No Such Thing as Society (Hollywood Squares)

Guy Debord writes in Society of the Spectacle about how “In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation. The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.”

Hollywood Squares has existed, in various forms, since the 1960s. Its format is one of bland simplicity: nine celebrities of varying levels of actual fame sit in the titular squares. Two players take turns picking squares. The celebrity is asked a trivia question, and the player must decide if their answer is right or wrong. If they guess correctly they claim the square; if they guess incorrectly their opponent does. Beyond that the game is one of Tic-Tac-Toe. 

This banal setup is, in reality, simply a frame to hold the real and equally bland dynamic, in which the celebrities came up with humorous wrong answers, called “zingers” by the production sta. Which is to say that the core dynamic of the show is simply celebrities making dumb jokes with a broad structure of a game show to guide proceedings. In truth, all of these interactions were functionally scripted; the zingers were supplied along with a right and plausible wrong answer, the celebrities relied upon only for entertaining delivery, which, to be fair, was in fact many of their jobs. 

The Nintendo version strips even more of this away. The likenesses of actual celebrities are, after all, expensive. So instead there are nine sprites given arbitrary names—only nine sprites, to be clear, although there are more names than that, so that these fictive celebrities seem in fact to cycle through an endless number of identities, all of them less distinctive than their actual animations. One is left to think of them in these terms: the annoying bro in the center square, the granny underneath her, the one Black dude in the upper right. Their names become meaningless, empty non-signifiers. Meanwhile you answer trivia questions for money that does not exist, and get an opportunity as a bonus to try to win a car that also does not exist. 

It is a simulation of a simulated situation with all of the markers that gave meaning to the original simulation stripped away. Looked at now, nearly twenty years since any version of Hollywood Squares has been on television, its vapidity becomes a hollow, frightened thing. Nine haunted visages of a spectacle so comprehensively unreal that it is impossible to imagine it demanding, over and over again, to know if they are lying to you.

ACAB (High Speed, Hogan's Alley)

My mother was a woman liked overly big, showy Christmas presents, and one year she decided to outdo herself and buy me a pinball machine. She did her homework on slightly older machines she could get a good price on, and settled on the classic Williams table High Speed. Needless to say, I was gobsmacked. She hid the pinball machine in plain sight with a blanket over it and insisted it was the surprisingly oversized toy kitchen my sister was getting and I bought it because "there's a pinball machine hidden in your playroom" is simply not an outcome I was equipped to imagine.

High Speed was a 1980s machine with a pleasantly frenetic pace and soundtrack. Its plot, such as it was, involved hitting a series of targets around the table to steadily illuminate a traffic light, then made a ramp shot to "run the light" setting off a high speed chase; successful completion of a few more targets constituted getting away and launched multiball.

It's probably too much to ask for moral lessons from a pinball table, and I'm pretty unconvinced by "run red lights" as a lesson in the first place. And yet there is something about the impish anti-authority leaning here that is easy to respect. "Fleeing from the cops is fun and should be rewarded" has an easy charm to it, fitting into the long tradition of the noble outlaw. 

Interestingly, the game's sound effects are from the perspective of the frustrated cops—"Dispatch this is 504. Suspect ran a red light. Over," and the like. Which means that the player is positioned not with the driver whose actions they are nominally controlling via the ball (although the question of avatars in pinball machines is to say the least vexed) but with the cops who exist in a state of endless frustration, always missing the perp. In a pleasant detail, there's literally no victory dialogue: when you lose a ball the cops don't say "we got him" or anything. And so the game is simply an endless recitation of defeated authority that can only ever be revealed as impotent and useless, with the player's pleasure always allied with that revelation. 

The NES port is reasonably faithful as a table—I was able to pick it up quickly and was broadly speaking almost as good at it as I was on the actual table the last time I played it, which was admittedly some eight years ago. It makes the irritating and non-optional decision to add a bunch of gimmicks—little threats that show up on the table and disrupt play, along with random collectable bonuses that tricker extra rounds. From a design perspective, a "Normal" and "Enhanced" mode would be nice touches. But as a pinball port it's reasonable, an entertaining bit of nostalgia that I legitimately didn't expect to find on the NES. (Honestly, if I'd realized I had this coming in just two posts I probably wouldn't have quit the project when I did.)

I remember one evening when my father came to get me. I don't remember what I was doing—statistically speaking it was probably playing video games. He walked me down the front lawn to where a traffic stop was taking place; some teenage girl had been speeding or run a red light or something. And we stood and watched. Eventually the cop decided he didn't like this, and asked my father to go back inside. And my father replied, very calmly, "I believe citizens should watch their police." 

There are no shortage of bad games on the NES. Still, it is hard to think of a more straightforwardly evil one than Hogan's Alley. Another light gun game, this one functions as a shooting gallery in which a mixture of criminals and innocents pop up and you must quickly identify and shoot the criminals. The name dates back to 1920, when the NRA and the Army collaborated to create a training range in Ohio after determining that an insufficient number of cities had dedicated firing ranges. This was presumably named after Richard Outcault's Hogan's Alley, widely credited as the first newspaper comic strip, although as usual the word "first" turns out to be extremely vexed here. The Hogan's Alley range was notable for being a broad simulation of a city, with targets popping out in unexpected places as the officer walked through. This eventually became a generic name for that type of shooting range; two years after the NES game came out the FBI established a range of the same name in Quantico in which actors were hired to portray a mixture of civilians and terrorists for the purposes of training. 

There are multiple levels to this sort of training. On one level the presence of "civilians" constitutes training in threat assessment. But these ranges are also known as surprise ranges, with the idea being that threats might jump out of any corner. The end result is to keep police on edge, paranoid, always afraid that something bad could happen to them. This is the logic that would eventually evolve into Dave Grossman's horrifying notion of "killology," a set of police training seminars that can be boiled down to convincing cops that they need to learn to kill without hesitation or moral qualm. The lethal consequences of this are, I imagine, self-evident. 

Hogan's Alley avoids the worst baggage of this with an entirely white cast of criminals, who are generally in the mafioso style. But its basic logic is still the same. All runs at the game ultimately end the same way, with a failure to clear the room of criminals leading to the player's defeat. Perhaps they're defeated by hitting a civilian, but more likely they miss a criminal. The lesson is still that cops are under constant siege, always threatened, and thus that violence is inevitable and necessary. Ultimately, the goal of the game is still to shoot all suspects on sight.

My father's lesson was one that I was not entirely prepared to absorb at the time. Grounded in realities and systems too abstract to grasp, an insufficient counterweight to the copaganda of D.A.R.E. All the same, it is the lesson that has held; an understanding both of citizen and police that steadily grew to a worldview. The real secret history in all of this,

The Head That Wears The Crown (Heavy Barrel, Heavy Shreddin')

The obvious question—the only one that makes any sense in context, is what exactly is heavy here. Or perhaps more usefully, what is the nature of the weight? The 2.6 ounces of an NES controller are essentially immutable, after all—in a strictly literal sense these allegedly heavy games weigh no more than Bubble Bobble or Airwolf. All pixels are weightless. Clearly, then, we are in a realm of something else; a metaphoric weight akin to moral obligation. 

There certainly is a morality at play in Heavy Shredding; that old familiar logic of cobra command. Here we are on an island, tasked with destroying the enemy's underground artillery base. Who are we? Who is the enemy? The game remains wholly silent on this. We are a man with a gun and they are an island military base; these things combine like knight and princess, plumber and weird mushroom thing, The manual clarifies slightly; terrorists have done this, and the base contains a nuclear weapon. But this is not knowledge—merely further trappings of cobra command, a symbolic system that exists to compel run-and-gun action. It is only in the larger context of Reagan/Bush America that these isolated and compulsory symbols acquire any sort of moral dimension—one of neoliberal militarism and American economic imperialism. Even still, this morality is meant to be automatic—a simple and reflexive symbology. A terrorist implies a commando to shoot him. These things must be. 

This is not weight but its opposite. The entire point is that these are not heavy moral decisions; merely the reflexive consequences of politics as aesthetics. (So politics, then.) The bullets, the tanks, the death tolls, ll of these are as insubstantial as the pixels. Heaviness is forbidden, suspect, probably queer or commie. Once again we reach a dead end.

Of course, had the alphabet run the other way we'd never have made the mistake in the first place; clearly Heavy Shreddin', a snowboarding game that can be described as a sort of proto-SkiFree only with a snowboard. This is a game of blissful amorality; there is simply the hill, the snow, the exhilaration of speed. Moral heaviness lies self-evidently outside of its system, an irrelevance, perhaps even the thing this game is meant to be a tonic to.

A third sense, then—something akin to what is heavy in heavy metal music. This can be understood as a heaviness of aesthetics. Heavy metal is excessive music, a genre whose promise is that it gives too much. The pleasures it offers are explicitly ones of overstimulation. This is, of course, a difficult thing to judge about thirty year old video games. It was bad enough a decade ago. Are these games overstimulating? Were their simple and heavily abstracted graphics and tinny soundtracks a blast of thrilling sensory overload? It's possible in the abstract, but it's hard to imagine either of these being among them.

Perhaps the useful way to think about this, then, is to ask what run-and-gun military action and snowboarding have in common. Once that's determined we can move on to figuring out how this thing might be heavy. The obvious answer is a sense of coolness. Shooting terrorists is cool. So is snowboarding. Indeed, snowboarding is on some level defined precisely by the fact that it has a coolness to it that skiing lacks. These things are heavy because they have a sense of swaggering grandeur.

In this regard "heavy" might be understood as a synonym for "super" (the term that would eventually be used for the cooler successor to the NES, but already used for ten separate NES games) or "power"—prefixes that serve simply as intensifiers. But in this case the two objects in question point towards more concrete terms. Snowboarding and the military are not simply cool—they are masculine. This is boy stuff. And that's true in a way that the other intensifiers aren't. Sure, video games and the NES had a certain masculine aesthetic to begin with—the sleek cyberpunk grey and red design wasn't exactly playing for the same crowd as Polly Pocket, y'know? (There's a lot to be written, incidentally, about the way in which Nintendo console design evolved versus its competitors.) But Power and Super do not suggest the sort of masculine bravado as this suite of heavy games.

One could point out the fragility of this—the way in which the heaviness of these games feels defensive, a point undermined by the ardency with which it's made. But the true is a moment of the false, and this is no exception. And if the secret history of masculinity is that it's a burden to bear, well. What more is there to say on the subject?