Not for Broadcast: Manipulating images

To manipulate

To hold an object in one’s hands while using it in any way; to maneuver a device, to make it work with one’s hand; to subject something to various treatments, various exercises.

But also: to exert a more or less occult or suspicious influence on something in order to make it do what you want it to do; to act on someone by devious means in order to make him do what you want him to do.

Welcome to National Nightly News, you’re on Chanel One!

Day 1: Advance, a populist left-wing party, wins the elections and takes power. On the surface, it’s all well and good: redistribution of wealth, equal rights, food for all, and so on. In reality, a hell is being created. Soon, centers for the “relief of the burdens of society” (the elderly and the handicapped), reform camps, and youth indoctrination associations were springing up. In terms of foreign policy, the Party will not hesitate to use, shall we say… terrorist methods?! Last but not least, Advance is no slouch when it comes to using the media: television propaganda and censorship are also part of the party.

After a few months, a second group started getting involved: Disrupt. A resistance movement – easily qualified as terrorist – which, through its spokesman Alan James, claims to have quite right-wing ideas.

Not For Broadcast invites us to experience these events, which take place over a period of about seven years, through the prism of a nightly news program that we control. In short, we choose which images to show, how to show them, what to censor, and so on. So at the core of NFB is the role of the media in the political life of a country. Does that make you shudder? Perfectly!

Images everywhere…

The game takes us right to the heart of media bias and the influence of information relays in the life of our societies. But the reason I wanted to come back to it now is because it seems to me that in recent years a very particular malaise has developed in France around these issues. The events of recent months are a striking illustration of this. It seems that the discourse that makes the press a fourth power, in the Montesquivian sense, has become difficult to sustain for anyone with a modicum of seriousness.

If the news media play a central role in modern, and even more so in postmodern societies, it’s because they are a ubiquitous mediator in our relationship to the social. We watch television, or at least snippets of it; we read newspapers and news sites; we pick up the words of various influencers here and there, and so on. In short, the self-perception of society and its members is mediated by a series of images it receives from within itself. There is no pure, direct relationship with society, only one that allows for a variety of intermediaries. The media are these intermediaries, presenting themselves as such, staging themselves as such, claiming to reflect the self-consciousness of society.

They show, they tell, they propose and dispose, they choose. In this sense, they manipulate in the sense of taking in there hands: they dispose of photographs, videos, statements, and so on. They decide whether to publish them or not, whether to publish them in this or that way, whether to cut them up or reassemble them, whether to comment on them or leave them for others to comment on. To manipulate, then, is to alter. The image is the site of a permanent ontological shift: it constantly escapes itself. It is an image only in its ceaseless becoming other.

Photography and video have a unique relationship to manipulation because they are always a representation of the reality. Paradoxically, however, in presenting themselves as such, they also alter that same reality. The result is a double movement: that of the image in relation to itself, and that of the real in relation to the image.

So what is media? It’s a place to manipulate images and therefore reality. When showing is doing.

Play to manipulate

In a sense, video games do the same thing: they manipulate images. Even more so in FMV (Full Motion Video) games, which reintegrate photography into the game itself. There’s a constant back and forth between what’s being shown and what’s actually being played. But a video game is only a video game because the act of handling alters and transforms the image. That’s why Not for Broadcast‘s proposal is so interesting: it superimposes two orders of image manipulation. To play NFB is to manipulate images by manipulating images.

To venture into the NFB is to play with reality through images. Our choices affect the history of the country. We are not, as in most games, a direct actor in events. Instead, we help create the conditions under which certain events and actions take place. Our work is far less glamorous than that of a hero who directly puts his life on the line against an overt villain. But on the other hand, our actions are more profound because we don’t coerce or prevent, we plant the seeds of motives of action on the scale of an entire population.

In NFB, we’re doing something very serious. All the more serious because it’s probably easier to put yourself in the shoes of Alex Winston than Cloud Strife or Geralt de Riv. I’m more likely to find myself in a TV control room than chasing monsters with a silver sword.

Success through failure

I won’t dwell on the gameplay mechanics themselves, as they are relatively poor and quickly become boring. Behind our control panel, we choose which camera will be shown on the screen, which picture or video will illustrate which topic, and we have the duty to censor insults and speeches hostile to the ruling government. We also choose which promotional tapes to show, and whether or not to broadcast (or interrupt) a government propaganda tape. From time to time, we also have to adjust the signal so as not to lose the airwaves, and then there is the occasional activity to ensure that the broadcast is not interrupted. In short, the whole thing is quite repetitive, and over nine hours of gameplay, it’s not really what keeps the player hooked.

Basically, NFB becomes interesting when you ask yourself what you’re doing there.

Is the game intended to demonstrate or illustrate the weight of the media on the development of our societies? This is obvious, and it would be naive to think that the game intends to rest on its laurels. I’ll focus my analysis on two points.

Anti-agentivity

First, I’d like to take a closer look at the way in which the game seems to turn our claims to agency on their head. Yes, there is a demiurgic dimension to the game, and it seems that our actions alone are what gradually tilt society in certain directions. Of course, a single individual in a TV newsroom doesn’t remake a society, even indirectly. The NFB game should be taken for what it is: a simplification. Of course, this is not without its difficulties. Indeed, there is little mention of other television channels, and even less of what can be said on them. But what we call “the media” is actually a “media field,” to use Bourdieus’ terminology. A field in which individuals with different interests struggle to secure a position within it. Here, our relations with other people in this social space are reduced almost entirely to the discussions we have with our boss (whether he calls us or this occurs in moments of textual narrative). Added to this is the almost total absence of other political forces outside of Advance and Disrupt.

On the other hand, this agentive simplification serves the game by turning it on its head. In the game, we’re at the center of a society that’s being ravaged by forces we haven’t chosen, where the choice boils down to plague or cholera. Where we sometimes hope to do good, but at best do the lesser of two evils. And when you realize that behind Disrupt is a tiny group led by some of the country’s wealthiest individuals who, in our world, would have no problem being part of the American alt-right, you’re in for a real shock. Whether you choose to support one side or the other, the game puts you in a particularly uncomfortable position at every turn, where the right option seems to be non-existent. In the end, it’s up to the player and their conscience to find their way through. Good luck with that.

The loading artwork is particularly significant: it shows our character as a puppet controlled by others. In manipulating images, we are simultaneously manipulated by them. We’re caught in a headlong rush with no emergency brake. The further the story progresses, the more tense the situation becomes, the more we are pressed to take sides. We are not the demiurge we seem to be behind our console. Neither the TV console, nor our computer. By ricochet and analogy between the game and what we do in it, it is we as players who are directly affected.

By putting us in the place of a supposed demiurge, the NFB is really trying to strike at the heart of our claim to exist as free agents in the field of images.

The Jester’s Show

Second, I’d like to return to the buffoonish staging of the game. NFB presents us with an eminently buffoonish society in which, from the very beginning, too much is king. The news anchors, of course, but even more so the politicians and all the other characters who appear on the set as the days go by. Everything is caricatured to the point where a game like GTA V seems like a realistic portrayal of the United States today. It’s a world where the media has been completely transformed into Cyril Hanouna’s shows. But that’s where the game is wrong, and it misses the point: our society is not so much a giant circus of farce, but a subtle combination of that great farce and a seriousness that confronts it. But it doesn’t confront it as an external opposition, but as its counterpart, its necessary complement. We don’t think enough about how much we owe to our dear Silvio Berlusconi. Maybe one day we’ll realize how much we owe him. Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Javier Milei, Emmanuel Macron and his clique are, to varying degrees, his legitimate children.

It’s this combination that makes our media spectacle so fascinating, this ability to suddenly – and more or less subtly – slip from one to the other. It’s those politicians who lie to our faces, or tell the dirtiest nonsense with the utmost seriousness: that’s the real show.

History, religion, race, or whatever. This appeal to great principles, to the history of the nation, to its religious essence, to the rejection of the other in the name of centuries-old values, and so on. It’s a transformed seriousness, internal to the show, but no less necessary. It’s the vertigo of the great discrepancy that erases all points of reference. To say that we’ve saved the economy when food shortages have exploded, homelessness has doubled, precarious work has spread like the plague, and the richest people are gorging themselves. Supposing to be sorry that our public services are collapsing and accelerating their destruction at the same time. And then, the next moment, we can be seen in retouched black and white footage hitting a punching bag. Men, that’s quality entertainment! It’s worthy of true “shock therapy” in the sense that Naomi Klein uses the term. Destroy, brutalize, lie, ignore the scientists, then the buffoonery. People are left stunned and helpless, not knowing what to say or do. Then we start all over again.

This clear misunderstanding of our societies from NFB comes to the fore at the end of the game. When News show becomes a ridiculous talk show with the Prime Minister, the impact is lacking. In reality, it was all at that level from the beginning, more or less. Maybe we’re already too immersed in nonsense, in the sense of being belittled and destroyed. Nevertheless, the game manages to dramatize the dangerous slope of the destruction of meaning that our societies are taking.

Meaning destruction

In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard examines the growing ubiquity of the media sphere and its significance in our postmodern societies. Far from contributing to the production of meaning and the social, the proliferation of information gradually destroys it. There are two reasons for this. First, information seems to exhaust itself in its own staging, to the detriment of communication itself. Staging meaning instead of producing it. Figures like Macron and Milei are perfect illustrations of this. The explicit construction of the “Macron character”, Jupiterian man, Mozart of finance, revolutionary of politics, is a delicious example. But when it comes to the facts, he’s nothing of the sort: a man with old-fashioned ideas, a poor manager of the state, whose authority is only as strong as the police truncheons at his disposal. What’s more, the truth no longer matters: we lie, we deny ourselves from one day to the next, but no one is there to take us back. In short, the alternative facts of the Trump administration are having a field day on our side of the Atlantic as well.

Baudrillard goes on to emphasize the destruction of the social through the reign of information. The mediating role of the media is gradually being replaced by the reality they create. Reality, says the sociologist, is becoming hyper-reality. The distance between the image and the world it represents is disappearing. The world becomes completely simulated, a spectacle from beginning to end, and nothing escapes it. And the NFB is quite Baudrillardian in this respect, in fact it is doubly so through the mise en abîme of computer simulation. We simulate the simulation; we manipulate the square; we are manipulated as well. And even in the political opposition it presents, the game follows the example of the French sociologist. Terrorism appears in all its ambiguity: a spectacle and a shattering at the same time.

More than ever, violence is the spectre that haunts our societies, where the possibility of public space, of democratic discussion, is destroyed from within. When we can no longer be heard because words no longer have meaning; when truth no longer has more value than falsehood and especially lies; when the executioners of meaning cynically set themselves up as authoritarian masters, then the temptation to violence reappears with a vengeance. As our societies destroy any public space for speaking and listening, only the sound of bullets and bombs can be heard. Years of Lead 2.0. And once again we’ll be the losers. Just as there is no satisfactory outcome to Not for Broadcast.

If there’s still a glimmer of light, it’s in the contrast that the game still produces in us: unlike everything that happens in it, what happens in our world still doesn’t make us indifferent, not completely. And when we shake in the wind, it’s with anger, not with the boredom and indifference that this computer simulation too often produces.

This is D4ndy for the National Weekly Kaleidoscope! Good evening everyone and see you tomorrow (or not).