Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed

by Harlan Ellison

  But even the botulism bacterium looks innocent at first encounter. And “The Empire Strikes Back” videogame is an analogue for the Myth of Sisyphus.

  Never having played a videogame, having stared with creeping horror at the legions of silent, intense kids mesmerized in front of Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Donkey Kong machines in Chuck E. Cheese pizza & videogame parlors, I greeted the request to review this new cartridge with mixed emotions ranging from fearful curiosity to outright dismay.

  I had no reason to think this fad was any more dangerous than swallowing goldfish, phone booth-stuffing, Hula Hoops or wearing one’s hair in imitation of Farrah Fawcett. Yet the vast amounts of money being poured into these games, the accumulated years of time lost playing them, the apparent absence of any benefit to the players, had produced in me a frisson of concern. In a nation where reading is becoming an arcane lost art, where television has become the universal curriculum, where the lemminglike pursuit of mindless “entertainment” has taken on the noble obsessiveness of a search for the Holy Grail, the inspired exploitation of the Star Wars totem in videogame form could emerge as the most virulent electronic botulism of them all.

  The Atari console system was rigged to a television set in my home, I read the simple instruction brochure, and proceeded to bore my ass off for the next hour becoming as adept at “The Empire Strikes Back” as I cared to be.

  (Kindly refrain from kvetching that a ten-year-old can become more proficient at one of these twiddles than I, an adult at least in years, could ever be. Yes, he or she very likely can beat me ninety-nine out of a hundred times; but no ten-year-old I’ve ever encountered can write Moby Dick, create a Sistine Chapel fresco or fuck with any degree of expertise. And none of those are taught by videogame).

  The extremely simple-minded parameters of Parker Brothers’s “Empire Strikes Back” are consistent with virtually all other videogames. Destruction is the object. A line of two-dimensional Imperial Walkers plod toward a Rebel power generator on the Ice Planet Hoth (if you can believe those mundane pastel readouts represent an Ice Planet). You, as player, have to blow them up with blasts from the five Snowspeeder aircraft you are given. The “object” of the game is to destroy as many of the Walkers as you can (it takes 48 direct hits to neutralize a Walker) before they reach the power generator and blow up the entire planet. Terrific object-lesson for kids to learn; invaluable for everyday life in a world where Nuclear Holocaust paranoia already immobilizes us.

  The Walkers fire missiles at the Snowspeeders. They can track the zipping aircraft, fire “smart bombs” that loop and follow a Snowspeeder, blast fore and aft of themselves, and otherwise cause you aggravation. Occasionally a “bomb hatch” will open—as indicated by a minuscule dot of light that strobes too briefly for anyone to hit—save someone who has devoted his or her life to playing this game—and the Walker is off’d at once. Your Snowspeeders can be repaired and go back into action, but only twice. If you knock out a Walker, another one appears. Smarter, stronger, with new abilities. Points are amassed for various degrees of destruction to the Walkers; and for every 2000 points scored, you get an extra Snowspeeder.

  There’s a lot more hurly-burly. Walkers change color and are weakened as a result of amassed hits, you can crash your Snowspeeder into a Walker, sometimes you acquire The Force and cannot be destroyed…32 variations of one-and two-player games.

  But here’s the bottom line, quoted directly from the rules brochure: “END OF THE GAME: The game ends when the lead Imperial Walker reaches the power generator—or—when the last of your Snowspeeders is destroyed.”

  In other words, you cannot win.

  The game ends when you lose.

  It may take you ten minutes or fifteen years. The level of your expertise may grow to be one so elevated that the game will have to be concluded by your grandchildren, but…YOU CANNOT WIN!

  In classical Greek mythology we find the familiar legend of Sisyphus, founder and king of Corinth who, because of his avarice and fraudulence, was condemned to the lower world, eternally to roll a great stone to the top of a steep hill, whence it always rolled down to the bottom again. This ghastly punishment, perceived through the ages as a paradigm for the worst eternal fate that could be visited on an errant mortal, is spoken of thus in Webster’s Dictionary of Proper Names:

  “Hence, a Sisyphean task, an unending task on which immense energy is expended with little to show for it.”

  Hence, playing Parker Brothers’s “The Empire Strikes Back” videogame.

  An unending task on which immense energy and great gobs of money are expended with little to show for it.

  To be played by urchins incapable of reading a book, parsing a sentence, thinking an original thought; rationalized as valuable in establishing eye-to-hand coordination even if it’s a coordination so specialized it won’t help you sink an eight-ball in the hip pocket; costing, with its cheap and sluggish joystick console, enough to buy a good set of the collected works of Mark Twain; fostering a solitude of activity that separates the player even more from the real world; this latest icon of the Imbecile Industry is a pointless, time-wasting enterprise that can instill only one dreadful life-lesson in those of a youthful intelligence who play it.

  And the lesson is the lesson of Sisyphus. You cannot win. You can only waste your life struggling and struggling, getting as good as you can be, with no hope of triumph. As one with governments in power, the chief reason for the existence of this game is to stay in power. To keep you playing. Over and over and over, rolling that great rock up the hill, killing Walkers, only to have the rock roll down on you again, only to have faster, cleverer, more destructive Walkers come to life on the screen. And you play, and you play, and in the twilight you find the cobwebs have smothered your imagination, your leg has gone to sleep, your money is gone, your friends have grown up and achieved immortality and died; and you are all alone there in the gloaming, with the radiant screen and its two-dimensional electronic death-machines…firing, firing…lumbering…making no progress, winning no awards, enriching life not one whit.

  But does it really matter? Clearly not. Because life—as viewed by this and other videogame Body Snatchers—is a pitiless congeries of rocks being rolled up a steep hill, only to fall back. This is the lesson one learns from Parker Brothers and their shamelessly exploitative little toy. Unless one has the presence of self to become rapidly bored.

  What a helluva recommendation: the best one can hope for is that one yawns before one’s soul is snatched.

  POSTSCRIPT

  What you have just read was my first and last encounter with videogames. It was altered and presented in an unauthorized manner by the editors of Video Review, one of the leading magazines in the industry, who had commissioned it. (For those who may feel Video Review acted courageously in soliciting the writing of one whom they knew would probably disaffect their prime advertisers, not to mention their drone readership, be advised that the commission was tendered by one of their junior editors, a fan of my books, who caught sheer hell from the publisher. Parker Bros. did, however, pull its advertising from the magazine.)

  Subsequent to its publication, I got a call from the office of the President of Atari in Sunnyvale, California. He wanted a copy of the original manuscript to frame on his wall, having seen a framed copy in the office of Dr. Alan C. Kay, Atari’s chief scientist.

  That was the first I knew of the amazing ripple effect my humble efforts were causing. Apparently the essay was the first dissenting piece ever published in the videogame community, and the screams were loud and long.

  Within a month, the number one magazine in the industry, Video Magazine, featured an editorial by Bruce Apar, its head honcho, lambasting anyone and everyone who dared to suggest that videogames might not presage The Second Coming or some other portent of Utopia. It was titled “Video-game Critics & Cranks.” And though it lashed out to all points of the compass in hopes of striking a target, the big blast was reserved for your self-effacin
g columnist as follows:

  “Adding to the strident rant of these cockeyed pessimists [Mr. Apar wrote] are irresponsible periodicals, one of which recently ran a review of a new game that insulted readers’ intelligence by virtually ignoring the game. This so-called review was in truth a diatribe against all video games and people who play them. The writer, who freely admitted to never playing a video game before, was operating on that familiar premise, ‘If I don’t like it, it’s bad for everybody.’”

  Well, imagine my pleasure at discovering the behemoth was capable of a bleat now and then! Further enhanced by information that reached me later, the content of which was that Apar and his magazine had commiserated with Parker Bros. to the extent of telling their advertising department that Video Review was a nest of Bad Guys, and that they should convert all their advertising bucks spent with the magazine that had published such a dreadful bit of heresy…to the righteous venue of Video Magazine.

  I wrote a letter to Mr. Apar. Here is most of it:

  Dear Mr. Apar:

  Though referenced blind in your recent editorial, I suspect the name on the letterhead above will strike a familiar note.

  One of your readers, recognizing the referent, sent along a Xerox copy for my attention, with the words, “Looks as if you pinked the bull.” It would seem so.

  I was advised, when I wrote the piece for Video Review (at their behest, and with considerable reluctance on my part), that it was the first dissenting view of videogames to be published in magazines whose vested interest is, of course, to keep as many kids goggle-eyed in front of Donkey Kong and Missile Command as possible. And was further advised that it would bring forth the apologists for the industry in force.

  They were correct in their estimation, of course. Your sally is estimably off-the-point and no defense of what I wrote from observation in the Real World seems required. The studies are beginning to be published on the effects of videogames on kids, so I take your umbrage as similar to that of the tobacco industry when it’s suggested that cigarettes might not be good for people. But if you’re going to rebut your critics, I suggest that you find other grounds than that a reviewer had never before played such games. For that was precisely the reason I was chosen to write the review (apart from my literary and critical credentials, which even Video would have difficulty assailing). I had no preconceived opinions, and was ready to deal on the square.

  It’s a shame Video, and you, don’t have such a lack of self-service. My, you do get upset when someone suggests the Emperor ain’t got no clothes, don’t you?

  Never received a reply. Didn’t expect to. Just felt like sticking it to him. Keeps balance in the universe.

  But little more than two weeks later, on November 10th, 1982, front page headlines all over America announced:

  U.S. SURGEON GENERAL C. EVERETT KOOP SAID TUESDAY THAT VIDEO GAMES MAY BE HAZARDOUS TO THE HEALTH OF YOUNG PEOPLE, WHO HE SAID ARE BECOMING ADDICTED TO THE MACHINES. “THEY ARE INTO IT BODY AND SOUL,” KOOP SAID.

  Naturally, I wrote a follow-up letter to Mr. Apar, the gist of which was: “Posterity seems determined to have its say rather more quickly than usual on this disagreement between our positions. How many ‘cranks’ does it take to make a consensus?”

  He didn’t respond to that one, either. Thank god I handle rejection with equanimity.

  I could not, in my most power-drenched fantasies, have postulated how speedily posterity was bearing down on the videogame Eden and all its leech apologists. I like to think I have a cultivated talent for helping to redress the balance in the universe, but not even Zorro had the power to decimate an entire multi-billion-dollar industry so quickly. On two days in the following month, December 1982, Warner Communications, Inc. (parent company of Atari, Inc., as well as of DC comics) watched its stock plummet 45% as Atari went into the toilet.

  Atari, whose revenues were nibbling at the edges of $2 billion a year, with 10,000 employees in fifty buildings all across Silicon Valley, announced on December 8th that they had been hit by massive order cancellations, and in the next two days (as reported by the Wall Street Journal) stockholders lost a collective $1.5 billion to $2 billion on paper. Soon after there were rumors of insider trading, rumors that certain Warner and Atari executives had jettisoned huge blocks of Warner shares just before the price tumbled. Stockholders filed suit to find out what actually happened inside the company, and the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating.

  All over America, landlords who only a few years ago were forcing Mom-&-Pop grocery stores and boutiques out of their locations so the shops could be converted into videogame arcades, are finding they have echoing emptinesses to show for the sudden drop in clientele. As quickly as it dominated the scene, the videogame craze has receded.

  At moments like these, I find my reluctant acceptance of the transient nature of the human race ameliorated. Perhaps the cockroaches won’t take over in my lifetime.

  On the other hand, the spirit of James Watt is still with us.

  A LOVE SONG TO JERRY FALWELL

  This indictment of the ways in which society brutalizes its creative geniuses originally appeared as “Black Thoughts/Blood Thoughts” in the April 1969 issue of Richard Geis’s SF Review. It was reworked in 1973 for inclusion in Dart, a literary publication of Dartmouth College, revised again for the 1983 Yearbook of P.E.N. Los Angeles, and has been especially revised and expanded for publication here. In mood and imagery it resembles Harlan’s fiction writing more than any other entry in this collection.

  First, let us sit in the dark, as they sit in darkness, and hear words from writers.

  Don Marquis said: “If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.”

  Geoffrey Wolff said:

  Writing has nothing much to do with pretty manners, and less to do with sportsmanship or restraint…Every writer begins as a subversive, if in nothing more than the antisocial means by which he earns his keep. Finally, every fantasist who cannibalizes himself knows that misfortune is his friend, that grief feeds and sharpens his fancy, that hatred is as sufficient a spur to creation as love (and a world more common) and that without an instinct for lunacy he will come to nothing.

  Arthur Miller said: “Society and man are mutually dependent enemies and the writer’s job [is] to go on forever defining and defending the paradox lest, God forbid, it be resolved.”

  And, finally, Robert Coover has said:

  The best social orders run down with time, and so occasionally you have to tear it all apart and start over. Primitive societies set aside a time each year to do this on a ritual basis. Get drunk, break all the rules, commune with the primordial chaos and the dreamtime of the civilizers, recapture the sense of community and thus of order. Anyway, good excuse for a party…

  …it’s the role of the author, the fiction maker, the mythologizer, to be the creative spark in this process of renewal: he’s the one who tears apart the old story, speaks the unspeakable, makes the ground shake, then shuffles the bits back together into a new story.”

  But they are writers. What else would they say to defend themselves? They are professional liars. And has not one of their own, Pushkin, said: “Better the illusions that exalt us than ten thousand truths”?

  So what are we to make of the mind of the writer? What are we to think of the purgatory in which dreams are born, from whence come the derangements that men call magic because they have no other names for smoke or fog or hysteria? What are we to dwell upon when we consider the forms and shadows that become stories? Must we dismiss them as fever dreams, as merely expressions of creativity, as purgatives? Or may we deal with them even as the naked ape dealt with them: as the only moments of truth a human calls throughout a life of endless lies. Are they not evil, these liars? Consider their aberrations!

  Who will be the first to acknowledge that it was only a membrane, only a vapor, that separated a Robert Burns and his love from de Sade and his ha
te?

  Is it too terrible to consider that a Dickens, who could drip treacle and God bless us one and all, through the mouth of a potboiler character called Tiny Tim, could also create the escaped convict Magwitch; the despoiler of children, Fagin; the murderous Sikes? Is it that great a step to consider that a woman surrounded by love and warmth and care of humanity as was Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, could produce a work of such naked horror as Frankenstein? Can the mind equate the differences and similarities that allow both an “Annabel Lee” and a “Masque of the Red Death” to emerge from the same churning pit of thought-darkness?

  Consider the dreamers; all of the dreamers; the glorious and the corrupt:

  Aesop and Amado; Borges and Benvenuto Cellini; Chekhov and Chang Tao-ling; Democritus, Disraeli; Epicurus and Ralph Ellison; Faure and Fitzgerald; Goethe, Garibaldi; Huysmans and Hemingway; ibn-al-Farid and Ives; Dalton Trumbo and Mark Twain; and on and on. All the dreamers. Those whose visions took form in blood and those which took form in music. Dreams fashioned of words, and nightmares molded of death and pain. Is it inconceivable to consider that Richard Speck—who slaughtered eight nurses in Chicago in 1966, who was sentenced to 1,200 years in prison—was a devout Church-going Christian, a boy who lived in the land of God, while Jean Genet—avowed thief, murderer, pederast, vagrant who spent the first thirty years of his life as an enemy of society, and in the jails of France where he was sentenced to life imprisonment—has written prose and poetry of such blazing splendor that Sartre called him “saint”? Does the mind shy away from the truth that a Bosch could create hell-images so burning, so excruciating that no other artist has ever even attempted to copy his staggeringly brilliant style, while at the same time he produced works of such ecumenical purity as L’Epiphanie? All the dreamers. All the mad ones and the noble ones, all the seekers after alchemy and immortality, all those who dashed through endless midnights of gore-splattered horror and all those who strolled through sunshine springtimes of humanity. They are one and the same. They are all born of the same desire.