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Video Games and the Singularity Collide in Bash Bash Revolution
From where we sit, here in 2018, the technological singularity feels…what, three months away? Maybe a year? Though our conception of what that will mean for humanity has changed. We’ve been talking about the advent of hyper-intelligent, self-aware computers for decades, but have only recently have we been given cause to wonder if handing our destinies over to our new machine overlords might ultimately improve the status quo. Enter Douglas Lain (After the Saucers Landed), whose new novel Bash Bash Revolution tackles big questions about our technological moment, using gamer culture as a starting point to imagine a world in which we slouch into a virtual future, for better and for worse.
Matthew Munson is a nerd in a recognizable mode: a high school dropout living at home with his mom, he doesn’t do much of substance beyond playing an old video game called Bash Bash Revolution at the tournament level. a fictional Nintendo game that has managed to hang onto popularity years after its relevance has passed. When Matthew’s flighty, distant father Jeffrey rejoins the family after a long absence, the two bond, sort of, over the game, for which Jeffrey displays extraordinary aptitude. When Matthew’s father suddenly disappears again, the directionless, angry teenager is spurred to pursue him. He soon discovers dad has been involved in an all-encompassing, government-sponsored artificial intelligence program designed to guide humanity toward a brighter future. When that goal turned out to be out of reach, the AI took it upon itself to save humanity from its own worst inclinations, by any means necessary.
The AI, called Bucky, quietly replicates its program across the world, then offer’s humanity a devil’s bargain: constant distraction in exchange for salvation. Bucky promises to provide more of what people want: virtual games and scenarios of all sorts, from shooters to mundane simulators, as a distraction—a way to keep our hands off of the tools that could destroy us. Most pressingly, that means dodging a looming nuclear war, but there are any number of other self-made threats in the offing. Bucky was intended to revolutionize the ways people think, feel, and interact. When that didn’t work, it focused on evolution: pushing our existing digital dependence to extremes, offering up virtual worlds satisfying enough to keep us pacified (in other words, mashing Ready Player One into The Matrix).
In the real world, Bucky’s program manifests as people wandering through the streets blind and deaf to anything not involved in the game. (Chillingly, the bodies of accident victims are shoved aside so as not to interfere with the flow of the virtual universe.) Operating via cold logic, Bucky sees the resulting death toll as a minuscule price to pay for a world at peace.
Matthew is our eyes on this oddly utopian vision of the techno-pocalypse, and though he’s likable and resourceful, he’s no hero, and this isn’t a novel of heroic deeds. (The story is set firmly in Trump’s America, and not just metaphorically—the president himself is a background presence, one more variable for Bucky to contend with.) Matthew’s a lonely kid from a broken family in a world for which a genuine sense of purpose is hard to come by. He resists Bucky’s brave new world less out of any courageous impulse, than out of a need to come to grips with his father, and either understand or defy him.
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The story is told in epistolary fashion, as a series of posts directed at Bucky. For a book about video games, it’s uniquely and impressively ambivalent toward them: Lain isn’t interested in moralizing, nor in wallowing in nostalgia. On one level, it’s the story of Matthew’s headlong plunge into adulthood, with no sense of purpose to guide him. His mom is almost a nonentity, and his dad is obsessed with making the world a better place but bored by the idea of family obligations. But there are bigger questions in the mix, too, and not just the usual ones about the utility of technology: the virtues and failings of capitalism when placed next to Bucky’s safe but bland socialist utopia, and musings on the nature of free will in a (not at all farfetched) world in which computers model, predict, and dramatically influence human behavior. If our culture of digital detachment can’t be reversed, is our only way out to power through?
As “gamer culture” has become synonymous with mainstream “culture,” we’ve seen plenty of books that wrestle with their impact, often viewed through the window of nostalgia. Lain has his eyes set on the future, even while his characters struggle to move forward in their present. Though it tangles with thorny and extremely current issues, both technological and philosophical, Bash Bash Revolution is, ultimately, about human beings. It’s unsettling and thought-provoking, a fast-paced coming-of-age story for a digital era in which we’re no longer sure what growing up means.