Mar. 18, 2009 - Issue #700: Polaroids
Infinite Lives: In Soviet Russia, game plays you!
It’s a weird thing, this “retro,” especially as it gets layered on top of itself. At a certain point it creates an effect like looking into a mirror when there’s another mirror behind you, a tunnel of regression down into the dimness where infinity lies.
I’m reclining on the couch, reading old zines, nicely mellow thanks to my accidental discovery of what I’ve since learned is known as a “Kalimotxo”—poured the last inch of last night’s cheap wine into what I thought was a half-full coffee cup of same, only it turns out the mug contained Coca-Cola; after the initial “Eeww!” reflex ... dee-lish. The zines are from my wife’s collection of Ben Is Dead back numbers from the mid-’90s, specifically the legendary (I’m told) “Retro Hell” issues. Good stuff, funny in that old zine way you don’t get so much in the Blog Millennium, and here’s where the psychedelic mirror-regression begins; this is retro-retro, an 11-year-old magazine about 20- or 30-year-old pop-culture artifacts.
‘Course, this isn’t really a trip down my personal Memory Lane. These writers are southern Californians, not northern Albertans, and their old familiars are still exotic unknowns; they had the Sherman Oaks Galleria and the medicine chests of the doctors they babysat for, I had the half-broken homes of the neighbourhood feral children and the poorly concealed Penthouse stashes of their laid-off boilermaker dads. They had Rodney Bingenheimer, I had Mike Sobel. Digging down through the retro of others is a kind of double archeology, where the familiarity of shared reference provides hooks for comprehending an alien time and place.
I’ve been having a similar experience playing through the Soviet Unterzögersdorf adventure games (monochrom.at/suz-game). Designed by Austrian art/theory collective monochrom, the Suzoeg (I’m just going to use the abbreviation from the .exe file) games place you in the eponymous notional country, a tiny (2.5 square kilometres) nation that is “the last existing appendage republic of the USSR,” completely surrounded by the Republic of Austria. In this milieu—basically, a broken-down farmstead littered with antiquated junk—you go around solving more-or-less standard-issue adventure-game puzzles expressed through the lens of the tattered remnants of Leninist/Stalinist social/material culture.
On the surface level, this is enjoyable comic nostalgia. Not so much nostalgia for the Soviet era, but nostalgia for the jokes we made during the Soviet era about the (perceived) foibles of life behind the Iron Curtain, the Yakov Smirnoff riffs, SCTV cracking wise about “Soviet minicam!”—a rusted-out old baling machine as the diesel-powered “8-Bit Agrarian Memory Drive;” a gallery of People’s Triumphs lauding such accomplishments as the development of a superior sugar beet; characters getting patriotically misty-eyed over the perfect utility of cardboard boxes. As entertainment, it’s an enjoyable frolic through a MAD magazine theme-park of Soviet kitsch.
But what can we learn from this? Based as it is on politically motivated western lampoons of Eastern Bloc existence, what (if anything) can the twice-removed retro of Suzoeg tell us about the reality of living in a totalitarian agrarian/industrial/ideological state, a time and place that is living memory for millions of people ... and a version of which is, right now, a daily reality for millions more? Here, the adventure-game medium gives us much more than do the surface gags. As any adventure gamer will tell you, playing these games is an exercise in controlled frustration, in failing and starting over, failing and starting over, failing and starting over until you figure out exactly where and when to use which item in order to progress. Adventure gaming, at its heart, is unforgiving, faceless bureaucracy.
Nothing brings this home better than the “error” messages in the series’ second chapter, Soviet Unterzögersdorf Sector 2. Adventure games all have a stock set of phrases your character will utter when you try to get him/her to do something that doesn’t return a valid in-game result: “That doesn’t make sense” or “What am I supposed to do with this?” As a properly indoctrinated Unterzögersdorfer with good political hygiene, Suzoeg 2’s Comrade Nikita Perostek Chrusov responds to such adversity with right-thinking slogans. Given the trial-and-error nature of adventure gaming, these situations come up every few seconds ... sayings like, “Hegel knew all along!” and “I can see that there will be a revolutionary transformation between the capitalist and the communist period!” quickly lose their humour and become something like a nightmare. Constant frustration met with constant propaganda, the “progress” he speaks of seeming more and more like an empty promise with each ineffectual click. V
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