Death in the Digital Age

What I find very intriguing is how even our treatment of trash will change in the future, and how it’s already different today. For instance, it was once not too difficult to list all the video games created, and keep track of how they’re doing. Interestingly, more and more media is becoming entirely digital, and usually stream able, or a combination. Why this is important is just how money, at some point became this number with no real physical connection in our lives. The information and entertainment we consume daily and from moment to moment has also lost its physical origin or connection. There are no cartridges. Sure there are CDs, DVDs, but none of these things are as mandatory as they once used to be. You HAD to buy a video game in a store. Now it’s all doable online.

In line with that, there are so many video games today. Development has also become more accessible, and so there are more and more additions every day. Most of them actually never see any form of attention or popularity, instead, they exist, but are never even born. We can look at Steam for instance. A game might be greenlit (given the green light to start development and its journey on Steam), yet still never see a large enough player base for anybody to find out. The interesting thing is, there are SO many video games that never see the light of day and we’re just entirely unaware of them. These games can’t even die properly because they’ve never had a life. In other words, I don’t think it’s possible for another instance of “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial” (1982) to ever happen, because games flop even harder than ET ever did, but they never even exist in a physical form, so there’s nothing to really discard, we just kind of ignore them.

Peace,

Duka

The description of the state of the E.T. cartridges which the author was researching is one of the many permutations of views that we hold regarding technology. Many of the works we have examined in class have portrayed technology as having a timeless element. There Will Come Soft Rain captured this sentiment most poignantly, as it’s narrative portrayed a technological system running many years after humanity’s demise. However, this poem also flirts with the concept of technology’s death, in a much more gruesome way than E.T.‘s burial was portrayed in the current reading. The polluted atmosphere of the Bradbury poem is common imagery held throughout almost all views on the death of technology. Where the house in There Will Come Soft Rain squirts green bile from itself as it attempts to smother a fire, I imagine much more toxic pollutants will leach from the reactive metals used in constructing game cartridges (and whatever else the article classifies as “eWaste”). What I am ultimately driving at with these two examples is that what we consider to be the death of technology, in whatever form that may take, is an incredibly damaging thing to the health of the earth, and it is important for that connotation to carry through in portrayals of technological death such as the eWaste graveyard where the copies of E.T. were buried.

In an ironic twist, the lifespan of E.T. described by the article would have gone largely unknown if it were not for the “death” which the game experienced by having several thousands copies buried in a landfill. That spectacle turned a terrible Atari game into a cultural monolith, something gamers could point to as “the worst game ever made”.  It’s persistence after death has cultural significance which some of us have studied through our last class project and deserves to be further related to other works we have studied.

Dr. Ford in the English department has talked about how he’s very interested in the “aesthetics of badness” and I confess that I am too.  Awful films or TV shows can be so enjoyable in that so-bad-it’s-good way and often develop serious cult followings.   But this doesn’t seem to be the case with the E.T. Atari game.  So I’m interested in what distinguishes good-bad from bad-bad.  To illustrate, I have two pieces of E.T. media to share.

(E.T. Atari let’s play video by YouTube user J.C.’s Channel.  Click the title and it will take you right back to the source)

(The musical masterpiece “ET Where R U” from “Themes for Television, Sports, & Aerobics,” directed and produced by George H Semper.  Again, the title will take you right back to the source.  The song has a really long intro, so skip to 2:45 for the good stuff.  I’m using the term “good” loosely here)

Initially, I thought that maybe any video game with bad, clumsy game play would be despised.  I’m not much of a gamer myself, but I imagine there’s a great degree of frustration when playing an unnecessarily difficult game.  However, I did a bit of research on the best worst video games, and plenty of games made the list that were criticized for having really terrible game play.

So instead, here’s my conclusion.  We can appreciate art for two reasons: 1. it is a good piece of art or 2. it makes us feel good.  To be enjoyed, you have to meet only one of the categories.   I will admit freely that the first Captain America movie is not a good film from a critical standpoint, but it brings me joy.  Similarly, I appreciate Logan as one of the best superhero movies ever made, but I have no intention of ever sitting through it again, because it was extremely depressing.

So “ET Where R U” is an awful song.  It doesn’t meet criterium one.  But it’s just absurd enough to be really funny, therefore meeting criterium two, and therefore gets to be good-bad.

Just watching the play-through of the ET video game is maddening and frankly, pretty boring.  And from an aesthetic, artistic standpoint, it’s just not that good.  So, meeting neither criteria, it’s bad-bad.

I could see, perhaps in an alternate universe, the ET Atari game being a cult classic as a good-bad game if it were any fun to play.

To illustrate my point, here’s yet another YouTube video of some “so bad they’re good” games.  The difference between the ET video and these games is clear.  They’re garbage, but redeemed because they’re funny or enjoyable.  ET, unfortunately, is just plain bad.

(Accessed from the WhatCulture Gaming YouTube channel)

Reading about the landfill excavation that unearthed Atari video games made me think about other instances in history during which American companies “hid” potential setbacks, mistakes, or failures. My mind immediately raced to the “Syringe Tide,” an environmental disaster that occurred from 1987-1988 where significant amounts of medical waste, particularly hypodermic syringes were washed up onto the beaches in New Jersey, New York City, and Long Island. Hospitals decided to discard the medical waste in the ocean to avoid extra costs associated with the government regulations, figuring they could save money by burying their problem at sea. However, when the medical waste was found, hundreds of thousands of vacationers were driven away, causing places such as the Jersey Shore to lose much revenue in tourism as well widespread skepticism regarding public health in general. I also thought about the movie Erin Brockovich, a dramatization of the story of Erin Brockovich, played by Julia Roberts, who fought in a real estate case against the energy corporation Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) which polluted a city’s water supply with hexavalent chromium. It was not until Brockovich looked under the surface that she discovered how many residents in the area were poisoned by the toxic waste, leading her to succeed in one of the biggest class action lawsuits in American history. Although these examples differ in content and form, an examination of them led me to the conclusion that we bury our mistakes simply because we can, and yet, many of them are eventually uncovered.

During Easter Break, I decided to watch the documentary entitled, Atari: Game Over which explores the burial and excavation site in Alamogordo, New Mexico more in depth. The film brought light to many of the success of Atari, considering it to be “the future of technology.” It also highlighted the idea that it has become “fashionable” to say that E.T. was the worst video game of all time, when in actuality, it was not, and was certainly not the sole reason for the company’s downfall. Many people in the documentary reiterated the point that the E.T. game was not buried because of it was the worst game ever, rather it has become known as the worst game ever because it was buried. While society has become quick to “trash” games and game designs both physically and verbally, hiding our mistakes from the public view has also become part of our history. After thinking about this more, was there a valid justification for the Atari burial site to be unearthed? If the site is looked at as being Atari’s funeral, was it ethical to dig it up? Why does society feel the need to reclaim “dead” technology?