Moving target

Published 03 June 2002

Video games - Nicholas Blincoe takes a nostalgia trip back to the virtual reality of the Eighties

It takes a special kind of curator to make video games seem old hat. The Barbican has succeeded with "Game On". Remember the virtual-reality headsets and gloves that promised unlimited sex over the internet? That would have been 1998. Now, staring at the wired-up helmet and latex gloves inside their museum case, they seem as outdated as Grandma's cough sweets. Nostalgia makes the most appalling taste palatable.

Aside from Pong and a couple of primitive games for mainframe computers, video games began in the Eighties. On this timescale, even a 12-year-old could become a chin-stroking nostalgia buff. It is difficult to walk past the arcade versions of Donkey Kong or Pac-Man, or look at the early, chunky versions of the Game Boy, without recalling Christmases past when toys such as Simple Simon - a memory test that involved coloured lights - promised a new technological dawn. Until Boxing Day, when Simple Simon went the same way as the wrapping paper. But given that the essence of this technology is its newness, the curators have to offer more than a walk down memory lane.

Somewhere in the planning stage, hard choices were avoided, leaving "Game On" all show and no tell. One can play the games or stare at the consoles, but there is no attempt to demystify the technology, or to make serious claims for the creativity of the designers.

The video game is both a harbinger and symptom of what has been called "accelerated culture". Over the past 25 years, our world has undergone rapid, discontinuous changes, all as a result of microprocessors - as they used to be called. The Barbican has missed a chance to investigate these changes. Admittedly, it is not easy to hit a moving target. It becomes even harder when the most decisive changes have happened in unexpected places. The history of this technology is littered with people who got their predictions wrong, like IBM or the dotcom entrepreneurs. And with others who came from nowhere to dominate everything: the Finnish Nokia or the Japanese card company Nintendo. A display case at the Barbican holds a Sega Dreamcast console with a note explaining that Sega no longer manufactures hardware - this of the company that once dominated the industry with the Megadrive and Sonic the Hedgehog.

Video games provide the aesthetic to this accelerated culture. But it is a peculiar aesthetic, primarily a way of thinking about space and movement. Their beauty does not lie in the artwork or the accompanying music, which is all derivative. Nor in the game scenarios, whose whimsicality ranges from the intriguing, such as Crash Bandicoot, to the inane, as in Myst.

It is this dynamic playing space that heralds a new way of looking at the world. By entering this space, the games player can assume multiple perspectives or identities, and soon learns that the rules which underpin a game at one level might be stretched or broken at another. Everything is relative. And, like Schrodinger's cat, the characters are alive or dead at the same time, depending upon the way one approaches them.

Perhaps because it was created by mathematicians, game space is similar to the world described by quantum physics. Both quantum physics and video games tell us that there is an infinite number of worlds or levels. Therefore, everything that may happen, will happen, somewhere. The novelist Scarlett Thomas comments on this in her latest book, Going Out. She argues that our world becomes frightening the moment we accept that anything might happen at any moment: if everything is possible somewhere, this is the world, for all we know, where everything happens for the worse. If this recourse to quantum theory is reminiscent of Douglas Adams and other writers of science fiction, it should be noted that Thomas is rarely fanciful. Her quantum world is neither "parallel" nor "other". It is not "invented". It feels real; which, after all, is the essence of "virtual reality" or the hyperreal space of video games.

The world of video games is capable of being explained in terms of technology and logic and this is what is missing from the Barbican's exhibition. But, to be fair, there is little explanation anywhere. Steven Poole's excellent Trigger Happy is one of the few serious books on the subject. In the wider arena, the idea of a world in rapid and discontinuous change has received little consideration since the French post-structuralists of the 1960s and 1970s. These philosophers, liberal and left wing to un homme or une femme, were largely condemned as relativists who would plunge the world into a value-free abyss. The aim of all recent left-wing strategy has been to neutralise any suggestion that the left is liberal or freethinking on any issue.

But there are signs that a radical new philosophy is emerging. The disaster is that it comes from the right. As Scarlett Thomas notes, a world of rapid change brings insecurity. This was the keynote of the recent French election and the reason for Jean-Marie Le Pen's success. Le Pen is not a sophisticated thinker, but in Italy and the Netherlands, the right is prepared to embrace relativism as part of a western triumphalism. Silvio Berlusconi has argued that the post-Enlightenment west has learned to cope with an uncertain world of competing values, so only western culture should be promoted. So did Pim Fortuyn.

This is tough, tough relativism for tough and worldly men, men who present their views as common-sense, non-ideological responses to an uncertain world. But it is more like the world we encounter in video games or quantum physics than our own world, because it is derived from an analysis of technology (usually their own) rather than an analysis of real life. The problem is, what we call "real" life does not exist in the political sphere: we vote on the basis of our fears, our insecurities and our future prospects. Unless the rest of us recognise this and develop our own responses, men such as Binyamin Netanyahu will run the show. That is the real game on.

"Game On: the culture and history of video games" is at the Barbican Gallery, London EC2 (020 7638 8891) until 15 September

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