Independent Games - Landlord Vigilante

By Juan Devis

After achieving cult status for cleverly weaving stories of gang violence and redemption, and for pushing the envelope to gain some serious street-cred in the gaming industry, Rockstar Games found themselves in the middle of a national controversy when they released the last installment of their inner city saga: San Andreas.

Story goes that a fan of the game in Holland began to mess around with the code and "uncovered" a series of pornographic sequences hidden in the main directory of the script. The producers maintained that the gamer wrote the new code, but the gamer insisted that the scenes were already written into it, they simply needed to be unlocked.

San Andreas became an Adults Only game in a matter of days, and the PC version was taken off the market and replaced by a closed console version available only for Playstation and X-Box. To avoid any future controversy, many game producers and developers are beginning to take the same steps.

It's a dangerous road to follow, because some of the most daring media produced in and about gaming exists because users - fans, artists and aficionados - can modify the content of an already existing game to create their own. The Mod community, as it is commonly called, has grown so fast in the last few years and their influence so strong, that many of the "new" games produced by modders have become even more popular than the originals.

Likewise, Machinima, whose object is to modify scenes, characters and narratives of games to produce videos and films, has become a new form of emerging gameplay. The gamer, as producer, must study, learn and deconstruct a game in order to create his or her own Machinima video. The original in this case becomes a tool, a library or repository of content to be used and modified for other creative purposes.

The allure and fascination that exists in manipulating and modifying the original, though, has created what I call fan-gaming. There are only a few people out there who have managed to distance themselves enough from the original, and use these access points as tools to study, critique and produce new media work that truly opens, in a literal sense, not only the code of a game, but its fundamental ideology. Eddo Stern is one of them.

Back in 1999, Eddo Stern, a former Israeli soldier and avid game player, produced one of the first and most daring examples of Machinima. Modifying content from various war games on the market, Stern created a non-fiction film, Sheik Attack, about an Israeli commando on a mission inside Lebanon during the six-day war of 1966.

The film's perspective jumps from wide angle establishing shots of choppers flying through the desert and commandos traversing through the night, to first person reconnaissance shots of the action on the ground. We always have a gun, a rifle or a machine gun, in our hands, but we are unaware of the final target of our mission.

As the film comes to an end, we kick a door open and enter a room. A pixelated avatar falls to it knees and begins to plead with us. We don't care, we simply (and mechanically) pull the trigger once, twice, and the body falls to the ground, dead. It's only then when it hits us; clicking was not possible in this film or game, or whatever it was; we were at the mercy of its narrative, and although the images used to narrate this history were stolen from fictional video games, the results are nothing game-like; they seem too real to ignore, or better yet, too real to turn off.

Although produced almost ten years ago, Sheik Attack, Stern's "mis-rememberence of a long lost Zionist Utopia," as he refers to it, still continues to mirror the realities of a region torn by history and memory. Sheik Attack updates the conflict for the clickerati generation, adding a new layer of content (and form) to the discourse and debate over the purpose of war, art and video games.

Stern continued to tackle the erosion of memory and history in his incredible smooth video ride: Vietnam Romance. A genre in itself, Nam games now abound in stores giving us different experiences of the rock disillusion of the Vietnam War. Stern cleverly juxtaposes game imagery with MIDI extracts of '60s rock tracks and recreates classic scenes from Hollywood movies to make his point.

A chopper slides over the landscape, for example, as we hear the opening track sequence of the TV series MASH, or get a glimpse of Charlie Sheen as he dies over and over again in the classic sacrificial scene from Platoon. There are more references and visual puns that ultimately seduce you into a state of abandonment or rather... forgetfulness, because the video, with killings and all, is actually a pretty cool, smooth ride, just like Apocalypse Now was; or the rock - hallucinatory - opera of the era.

Stern's latest video, Landlord Vigilante, a collaboration with artist and writer Jessica Hutchins, is his first venture into the inner city of Los Angeles. Working off a neo-noir text written by Hutchins and loosely based on a true story, Stern and Hutchins deliver us a revisionist and ironically reactionary digital documentary on landlords in Los Angeles.

Landlord Vigilante tells the story of a voyeuristic-migrant-cab-driver-turned-landlady, who has nothing in life except for her fierce belief in individual freedoms and the marketplace. Abandoned by her husband and with no means to survive, Leslie-Shirley decides to move to Los Angeles to re-invent herself. She becomes a cab driver to make some spare change and saves enough money to buy her first piece of real estate. Years later, Leslie-Shirley becomes a savvy, ruthless, and horny landlady in the gentrified neighborhood of Echo Park. Her luck runs cold, however, when the gangster vatos of the hood call her a rata for apparently calling the blues on them. Leslie-Shirley dies alone, in the backyard of one of her properties.

It seems only obvious for Stern and Hutchins to have used San Andreas as source material for this doc exposé. Due to the controversy around the hidden porn code of the game, Stern had to buy an earlier bootleg version on eBay from Russia. Other games were also used and modified for Landlord Vigilante, such as The Sims, but San Andreas became its visual backbone and main reference because it provided them with almost all the elements they needed: a ghetto, with all its usual suspects, and a town that could be imagined as Los Angeles or not.

As the video game version of gangster rap, San Andreas is consciously irresponsible and exaggerated; it turns inner city poverty and violence on its head and delivers it as entertainment. But when Hutchins and Stern layer their noir text over modified images of gangster avatars walking aimlessly in front of abandoned couches without purpose or goal, the results are simply hilarious. Stern and Hutchins manage to strip the game completely out of context, allowing us to see how video games shape the way in which we see and define the world under the guise of entertainment. As one of Stern's critics points out: "Stern plays on the possibility that the digital fake-out isn't fake after all."

Stern's Machinima videos will be remembered as some of the first excavations into the grammar of our gaming culture. From entertainment to social documentary and art and with a high dose of humor, Stern and Hutchins have managed to question the very foundation of games, giving us a glimpse into the many ways in which we passively consume our digital culture. This pair of digital renegades though, are optimists at heart, they mess around with this stuff, not just to critique it, but also to have fun.