Our class discussion of zombies the other day immediately reminded me of one particular episode of Black Mirror: “Men Against Fire.”
***SPOILER ALERT***
In this episode, soldiers are fitted with special technology in their senses (eyes, noses, etc.) that augment and modify their senses. They are able to see holographic maps and blueprints so as to more efficiently breach enemy inhabited buildings. Essentially, they are equipped with military-grade virtual reality goggles, but they are not clued in on just how powerful the technology they use might be.
Throughout the episode, soldiers hunt these creatures called “roaches” throughout the countryside. These “roaches” are horrible looking humanoid creatures reminiscent of zombies and they are very clearly monstrous. The main character is a new soldier and ends up killing his first roach while out on a run. In the thrill of the moment and in the face of such monstrosity — he stabs a roach to death, repeatedly stabbing the growling creature until it falls still and silent.
Towards the end of the episode, his military-grade augmented senses start to glitch out. We come to find out that without his modified vision, the “roaches” that he has been hunting are actually humans just like him. The government developed technology that was able to monstrosize an entire race of people because they were other, less than, or genetically inferior — and convince one group of humans to kill another because they thought of them as “roaches” rather than people.
In class, we discussed how video games make it easy/necessary to kill aliens, Nazis, robots, masked men, zombies, terrorists, monsters, pests and vermin. What’s so horrifying about this episode is the combination of a real technology — virtual reality — with real world realities in which we demonize entire groups of people. Some might argue that video games teach us that it is acceptable to kill things that are less than human, and when we mix that with a world that in some ways is becoming more and more like a video game — things get scary.
What a disturbing episode of Black Mirror. The othering reminds me of something from America’s Army, one of the most popular videogames of the early-to-mid 2000s. It was a squad-based cooperative shooter developed by the U.S. Army, partly as a recruitment tool. It’s a multiplayer game, and every time you log in, you’re assigned a team. What’s interesting is that no matter what team you play on, you always see yourself as the U.S, and the other team as the enemy. And meanwhile that other team sees themselves as the U.S. and your team as the enemy. The developers called this technique a “swapping paradigm,” and it doesn’t seem to be a stretch to move from this swapping paradigm in a videogame to something a government might actually try to institute in real life.
There’s a good article in Games and Culture about this swapping technique.