Dear Player: Death Driving Games

Heard of the ‘death drive’? Well this time it’s literal. Nought to self-destruction in 60 seconds.  A recent sub-genre has caught my eye – a species of racing/runner which blends an ironic horror with a species of racing. What do I mean by that? Racing towards the player’s own doom, this is a kind of game where victory is defeat, self-destruction is progress. Go from point A to point B, resolve crisis C. Why have a narrative when you can go from point A to point A to point A…? Instead of inflicting violence on the game world, what if our goal was to bleed into it?

The games I’m thinking of grew from alternate game-modes in mainstream titles. Burnout’s showtime, its crash mode, made collision the very object of a genre predicated on avoiding obstacles and set collateral damage as the mark of skill. Games like Little Inferno, punchamonet and Jeff Koons Must Die!!! All glorify collateral, and destruction over acquisition. But what about some healthy self-negation? The games I’m looking at here have more in common, arguably, with Dear Esther, a narrative that progressively unravels itself, deconstructing its text and leading the player inexorably towards a climactic suicide. Race the Sun and Distance, however, ask us to repeat the exercise, banging our head against the wall with an addict’s fervour. Here victory and failure both result in self-destruction. Why? Why now? Are some games fundamentally shifting the object of violence from the game environment to the player?

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We might do well to begin with the greatest movie ever made ever: Mad Max: Fury Road. This rollercoaster of a film is effectively one extended car chase, from point A to, well, point A again. It’s a heroic non-journey, a prison anti-escape, where everything is deadly and illogical and the world is already lost. What’s more, the movie engages the highest intensity of ‘flow’ I’ve ever encountered in film – everything is in constant circular motion, the beat of the soundtrack synchronised to impacts of pictured action. Music is situated, spatialized in the chase, with drummers and blind guitarist setting the epic theme while Doppler-shifting in and out of audibility as the camera roves through the convoy. This sense of situatedness, of drive, of rhythmic flow, dreamlike logic and truly ‘fantastical’ violence makes Mad Max perhaps one of the first true ‘post-game’ films (‘post-ludic’, is that a word, it probably needn’t be). Everything from the adrenaline rush to the fragmentary exegesis, from its simple and transparent mechanics to its self-effacing characters, situates the viewer as if in a game. A game that feels like what would happen if GTA and Guitar Hero made a glorious suicide pact.

The movie may resolve on a happy note, but throughout it its characters are obsessed with self-destruction and the squandering of finite resources on impossible goals – Thanatos stalks this desert. A literalised ‘death drive’, in the Freudian sense, the expression of desire consists in the ending of the self, the explosion of the body into matter. Melding flesh and machine, like the chrome-covered teeth of an irradiated Warboy we are sometimes pushed not by the will to survive, but instead to return to inanimate matter. In the now near-ancient words of the Futurists: “A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath…a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” If, in Mad Max, it is always ‘a lovely day’ to die, is the same not the basic foundation of many games? We ‘will’ ourselves into inorganic objects, processes of polygons and digitised inputs.

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Where Walking Dead and Bioshock Infinite question purpose, sacrifice and guilt in games, do not the majority revel in suicidal heroism? Re-load the gun, re-load the game – bring on the permadeath! We destroy ourselves in so many games, almost as much as we destroy our environs – and in some, self-destruction is the explicit goal.

In Race the Sun every day is a ‘lovely’ sunny day to race to our demise. The sun powers us in a seemingly infinite race towards it. Were we to reach our goal we would explode in the heat, but if we linger in the shade we are soon snuffed out. A new day, a new procedurally generated rat race. As the player races to nowhere, they wonder at what the horizon begs. To race for the edge of the world, when it has a horizon, implies winding up back where you began. This is the world of Mad Max, an infinite flat plane of self-destruction.

Race the Sun is something of an ironic Icarus. Upon our death we are urged on with hints at this futility – ‘here, have some points, whatever they do’. Our deaths are rewarded with triviality – ‘here, have a decal, we know you like that sort of thing for some reason’. But arguably a stronger reference in this game ties it to Bataille and his theory of ‘double use’. If humans are masters of what they survey, freed from all-fours, erect tool-users scanning the horizon, they have only achieved this state from the the dirtiest and most rudimentary appendage, the big toe. Our mouths both eat and vomit, give voice to culture and also spit. The sun lights our way, but it can also blind us. In the general games are good at making this explicit: choice is pre-determined, persistence is checkpointed death, while we may want to complete a game, the enjoyment lies in postponing that moment.

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The enjoyment of games betrays their ultimate futility. To complete a game is to end the experience. Progress in games may be better thought of as a reduction in potential. Play exists in the moment, as so many processes and polygons. And what do achievements achieve, anyway? While triple-A games attempt to deny ‘mortality’ by offering 40+hrs of play, and gargantuan worlds, the most successful games (largely the progeny of the mobile world) offer mere seconds or minutes of enjoyment. In the words of Race the Sun: “We hope you enjoy your race against the inevitable”. And somehow, because I know that’s what it is, I feel liberated and subjugated at the same time. ‘What a lovely day’, sunny with a chance of skin cancer.

Why am I being so morbid? Why am I mentioning Freud? I’m not attempting (nor desiring) a psychoanalysis of gameplay, I don’t want to explain away games, but I do want to play about with ideas. Here’s my point: games undo themselves, just as we undo ourselves through them.  In some ways we’re equally self-contradictory creatures, and perhaps that’s not culturally surprising – humans made them after all. Instead of reifying us, perhaps games are one of the best media for expressing our humanity and mortality. While commentators often point to the fantasy of empowerment in gaming, in Bataille’s sense this always implies our opposite. We don’t have to play Bioshock to confront the paradoxes games are built on, their transparent contradictions. But perhaps games can similarly be especially well suited to confronting us with our fragility?

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There is something both melancholy and energising about Race the Sun, its chilled electro beats forcing us to live in the moment, and feel just how fleeting that moment is. Death with joy, a ceaseless stream of activity. Distance, another of these ‘death driving’ games, embraces this fully, combining the affects of ‘flow’ and horror.

Joyously self-reflexive, our race through Distance’s tron-like dystopia is short and sweet. Our car is also our interface, bearing all the HUD elements on its rear window, the track is empty apart from ourselves, level areas ‘under construction’ are literalised as walls. We might be inside a simulation. Might not be. We are racing to address a problem we have no means of addressing, sent to an area of outbreak, a ghost in the machine – in order to, well, drive around a bit and blow up. Spreading red corruption turns maintenance systems into deadly obstacles, and we race until it consumes us with a fourth-wall breaking glitch.

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Our quest is senseless but addictive, a pulse-pounding soundtrack keying us in to a mesmeric trajectory, as if OliOli took on Outlast. We flip and spin until we have no sense of direction, nor sense of the purpose of driving. Our car deforms and reforms continually, it even has a built in self-destruct, and even more interestingly speed is in infinite supply. Unfortunately, in using your boost, you eventually exceed your machine. Power up for too long and the car explodes – simple as that. Limits and progress in this game are merely a matter of choosing the way you die. Our power is here only limited by our fragility. This is a game where we control a speed, a vector of force, not a vehicle with an occupant.

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This HUD-Car-Plane (yeah, it can also fly – which is another way of saying it has wings and can explode in the air) is both our only interface with this desolate city, and our only real obstacle. While traps lurk everywhere, if we slow down enough we are effectively immune – but where lies the fun? Racing in an empty city, we wonder where all the people have gone, if they were ever there, and all we do is drive while the world dies. Like a nightmarish Audiosurf there is nothing here but speed – no rival cars, no spectator, we are just a charged impulse capable of jumping and driving up walls and along ceilings. Like Icarus we go onwards and upwards, without a single lap, but our wings are made for melting as well as flying. Or in this case… exploding.

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In effect, the player is nothing and everything in this game – a force moving through an empty environment, an empty car in an uninhabited and functionless city. Our HUD happens to have four wheels (and 2 wings) but we are no more this infinitely exploding and regenerating car than we are the track. The avatar is a pure transparent point of interface, which serves mainly to glow red when we are about to speed past it, explode out of it. It’s pretty much Freudian (or, arguably, Lacanian) to the extremes of Cronenberg’s Crash 1996. But who would forego a little death?

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Like Mad Max’s Furiosa we are cyborg, melded with a machine for driving nowhere. Like Max, we exist only on the infinite road. Even if it sucks the life-force out of us, we keep coming back. In games we lose ourselves and find ourselves in the same manoeuvre. Violently meditative, we lose our sense of self in a current of processes and polygons, becoming ‘one’ with the rhythm. ‘Death driving’ games unravel with us, flowing through our veins as we speed through their tracks, and like some of the ‘best’ of the medium, we lose track of where we end and the game begins. To put it blandly: in overcoming something of ludo-narrative dissonance, I reckon games are rediscovering something about ludo-player consonance. And man, what a drive!

Merlin Seller