Games where you fly around mindlessly blowing stuff up have surprising educational value: They enable you to simulate the lives of insects

Serious video gamers have a term, shmup, which is short for "shoot 'em up." While this term could be said to represent ninety percent of the games out there, the word shmup refers to a specific genre, the one where you're a little spaceship facing waves of oncoming enemies, usually against a linearly scrolling backdrop. Unlike the much-maligned first-person shooters like Doom and Halo, shmups are almost always totally abstract. There might be a vaguely robotic or insectoid feel, but the best designers never bother with a narrative or characters, preferring to focus on delivering delicately calibrated fast-paced electronic mayhem. Think Space Invaders, Galaga, Thunder Force, that kind of thing. You can download and play some of the first shmups on the American Museum Of The Museum Image's Computer Space page. You'll need a MAME, a (free) emulator program to make your high tech machine as dumb as a computer from the eighties. Mac users, get yours here; Windows people, here.

The spacecraft-based shmup went out of style in the US twenty years ago, but it's alive and well in Japan. Though the graphics and sound are better than they were back in the day, the concept remains the same. There's a recent one for the PSP called Platypus, in which the combat takes place against a series of magic fairytale backdrops, enemies explode in showers of fruit when destroyed, and everything is rendered in realistic-looking claymation. Japan supposedly doesn't have a big LSD culture, but if your only evidence was their games, you'd think the whole country was like the parking lot at a Phish show.

My two favorite shmups in the world are both extremely strange pieces of shareware by (I think) the same Japanese designer, whose name I unfortunately can't find except on pages full of indecipherable kanji. The games are unmellifluously named rRootage and Noiz2sa. They're both free and they both kick azz. The games use strikingly and intentionally old-skool graphics. Everything on the screen is composed of simple flat-colored geometric shapes. Once the game really gets going, there are an enormous number of these shapes swirling around you. A screenshot from each game:

What's so much fun about shmups? First of all, they offer the simple bodily pleasure of hunter mode. Your breathtakingly sophisticated visual system doesn't get many chances to exercise its smooth pursuit abilities. Primates have such sensational vision because our prehistoric ancestors spent many millions of years hunting fruit and insects among the treetops. Most of us don't need all this onboard hunting and gathering equipment anymore, but there it nevertheless is, and it feels good to give it a nice workout now and then. I see video games as a harmless way for us to scratch our hunting itch without needing to take it out on the endangered megafauna.

It's no accident that so many shmups have an insectoid feel. For me, these games are a good simulation of what it must be like to be a bug. You have problems coming at you in real time, and you have a finite repertoire of preprogrammed moves available to deal with those problems. You deploy your moves against your problems as best you can for as long as you can, until you die. If you can manage to reproduce, that's like getting a whole bunch of extra guys for your DNA.

Antonio Damasio says that our consciousness consists of constantly updated images or models of ourselves in our environment. While it's likely that all of the big, complex animals do this, humans do something more. In addition to modeling our own body and the environment it's in, we also imagine a third-person observer, a consciousness of our own core consciousness, an inner 'watcher'. It's possible that other brainy animals like chimpanzees and whales experience consciousness of being conscious as well, but humans are the only animals who devote such enormous bodily resources and brain space to consciousness of consciousness. You experience this consciousness of yourself as a voice (or voices) in your head. This feeling is what Freud meant by the superego, but it has a more general problem-solving function. It enables you to step outside of yourself, to step out of loops and not get bogged down by minor obstacles. This model of your own mind evolved from your ability to model the minds of others, and isolated people need to outsource some of their inner dialog to imaginary others. Think of Tom Hanks and Wilson in Cast Away.

The third-person perspective we experience in shmups is familiar; we routinely view our own activities from such a perspective. Daniel Dennett and Marvin Minsky imagine our high-level mental activity emerging from the interaction between many unintelligent subprocesses. As Dennett says, "I have a soul, and it's made of tiny robots." Robots are a lot like insects. Insect brains are made of the same components as ours. We have a lot more of those components, arranged in a more complex way, but the underlying operation is not too different. For example, the much-studied fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster gets drunk from alcohol, and staggers around the same way a human does. A lot of your brain activity consists of insectoid processes doing their thing, watched by other processes, watched by yet other processes, and so on up the organizational heirarchy. Steven Johnson draws an analogy between your mind and a termite colony or anthill - the insect colony spreads its processor power among many tiny bodies, but again, the basic operating principles are the same.

Marshaling the vast associative and analytic resources of your mind around a simple series of insectoid processes like a shmup would seem to be extremely dull, but remember that for most of our history, that's precisely what all of our sophisticated mental hardware was for: predicting and tracking the movements of insects. Playing a shmup is a restful visit with our primate ancestors, and their ancestors, and theirs, all of whom are still very much present in ourselves.

Update: Another masterpiece of the shmup, Grid Wars 2, has just crossed my consciousness. It's free to download it and play. It's best enjoyed with a dual-stick controller, but you can do it with mouse and keyboard too. Getting my joystick configured right took me several tries, it was well worth it. Aside from testing your reflexes, the game also provides a surprisingly good introduction to Einstein's theory of relativity. No joke! GW2 been the subject of some thoughtful blogging - scroll through the page to see all the pretty screenshots.

© ethan hein 2007 | back to memebase | back to top