Dear Player: Digital Drugs
Drugs don't just effect you, they effect those around you...
“Plasmids changed everything. They destroyed our bodies, our minds; we couldn’t handle it. Best friends butchering one another, babies strangled in cribs... the whole city went to Hell.”
We all know that Mario does a lot of 'shrooms, but how do games meaningfully deal with drug-use and altered states of consciousness? We might say that the popular press associates mature games with sex and violence, but what about the rest of the rock and roll lifestyle - what does it mean to get virtually high, and why do developers draw on drugs as both a mechanic and an icon? Sensationalist news is often quick to draw analogies between game use and drug use, but how do games themselves comment on drug use, and is there space here for games to comment on their own relationship to escapism? From power-up to genre convention, from feedback loops to structural necessities, games discuss drugs as tools with a dark side in ways which relate deeply to the way we see games themselves. This is a tour of 'digital drugs' from Oblivion to >observer_, and a look at how games expose the complex layers of responsibility behind, and the affordances of, altered states.
Spate
Spate has a button dedicated solely to drinking absinthe, in a surreal noir platformer featuring a hard-boiled detective with a lovingly generic, alcoholic, flaw. A completely optional mechanic, you can elevate the difficulty by making your vision swim, distorting the terrain, as you jump and puzzle your way to the bottom of your family tragedy. Here drugs are cast neither as a power-up or a debuff, but a problematic coping mechanism for personal grief.
First we should address the giant mushroom pick-up in the room - the supposed 'drug-like' qualities of games. Medically, there is no easy analogy of chemical addiction to a dependency on games, nor is addiction in any context sui generis, addiction is always a social and contextual issue, and not my interest here, but it is worth reflecting on how sensationalist journalism frames the power of games, as well as serious trajectories in design philosophy, before looking at some trippy examples of drugs' representation.
Some game loops mimic the form of an addictive high, and tangibly play on our endorphins. Facebook has invested billions into researching the little dopamine uptick we get when a new notification arrives, and in the same vein Blizzard has mastered the world of semi-randomised loot boxes. At a fundamental level, AAA design aims for tighter and tighter cycles of positive feedback to continually incentivise the return of the player with 'Skinner boxes', a lesson taken to addictive lengths in the mechanisation of the gambling industry according to Natasha Dow Schull's historical study 'Addiction by Design.' However, to exaggerate or generalise here is to fall for myths that often characterise media as 'intoxicating' - it's easy to attribute 'magical' powers to an immersive medium, to the extent that we often (wrongly) assume games have a direct line to our subconscious: Polybius is one such urban myth about an arcade cabinet that secretly reported back a wealth of pyschological data to the men in black.
Oblivion: Shivering Isles
Eliding the altered states of drug-use and neuro-diversity, this Lovecraftian expansion bent and broke the visuals and mechanics of the base game. It had the player submit themselves to a drug addiction in a n opening level, subverting the RPG convention of gradually improving skills and abilities by forcing them to oscillate between a high and come-down that played havoc with player strength, as they massacred a giant ant colony in pursuit of this body-altering sap.
Moreover, and more crucially, the social function of games as they currently stand is indeed structurally similar to a recreational substance - not in terms of their 'intoxicating power', but rather their social function. As Jane McGonigal acknowledges in 'Reality is Broken' we need to acknowledge that games largely afford us distraction and illusory agency without changing the world that withholds power and pushes us to look for this escape. If this is so, then looking at how games engage with drugs might shine some light on how we view this escape, how it functions, and how it can be subverted.
“We can argue that drugs and games both occupy an ambivalent position in society between work and leisure, a margin which sparks a lot of larger anxieties. ”
What motivates the framing of games as 'digital drugs' is part of a long history of media scares and class-based fears: reactionary elements fear popular culture, fear alternate worldviews, and fear an idle working class that isn't engaged in productive labour. If you're a bourgeois capitalist you might fear drugs and games both for much the same reasons, but alternatively you might also see them as related tools. It's important for a workforce to be able to drink away their frustrations rather than rise up in revolt, or power their workday with copious caffeine and nicotine, not to mention the money big businesses get from these acts of consumption - in comparable ways games let a workforce distract themselves, perform fantasies of empowerment without challenging real power, and learn repetitive skills conducive to a(n increasingly gamified) work environment. Loosely paired like this, we can argue that drugs and games both occupy an ambivalent position in society between work and leisure, a margin which sparks a lot of larger anxieties.
Bioshock draws on a rich visual history of marketing powerful narcotics in the early 20th-century.
As Adorno and Horkheimer argue in the Culture Industry, work and leisure are interdependent in Capitalism - one isn't an escape from the other in a society which only seeks to exploit labour and ensure steady rates of consumption. For Adorno, entertainment serves to keep workers docile and ready for work, rather than truly offering an escape from industrial labour. Drugs and games, however, problematise this in two ways: by offering alternative systems of value, and alternative views of the world. They both challenge and reinforce the idea of productive labour, and they both challenge and reinforce the idea of passive leisure.
Life is Strange also gives the player opportunities to diegetically smoke and reflect on their journey...
A quick tour of some examples can demonstrate that drugs are a malleable trope in games, but one that's often concerned with questioning this margin of work and play. In GTA V smoking weed is a reprieve from work, and from the game's mechanics, as we sit and watch TV through a smokey haze and saturation filter in a parodic poke at the Players' position in front of their own screen. In Bioshock, drugs are the very basis of labour - utilitarian plasmid powers that replace the need for zippos and apiaries - and a metaphor for the ruination that follows a self-interested lust for power. In the Elder Scrolls, 'Skooma' is basically glorified catnip, but by taking the form of a potion with magical effects equivalent to potions and food, it frames drugs as part of a wider ecology of consumption and alchemy - drugs here are world-building in the tradition of an immersive sim, and in Morrowind they were even a means of bending and breaking the game. In Elite: Dangerous and Egosoft's 'X' series, narcotics are black-market commodities - a means of winning the commerce game from the outside by subverting the law and drawing in commodities from a different economy. For Life is Strange, drugs are a prop for staging character relationships - whether this be the trigger for a statement on loyalty or subtle evidence that a character is battling with depression - but these too are power relationships: of stepfather and daughter, of individual and big pharma. Tellingly, in the prequel series Before the Storm, weed is the currency of youthful rebellion - both the narrative reward for manipulating the world of adults, and the material marker by which you are judged for your transgressive behaviour. Drugs are far from simple escapism in these representations - they are a complex and powerful signifier of how we engage with the wider world.
Moreover, they can be used to signify in self-aware social critiques. Games often frame drugs as a stabilising force, a necessity which reinforces the status quo, and in doing so they target their critique at the pharmaceutical industry rather than demonising recreational drug use. The poorly executed, but fascinating, premise of Haze has the player confront the military industrial complex through the lens of a drug called Nectar. As a private military soldier, you dose on a drug that abstracts the battlefield, excising the horror, dehumanising the enemy and positively reinforcing death with a dose for every kill. This is war-as-game, a blunt analogy for an FPS interface that renders death with a beautiful clarity. However, by getting the player protagonist to rebel in the second act and abandon this drug, the game confronts us with a world in which bodies don't disappear, and it does so in contravention of the established arc of player empowerment. We get less powerful over time rather than maturing into a god-like bad-ass, muddying the promise of control and agency games offer us by switching a colourful paradise for muted 'reality.'
Cart Life, by contrast, offers the player nothing but a monochrome world from start to finish, in which cigarettes are inescapable. Here drugs read as a symptom of socio-economic status, and as the player laboriously types out every command in the game, a cigarette break becomes indistinguishable from the labour of 'work'. Like a Fordist nightmare, the ritual of smoking becomes the itemised procedure of a production line - opening, lighting breathing, our body rendered in cross-section as we draw in the smoke. As its characters ruminate while coughing up phlegm: blood tastes like nickles and dimes - capitalism corrupts the blood, just like tobacco. More systemically, Big Pharma renders a similar power dynamic in the form of a strategy game. As a drugs company, the player produces meds for a variety of scenarios, but always for money - you plan produce and distribute the drugs on a vast scale, and every side-effect is your moral responsibility. However, like the corporate world of today, the only feedback mechanism in the game is profit - better to produce chemicals that patients come to depend on than chemicals which free them from a chronic condition, and better to delay than to rush to the aid of the unfortunate if you want to 'expand your customer base'. If Haze cast the player as the low-level enforcer of a chemical-industrial complex, and Cart Life positioned the player as a victim entangled in it, Big Pharma has us generating and perpetuating the system at a macro level, exploiting dependency for profit.
Observer focuses on the gritty distortion and recombination of the senses
While these titles expose the complexities of responsibility and power behind drug use, and question how much 'escape' games can afford us, it takes another, final, example to synthesise this with the affective intensity of a bad trip. Observer ('>observer_') jams us into the body of a cyborg detective in a dystopia premised on the total privatisation of the state. There are loose similarities here to Haze and Spate as you dose yourself with 'Synchrozine' in this cyberpunk film noir, a drug which functions to cohere your senses, your world-view, as you bleed in and out of other people's minds. As an Observer, you can quite literally plug yourself into someone else's memories - altering your state of consciousness involves fusing yours with another's. 'Synchrozine' here is a drug that serves to return you to normalcy, clearing the broken checker-board filter that dissolves your view. More-widely, however, this post-state world reflects on the misery of a world filled with exotic drugs and brutal medical regimes predicated on altering the senses and cultivating dependencies. From a janitor whose mechanical limbs are about to be repossessed, to tenants who ingest drugs half physical and half digital, to job-listings that offer to remove your sense of smell to allow you to perform sewage work, this apartment block is a microcosm of pharmaceutical power relations in a world where everything is a nightmarish trip.
And 'nightmarish trip' doesn't do it justice. Jacking into another mind has you faced with the full spectrum of hallucinatory and mind-warping techniques developed in Amnesia, Portal, Antechamber and the studio's previous title Layers of Fear - space folds itself like a mobius strip, assets spawn, disappear and deconstruct their geometry before your fracturing vision, while the world you pass through changes the second you turn around. Observer is a game obsessed with the phenomena of observation and interrogation, and an evolutionary leap from the simple visual-filters which used to stand for 'drug-addled' minds. As assets swap and recombine into tortured hybrids of memory and fear you find yourself swimming through a labyrinth of office kiosks and the oblique angles of domestic abuse, solving impossible tessellating corridor puzzles as your try to tease clues from between the mundanity of everyday life and the exaggeration of the dreamscape.
“Blood tastes of nickels and dimes, but it looks like compression artefacts and polygons. In Observer, drugs are the medium, the lubricant and the marginal matter of a broken world not so far from our own.”
This cyberpunk fusion of the digital and the chemical reaches a greater intensity than film ever has, channelling Jeff Noon's 'Vurt', while leaving you with the impression that Rene Magritte wants Rick Deckard Dead. Indeed, these trips draw explicitly on the visual language of 80s VFX, projecting found footage onto objects, and playing with the lights streaming through the blinds and the stacking of CRT-monitors. These are clear self-conscious simulation in a game with transpires in a single apartment block, constantly bending and reconfiguring its architecture with an intense theatricality. In short, you're a performer here, in a film noir cop procedural, and your thin identity is as fluid as the sense you have of time and space around you. Coming-to, you dose yourself through a machine implanted in your wrist, and here a data-moshing effect uses glitch aesthetics to reflect on the dissolution of your mind into the memories of others. A technique by which visual artefacts linger in a video here stand in for the protagonist's sense of time and identity - pixels bleed as we rip our metal tendrils from the base of a dead-man's neck. Blood tastes of nickels and dimes, but it looks like compression artefacts and polygons. In Observer, drugs are the medium, the lubricant and the marginal matter of a broken world not so far from our own.
Dr Merlin Seller