into games the way an author might insert a message into a book, games try to communicate through experience. So instead of watching a character get hoisted on his own petard for being too arrogant, the player is to experience this reversal and recognition himself.

  There are games about health, violence, ethics, pollution, and pretty much any serious subject you can imagine. Games for Change, for example, is an organization and website that collects and curates games that engage players with contemporary social issues. One of the most famous such games so far, Darfur is Dying, re-creates the experience of the 2.5 million Sudanese refugees. The player is the refugee, whose gender and other preconditions end up having a lot to do with what happens (rape, murder, or escape). In some sense the game is unwinnable, but the interactions and experience may convey more about the refugee plight and the futility of the situation than a hundred hours of news footage. The game, like many others, provides opportunities for players to donate, Tweet, or otherwise use the Internet to participate in the cause.

  Games offer a healthier, or at least more active, response to the collapse of narrativity confounding much of the rest of popular culture. They also offer us an inkling of how we may avert present shock altogether and instead adopt approaches that successfully reorient us to the all-at-onceness of life today. Instead of panicking at the death of the story, players become the story and delight in acting it out in real time. The people designing the game can still communicate values if they choose to; they simply need to do it by offering choices instead of making them in advance.

  This approach is applicable almost anywhere narrative is failing. In the world of politics, this would mean taking the tack of the Occupiers prototyping new modes of activism—eschewing ends-justify-the-means movements and developing a normative behavior, instead. In retail, the equivalent would mean deemphasizing brand mythologies and focusing instead on what is called brand experience—the actual pathway the customer takes through the real or virtual shopping environment. It’s not about the story you tell your customer; it is about the experience you give him—the choices, immersion, and sense of autonomy. (It also means accepting transparency as a new given, and social media as the new mass communications medium, as we’ll see in chapter 4.) In medicine, it means enlisting patients in their own healing process rather than asking them to do nothing while blindly accepting the magical authority of the doctor and a pharmaceutical industry. Understanding these cultural, political, and market dynamics through the lens of gaming helps us transition from the world of passively accepted narrative to one that invites our ongoing participation.

  Games point the way toward new ways of accomplishing what used to be done with stories. They may not be a cure-all, but they can successfully counteract some of the trauma we suffer when our stories come apart. Our disillusionment is offset by a new sense of participation and self-direction.

  In fact, gaming’s promise as an antidote to post-traumatic stress on a cultural scale finds support in its increasing use as an actual treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder on an individual level. At a University of Southern California lab called the Institute for Creative Technologies, a psychologist named Albert “Skip” Rizzo has been using virtual-reality simulations to treat Iraq War veterans suffering from severe PTSD. He started with the immersive video war game Full Spectrum Warrior, and then adapted it for use in therapy sessions. The patient wears 3D virtual-reality goggles and describes the scene of his trauma as the therapist builds that world around him. The patient holds a game controller and walks or drives or shoots as he did in the war zone. The therapist uses the game to re-create the entire scene, allowing the patient to relive all of the horror of the lost and tragic moment in the safety and from the distance of a computer simulation.

  I had the chance to use the gear myself while working on a documentary about how digital technologies change the way we live. Rizzo operated the simulation as I described a car accident that had occurred many years ago, in which I lost my best friend. I was originally planning on criticizing the technology for getting in the way of the human contact between therapists and their patients—but I was wrong. I had told the story of my car accident to many people, even a few psychotherapists, but never felt anything about the incident had been resolved. Just telling the story somehow was not enough. But in the simulator, I was able to tell Dr. Rizzo that the sky was a bit darker—it wasn’t quite dawn. He darkened the sky. Pinker, I said. He made it pinker. And there were some thinned-out shrubs on the side of the road. He added them. And my friend had a paler complexion. Done. Rizzo used another device to generate the smell of the desert and the juniper bushes I described. It was as if I were there again.

  More important, Rizzo was there with me the whole time. He wasn’t just making the simulation for me; he was in the simulation with me. The human connection was actually more profound than when I had told the story to friends and even a therapist before, because I knew for sure that he could see what I meant—because he was literally seeing and hearing and smelling what I was. By bringing a traumatically archived narrative into the present, the game simulation allowed me to reexperience it in real time instead of the artificiality of my story about it. It became real, and I have to admit, I was changed and even largely healed through the experience, which was meant only to demo the technology and not treat my own PTSD. But I never underestimated the potential of computer games again.

  Computer gaming is valuable to us not just through its particular applications, but as the inkling of an approach to contending with present shock—in this case, the inability of stories to function as they used to. Without the beginnings and endings, nor the origins and goals offered by linear narratives, we must function instead in the moment. We must mourn the guidin
g stories we have lost, while also contending with new measures of control, freedom, and self-determination. Gaming is a great lens through which to see this process of maturation.

  Narrativity is just the first of many things obsolesced by presentism, and the sense of trauma at losing linearity just the first of five main forms of present shock. But like the rest, it provokes both some initial, panicked reactions as well as a few more constructive alternatives. The disappearance of story first incites a knee-jerk sensationalism. We attempt to re-create the exhilaration and fall of traditional narrative with the increasingly lewd, provocative, or humiliating imagery of the reality-TV spectacle. Our always-on news media follows suit and, spurred further by the needs of the multinational corporations that own them, reproduce what had been the narrative authority of the newscaster with the graphic authority of the lens. How we’re supposed to feel about it, on the other hand, is debated in real time as the images still play behind them.

  Young people raised in this environment are among the first to take back what has been lost. Instead of finding new storytellers, they become the equivalent of storytellers themselves. Snowboarders score their own paths down a slope, while skateboarders reinterpret the urban landscape as an obstacle course. Like their peers in other pursuits, they are playing winnerless, infinite games. This growing improvisatory subculture of players also abandons the single-minded effort of political parties to win offices; they instead write their own set of behavioral norms for activism and economic justice. Instead of looking to TV and film to inform them about the world and its values, they turn to computers and games to choose their own adventures and find their own answers.

  Of course, it’s not as easy as all that. The digital environment presents many challenges of its own, and members of the connected generation are among the first casualties of its many distractions and discontinuities. Computers and the net may be running in real time, but its torrent of pings seems to be coming at us from all sides simultaneously. Which flashing screen we choose to answer often means less about whom or what we want to engage with than who or what we want to be, ourselves, in that moment. We’re in the game, all right, but playing on many different levels at once. Or at least we’re trying to.