Ideology and the Virtual City by Jon Bailes;

Author:Jon Bailes;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Hunt (NBN)
Published: 2019-07-22T16:00:00+00:00

5

No More Heroes: The City as Wasteland

No More Heroes (NMH) is another game set in a fictional US city, but one which offers a vision of US culture developed in Japan, and a significantly different approach to the open worlds of SRIV or GTAV. The usual split between free roaming and prescribed missions now takes shape in a far more surreal and self-reflexive universe, in which numerous “metanarrative” elements reference the game itself. Its overall tone is one of punkish rejection, depicted in its grimy visual style, barren city and cast of freakish characters. And the core mode of interaction is a deadly close combat that occurs at a remove from reality, where normal social rules are irrelevant and even death is greeted with disinterest. As with GTAV, NMH features a main character who struggles to find meaning in modern society (there are “no more heroes” perhaps because there are no more heroic causes), and as with SRIV he seeks that meaning in consumer culture. Yet, unlike GTAV, this protagonist still seems to want some greater sense of purpose, and, unlike SRIV, does not seem to really find it in his obsession with entertainment.

The main theme of NMH instead resides in how it reproduces and reflects on the real-world dynamics of playing the game within its own fiction. In particular, its main character’s escape into a surreal, violent criminal underworld, which endows him with a clear life goal, mirrors the way we, as players, play the game to escape our commodified reality. That is, its power fantasy is one of evading dominant expectations and forging a path outside social norms, but it is complicated by the lack of a place to go that exists outside the capitalist totality. In effect, while all the games examined in this book can be seen as escapist power fantasies, NMH offers escapism itself as a power fantasy, in that it provides us and its main character with an alternate life that offers real meaning and satisfaction, even if we must eventually admit to ourselves that it is fake. In the end, there is thus no solution to modern alienation on offer here, only a temporary distance from it that brings some release before dumping us back in reality. In this way, NMH is implicitly critical of American and Japanese obsessions with consumer entertainment, and even considers its own position in that culture, by mocking its audience and provoking them to reflect on the false escape that playing it entails. But it doesn’t imagine a political alternative to the desperate society, so this false escape is left as the only option for the dispossessed, or an understandable response to existing social conditions which is perhaps all we can achieve.

As an ideological response, this “escapist defeatism” contains elements of cynicism, in that it also involves an outward rejection of normal social demands and a pessimistic outlook. The difference between it and cynical self-interest, however, is that the defeatist doesn’t still want to thrive within the existing order.

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