By Mike Fischer
“You don’t even see me . . . you don’t see anything outside of your game. You don’t see anything that’s real!”
– Jennifer Haley, Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom (2008)
“Just because it’s virtual doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”
– Jennifer Haley, The Nether (2013)
Milwaukee first met brilliant playwright Jennifer Haley in Youngblood Theatre Company’s 2012 production of Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom, which features a multiplayer video game that has hooked the neighborhood kids.
Graphic photo art by James Fletcher
That game and Haley’s play unfold in a suburban enclave of identically nondescript houses – replicating the actual neighborhood in which these kids live. The goal: escape the neighborhood by butchering the zombies, who just happen to resemble the neighborhood’s parents.
It’s a killer concept, giving Haley a wormhole into the way we live now, where it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish what’s virtual from what’s real – and where our fictive selves, from our avatars in games like “World of Warcraft” to the roles we adopt in every e-mail, become who we really are.
Cue Haley’s even more impressive The Nether, which begins in an interrogation room (Haley admits she was partly inspired by “C.S.I.”) where a female detective named Morris interrogates the creator of another, equally troubling online game allowing players to indulge their most twisted fantasies involving sex and power.
Sims, the creator of this ostensibly harmless universe, insists he’s just giving people a chance to blow off steam. Living out their fantasies in a virtual world of digital simulacra, players avoid acting on criminal urges in the real one. Can one commit crimes against virtual images? If a virtual tree falls in a virtual forest, can it even make a real sound?
Moreover, one player in The Nether points out, living our fantasies means allowing our imaginations to run free. It’s what actors do when they embody alternative selves. It’s what each of us does every time we enter the wormhole of a good novel – bearing in mind how many great novels were once banned as pornographic.
Should any government have the right to monitor, shape or even prohibit the worlds we build in our minds, even though they’re merely shadows and spirits that will melt into air? “It’s nothing but images,” Sims insists. “And there is no consequence.”
“Images – ideas – create reality,” Morris counters. “Everything around us . . . began as figments in someone’s mind before becoming a physical or social fact.”
Who is right?
As surveillance of our everyday activity increases, answering that question matters more than ever. Two illustrative examples underscoring why:
Last year, we learned that Amazon hired thousands of people to listen in on everything from our kids’ conversations to intimate pillow talk as recorded by Alexa smart speakers.
And The New York Times Privacy Project has recently shared leaked information involving 50 billion pings from more than 12 million Americans’ smartphones during several months in 2016-17; every movement of those being monitored could be tracked, right down to kids’ favorite stalls at an annual holiday carnival.
Detective Morris works for a quasi-governmental entity that’s been vested with the authority to police and prosecute online activity; it’s not hard to imagine her working for a funhouse mirror version of behemoths like Google or Amazon, Facebook or Twitter. Even if she’s right regarding the bigger philosophical questions explored in Haley’s play, isn’t it wrong that she or anyone else can so readily invade our private lives? Does anyone have the right to destroy our privacy because they’re claiming to save us?
Haley doesn’t answer such questions; that’s our job, in this brave, scary world in which nothing is quite what it seems – and in which truth is even stranger than fiction. Welcome to The Nether.
– Chicago, February 18, 2020