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So much is to say that there is almost
never a cultural trope that is totally new,
springing fresh-minted from a single work:
everything has roots and foreshadowings,
and how could it be otherwise, since it
is existing art that feeds the imagination
of future creators?Ever since Pac-Man raced to munch
the Power Pellets in the corners of the maze
in order to turn the tables on his phantom
pursuers, the specific videogame model of
the power-up does seem to have ramified out
into the wider world: not just in otherentertainment media, but even in the wider
cultural and political discourse.
Take, for instance, the British prime
minister’s slogan of “levelling up” the
country. This phrase, too, has pre-videogame
forebears: in 1873, the artist Philip Gilbert
Hamerton advised a student of modern
languages that the only advantage classicists
might have would be a better memory or
“superiorities of sympathy to which he may
‘level up’ by that acquired and artificial
interest which comes from protracted
application.” But in 21st-century English, to
“level up” a region or country is inevitably
associated with the vocabulary of roleplaying
games – which is quite appropriate in this
context, given that the speaker in question
appears to think of politics, and the lives of
people in general, as a game, of a kind that he
might have cheatingly played at Eton.
But such flippant talk of levelling up or
powering up also serves an argumentative
purpose, which is to reinforce a view of
society that is focused on the individual and
their freedom to pursue certain goals and
desires. Which is also, inevitably, the point of
view of heroic action videogames in which
the player’s character pillages and kills to
their heart’s content, periodically acquiring
power-ups so as to rampage more effectively
through a world that exists as mere scenery
for their exploits. It is a fundamentally right-
wing portrait of human affairs.
That such a view is dangerous to society
as a whole is no more evident than in the
controversy over mask-wearing during the
Covid pandemic. Libertarian polemicists
have called them “muzzles” and complained
of “mask Nazis”, because they can think only
of their own freedom and not of others’
balancing rights. But perhaps it’s possible to
reclaim the videogame language and point
out that, in the present situation where there
are few tools available to us, what a facemask
really is, is the best power-up we have.T
he world’s premier long-running series
of space films for children failed to
please many fans with its last
instalment, in which major characters
suddenly acquired the ability to shoot bolts
of coloured lightning at one another, just as
they do in all other indistinguishable
superhero movies. But all was not lost for
fans of stories about galactic elves, since
Disney’s show The Mandalorian proved that,
by returning to the franchise’s Western roots,
you could make a satisfying new branch
of the mythic universe – even if it is
momentarily confusing when Gus Fring
turns up looking for Baby Yoda.
At the end of the first season of The
Mandalorian (spoiler alert), the hero is given
an item to help him in the next stage of his
quest: a rocket jetpack. Very cool, and very
obviously a borrowing from the narrative
structure of videogames. You have fought
bravely through the first world; now a mentor
offers you a power-up that expands your
abilities for the tougher challenges to come.
The English verb form ‘to power up’,
meaning to increase the supply of power to
something, already existed in the 1920s,
while the intransitive form, when something
‘powers up’ (begins operation) was around
long before that. As Lucy Hutchinson wrote
in the 17th century of her husband John,
a parliamentarian who was one of those who
signed the death warrant of Charles I:
“Sometimes he would say, that if ever he
should live to see the parliament power up
againe, he would never meddle any more
either in councells or armies.”
The idea of powering up, then, is not new,
and was applied to individual human beings
long before electronic games. (One Ohio
newspaper columnist wrote in 1925: “On this
night I was all powered up, clean shirt, pants
all pressed, and my curly hair all plastered
down.”) Even the idea of a single item that
gives the hero a new ability was present in
literature: think of the sword Excalibur, or
Tolkien’s invisibility-conferring One Ring.The specific videogame
model of the power-up does
seem to have ramified out
into the wider world
DISPATCHES
PERSPECTIVETrigger Happy
STEVEN POOLE
Shoot first, ask questions later
Steven Poole’s Trigger Happy 2.o is now available from
Amazon. Visit him online at http://www.stevenpoole.net