June 21, 2004

Parasitic Gamer

One of the weakest (or technically the most vulnerable) elements of current first person shooter videogames is that you either must win or lose. Narrating the plot via population diversity in RTS or TS (Real Time Strategy / Turn-based Strategy) games or what is generally called Race-based campaigns has slightly diverged this despotic element through a consistent continuity between campaigns effacing the harsh narrative impact of ‘victory/defeat’ (V-D) terminus. V-D principle has pushed the entire shooter genre to a blind survival bulimia. The player cannot refuse to survive if he wishes to play the game. Whilst in a secret twist, the recent PC game Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne coils this survivalist apparatus into a vermiculate parasitic epic spreading over the videogame’s survival mechanism itself: Max Payne, a fugitive undercover cop finds his wife murdered in a mysterious attack by junkies and consequently dives into the hadean dimension of New York City to find those responsible (mainly a representative of the AOE known as Inner Circle). Cruising streets infested by a drug named Valkyrie -- which provokes occultural excitations and sizzling the meat away -- he is slowly overran by particles of an artificial ancientness bleeding into music, Television, phone sex, drugs, military equipments and the air he inhales. He actually encounters the copies of Necronomicon, the spellbook of Kharun (the Etruscanian demon), a club named Ragna Rock (Ragnarok?), people summoning Lylith, Asmodeus or ‘tasted the flesh of fallen angels’.

Max Payne astonishingly survives over the apocalyptic carnage of the game ... his germinally enduring survival turns his initial negation to a hyperstitional combustion in which he, himself, becomes a hyperstitional entity. In the final chapter, he runs into the last Boss of the game. Continued to exist after nonstop massacres, wounds and lethal traumas, he survives the last encounter to beat the game. The Boss anxiously shouts: “What’s the hell with you? Why don’t you die? What are you?” ... in one line gives a direful reportage to expose the survival economy mechanized in the game as a bacterial endurance (some sort of sporulation), uncovering survival agencies as parasitic germs enduring on a hyperstitional schizocyte named videogame, diagramming the mutation of Max Payne from a liveware to a deeply meshed hyperstitional entity, a Fallen Angel or an undead (Gamer as a Zombie plague hyperstitionally engineered through the ludicosm [Nick Land] of videogame). The camouflage is unwrapped: the omega-degree of survival arrives as a Feeding Project to receive the glutto-signals of the inside and outside. If mere survival reinforces the Feeding Project with pre-parasitic developments toward predation then the Omega-degree of survival is an effective participation in the festivities (of voracity).

Posted by hyperstition at June 21, 2004 07:02 AM

 

 


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