Press Start

[nevanna]

Recently, and very coincidentally, I read two books about Video Games That Brainwash The Youth. One of them was End of Watch, the final book in Stephen King’s Bill Hodges trilogy. I started the series because one of the supporting characters is the star of a later book that I enjoyed a lot, even though I don’t usually gravitate toward crime fiction. End of Watch – in ways that I suspect might alienate fans of that genre – leans much harder into speculative fiction than its predecessors. I’m not sure whether it’s a good book, but I can tell you that I devoured all nearly-500 pages of it within a few days, because it gave me exactly what I needed from a story about possession and mind control. (Possibly, it appealed to my inner 13-year-old, who would totally have written a story about a handheld video game that brainwashes people.)

The other book was Collin Armstrong’s Polybius, which is based on an urban legend about an arcade game that appeared in the 1980s and had a sinister effect on its players before vanishing just as quickly. In Armstrong’s novel, the game mesmerizes anybody who plays or even looks at it too long, reducing them to their most violent and/or paranoid impulses. Andi, an engineering nerd who is largely immune due to her colorblindness, and her classmate and love interest, Ro, have to figure out how to destroy the game and reverse its effects before it destroys their small town entirely.

I picked up this book because the urban legend at its center fascinates me, and although some of the marketing referenced The Walking Dead as well as Stranger Things – so I can’t pretend that I didn’t know what I was getting into – I hoped that the story would be as much about the mythology around the game as what it does to players in this fictional world. Since I’m not a fan of zombie media or other stories that consist mostly of human beings going feral and trying to attack each other, I am probably not the target audience for the story that we actually did get. I was much more interested in the revelation about why the game was created.

It turns out that the U.S. government and military intended to weaponize Polybius against “undesirable” communities, which they would swoop in to control through martial law and gentrification once those communities turned on each other due to the game’s influence. As the plot progresses, we find out that military officials are, in fact, moving in that direction, taking steps to isolate the affected town from the outside world. I like this idea a lot, but I sort of wish that it had been front and center from the beginning – that the attempt to control and reshape the town was already in progress; that we got to see the townspeople’s varied reactions to the changes, and the narrative that those in power might spin in order to crush any dissent. The story that I would have wanted to read probably diverges considerably from the story that I think Armstrong wanted to tell, but I believe that it would decenter the premise of “what if the conservatives were right and there was a video game that made people violent?” in favor of a storyline that is just as scary and much more relevant. Just as I’m not fond of zombie stories, I’m also increasingly critical of stories that posit, “what if this moral panic was actually correct?” (See also: fantasy fiction that suggests that there were witches with actual magical power in 17th-century Salem. I can tolerate that trope, and I understand why people like it, but it does not evoke too many positive feelings in me.)


If you’re interested in the Polybius myth as a myth, this video essay delves into the rumors about the game and the videographer’s attempts to discover whether there was any truth to them.

Comments

[lb_lee]

Aw, I remember you telling me about that Polybius urban legend! Too bad it was used for that.