The World is Born From Zero

by Cameron Kunzelman

In the 2000 film High Fidelity, John Cusack talks to you (meaning me) directly and intimately about how he navigates the world. His was the type of existence that I, as a late teen, thought everyone wanted: quirky, ad hoc friends; job–not career–that catered to your tendencies but did not define you; the overarching quest for adolescent romantic validation through capers. That these capers tended to dehumanize women, turning them into collectable objects, didn’t occur to me as a fresh-faced collegiate frosh. Nor did the bleakness of using other human relationships as a way to workshop out your own mess so you’d become more equipped to return, as an enlightened version of yourself, to your original canonical pairing. Those people you’re dating on the road to self-actualization are real people! They are real and have lives that are as full and deep as yours! Most media don’t have the time to fully realize side characters! You shouldn’t hurt them just to learn your own interpersonal boundaries!

I’m all for a bunch of experiences for their own sake, but High Fidelity positioned each relationship with a clear win/loss condition. I think this entire structure is basically gross and wrong: maybe I was too young to understand that John Cusack was supposed to be a complete loser with whom we were not supposed to empathize, but he was the POV narrator. Unless you already had an undergraduate intro to lit and/or film theory course under your belt, or went to a better high school than mine, you weren’t necessarily versed in the concept of the antihero at 18. Though at least it wasn’t Breaking Bad. Or Rick & Morty. Ah geez, should we focus more on teaching teens media literacy?

I can not see how the film (or the book, which I read but barely remember) positions the narrator as anything but the cold center of the universe. I do not believe there is an ironic, unreliable, or antagonistic angle presented to us. John Cusack is becoming a person that appreciates the girlfriend he had at the beginning of the movie, and to get there he has to step on a bunch of necks, romantically speaking. Yes, character growth is good. Yes, protagonists can have flaws at the beginning. Perhaps their flaws should be the source of their growth and not be the characteristics that reward them while damaging people around them, with nary a consequence to be found.

A quotable quote that props up the film and continues to pop up throughout the decades is, “It’s what you like, not what you are like.”

I actively think this wrong, though I believe it is my hook into how High Fidelity relates to The World is Born from Zero: Understanding Speculation and Video Games. So, here we go.

I love a dense academic text about video games. I simply love the medium of video games, and I’ll take them any way I can get them. I like how video games function on a technical and artistic level. I like thinking about them, I like their clichés and tropes and the way they work as a device to carry narrative, or theme, or simple pleasure to the person interacting with them. 

I don’t—and my reliance on a movie from 25 years ago should confirm this—particularly enjoy movies. For a long while I thought perhaps I didn’t like them for their length, but the more I learn about movies–they have their own unique format, pacing, presentation, and language–the more I realize it’s simply the structure that I don’t enjoy. Which is fine, it just means that I don’t really watch movies anymore. I don’t mind reading about them, though, especially from a source that is clearly informed and also enthusiastic. 

I don’t like the Metal Gear Solid series beyond the 1998 PlayStation release. I had no idea where the title of World is Born had come from (it is Metal Gear Solid 4). That’s fine. And to be honest, and don’t particularly like Science Fiction. What I’m trying to get at, here, is that the author and I have almost dipodal tastes. I know this is true because beyond being the author of this book, they are my favorite, by a long mile, podcast voice. It is relevant to state that I strongly dislike Stephen King’s writing, and don’t really care for the Fallout series, either. And yet.

could never imagine the author voluntarily playing fantasy life i.

So no. It is not what you like. Even a little bit. Because the way the author thinks, the way they approach the world–at least as a public-facing, book-writing, podcast-creating entity–overlaps so completely with my own perspective that I am fascinated anew each time they talk about really liking something I simply do not. Taste is spun from the aether, as far as I can tell, but structural conceits build the world.

The reason I read World is Born has been established. What does it, as an artifact, do? As a gamesperson, and someone interested in the academic field of game studies, it does what I want: it makes points about the world outside of video games using video games to do so. I like to learn about games, but the street has to go both ways. Just as the structure and mythos of High Fidelity infected my understanding of how to date in college–I was sure I was going to end my first year back together with the girl that cheated on me in the first few months of dorm life–the way a game presents the world to a player does, in fact, create expectations and understandings of the world beyond the screen. “…[T]he aesthetic operations of a given game often corral or transform mechanical interactions.” Pasta is mostly made of flour, water, and egg, but each pasta’s unique topology, from agnolotti to ziti, is designed to interact with and carry a different type of sauce in a different way.

The Last of Us 2, the spaghetti of video games, is another series that I barely touched because I did not enjoy what I played of the first one. But it is a popular cross-media darling, so poking at it to see what critical understanding piñatas out makes a certain amount sense. Some might say it is more approachable to the average game-playing person to tackle the theming of a large-budget popular game than, say, spending a chapter on the obscure VA-11 HALL-A. I am not one of those people, not only because I played more VA-11 than TLoU but because I find it edifying to read about the contours of a game that I have no interest or experience in playing. I am not unique in this regard, as a shared adolescence with countless other online nerds spent reading hundreds of screenshot Let’s Plays can attest.

To translate why a game is relevant to a broader theory or concept, you often have to break down more than its theming or do more than simply gloss the plot–the actual way a player interacts with the system has to be dissected. The language around this critique has yet to be fully standardized as there are no bedrock principles that stem from game design, discussion, or dissection. Critical theory around video games still relies heavily on the concepts and conceits built in other media theories, so having an author that is experienced in film and film studies adds contrast, particularly because knowing film theory well means that there is never an attempt to stuff the oblique angles of video games into how people already talk about film. Video games within the text are given their due, are treated as unique artifacts rather than simply “movies where you can move around.” The singular best part about The World is Born is that it never approaches the format of video games ready to wield the tools of another academic discipline. Knowing the tools of film critique helps to not employ them. A specific example, with regards to VA-11, a cyberpunk/dystopic bartending ‘simulation’: “We become subjects whose entire relationship to the world is determined by the interface we use and how it asks us to labor.” As in, the flat, screen-based interface we players use to play the game is a one-to-one overlay of what the character whom we are playing as uses to do her in-game job. This is an interesting assertion in and of itself, and is enmeshed with the scifi theming: you cannot use UI/UX to replicate magic or physical acts in a one-to-one the way you can with technology, no matter how many wii motion +’s you append to a controller (Though…perhaps Tapper? Is VA-11 touchscreen Tapper?).

There are a hundred points of extrapolation for someone to think about when reading The World is Born—even the term “extrapolation” gets its due, versus the concept of "speculation.” The book is fertile ground if you like thinking. The World is Born treats video games with respect; I would even hazard to say that much of what is discussed is about human culture non-specific to video games—video games are simply the fissure through which we reach the bedrock, similar to how traditional academia uses other forms of media to touch upon the underlying human condition. It is vivifying to see games discussed at this level, to have someone approach the way black characters are presented in The Last of Us as vehicles for plot movement:

Any possible reflection on black death is kicked into the void, and it is done so to deliver emotional gravitas for white characters and to maintain the blackgound [sic] of this dystopia that deploys black death as a structuring principle. 

The book asserts that TLoU treats black people the same way I believe High Fidelity approached women: a little song and dance for the benefit of whatever the POV main character is thinking. They are a waypoint on a journey through some sort of experience and once the point is made, they can fuck back off to being irrelevant to life, the world, and—implicitly—to us as readers. When this cycle goes unnoticed in media, it is insidious. When media and life commingle in the way they do during modern platform and surveillance capitalism, it becomes inescapable. It has infiltrated basic IRL language: “NPC”; “main character syndrome.” Other people don’t matter, specifically the women and male non-white minorities who are presented to “us” on screens as flat, single-issue metaphors, synecdoches for the struggle our largely white, male world needs to overcome. 

For me, the major revelation of World is Born piggybacks off the idea that constant exposure to reduced-humanity minority-character-as-plot is harmful to the consumptive public, but it focuses attention on wealth disparity rather than the vagueries of racism of sexism. The idea is not novel but is presented coherently within the substrate of video games, which is a shift toward respectability within a format that deserves more than it often receives. The commingling of media and reality wasn’t what I found amazing, but the entwined nature of an argument from economic class-based structures, rather than the sociocultural ones was:

Seeing the labor of the factory worker was once a way of demystifying the commodity and revealing the process of capitalist exploitation that created those commodities. Now the transparency is its own mode of exploitation.

You cannot have Sinclair’s The Jungle anymore because looking deeply into the meatpacking industry would simply be a reality show, its nightmares leading not to regulation but to ratings. We’ve monetized the shock out of exploitative labor practices: reality programming had a chance to shift away from pure exploitation, and it said “I’d prefer not to.” 

I cannot stop thinking about how all things great and small have been reduced to “content,” made to fit the pre-existing forms and formats, to be consumed rather than engaged with or entertained or appreciated. “Content Creator” covers the width and breadth of creative human output, and yet we all know what it means: fluff pieces; eating challenges; unboxings; rants and raves; physical violence; gotcha pranks. Content, things that are contained. “The potential for a revolution of workers is foiled because the way that they become transparent, or the way that they come to be represented, is as the smiling face of the humanized capitalist worker.”

Platform exploitation–also known as monetization–of creative and/or immaterial labor is uniquely capable of being represented through gameplay elements. Capital accumulation is an easier thing to program than spiritual fulfillment. The player character in VA-11 can “...either perform consumer behaviors or facilitate the consumer behaviors of others.”

If you cannot get outside the system of exploitation through transparency–everyone already knows what it means to be personally exploited by the system because it is how we live, now–then you must move further into it, through representational gameplay, through alienation in extremis. You can’t simply see the inhumanity of the modern era in a book or on the news–you’ll have to play it. Is this a call for more Spec Ops: The Line? Yes. Am I one of those weirdos that felt like the non-choice to use the white phosphorus was, as the developers were roundly castigated for saying, a choice between clicking the button to keep the gears of the plot grinding along or opting out by shutting down the game? Also yes. To walk away from the media that we were engaged with was a real choice that some of us made, and it has stuck with me longer than, saying, “winning” any number of other video games of that era.

You might have paid money for Spec Ops: The Line. You might have been invested in the story. But to see it through, to keep playing, required acquiescence to an act of violence—false violence, sure—that is as attenuated as it would be in reality: click a button and a sidewinder missile explodes a wedding. Walk away from your XBOX game, sacrifice fifty dollars. Divest from Chevron, miss out on some dividends. Sell you car, arrive places slightly sweatier. Stop piloting the drone half the world away from the carnage that you will never feel, will only see on a small screen.

If you’re not sure whether The World is Born is within your orbit, here is a simple test: does the distinction between “a few” and “a couple” sound interesting to you? Perhaps, without ever examining it, these words have been conflated, their distinction narrowed down to a matter of linguistic flourish, the terms meaning functionally the same thing in your mind. Or perhaps you require a specificity, wherein “a couple” is heavy with implicit assumption delimited to two, as in a romantic couple, and “a few” necessitates more than that by virtue of functional application. Within this text, “speculation” and “extrapolation” do similar work to “few” and “couple”; a very specific definition is required, and is employed, to cover “...how video games activate speculation in a way that is unique to the medium.”

When I do something in a game, I am considering what is going to happen next. Before I press the button, I speculate on what might occur right after; when I watch the cutscene, I speculate on the next set of actions that I might partake in. More often, these speculations are more technically extrapolations. I know that pressing the controller button mapped to a “jump” action will cause me to jump, and a game with this particular action might ask me to do it a thousand times over the course of the game.”

You don’t have to be a Ranged Touch fan to read The World is Born from Zero. You don’t have to recognize a single one of the video games discussed, philosophers quoted, or terms of art created. All you need is a curiosity toward culture and an acceptance that video games are a relevant and interesting part of human expression. Don’t let John Cusack convince you that your media preferences represent your personality; instead, create room to examine what you like, why you like it, and how it can help you navigate the world, no matter what it that world is born from.