Dissertation submitted as part of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts in Visual Culture
Middlesex University October 1995 Seth Giddings

chapter I:

'Once plants have become machines - and even though not a breath of wind has ruffled the selfsame landscape equal to itself - every object changes and becomes a human sign (not unexpectedly drawing all the theories of language and sign systems after it)... these are anachronisms that overspring the present into the far future of android technology, and now all of our things, of whatever fabric and purpose, are inhabited by the possibility of becoming nasty dolls with needle teeth that bite...'1

In a world animated by constantly agitated plants, distant machinery and flickering lights, a spiky blue figure with red shoes and white gloves repeatedly jumps and spins to navigate his environment of platforms and spikes, looped tracks and hanging vines, lifts and springs, pinball flippers and conveyor belts. Accompanied by a mutant two-tailed fox (Miles 'Tails' Prower), Sonic the Hedgehog disappears in a spinning blur and ball of dust, revving on the spot before exploding in spectacular bursts of speed to bounce off robotic animals (floating seahorses, gun-toting chickens, martial arts praying mantises) which, in puffs of smoke transform back into the woodland animals they once were before being captured by the evil scientist/dictator/industrialist Dr. Robotnik.

This battle against evil is played through a series of transformations between nature and technology (the landscape is both architectural and mechanical, forests and factories) and against an incessant and repetitive soundtrack. Television sets relinquish magic running shoes, and push the characters into even more disorientating and exhilarating velocities, propelling them into space and brief vertiginous moments of free-fall.

The Emerald Hill Zone, a mutated jungle, is the first of a number of 'levels', environments that range from immense factories, ancient ruins in leafy woods to giant flying battleships and subterranean labyrinths. Most are animated by cataclysmic events: earthquakes, lava flows, floods of water and toxic waste, all are evidence of past disaster, populated only by the malicious robots and traps of Robotnik's evil plan. All of these zones have strings of shimmering, gently spinning rings hanging in space to be collected by Sonic and Tails, conferring a minimal protection from the cyborg animals, and granting extra 'lives'.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is a platform game - this describes both the cross-section architecture that the characters run and jump on at each stage of the game, but also the structure of the game itself, a 'narrative' broken into discrete levels, separate zones through which Sonic and Tails advance (there is no return to previous levels, the game's forward dynamic is only ever disrupted as the result of failure, and subsequent reincarnation back at the Emerald Hill Zone). There is a constant replay of death - whether the swift dispatch when mechanical fauna strike, or the almost tangible drowning under water or lurid pink toxic waste - and resurrection.

Sonic's world is one of two-dimensional layers - an electronic version of a toy theatre, the scene scrolling horizontally backwards and forwards following protagonists and action in a flat foreground. The background, whether the vivid orange sky of an ecological disaster or clouds and waterfalls, is as inaccessible as a film's painted backdrop, but animated with a simulation of parallax vision. Some levels do not even have this spurious relief from the claustrophobic flatness - caves and tunnels seem to be pressed flat against the screen. All the zones are stifling spaces, their action, narrative and space, heroes, villains and treasure all sandwiched as though between microscope slides.
Though the music is more sophisticated and discordant than muzak, its depth is countered by its temporal deficiency - its short repeated loops functioning to heighten the general anxiety of the game. This is further exacerbated by the skipping of a note from each bar - it is a fraught environment where both time and space are saturated with the imperative to move faster. Sonic himself, if the player ignores the ever-present clock in the corner of the screen, turns to face out from the screen, first scowling and tapping a foot, then lying down and drumming gloved fingers. This lack of space to catch breath (in two senses - the injunction against rest and the stifling two-dimensional crush of pixellated colour) is pushed to excess when Sonic is submerged in The Aquatic Ruin Zone, and the player's attempts to maintain the game's demands for sustained momentum are thwarted in an interactive simulation of an underwater nightmare, as the music reaches new heights of paranoid urgency, a countdown to drowning appears in large numerals above the character's head. If a bubble of air in this doubly suffocating environment is not found, Sonic (with a final gasp echoed in the player, who will also have been holding his or her breath) drops from the screen, pixels briefly engineering a look of startled surprise.

The game produces analogous spatial and temporal disorientation for the player, who, twitching as though in dreaming sleep, spends hours playing, hours that seem only minutes. The frustration of repeated failure is allayed by the seduction of a goal of complete control of the game's limited variables, and the desire to discover what lies in wait in the next level, to finally master the series of moves and jumps that solves a spatio-temporal puzzle, or simply not to make the same mistake again.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2, a video game launched in Britain in November 1992 for the Japanese company Sega's Mega Drive home console, is one of the most successful of a very popular but generally vilified new entertainment medium. Video games are seen as being at once so banal as to be beneath contempt - a symptom of all that is bad about popular culture and its perceived future - and as a dangerous new threat it their own right. Catherine Bennett advises us not to

'expect personality or expressions of emotion from video game homunculi, nor any control over them beyond the sort of button-pressing options available to a rat in a laboratory. Some platform games are based on stories... but these are immaterial as the screen fixes you in one scenario, in an eternal, meaningless present, unable to track back, or anticipate beyond the next few seconds. It is hard to do justice to the poverty of an activity which amounts to nothing more than the manipulation of abstract symbols'.2

This poverty-stricken activity is particularly powerful however, a dangerously addictive practice, the term 'addiction' being almost universal in popular coverage of video games. Not only are 'computer games... as addictive as hard drugs for the most besotted children'3, they are a drug that acts as a vehicle for all the other violent horrors that popular culture offers children: they are 'indoctrinated with powerful messages... they... send out the message that life is cheap...'4. Games become everything that threatens an idealised children's culture. Against 'spontaneous play' on beaches and in woods, a 'play world of the natural child [that is] open and friendly', is set the play world of 'the 'electronic child'... hemmed in by conflict and fear'.5 Video games are other worlds, unnatural, airless and unreal, characterised by mindless violence and entered alone, 'the best escape mechanism in the history of the world'.6

Fears of the detrimental influence on children by new media, from cinema and comics to video nasties, are nothing new and are often the displacement of more general anxieties about popular culture, mass media and the future of a 'consumer' society. A new factor that video games bring however, is their relationship with computers and all the fears of surveillance and control, even machine intelligence, that these machines inspire. With rumours that games companies hire psychologists to ensure the addictiveness of their products, it seems that even children's minds are colonised, that they 'are left no scope for their own dreams'7. Unease about this link between an entertainment form and the computer industry and its products goes beyond concerns for children and play. The close links between the computer industry and the interests and money of defence departments are often pointed out, and it is true that Spacewar, considered to be the first computer game, was the product of MIT's military-funded Artificial Intelligence laboratory. Before being sent to the Gulf War American pilots were apparently trained in hand/eye coordination by video game simulations, presumably also instilling a sense of war as less than real: 'smart-bomb tapes played over and over, packaging war in the image of a video game'8. Video games not only train those who fight wars, but are seen as an ideological screen to mystify or glorify war for non-combatants. For example in the United States and Britain television news coverage of the Gulf War's 'surgical strikes' presented the war as though it only happened on a computer monitor or television screen. Games that simulate tank battles or bombing raids are big sellers, O'Brien goes as far as to suggest that
'Perhaps war is in the very nature of the machine and in the forms its intelligence takes. The simplest form of computer language is binary: on/off, yes/no, life/death. In video games, life is a quarter, death is 'the outside of the envelope' that the test pilot pushes'.9

With their high-tech connotations and fascination with science fiction, video games seem unable to avoid being seen as visions of the future, and that future is usually along the lines of Julian Stallabrass' paraphrasing of 1984 by way of Terminator 2, 'the jarring crunch of human skulls under the bright chrome of a robot foot'.10 Following Walter Benjamin's notion that the glass architecture of Nineteenth Century shopping arcades embody utopian dreams, the nightmares of amusement arcades are of cluster bombs as spectacle, 'a dream of the apocalypse, of instrumentalization, of forgetting, and of mechanical stupidity'.11 Indeed, video games seem to be dreams of dreaming itself -'invading subjectivity at a very low level, and producing manufactured memories and dreams which are powerful because based on a simulated action'.12 Video games seem to dazzle, the flickering images and electronic sound denying any critical strategies through which to articulate anything but doom. To see a game like Sonic the Hedgehog 2 as anything other than this harbinger of nightmare and simulacra, it is necessary to examine the twin horsemen of this apocalypse, computers and information technology on the one hand, and the commodification of culture on the other.

At first sight Fredric Jameson's description of contemporary culture in his essay Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism13 would seem to confirm these gloomy theses mentioned, indeed it offers a description of the transformation of contemporary culture that evokes the aesthetic of the video game, in its 'new depthlessness', a loss of history, new 'private temporalities' and a 'hysterical sublime'. The latter evoking both the attempts of the video game player to hold in his or her head the 'unrepresentable' system of the game's programmed structure, and ultimately the loss of 'critical distance' that may give some space to see elements of this new media environment as anything other than a game. Nature (with video games perhaps this means the human mind itself) is lost, and in its place a new urban space, in which shopping malls, theme parks and the disorientating architecture of buildings such as the Bonaventura Hotel, become indistinguishable in a 'hyperspace', transcending the capacities of individual body 'to locate itself, to organise its immediate surroundings, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world'.14

Although often seen as a key text in the pessimistic side of debate around the politics of culture in the 1980s, this essay highlights some important areas and methods of enquiry. Jameson argues that this disorientation is in part due to the 'unrepresentability' of new information and communicational technologies (as opposed to the emblematic machines of the industrial revolution), and that this 'unrepresentability' is in turn symptomatic of specific changes in the history of capitalism, primarily the commodification of areas previously seen as offering a space or 'distance' from which the artist or political activist could effect a cultural critique (Jameson lists 'Nature' and the 'Unconscious' as the prime zones of modernist critique for example).

In a later book, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: cinema and space in the world system, Jameson elaborates an analysis of the narratives of films from around the world as allegories of global capitalism, and it is this concept of allegory that I will use to explore the thesis that not only can Sonic the Hedgehog 2 be seen as an important product of changes in the global economy and culture industry, but can be read allegorically to shed critical light on the culture of multinational capitalism, that it is can be seen as one of 'the most random, minute, or isolated landscapes [that] function as a figurative machinery in which questions about the [world] system and its control over the local ceaselessly rise and fall'15

This essay will examine the place of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and the video game industry within the changing structures of capitalism, discuss how the game's narrative and images may be produced and consumed by economic and cultural forces, the methodological problems of analysing cultural forms in relation to economic changes, the implications of studying a form of global popular culture, whilst elaborating the factors that will be used in the final section which to suggest allegorical readings of the game.

footnotes for chapter I

1. F. Jameson The Geopolitical Aesthetic - cinema and space in the world system, BFI/Indiana University Press, 1992, p.12

2. C. Bennett 'Game Boys (and Girls)', The Guardian, 2 Dec 1993, Section 2, p.2

3. S. Boseley ''Hard drug' fear for computer children, The Guardian, 13 Mar 1995

4. E. Stutz 'What electronic games cannot give', The Guardian, 13 Mar 1995

5. E. Stutz 'What electronic games cannot give'

6. Jackie Miller, deputy general secretary of the Professional Association of Teachers, quoted in C. Bennett, 'Game Boys (and Girls)'

7. E. Stutz 'What electronic games cannot give'

8. P. Meggs ''Will video games devour the world? (and some related questions)', Print, vol.46, November/December 1992, p.26

9. G. O'Brien 'Like art - Glenn O'Brien on video games', Artforum, vol.28, September 1989, p.18

10. J. Stallabrass 'Just Gaming: Allegory and Economy in Computer Games', New Left Review, p.106

11. J. Stallabrass 'Just Gaming', p.105

12. J. Stallabrass 'Just Gaming', p.105

13. F. Jameson Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso, 1991.

14. F. Jameson Postmodernism, chapter one.

15 F. Jameson The Geopolitical Aesthetic: cinema and space in the world system, BFI, 1992