He's not a total non-achiever, although he sees himself that way. He uses his Taco Bell paychecks to help out a father who can't work anymore, because he was injured when the Soviets tortured him in the 1980s during their military adventure in Afghanistan. He has some sense of family duty, and he clearly wants to connect with his father and with his family's past, as becomes clear when he's playing the game.
The entire story is about this young person playing the game "Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain" on the day it is released in 2015. He had to scrimp and save to even afford the game, after what he gives his family from his paychecks, and he also kind of needs to hide its existence, because his father thinks paying for video games is an extravagance when there are "kids in Kabul...destroying their bodies to build compounds for white businessmen and warlords."
A kid playing a video game doesn't sound like much of a story, but this is--as our main character makes clear and manages to convince us, the readers--no ordinary video game. It's Metal Gear Solid V. What makes it worthy of a story is that it's the first game this Afghan kid in America has ever played where he can play as an Afghan, from the point-of-view of the Mujahedeen fighting the Soviets, instead of as an American shooting at Afghans. That means he can play without the guilt of shooting people who look like his father.
Magical realism or sci-fi?
Video games are incredibly realistic now. Accurate satellite mapping means you can play in city landscapes that are eerily like the real thing. Games can also be mind-bogglingly big. "Open world" games--and Phantom Pain was the first game in this series to be open world--are so large, they might as well be infinite, at least from the player's perspective. In open world games, there are still set missions to finish, but you can more or less get to them on your own schedule while you go off and play around, discovering what the world has to offer.
But the game our main character is playing is a little more realistic than video game technology currently can really achieve. It's so realistic, it's either an intrusion of fantasy into a realistic story or it's sci-fi presenting us a future game so true-to-life it's essentially a mirror of the real world. Because of the combination of an open world with hyper-realistic NPCs (non-playable characters), the protagonist is able to find his father and uncle just before the Soviets killed his real-life uncle and maimed his real-life father.
This is the quest that sets the story in motion. It's a virtual quest, but it feels very real. This feeling of reality is heightened by the main character's family banging on his door throughout his game play, then kicking on the door until he feels the need to barricade it with a dresser. He's under siege in both the real and the virtual worlds, but we, the readers, empathize with him when he feels that his real quest is in the virtual one. In the virtual one, he may be able to right wrongs that have continued to hurt his family for generations.
It's possible to read this story as a tragedy, because the main character is seeking to connect with his father, to catch him in his arms as he is falling, to "set him down gently on the clay so that the sky does not swallow him," but only in the video game, while outside his room his very real father is seeking to connect with him. The father told his son that he had something important he wanted to talk to him about, but the son hasn't taken him up on it. Instead, he continues to ignore even the father's gentle calling from his bedroom door.
I don't read it like that, though. Better philosophers of science than I am have written reams on how the dichotomy between virtual and real world might be false, or on how our "real" world might itself be virtual, might in fact be a video game of incredible complexity. I'll just say that the the main character's quest to right wrongs in the virtual world might not be as pointless as it would seem. I think the main character somehow really needs this. I think the video game is offering him a chance at redemption for his family, at a virtual catharsis that has to happen before he can overcome all the things troubling him in the real world. At the end, we see the main character carrying his father and uncle into a dark cave--symbol, no doubt, of the deep recesses of the psyche--as he attempts, perhaps in vain, to rescue them from assaults. It's clear that this retreat into the cave is a move into the protagonist's own mind and toward self-refection: "you feel compelled to keep moving into a darkness so complete that your reflection becomes visible on the screen of the television in front of you, and it is as if the figures in the image were journeying inside you, delving into your flesh. To be saved."
There is a play on words, of course, in "saved." He is trying to save his family virtually, from death and pain. His family, meanwhile, is trying to "save" him by carping at him to get his life together. And then there's the video game meaning of "saved," which is to backup game progress so you can leave it for a while, return to the "real" world, and come back to the game later in the same place. I believe the main character's descent into the cave of his own psyche is, in fact, going to save him.
The importance of representation
Video games have been criticized for decades for not being representative. The main character has played tons of games where Afghans are the "other," the ones being killed by American heroes. The emergence of a game in which Afghans are the subject is itself healing for the protagonist. Video games really are trying to get better at this. It used to be that nearly all women in games had giant breasts, small waists, and wore clothes that made it impossible for them to be doing the athletic things they appeared to be doing in the games. This has changed, and now women can play at least some games from the point-of-view of a woman who actually sort of looks like them.
I sometimes joke a little bit about the clumsy nature of picking stories for a Best American Short Stories collection, because it's pretty clear that there's a bit of artificial "we need at least some from each group" to it. But it's worth using this process even if it is a little bit of a blunt tool. It's better to force different voices into a collection than it is to try to pick stories without considering representation and ending up with none. Of all the attempts to improve the way culture views race, I think adding more diverse voices in narratives might have been the one that's been most effective. We can try to legislate right thinking, or we can try to inculcate it in our education, but it's far more effective to create compelling stories told form the points-of-view of different people and allow wide audiences to live virtually through their perspectives.
Did the story end too soon?
Like with the other Jamil Jan Kochai story I've read, I felt like there might have been a bit of incompleteness to this. I felt like maybe we needed a denouement where we can see that the son has been changed through his virtual interaction with his family history, see him now reaching out to the real father. Maybe he invites the father to come play the game with him. Maybe he saves his game and goes out to talk to the dad, asks questions he hasn't ever asked before. The final sentence isn't just "saved," a past participle meaning some type of salvation or preservation has taken place, but "to be saved," meaning the salvation is still hoped for. "To be saved" is almost the same in this sense as "to be continued." Maybe wanting a symbol of connection is too neat. The narrator might still need time in the cave before anyone can be saved. Maybe salvation is too much to hope for, and the moment of introspection is as close to victory as the narrator can get in this game. I'm still not satisfied at the end, but I love the way that I'm not satisfied, the way I have to keep asking myself if I should be.
My personal context to this story
I have a son who is a slacker, and it concerns me deeply. He doesn't show any interest in taking his future seriously, although he's at an age where he needs to. He loves video games. If he could sit in his room, eat what we give him, and play games until he dies, I think he would. I'm as concerned about him as the father in this story is concerned about his son. And I feel as unwelcomed when I knock on his door. At this point, if I knew that in a few years he'd be working at Taco Bell and kicking in a few bucks to help out, I might even be happy to know he'll be that productive. He's an incredibly smart, perceptive person. He has a lot to offer the world, but he's also full of ennui and ambivalence, and he's not sure it's worth the effort in a world that's going to hell anyway. This wasn't a parental issue I was prepared for, and I know I'm failing at it.
While I don't think playing video games is enough for a human being to do to justify the resources necessary to sustain life, I do see a lot of redeeming qualities to games. I hope that eventually, my son will find in one of those games a cave into his own psyche, one from which he can emerge in a better relationship with those around him and ready to do his small part to save the world.
So glad you liked this one, in addition to doing a great job analyzing it. It was, improbably, a favorite of mine from this year's volume - improbably since video games are a world apart from me. Interesting personal connection as well.
ReplyDeleteI know you've said you generally don't like slacker stories. But this isn't your average slacker story, and I'm glad you liked it.
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