Switzerland is pumping out more than just high quality chocolates and super-secret bank accounts these days. The resolutely independent central European nation has also stepped up its production of religious intolerance as evidenced by a recent national referendum banning the construction of minarets throughout the country. Similar to the hide-and-go-seek racism employed by the hijab haters of the French Republic, members of the Swiss People's Party and the Federal Democratic Union whipped up anti-muslim sentiment in November by claiming that the offending architecture, which is only the most visible part of a larger mosque structure, was just the tip of the Islamic iceberg. Left unchecked, supporters claimed, Islam would loom as large on the political landscape as the Matterhorn over the Alps.
Into this hotbed of Alpine arrogance, Minarett Attack [sic] emerged online as a game firmly in support of the ban and its underlying logic of cultural overwhelm. The game comprises a single scene: a quaint mountain village that, based on the monuments depicted, is at least part Zurich and part Geneva. A small Swiss flag flies atop a distant mountain peak. The light oom-pah-pah of accordion music fills the air, while the entire scene is bathed in the soothing glow of an alpine sunrise.
The game's mechanics are essentially Whac-a-mole. Gold colored minarets emerge slowly at random points throughout the landscape, like missiles emerging from silos. The player fires at the minarets with an aiming reticule, and they recede back into the ground when hit. Predictably, minarets begin to emerge too fast to hit. If a given minaret remains unhit longer than a second or two, it becomes permanent, impervious to any further shooting.
That's when the game really revs up.
Once a minaret is permanent, fez-sporting mullahs emerge onto the balconies of the buildings and begin a call to prayer. As more mullahs issue their calls, the soundscape becomes a cacophony of overlapping chants echoing throughout the land. The player may shoot the mullahs for additional points, but the game appears to be calculated so that it is impossible to shoot both at the mullahs and at the rising minarets and be successful in both pursuits. Notably, the mullahs do not die when shot, but they do fade away in body and in voice.
Play continues until either the clock runs out or until 7 minarets have become permanent. In any case, the closing screen reads "Die Schweiz ist voller Minarette" ("Switzerland is full of minarets"), followed by an exhortation to vote yes on the national minaret ban.
With coordination, it is possible to keep the minaret count below 7 for the entire duration of the game. However, the game seems to be rigged in that a few minarets are simply impervious to shots from the start and become established no matter how much they are shot at. Therefore, all game play leads to the same "rhetoric of failure," outcome so often trotted out in editorial games.
At the level of discourse Minarett Attack is an effective editorial game arguing against what the designers posit as a cultural mismatch and invasion represented by religious muslims in Switzerland. The minarets are brassy and gold against the calm grays and blues of the native Swiss architecture. They fail even to obey the laws of perspective, rising to the same threatening size no matter how near or far they appear in the landscape. The mullahs' chants quickly overwhelm the quaint Swiss accordion. Everything about the minarets communicates incompatibility and dissonance. The end result is a kind of suspended cultural indeterminacy in which the idyllic Swiss character has been not replaced, but inexorably transformed by foreign elements.
Minarett Attack follows several other xenophobic and paranoid games of Swiss origin developed by Inter Network Marketing for the Swiss People's Party. Described elsewhere, these games imagine Switzerland as constantly at risk of invasion, its culture always vulnerable to contamination. Minarett Attack plays out this fantasy of contagion, one in which the Switzerland at the end of the game is invariably unrecognizable as the frictionless collection of misty-eyed clichés presented at the start.
The mechanics of Whac-a-mole lend themselves generally to the cultural anxiety on display in Minarette Attack. The enemy minarets are perceived as unpredictable, relentless and above all renewable. They have no context, appearing totally at random, and no matter how often they are exterminated there are always more to come.
To understand these features more clearly, one need only consider a counter example: Space Invaders. In this classic arcade game, the enemy is entirely comprehensible--orderly, predictable, and once killed remains dead. In Whac-a-mole, the feeling of being under attack--that is urgency--is compounded by the feeling of futility. No matter how much you fight, it will never be enough. Yet to give up is to become immediately overwhelmed. A catch-22 par excellence.
The official Whac-a-mole web site touts this futility as inherent to the course of the game play. An urgent, yet decidedly futile struggle is not an epiphenomenon of the game play, it's the main point of the game play:
[The moles] get faster and faster until they are quicker than you are. They can be quicker because there are five of them in a standard game. Yes, you can beat the moles, you'll just have to grow five arms.
A game that produces a sense of futility combined with an unpredictable, irrational, and numerically overwhelming enemy is a logical game structure for a community that sees itself as under attack in an existential culture war. This undoubtedly factors into the preponderance of the Whac-a-mole mechanic among all such games of cultural anxiety, whether the enemy be Islamic mullahs, homosexuals, or Mexican Immigrants. Whac-a-mole allows the player to experience anger, paranoia and defeat simultaneously.
It's no coincidence that a game that expresses a certain intolerance of Islam should arise at this particular moment. The West's latest doings in Afghanistan and Iraq are merely the latest salvos in a cultural tug-of-war dating back some 13 centuries , and the consequences are deadly.
One of the persistent features of existential culture wars, according to Reza Aslan, is that they are by their nature wars that must be won, and yet are unwinnable. The stakes are too high to capitulate--the future of civilization is deemed to lie in the balance--and yet combatants will never generate enough fire power ever to win once and finally. The only option then is war without end. And whether in game space or real space the result is perpetual failure.
