Social Attitudes

First published in Phlogiston Twenty-One, June 1989.

The first computer game I ever saw was tennis. It came in a little unit which plugged into your television set. Each player manipulated a stylised bat which moved up and down one side of the screen. A slow-moving “ball” rambled across the screen, and you had to move your bat so as to intercept it and knock it back towards your opponent. Briefly, the game was all the rage and the newspapers were full of dire warnings about how if you played the game too long the design of the tennis court and the bats would be etched into your television screen, thereby ruining Coronation Street.

Then we got a PDP 11/70 computer in the office and I found the original Adventure (sometimes called Colossal Cave). The hours I spent after work (and sometimes during work) exploring those caverns. The maze of little twisty passages, the twisty little maze of passages, the maze of twisty little passages, the little twisty maze of passages—it drove me to my Witts End. And how on earth are you supposed to remember a spell like xyzzy?

Incidentally, if any of you who have played Colossal Cave ever get access to a Data General computer running the AOS/VS operating system, try typing xyzzy at the operating system prompt. It isn’t documented in any of the manuals, but it is a valid system command.

The first space invader machines appeared (and pinball machines began to disappear—the Who got it wrong. Tommy now sounds very dated). Electronic sound effects and dead aliens were all the rage. Zapping Pacmen or Klingons seemed to be everybody’s favourite pastime. “What’s your highscore?” began to replace “What’s your sign?” as an opening gambit at parties.

The space invader machines introduced an entirely new short story format for magazine editors to reject. It used to be that the slushpile was filled to overflowing with shaggy God stories about the last two survivors of a nuclear war who have to start the human race anew. He is called Adam, and she is called Eve.

Now that is old fashioned. Now the slushpile is filled with space invader machine stories where the punchline (yawn) is that it isn’t a game after all, it is real and the brave kid in the corner dairy has just saved the Earth from a fate worse than death. Pathetic, obvious and boring, isn’t it?

However it is only fair to point out that Orson Scott Card managed to win a Hugo with exactly that plot (Ender’s Game). It only goes to show that no matter how old and bearded and dull the plot may be, a writer with skill and talent can still bring it alive.

Space invader machines and their clones are a fascinating social phenomenon—nobody from the highest to the lowest seems to be able to resist the lure of these mindless games (I even caught my boss playing Pacman). They are impossible to win—the beasties always get you in the end. The only challenge is to see how long you can survive. I very quickly reached my boredom threshold and apart from a few forays into the so-called adventure games, I have left them alone ever since.

But you can’t ignore them. They even bleep at you in the corner dairy and the takeaway Chinese.

And they are nearly all science fiction.

They provide the most visible evidence of the way that science fictional tropes have permeated the whole of society. Even if you’ve never touched a space invaders machine, you know what it is, and you see nothing foreign or peculiar in the idea of ravening alien hordes from Galaxy Nine attempting to evade your trusty laser beams and ravish the Earth. It’s a perfectly normal everyday occurrence, not worth raising an eyebrow over.

Why science fiction? I’d be willing to bet that if they’d had space invader machines a hundred years ago, it wouldn’t have been alien monsters from beyond the stars that you were trying to kill, it would have been wave after wave of niggers, or fuzzy-wuzzies or Indians or Jews. I strongly suspect that the little alien beasties on the screen are, as far as the collective unconscious is concerned, simply a metaphor for whatever minority group is currently out of favour. We just aren’t as blatant about it as we would once have been.

The combination of violence and science fictional images is a worrying phenomenon, and I don’t like it at all. I like the unthinking acceptance of it even less. Even SF fans, who ought to know better, don’t seem to realise just how sick and perverted it is. Look around at the next convention you go to. Count the number of guns.

In the Foundation stories, Isaac Asimov coined the saying “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent”. (On the radio just the other day, I heard this paraphrased as “Violence is the last repartee of the illiterate” which I think is even more clever and pithy.)

The phrase is the guiding principle of the Foundation stories. In story after story, Asimov shows that no matter what the problem is or how bad it gets, there are always better methods of solving it than by lashing out at it.

The best method of all, however, is described in the book Seamanship: Jottings for the Young Sailor, by a man called Callingham:

Perhaps the worst plight of a vessel is to be caught in a gale on a lee
shore. In this connection, the following rules should be observed:
1. Never allow your vessel to be found in such a predicament…

There is no denying that violence is a solution. Zap the aliens with your laser beams, eat a power pill and stomp a pacman and the problem goes away. But it isn’t the only solution. What are the alien’s motives? Can they be satisfied any other way? What else do Pacmen eat? The space invader machines and the jackbooted, weapon-laden fans at conventions are both aspects of the same totally mindless gutlevel reaction to problem solving. It is so much easier to react instinctively than it is to think a problem through.

It is the publicly acceptable face of violence, and it is publicly encouraged. When television and newspaper reporters turn up at conventions, the photographs in the papers and the films on the TV news invariably concentrate on the cretins with guns and camouflage jackets.

The phenomenon is driven by social acceptability. As long as only eccentric idiots like me find it sick and perverted, nothing is going to change. Only a society-wide condemnation will make any difference. The definition of what is and is not acceptable public behaviour has to change. There was a time when I would have said that was unlikely. Now I’m not so sure.

It used to be socially acceptable to smoke. The first thing you did when guests arrived was to offer them a drink and a cigarette. Everybody smoked, and there was no social stigma attached to it. Count the number of cigarettes handed around in old Hollywood movies. Read the extensive descriptions of smoking in “hard-boiled” detective novels.

Over a period of about twenty years, that attitude has undergone a complete reversal. Nowadays the smoker is a pariah. You ask permission before you light up. In restaurants you are often roped off in a special section. Many places ban smoking all together.

Because it is no longer acceptable social behaviour, fewer and fewer people are taking it up, and more and more smokers are giving it up. There is kudos in being an ex-smoker. People congratulate you on your will power and encourage you not to relapse.

This revolution in social attitudes has been brought about by education, not by legislation. People are simply more aware of the harmful effects of smoking. The impetus has come from below rather than above. The bans on smoking have come after the fact, not before, and are a response to a perceived need. They are not an attempt to impose rules and regulations.

In the same way, I don’t believe that the violence inherent in the space invaders machines and jackboot fandom can be legislated against. There is no point in banning these buffoons from conventions, or turning off the electric power on the machines. The only way to eradicate the sick tendencies is by a process of education. The people who glory in these dangerous notions need to be ridiculed and made to feel like the fools that they are.