August 9, 2010 Issue

I don’t know whether I would’ve read Nicholson Baker’s “Painkiller Deathstreak” (in this week’s issue), if I hadn’t previously read his “A New Page” (The New Yorker, August 3, 2009). I enjoyed that piece so much I thought I’d give “Painkiller Deathstreak” a try, even though it’s about a dubious cultural phenomenon, namely, video games. They’re dubious, in my opinion, because they’re inhuman and denatured. Have I ever played them? No. But I’ve witnessed others playing them, and the games they were playing seemed to consist of one long dark killing spree after another conducted in various bombed-out, war-torn environments. The accuracy of my impression is, in fact, confirmed by Baker’s piece. For example, regarding the video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Baker says, “Here’s what it’s about. It’s about killing, and it’s about dying. Also, it’s about collecting firearms. And it’s modern warfare, which means it’s set in places like Afghanistan.”

Baker really gets into the games, their controls (“The PlayStation 3’s blue X button is in a different place than the Xbox 360’s blue X button – madness”), their beauty (“You’ll see an edge-shined, light-bloomed, magic-hour gilded glow on a row of half-wrecked buildings and you’ll want to stop for a few minutes just to take it in”), the “weird camaraderie” among the players, including his sixteen-year old son (“There’s a lot of wild laughing”). I confess I enjoyed the piece immensely. Baker is a great writer. There’s an amazing passage in “Painkiller Deathstreak” – it begins “In order to give me a taste of multi-player madness, as I practiced my shooting and sprinting skills …” – and finishes with a flourish of description so specific that you almost forget that what’s being described is virtual reality and not the real thing. Actually, you know it’s virtual reality, but you marvel at the depth of Baker’s immersion in it, so deep that it excites him to write prose that really zings. Here are the concluding sentences of that great passage:

There were thick-budded poppies growing in the sun, with PVC irrigation pipes over them. Again I heard my son’s sprinting footsteps – he had a multiplayer perk that allowed him to run forever without tiring. He knew a way to get up on the fuselage – I could hear him running down the metallic skin – and onto the tail, and from there up onto a high cliff. I’d spray bullets in a semicircle, and then there would be a single quick sniper shot and I’d be dead. Then he’d apologize. “Sorry, Dad, I didn’t mean to kill, only to maim.” I died often enough that I received a temporary health boost called a "painkiller deathstreak."

How cool that “I could hear him running down the metallic skin”! Is “Painkiller Deathstreak” as good as “A New Page”? I don’t think so, because “A New Page,” besides being an inspired piece of description (e.g., “The Kindle 1’s design was a retro piece of bizarrerie – an unhandy, asymmetrical Fontina wedge of plastic”), is a glorious tour de force argument in favor of newspapers – the paper-and-ink print kind, not the electronic version:

The Kindle Times lacks most of the print edition’s superb photography – and its subheads and call-outs and teasers, its spinnakered typographical elegance and variety, its browsableness, its Web-site links, its listed names of contributing reporters, and almost all captioned pie charts, diagrams, weather maps, crossword puzzles, summary sports scores, financial data, and, of course, ads, for jewels, for swimsuits, for vacationlands, and for recently bailed-out investment firms. A century and a half of evolved beauty and informational expressiveness is all but entirely rinsed away in this digital reductio.

How fine that “spinnakered typographical elegance and variety”! Baker nails his case for newspapers with this assertion: “The Kindle DX doesn’t save newspapers; it diminishes and undercuts them – it kills their joy. It turns them into earnest but dispensable blogs.” I was sort of hoping, when I started reading “Painkiller Deathstreak,” that Baker would roast video games over the red-hot fire of his blazing intellect the way he brilliantly roasted The Kindle in “A New Page.” Instead, he’s written a celebration of the damn things – and a gorgeous one at that! There’s a father-son bonding element going on in “Painkiller Deathstreak” and I think it softened Baker’s normally sharp-edged critical faculty. At bottom, what he likes best about video games is the opportunity to interact with his son. He doesn’t come right out and say this, but I think it’s implicit in that wonderful “We went off to dinner full of weird camaraderie.”