Shmups X Metaphor - Part 02 - Preoccupations, Zeitgeists and Invasion

In spatial metaphors and mythic archetypes we looked at the shared qualities of shmups, why they speak to us through their underlying messaging. But now let’s turn to the individual fictions applied to shmups.

What is the ultimate fiend? What form does it take? What armies do you fight through to get to it/them? What do these armies represent? What type of worlds do you travel through on your adventure? Where must you go?

When you unpack these questions we can start to see commonalities in fictions used within the medium and the key meanings that they have to both their creators and players.

To use this view let’s draw from the ideas of preoccupations and zeitgeists.

Preoccupations and Zeitgeists

The concept of ‘preoccupations’ is a useful way to understand why the fictional qualities tied to a game can make the overall experience much more resonant and meaningful.

Del Coates describes preoccupations as ‘the myriad things generally in your mind at any given moment’ i.e. a feeling of hunger, a sense of claustrophobia, an interest in, or a feeling of anxiety about something. While any one person’s collection of preoccupations is unique, people exposed to similar settings and scenarios tend to have preoccupations that coalesce together to form collective ones. As suggested by Coates, ‘preoccupations that are shared by many people at the same time are largely responsible for the ebb and flow of fads, fashions, trends and styles’.

This concept of shared experience can also be paired with the notion of Zeitgeist. Zeitgeist is often translated as the ‘spirit of the times’ - the desires and aspirations of the people at that particular cultural moment. However, Zeitgeist can also be translated as ‘the ghost of the period’. So it is also tied to the particular anxieties that surround an era.

Because shmups and the common fictions that have become tied to the genre are tied to a specific cultural/historical moment of the  80s/90s, they the product of a particular Zeitgeist and a reflection of a  set of collective preoccupations moreso than many other video game genres.

Ultimately, by looking at the common fictions alongside the world they emerged from, we can see and understand a bit more about why they take the shape that they do.

Space Invasion

It hardly needs saying that the most common aesthetic/fiction that is tied to shmups is an invasion story set in a spacefaring future. In this world, a daring and skilled pilot in control of a lone prototype space fighter is sent against an entire army of aliens who are seeking to destroy what we hold dear.

Looking back, it’s not too hard to see how this became one of the key touchpoints for the genre - Space Invaders as the genre prototype embedded this fictional framing from the get-go, and it resonated strongly due to its direct connection to the preoccupations of the time. Emerging into a world overshadowed by the Cold War, Space Invaders captured both the feelings of existential anxiety around Communist takeover/nuclear destruction and the excitement around outer space brought out by the space race. The spatial metaphor here - claustrophobically being backed up against a wall, the last bastion of humanity’s defense, scuttling left and right in what will inevitably be a vain attempt to stop the endless waves of enemies - created a particularly evocative version of the invasion experience and a thus embedded in the genre the fundamental fear of imminent destruction by an exterior power.

It’s interesting to note that HG Wells’ novel, War of the Worlds (from which Nishikado borrowed the idea of cephalopodic aliens for Space Invaders), was itself a commentary on colonialism. By positioning the human race as the the less technically advanced civilisation in his invasion story, Wells hoped to comment on the brutality of the expansionist actions of the world powers at the time.   

Star Wars was also a key part of the zeitgeist surrounding Invaders, playing a massive role in entrenching outer space as a frontier of fantasy and adventure. Through presenting a galactic Empire that could be severely chastened through the actions of a monomyth hero in a solitary one man fighter, the film also potentially set the groundwork for the classic shmup ‘one vs, an entire armada’ trope. 

Xevious, appearing not long after Invaders, popularised the scrolling journey style - shifting the visual metaphor and the power dynamic to a heroic attack mission rather than Invaders’ doomed last stand. Xevious  also featured a new sub weapon, bombs to be fired at the ground below, matching the torpedoes that played such a critical role in taking down the Death Star. 

On the Japanese side, the lingering memories of WWII and the immediate aftermath meant that the concept of being in conflict with, and then occupied by, a foreign power was not to far from direct experience. Space Battleship Yamato in a way plays out these anxieties in the form of a space fantasy with the Earth as a stand in for Japan. Such narratives seeded the imaginations of shmup designers. 

For America, moving into the 80’s, Cold War fears of Communist takeover were replaced by the anxieties around the meteoric rise of Japan as a world power. The ‘yellow peril’ around an invasion from the East can be seen feeding into pop culture (with varying degrees of racism) in films like Rising Sun and Back to the Future II. This could be particularly felt in response to the increasing influence of Japanese companies in realms that were thought to be fundamentally American, such as the automotive industry and, originally an American invention, video games. As a result arcade shmup games sat on a strange line, creating fantasies about invaders but also being ‘invaders’ themselves.

What this shows is that individuals both making and playing games around this time, due to the global climate, were attuned to the idea of an dangerous external Other. If we have a look at how the Other is represented in shmups, it’s possible to  see the nature of this anxiety and how it reflects some of the other concerns that were around at the time.

In the next part we will look more deeply at the concept of Other along with synchronicity with the machine. Stay tuned to this wave band.

_DYR