Shmups X Metaphor - Part 03 - The Other : Biological, Mechanical, Cyborgian

The Other is a powerful concept that looms over many shmups. If we unfurl its meaning and the way it rears its head from beneath the surface in different guises, we can learn a great deal about the cultural anxieties that give power to this creeping shadow - and how we ultimately must become more and more like it in order to survive...

What is The Other

The Other in a ‘Space Invasion’ style shmup responds to the most primordial of preoccupations that we have as humans; it is burnt into our protoconsciousness; we fear that which we do not understand, that which seems profoundly different from us, that which exists beyond the borders of our awareness, that which is not human, or not human like us.

The representations in space shmups that are most often used as a symbol for Otherness itself are alien monsters and genocidal robots. In this way, the inhuman Other takes several key forms - the biological and the mechanical, and the combination of the two.

Biological Other

Biological horrors are made of tainted flesh. They are toxic, mutated. They cannot be reasoned with, they only devour other life. 

The origins of this trope in shmups again appears as early as in Space Invaders. As mentioned above, the designer borrowed the octopus martians from War of the Worlds to represent the antagonistic force. Fleshy tentacles expressed something profoundly inhuman; easy to blast as a means to unwind, easy to fear as a distinct Other.

The insectile is another direction that often serves as a representation of biological Other. In Galaga the mental projection of glossy carapaces, segmented limbs and crunching mandible mouthpieces create something profoundly disconcerting. The use of bees in Dodonpachi seems to also connect back to this trope. There are interesting shmup reinforcing metaphors that come out of this cohesion too: fighting against a swarm mindless drones shooting their endless poison darts before they expire, the increasing in veracity of their attacks as you make your way into the deepest part of the nest towards the queen, the ruler and center of the hive mind. 

Looking at these two forms of representation one could also argue that the pair come from two key forms of animal life that are present in Japan. With both childhood insect collecting as a key summer hobby and as an island country with a dominance of sea life, it is perhaps not surprising to see these two forms become fictionally expanded.

The concept of biological Other took a more dramatic turn with the release of Alien and consequently R-type which played with H.R. Giger’s erotomechanical style and took on the ideas of the parasitic and impregnation. Referencing the ideas of infestation and fusion, such imagery forces us as humans to confront our nature effectively as biomass, no more special than any other form of living matter, and with no profound barrier protecting us.

Consequently, R-type, and the endless shmups that have built on this aesthetic, also build on the themes tied to the Alien films themselves. In these fictions the biological other is the force of evolution itself - it is not immoral because it is not evil, our standards of morality do not apply to it. Is is alive and seeks to expand. It is a dark mirror to our own society and what we do to others.

Arguably what all these fears of a biological other show is a creeping anxiety around irrelevance- of not being able to survive in a rapidly changing reality. 

As humans and as humanity we need to need to fight for our own relevance as beings that exist. Life can sometimes feel more like an act of pure survival and this overlaps with what it is to play shmup games - to existence in the face of an ever increasing onslaught of purposeful destruction. Potentially this is another exorcising action that shmups serve - these games give you something that you can fight against, a metaphorical enemy that is actually possible to gain some command over.

Cyborgian Other

One of the other elements that is key to much of Giger’s art, and consequently the shmups that draw from it and R-type as a base, is the fusion or intersection of flesh and the machine-like. This conglomeration creates discomfort, being shown as largely unnatural. This is life made unclean, being interfered with through the infestation of technology. These horrors must be destroyed to restore the natural order between these fundamental opposites.

Mechanical Other

An alternate other that can often appear is that of the pure machine, the artificial intelligence, the genocidal robot army. Once again they cannot be understood, they cannot be reasoned with. They do not respect life. 

The idea of a machine uprising has been around for a while (since 1920 with Rossum's Universal Robots, in fact) but in the shmup era this most firmly existed in the form of the Terminator films. A central AI creating an army of machine warriors to wipe out the human race was a theme that Shmups could easily get behind, a central computer being an excellent doal for a daring last ditch attack mission to save humanity.

The notion that a machine class will rise and take over can once again be tied to a fear of becoming irrelevant. In a world rapidly becoming technologised and in a future that seems highly uncertain the threat of a systematized/automated Other becomes even more potent.

At one with the Machine

In all of this, it is interesting that what most often represents the ‘human’ is actually a machine - the player in the form of the pristine chromium fighter. 

This prototype battle mage becomes the pure and noble force of good responsible for cleansing the world of the tainted biomechanical other. But ironically, what this ultimately means is that the combo of flesh and machine is a factor that is also sometimes reflected in the hero experience. The barrier between human and technology becomes blurred in the search for the most effective synergy, the most battle capable pilot/ship fusion. 

In some ways this ties into the idea of corruption. You become like that which you ultimately fear, that which you are trying to destroy; forced into a murky space where the ends justify the means. But this representation of tech/meat fusion also mirrors the desire of players to become one with the game machine - to better immerse, become one with the digital experience..

This is a preoccupation that advertisers and tech manufacturers have been playing on for many years, suggesting that particular piece of hardware will allow you to break down the remaining barriers and draw ever closer to the asymptote of flawless synergy and telepresence. Lagless minimum throw arcade sticks provide the promise of direct connection with your fighter in the same way that a neural link would in the game fiction.

This fetishization of fusion has been articulated more recently and even more specifically with the decidedly cyborgian Hori PeriBorg ORE Commander, a device which uses vibrating motors to oscillate fingers and thus allow for high speed shmup button tapping. 

The desire for direct connection with the datastream of the game also comes through in the onscreen readouts and created as part of the recent M2 overhauls. The human increasingly in tune with the machine, through data readouts that emulate the cockpit of a fighter craft or just the raw data produced by the world, ready to be consumed by an appropriately attuned cyberbrain.

Image from zhuanlan.zhihu.com

In the next and final part we look at some of the most common shmup aesthetic tropes, their ties to history and their subtle meanings.

_DYR