"There is a symbiotic relationship between technologies of simulation and the military": Interview with Paolo Pedercini

pic: molleindustria

This is one of a series of interviews I conducted for my article about what text can say about war that AAA games can't. You can read the other interviews by clicking here.

I contacted Paolo Pedercini about all this because he made Unmanned, which is featured in the article. Unmanned concerns an individual cog in the military machine but uses text to simulate his experience of war in quite a different way to most games. Also, he comprises the staff of La Molleindustria, which makes radical games in at least two senses of the word 'radical'.

After seizing control of a local radio tower, I asked him the following questions.

When text games go to war, elsewhere

Somehow, against all odds, I have tricked left-leaning UK magazine The New Statesman to publish an article by me, John Brindle. In it, I examine several text-based war games which challenge the representation of war in mainstream games, and which manage to speak about that subject in ways that AAA can't. You can find it here.

Take 2007’s Rendition, whose title would not exist without the war on terror. Both the first two Modern Warfare games include "interrogation" sequences, once with a beating and once with electrodes. But where they coyly conceal the violence involved, Rendition makes you participate in awful detail. Try to leave the room and you’re told you haven’t done enough to Abdul. “Break Abdul’s toe,” you type, and the game replies: “Which do you mean? his left little toe, his left second toe, his left middle toe, his left fourth toe, his left big toe, his right little toe…” At this point, many players simply quit.

Below are some notes on what I think of the article and what others think of it.

From Cyberspace to Composite: Two Fantasies of Hacking

Once upon a time, in the early years of the internet, nobody knew you were a dog.

In those days, nobody knew that I wasn’t really a 21-year-old graphic designer from Britain either. Every night, in the witching hour, I would sneak down to my father’s study, furtively unlock the door, and spend all night flirting on IRC with well-built Australian women. Tom Brindle had left the key in the lock once after losing a particularly savage drinking contest to our mother, and I cycled the three miles into town to get a copy cut. From then on, it didn’t matter who ‘sat’ on my ‘lap’ or what weird shit I wanked to, because it happened in a place as placeless and secret as Narnia.

Watching the trailer for Ubisoft’s forthcoming Watch Dogs reminded me of those nights because I feel sure they couldn’t have come from the same planet. Ubi’s game belongs to the world of Foursquare, Girls Around Me, and geotagged Twitter posts, where I can sit on a train and watch my best friend’s kid nephew’s tween Twitter spats. But I didn’t get social networking until I was 18 and didn’t ‘get’ it for another year after that. My adventures took place in the world of another hacking game: Introversion’s 2001 classic Uplink. Existing more than a decade apart, these games represent two very different fantasies of what role technology plays in our lives.