Go Ask Alice
By Josh Mandel
Sadism has,
for years, been a theme rampant in electronic gaming. For every product in which
the goal is to construct or solve, there are at least a dozen whose goal is primarily
to inflict death or damage to as many opponents as possible.
Why does destruction
seem so much more intoxicating than creation? One explanation (this one’s my favorite,
and I hope it’ll be one of yours, too!) is that sadism mimics the power of life
or death, a power embraced most fervently by the young … and most game developers
are not only trying to appeal to the young, but are pretty young themselves (psychologically
if not chronologically).
Hurting people–physically or mentally–is a quick
and easy way to assert power over them. As children, we rarely have power over
others; hurting them, which is not hard to do, gives us this power. Fortunately,
most people eventually find less destructive ways of asserting power. Or they
somehow learn not to crave power over others. (Or, some would say, they satisfy
that craving by playing games that provide the illusion.)
Certainly all
children are not sadistic. But the cruelty of children is well-established, and
among (say) junior high school students, you’ll certainly find a high percentage
of individuals who routinely go out of their way to torment others. Sadism with
impunity, that’s what we get from games like Doom and Quake.
It’s
easy to hurt people just for the joy of hurting them, it and gets an immediate
reaction–gleeful delight from the young (unless you’re the victim), and disgust
from the old. Look at Adam Sandler, role model of 12-year-olds everywhere, poking
fun at retardation and speech impediments; adults revile him, but 30 years ago,
Jerry Lewis was pretty hot stuff among those adults (who, at the time, were children)–doing
the same mean-spirited shtick.
The power one feels from offending audiences
is very intoxicating. A young writer, or comedian, or musician, thinks, “Look
at all the people I can offend just with my words. I’m better than they are, because
I’m impossible to offend. I am resilient; they are inflexible. I am open, they
are closed. I am free and comfortable with my speech. They are shocked and uncomfortable.
I have the upper hand, and I’m enjoy it. I’m controlling the people who, until
recently, controlled me.”
This is the kind of thinking, bereft of depth
or maturity, that I suspect has gone into the new “adaptation” of Alice
in Wonderland coming from Electronic Arts (American
McGee’s Alice) . A desire to offend for offense’s sake, to find any
desperate way to shock in a culture where it is increasingly difficult to be outlandish,
and to find pride and a sense of accomplishment for achieving that low goal.
The
game is a nightmare version of the Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Alice,
we’re told, will be doing her killing with “a variety of lethally transmogrified
toys.” On the website, we can rotate Alice wielding an immense, glittering
carving knife, gazing at it lovingly, cleaning her nails with it, and considering
its potential for mayhem. Her face bears an expression of restrained malevolence.
She wears an upside-down cross. Blood drips from the scenery.
This is offensive
on a number of levels. I’ll try to enumerate them, but forgive me if I miss a
few. I’m sure I will.
First, anyone who’s read Carroll’s works knows that
violence played no part in his books. “Off with his head” was something
the Red Queen may’ve shouted many times, but not a single character was ever bruised,
let alone decapitated … let alone in graphic detail. The book’s gentle, intelligent
good humor–filled with good-natured parodies of then-current literature–supported
a theme of maturity (a point obviously lost on the designers of the game). The
theme was not good versus evil. The book was brimming with witty wordplay and
thinly disguised social and political satire; it was not an exploration of the
naughty joy of murder by a demented antihero, as Alice now appears to have become.
If one is going to creatively “adopt” another person’s invention,
one should at least make a reasonable effort not to abuse that invention–to distort
it beyond anything approaching the original author’s intent–if one would ever
hope for, or expect, the same treatment for their own invention. I’m sure
the designers wouldn’t like to see their own original inventions mangled by other
authors; why not offer Carroll’s work the same respect? Or did somebody imagine
that this treatment would actually improve on, or somehow enhance, the
original?
Carroll himself was a Reverend; it’s difficult to imagine that
he would actually approve of his heroine wearing an inverted cross. Just one of
many images that this peaceful man, who abhorred little boys’ violent games, would
likely find objectionable. My opinion? Sure, that’s all it is, but if one reads
Carroll’s letters and history, his intentions are pretty clear. And the concept
of American McGee’s Alice obviously ignores–or deliberately skewers–those
intentions.
Second, such a perversion of existing classic literature only
accentuates a designer’s own lack of inventiveness. It’s much easier to take somebody
else’s established world “riff” on it, to be led by existing boundaries,
than it is to work with a completely blank page. Now, to be fair, this may not
be just a matter of laziness. Based on my experience with Callahan’s Crosstime
Saloon, I know that sometimes designers are directed to utilize existing material
as a basis for their games due to this industry’s passion for licensing and cross-breeding.
But if that’s the case with American McGee’s Alice, the designers could
have at very least taken pains to preserve the integrity of the original, reinforcing
its themes instead of discarding them in favor of gaming’s lowest common denominator
cliché: “Evil has come to this once-beautiful place, and your job
is to carve it out by the roots! Lock and load!“
The book has
always seemed to suggest nightmarishness by our standards. That’s probably more
due to our lack of context than to the book’s real content. To casual readers
of the book in modern-day America, the images in the book may appear arbitrary
and foreign, disjointed like a nightmare. But even a cursory study of the work
(Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice is a great, readable guide) reveals that,
to the audience of its day, there was little arbitrary about it. This suggests
that the creators of the new Alice, in playing on the undeserved nightmarish
aspect, did not take the time to understand the work–or the author–they are
exploiting.
Third, let’s put aside the unanswerable question of whether
or not Carroll would roll over in his grave if he could see how his world is being
mangled (although I believe most of the evidence indicates it). That is not my
overriding objection to this product. Let’s instead ask: does the games industry
require another black eye? Or is this an attempt to exploit gaming’s negative
image, worsening it in the process?
The fact can’t have been lost on EA
and American McGee that the industry has come under attack for promoting violence
among children. That we use violence gratuitously in place of more worthwhile
content, that we glorify it and present it as a legitimate problem-solving tool,
and that we target children.
In light of American McGee’s Alice above
all others, how can we deny it? The very concept of the game embodies the substance
of all of those accusations. Here we have taken a story with humorous, gently
instructive content and replaced it with images of a prepubescent girl as an armed,
cunning killer. The original Alice solved conundrums through logic, sensitivity,
and imagination; in American McGee’s interpretation, violence is presented as
a seductive and legitimate solution suitable for prepubescent girls. By using
one of the most famous role models in children’s literature as the heroine of
the story, the game is guaranteed to garner more attention from children than
it otherwise would, in a realm already incredibly popular among children.
I’m
not one of those fearful parents or grandstanding representatives who wants to
legislate taste, but this product only serves to strengthen that sector’s argument:
it looks, and reasonably so, as if we are targeting children and trying to incorporate
graphic violence into every last benign sanctuary of childhood. What is next from
American McGee and Electronic Arts? Tom Sawyer gutting Injun Joe with a stake
from the fence? (EA, take note: blood shows up beautifully against freshly whitewashed
pickets.)
I’m disappointed that this product is being published by EA,
a company that is not known for scraping the bottom of the barrel. This sort of
astonishingly puerile entertainment could easily be expected to carry the Take
2 imprimatur, but not that of a usually responsible company like EA.
I don’t
like to put down other designers’ work publicly, out of professional courtesy.
But if ever a product deserved oblivion, it is American McGee’s Alice. It
takes a childhood hero, the star of one of the most clever, thoughtful, and nonviolent
children’s stories ever written, and gratuitously twists her into a weapon-wielding
vigilante. It’s a ham-handed play for profit through sensationalism and controversy.
And I have little doubt that the creators and publishers of Alice will
revel in the fact that they have managed to outrage people; they’ll be gleeful
about it in the same infantile way that a child is gleeful when he discovers the
empowerment of four-letter words.
