America is a Missile Cam

We don’t want to stop gun violence, we only want more camera angles

Many years ago, when I was younger, my friends and I would spend our lunch hour at school playing a video game called Wing Commander.

Mr. Tharp, our science teacher, let us install a copy of the game on the IBM PS/1 in the corner of his room, and that’s where I took turns playing with my friends Marc and Stuart and Wesley.

We didn’t have a joystick, so we played using the keyboard controls, and we loaded our separate games from different save files.

That’s how you played back then. One player per save.

Wing Commander was a space combat simulator.

You took on the role of a fighter pilot on the TCS Tiger Claw, an aircraft carrier of sorts in space. The game consisted of flying successively more difficult missions against the Kilrathi, a bipedal race of cat-like warriors.

So yes, Space cats. You were fighting space cats.

As a player you named your pilot and gave him a call sign. I was “Maestro”. Wesley, I think, was “Wizard”. The more Kilrathi you killed, the more quickly you’d earn medals and promotions.

Between every mission, you’d watch a cut scene of pilots talking about their missions, or the Kilrathi conspiring against the Terran Confederation. Each of those other pilots had names, and call signs, and backstories, too.

There was an entire universe of characters and stories inside Wing Commander. You got the sense the game, like certain books and movies, existed beyond your experience of it. The story began before your beginning, and ended, if ever, long after you turned your computer off.

The stories, of course, served mostly to make the space battles more meaningful, each encounter more dramatic than the last.

You weren’t just flying to just shoot down other fighters, you were flying to protect Jeannette “Angel” Devereaux while she routed the enemy away from a damaged freighter, or flying to avenge the death of pilot Kien “Bossman” Chen. You felt, or at least I felt, as a kid, that there were other people counting on you. That your wins or losses mattered.

You flew your missions in third person view, looking down on the pilot’s joystick, which would move as you moved yours.

You could fly up, and down, and sideways inside, seemingly, a 3D environment, and you could issue commands to the friendly fighters flying on your wing (hence the name of the game).

Your fighter shot different types of lasers mostly, which you used to work your way through the enemy’s shields. Your fighter was also equipped with a limited number of missiles, some of which were heat seeking.

Fire them, and you could watch as they streaked off into space, following a Kilrathi ship, around and around and around through space, until it hit.

If you were particularly interested in the damage missiles did, you could activate a function called “missile cam”, and from there watch from behind the missile itself as it turned, and rotated, and finally exploded against the enemy in a ball of pixelated fire.

The enemy’s face would show up on your dashboard, screaming as his craft disintegrated in space.

It’s the missile cam I’m reminded of, every time I see a mass shooting of a school, not unlike the school where I played video games at lunch.

It’s the missile cam I’m reminded of, every time I see news helicopters hovering over still-warm bodies, or tweets and snaps and Instagrams from children still trapped inside the building, saying mom I love you, the shooter still roaming the halls.

It’s the missile cam I’m reminded of every time we make topographic maps charting the course of the shooter through the halls or the church or the town. Here’s where he dropped his bag, here’s where he shot the gym teacher.

The missile cam when you read a high schooler’s tweet, itself retweeted hundreds of thousands of times, describing the sight of her dead friends.

The missile cam when the White House lowers its flag to half mast.

The missile cam when senators tweet thoughts and prayers, thoughts and prayers.

I think of the missile cam because it’s as if the missile cam is all America wants.

America doesn’t want to end violence, it wants to watch violence from every angle. America, this interest in violence is voyeuristic, almost endoscopic in its examination. Every camera angle is a new story.

America, it seems you won’t be happy until everyone has semi-automatic weapons, and until there is follow-drone footage for every spinning bullet.

America, you are the missile cam.

Wing Commander, of course, was only a game.

We were just pretending to fly through space, pretending that a new and different and exciting story was unfolding with every battle.

In reality, we were just sitting there.

We were just watching a screen and its shifting bitmaps, the illusion of being in the real world, the light of simulated explosions and faraway deaths reflected on our faces.

Just sitting there like we’re all just sitting here now, viewing all the different camera angles, watching all the things explode and die.

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