Indie | Execution

I still don’t know what to make of Execution. It’s a short ‘game’ released for free on YoYo’s Game Maker Community by a member under the alias 2Dcube. I honestly don’t know how to articulate the effect it had on me.

If it was looking to provoke a reaction, it succeeded; the only problem is working out exactly what that reaction was. Perhaps, like The Gutter a few weeks ago, it was actually taking the piss, making me look like an idiot for treating it with such sobriety.

That can’t be the answer.

Alternatively, it could just be a half-baked comment for comment’s sake. Maybe 2Dcube had no idea what she or he wished to achieve, maybe the goal was to annoy people, get under their skin with some semi-ironic bullshit. A lot of great art prods, demeans and laughs at the viewer, listener or user, coaxing, daring, them to work out what it’s trying to say. At other times, of course, reading between the lines is easy – indeed, the lines themselves can be meaningful. This can also be an attribute of great art. It needn’t be subversive nor blindingly obvious to succeed, but does Execution even qualify as artful? Of course it is; that it happens to be “not great” is almost incidental, if a dreadful shame.

The premise is thus: a man stands tied to a pole. Behind him is a wall, beyond which is blackness. At his feet are dust, grit and tumbleweed. Are we in a desert, a prison, a camp? It matters not. Nor does his backstory, nor indeed yours. You are looking through the scope of a rifle with the ability to fire in bursts at a click of the mouse; your magazine is infinite in capacity. It’s just you and him and the wind and a firearm. [At this point, spoiler warnings are inevitable. You might want to follow this link and download Execution before proceeding.]

//Moral choices
I tried all I could. I tried emptying the clip, I tried shooting everything in sight, I tried pressing the escape key. That worked, of course, but not in the context of the artwork, not on 2Dcube’s terms. Eventually, I caved in. I shot the man, shot him in the neck, shot him dead. A pang of guilt: what if I was an IDF soldier and he a Gaza civilian? What if I was a Chinese prison guard and he an unjustly charged victim? What if he had a family, a wife, a child, a cat, a gerbil? On the other hand, what if he was a serial killer, convicted by a court and condemned to this fate by my hand? What if he was a paedophile who had raped my daughter and I had finally tracked him down as an act of personal retribution?

As I said before, the periphery is irrelevant. The comment here is not to do with the specific details of this case; it’s to get us thinking about all the other virtual men we’ve killed, the families we’ve torn apart, the innocent blood you and I have on our hands. Is killing moral in any circumstance, even one that isn’t tangible beyond the rumble of a controller and a spurt of simulated crimson liquid on a monitor?

Were this true of Execution, I’d happily consider it great art. There’s a massive, jarring problem though. Because it’s a ‘game’, in either the most insulting or most mischievous way possible, you can ‘win’ or ‘lose’. That’s an “or” there. Once he’s dead there’s no way back, your decision to kill – were it out of curiosity, bloodlust or depressing inevitability – is forever etched into Windows’ registry, and upon restarting the program you will be informed that “Your actions have consequences. It’s already too late.” This would have been a deft and stark reminder of the lasting effects of a piece of great art, were Execution befitting of the description. All it serves to remind me of, sadly, is the foolish end screen: “You Lose”.

There’s always the chance that this was designed to parody the medium’s painfully ingrained tropes, but in reverse. That, however, seems a little too clever to be possible. Were loss inevitable, again, it could have been an interesting comment. We lose either way because we didn’t fulfil our objective, but neither did we follow the obvious moral path. But what makes this piece really hard to stomach is the “You Win” screen. Leave Execution running for seven minutes without shooting the victim, and you emerge victorious. Not only is this the most arbitrary triumph imaginable, but it comes with such baggage. For a start, it has robbed the world of a potentially great piece of art.

I lose indeed.