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17.
PARTY LIKE IT'S 1999
Our
lives are often discussed as narrative histories, as chronologies.
We have created this backward-looking science in order to study
ourselves through sequences of events achieved within a set of
determined dates. We embrace the deadline, in the workplace and
elsewhere. We embrace it as we embrace ourselves, a race of beings
defined by their mortality. The biomedical revolution of the next
century merely promises to extend the chronology, to delay death
and draw out the ubiquitous apprehensions. In this moment, we
are fixated on the countdown; the time remaining until… Everything
else is history. Even the video game, a utopia of our own making,
depends on the rearward clock to provoke action and incite haste.
Sam Fisher, on a top-secret mission for the National Security
Agency in Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, has but two minutes
to disengage a bomb before it wipes out a high rise. Players are
kept on edge; its a mere second to game over. The pretense of
immortality - through multiple lives or the ability to reload
and restart - exhausts gameplay before it even begins. It is beyond
the end, and thus useless. An avatar may endure a succession of
lives, reincarnations by the gamer's hand, but it will never come
to terms with its own demise. The action will stretch on forever,
reiterated and restated, without passing on into the future. Video
games, then, may be the perfect emblem for the (albeit fleeting)
millennia crisis. Even they, those little digital heavens, are
not devoid of a sense of real-life futility. In The Vital Illusion,
Jean Baudrillard posits that the year 2000 failed to take place,
"because the history of this century had already come to
an end, because we are remaking it interminably"16.
Perhaps the video game emerges as a solution to occupy our free
time, the time remaining until…
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