Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 1
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Polansky, Lana and Brendan Keogh (eds). Ghosts in the Machine: A Short Story Anthology, Independently Published, 2013. / Adriana E. Ramirez
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<1> Ghosts in the Machine is an anthology of fiction and gaming glitches: thirteen short stories centered around video games and the inevitable slips that befall both user and software. What happens if your existence depends on another’s gameplay? Or if one member of a military strike team experiences sudden and unexpectedly upgraded abilities? How would we cope if the avatars inside our consoles had feelings and desires that did not correspond to the storyline—if in fact, our avatars were trapped inside the games we play? This anthology raises questions about free will, identity, sentience, and existentialism in relation to the virtual environments we create, as each story interweaves human and programming malfunction into a larger metaphor about the loneliness of being a person.
<2> The fiction of gaming tends to revolve around the gamer; one easily remembers tales of a user being transported into the game-world, or of a user beating a record score (victory arms in the arcade, swelling anthems playing in background). It’s easy to pinpoint why: We root for the character with agency, and within a game, the avatar is controlled, and not controller. Yet, this anthology spurns the gamer and instead focuses elsewhere—we meet a would-be developer in crisis, a character trapped in an Animal Crossing-esque world, and a choose-your-own adventure on permanent re-loop. And while the conceit and passivity of our protagonists can be weary on the reader, each story opens up questions about the relationship between our virtual reflections and ourselves.
<3> In Ghosts in the Machine, the main character often finds himself—the protagonists of the anthology are overwhelmingly male—confronting his lack of autonomy, reminding the reader that even our games feel lonely and unloved. Unfortunately, beyond anthropomorphizing characters within the game world, the messages start to get muddled, themes recycled, and one walks away from the text feeling a bit overwhelmed by the idea that “avatars are people too.” Perhaps, as human beings, we cannot help but project our own emotions into the virtual selves we’ve fashioned within games. The stories seem limited by the ideas that help define them; while fun in theory, Ghosts in the Machine works best when parceled out piecemeal.
<4> “We’re aware of the problem, and we intend to address it as soon as possible,” writes Ryan Morning in “Patched Up.” Where the frustratingly familiar technical note ends, a tale about diminished ability and age picks up. The problem in question: Coster the Grenadier, one of the oldest characters in an unnamed game, has an ability that instead of reducing damage, increases his damage-per-second unfairly to others—and as it turns out, Coster the Grenadier does not like that his ability is a glitch, and a soon-to-be-fixed glitch, at that. Between battles, he commiserates with his brothers-and-sisters in arms.
“Me?” Coster sighed. “I lob grenades at the mobs . . .
“I’d figured out how it all worked. I was used to it, happy with it. On the bad days, when my player was new or maybe unlucky or Hell, even just plain lousy at the game, I coped. Because I knew it would work on the good days . . .
“What’ll happen now? I checked out the numbers. If they tweak it, Bombardment’s effectiveness will be halved. Worse than halved. And even now it’s not a win button! . . . So if the devs make it worse than that, where do I fit in? What do I actually do?” (loc. 1250, Kindle)
<5> There are two levels of god to whom our poor Coster must appeal—both player and developer. He must, by virtue of his situation, completely surrender himself to the hands of his creators and manipulators. Like many humans facing unemployment in the current economy who suddenly find themselves without the necessary skills to be desirable in the market, Coster the Grenadier debates how to justify his existence—for what is he after his apex ability gets reduced by the Powers That Be?
<6> Just as one glitch ends up causing his entire existence to come to question, so does another end up redeeming him. Except the second one isn’t quite a glitch—the gods in the machine decide to reward the players that stick with the Grenadier, and in doing so, Coster lives on to fight again.
<7> Morning’s story, like some others in this anthology, achieves pathos and agency for his character by staging him in an off-area, outside the diegesis of game play, where he is allowed to fully exercise his sense of self. Within the game, one imagines, Coster is simply an aware observer trapped in a body beholden to the actions of his lucky or unlucky players. One understands the writerly choice to stage the reader’s encounters with Coster in limbo, as in limbo, between players, Coster is able to exert his existence outside of his manipulators’ actions.
<8> There is an element of horror here too. While the reader does not see Coster being controlled by his player, or encounter him rendered useless in that form, one does confront that in “See You on the Other Side” by Shelley Du—where Saphira, a healer in an RPG, must watch her team die over and over again because her “pea brain” player can’t get it right (loc. 1040, Kindle). Saphira finds herself in an interesting position, one that requires her to exert control in a situation that is designed to be governed by the mathematics of game play.
<9> She and the other members of the raid communicate during “morphing” sessions when the server is down or in transition, scribbling messages in the sand about romance and the existential crises facing a team certain to fail (like many of stories in Ghosts in the Machine, “See You on the Other Side” suffers at the hands of an expert game critic who is not a writer by profession, hence the writing in the sand). Cliches aside, Du evokes the trepidation of living in world defined by another’s faults.
<10> “Slow Leak” by Rollin Bishop pushes the horror element even further. An un-named narrator watches his world slowly disappear. Unlike the protagonists of “Patched Up” and “See You on the Other Side,” he is not aware of his status within the game. Suddenly, the trees are gone. Then the sky. Soon the people. The mayor goes mad, screaming theories about “devs” and “admins” before she too is gone, leaving the narrator alone in an empty world. This feeling is echoed in “The Hierarchy of Needs,” by Ian Miles Cheong, when a character in a Sims-type world finds himself with a full bladder meter and no bathroom to be found. The tension between the physical need of a virtual character and a world that cannot relieve that need pushes the reader to consider the sadism of game design. Why after all, can a character not relieve himself in the hallway?
<11> In the worlds of Ghosts in the Machine, the person wielding the controller plays the role of fickle god, ugly consumer, and relentless perfectionist. The gamer feels like the antagonist in these tales; this is the avatar’s story—the story of the programmers and testers, the hero at the end of the last level about to be powered down, the autonomous and disconnected player-character. The user usually mucks things up with desires for a faultless universe and consistent, uninterrupted play.
<12> In the prologue to Ghosts in the Machine,co-editor Lana Polansky writes, “We believe these stories demonstrate why the things that can wrong in videogames can also be treated as significant and humanizing in their own right” (Prologue, Ghosts in the Machine, loc. 12 Kindle). Perhaps it is Polansky’s story, “Ten Steps” that embodies this best. The hero walks through a crack in his reality and finds himself questioning his destiny. Why is it he is the only one that can clear the cave of monsters? In another dimension, a programmer bemoans a crack on a CD that won’t let him get past the cave level. Bud, the Hero, soon disappears, his entire existence reduced to a “shiny little particle” at the “bottom of landfill” (loc. 509, Kindle). This, one knows, is where the glitches in gaming really end up: alone and useless, in the trash. Ghosts in the Machine pulls them out and gives them enough life to make the reader care.
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