The Other
At the basis of our relationship with the Other, according to Emmanuel Levinas and to Judaeo-Christian religion, is the injunction ‘Thou shalt not kill.’
Upon encountering the Other – any human other – his/her face communicates to us something that far exceeds the limits of our rational understanding. Through his/her face, the Other reveals him/herself as an abyss of infinite mystery, and as the place in which God shows Himself as the essence of Otherness. Such an encounter comes as a trauma to the person who is faced by the Other. The Other forces us to accept that our dreams of individual autonomy were always ill-founded, and that we always carry within ourselves an infinite responsibility towards the Other-God – a responsibility that haunts us forever, to the point of being a true persecution. We are ruptured inside by the presence and the demands of the Other, yet we cannot fully comprehend him/her. We are bound to the Other, yet this burden is always excessively heavy for us to carry. The injunction ‘though shalt not kill’ reveals our most immediate reaction in the face of the revolution that the Other brings into our lives: our desire to kill the Other, so to free ourselves from our responsibility towards him/her and to be able to pursue our dreams of perfect autonomy.
Team Killing
The dust is settling over the corpses of the enemy combatants. I crouch behind the wreck of an exploded car. The street is empty. I can see clearly, which means that I shouldn’t be wounded – how else could I know, not having sensation of my own body? I can only read the sudden red clouding of the screen, whenever I am hit, or the apocalypse of sound and vision, whenever an explosion occurs too close. I take out my sniper rifle and look through the telescopic sight mounted on it. My breathing is calm, and the buildings in the distance oscillate gently along the axes of distance. I see a man in a greyish uniform pacing back and forth on a balcony, smoking a cigarette. I lift the scope until the beanie hat on his head is exactly at the junction of the axes. I hold my breath, I count the oscillations... A pink slate suddenly covers my target. My hand jolts on the mouse and the scope shifts to one side. It’s the over-blown face of one of my teammate, always in the wrong place at the wrong time. I say it is my teammate, but is it really? I look at the angular features of his face, so brutally geometrical in the enhanced vision of my sniper rifle. He is facing me, motionless. I look at his eyes, his poorly drawn eyes, so blue and distant. Who is he? Is he the Other? I don’t recognize myself in him, yet at the same time I know I am supposed to. I hold my breath again, and lift the rifle until the axes cross on his forehead, like a diadem. I fire. He falls. The screen darkens. Game over. ‘Thou shalt not kill.’
Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare
Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare was developed by the American company Infinity Ward, and released in 2007 by the video game publisher Activision. The game unfolds as a first-person shooter, in which the player fights as part of a small team of American Marines or British SAS. The action takes place between Russia, the Middle East and Azerbaijan, and the general plot draws heavily on the rhetoric of the ‘war on terror’ as developed by the American and British administrations after 9/11.
Although the game can be plaid in single-player mode, it is the multiplayer option which has brought Call of Duty 4 the fame and success that it enjoys in the world of video games. The differences between playing in multiplayer and single-player aren’t only limited to the different possibilities of interaction, but they also extend to minor – though fundamental – details. Particularly, the multiplayer option allows fighters to engage in what is technically defined as ‘team killing,’ that is voluntary or involuntary ‘friendly fire’ against other members of their own team. On the other hand, when the game plaid in single-player mode, friendly fire leads immediately and automatically to the game over. In the secret of one’s own room, when the player is surrounded only by the phantasmic entities of the AIs, ‘unlawful killing’ becomes effectively equivalent to suicide.
Architectures of Devastation
As I stroll through the streets of this imaginary Middle East, I move my camera all along the scarred surface of the buildings still standing. I take my RPG launcher out, I lazily aim at a balcony and shoot. The explosion makes the balcony collapse, and part of the facade of the building with it. This is a world of houses without inhabitants, where the only possible architecture is devastation. It’s not much different from the room where I am sitting, busy playing the game. The room is dark and empty, and around me there are open cans of coke and half-eaten snacks. Both inside and outside the screen, I’m fully engaged in pure consumption. One of my teammates stops in front of me and crouches behind a vehicle. There must be somebody in sight. What is the difference between my digital friend and my digital enemy? Both of them share the same pixels, the same obsession with killing – perhaps the same fear? If only my teammate was the avatar of another human, hidden somewhere in another room as dark and as empty as mine, I would imagine a spark of pleasure shooting from the screen back to his/her neural webs. But here, now, I am the only creature who is in this for fun. I see the enemy running towards us from the end of the street. I aim, I shoot, and I watch him convulse on the finely textured street floor. Who was that I just killed? It wasn’t a Man, a human like me. It was something else, something else entirely. Truly, it was an Other.
Two Trinities
The taboo of friendly fire seems to find enough justification in the political rhetoric supporting patriotic American militarism. Yet, the possibility of ‘team killing’ when playing in multiplayer reveals the thinness of this connection. If the Other whom we ‘shalt not kill’ is not our human neighbour – whom we can happily murder, both in physical wars, under the disguise of public order, and in multiplayer team killing, – what does the digital Other hide within itself, which has to be for us more sacred than the life of our fellow human animals?
Levinas provides an answer to this question – which doubtlessly obsessed him whenever he played Call of Duty 4 – through his intuition of the coincidence of Otherness and God, and of God and Otherness. When killing out teammates in Call of Duty 4, we are aiming our digital guns not towards a representation or an avatar of a specific human being – in all his/her finitude and limitedness – but towards the idea of Human itself. Our teammate is nobody in particular, but an exemplay creature with the thin appearance of a human and the deep essence of a God that eternally dies and eternally resurrects. The moment we aim our weapons at him, and we direct our destructive fury at his purely abstract nature – that of a representation which only hides within itself the perfect geometry of its own digital structure – we put ourselves against an adversary which we cannot (or we are not supposed to) match: God, the Other, the Human. In the digital body of our AI teammate, the trinity God-Other-Human reveals itself as the real object of the injunction ‘thou shalt not kill’: that whom we shouldn’t kill is not another individual human like us, but that pure abstraction that orders our behaviours like a God, which is the very idea of a Human – as opposed to the mere practice of a human in flesh-and-blood. By respecting the trinity of our AI teammate, we shall be allowed to continue playing, and especially to continue reincarnate ourselves through our ever-resurrecting digital character, as if we were minor divinities part-taking of God’s miraculous powers.
At the same time, the enemy AI functions as the perfect equivalent of our AI teammate: while the teammate’s trinity is that of God-Other-Human, the enemy’s is that of God-Other-Enemy. While the Human’s prerogative is that of remaining endlessly alive – and resurrect countless times – the Enemy enacts its prerogative by endlessly dying, and, vanishing in a cloud of pixels. Whenever we fail to kill the Enemy, just like when we succeed at killing our AI teammate, death descends upon us, and the game is over. We are but paws, in the apollinean-dyonisian dance of the abstract Human and the abstract Enemy.
Mortality
Caffeine makes the muscles in my arms twitch. I keep my eyes on the screen, while my hand reaches out for a can of coke, in the garbage dump on my table. The background music of the game buzzes in my ears, like a seamless sonic carpet of cymbals and violins on steroids. I grab something metallic, I slip a finger in its hole and as I move it towards me a muscle in my arm twitches again. The edge of the can slides fast against my fingertip and splits my flesh open. Coke spills out all over the keyboard of my laptop, and my blood starts leaking over the can, the table and the keys. The game freezes. The music remains stuck on one single note.
It isn’t game over. I am no longer in or out of the game. Everything has suddenly stopped working, as if struck by a sudden revelation. My dark blood flowing between the keys on my laptop, black coke flooding the air conducts under the screen. The digital bloodshed is suspended. The Gods are now silent, neither alive nor dead. The only thing that could stop the hypnotic dance of resurrecting divinities was the liquid accident of a mortal. The blood of somebody who won’t resurrect, the content of a can of coke which will not replenish itself. The Gods are immortal, except when faced by mortality.
