We sons of Eichmann: game reflection about “Do not feed the monkeys”

As I was scrolling Ned games website page last week like a normal shopaholic, I saw the premium edition bundle of “Do not feed the monkeys.” is on sale.  I was tempted, but I didn’t buy it eventually. Instead, I wrote this blog post to stop my impulsive decision to buy things I don’t need since I already owned the game and am looking forward to spending money to buy the sequel “Do not feed the monkey 2099”.

A screenshot I took when I was monitoring my rabbit, Yosuke, to see if he was fine (and stalking him) while I was outside.

Aren’t we all monkeys?

Do not feed the monkeys (DNFM for short in this article)  is a life simulation video game developed by Fictiorama Studios in Spain in 2018. The game is inspired by Hitchcocks’ film “Rear Window” and a website called Insecam, which allows users to view hacked CCTV footage worldwide. 

In the game, the player is invited to a secret club to become a spy, monitoring multiple CCTV on the desktop. And in the gameplay, the player will gain information about the character and story background through surveillance. Besides the monitoring, you also need to earn money to support your daily spending, like food and rent, and you also need rest to keep you alive. There’re two ways of making money: going to a part-time job or activating certain storylines so you can earn money from the characters (for example, anonymously providing information to a hunting association about a rare specie). It is possible to help or report the character on CCTV when they are in trouble or doing something terrible, but the club strongly disagreed with this behavior, as the game title, “Do not feed the monkey!”

The inverted utopians

As a very classic dystopian game, DNFM shows what it feels like to be on the side of “big brother.” Based on this frame, I would like to discuss something outside voyeurism or the Orwellian genre of sarcasm in the game but how technology is developing so fast that human beings started to feel shame and anxiety about our existence and the incapabilities of controlling technology. 

‘We Are Inverted Utopians’: The basic dilemma of our age is that ‘we are smaller than ourselves’, incapable of mentally realizing the realities which we ourselves have produced. Therefore we might call ourselves ‘inverted Utopians’: while ordinary Utopians are unable to actually produce what they are able to visualize, we are unable to visualize what we are actually producing.

Günther Anders, 1962

In philosopher Günther Anders’ Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The Obsolescence of Humankind), he first brought up the concept of “Promethean shame,” which refers to the shame of being an “inadequate” human (creature) compared with the “perfect” machine performances and efficiency. Anders then came up with the theory of “Promethean discrepancy,” which refers to the differential between “Vorstellen” (imagining) and “Herstellen” (producing), and it shows that our imagination and our grasp of technology is an inversed slope. The further a technology develops, the bigger the gap between our understanding and what the technology can exactly reach. 

Surveillance technology inventions like CCTV are commonly used in daily life, like elder care, warehouse management, or security. However, with technological development, more complexities, more embodiments, and algorithms are controlled by non-humans. Our decision in the game of whether to rescue a guy trapped in elevators for months at risk of being assassinated by the secret club, expose someone having a secret fetish for money or report something injustice all show our elasticity of ethics.  Considering Anders’ theory, the less we can control and imagine, the less we can take responsibility for, yet what differentiates humans from non-humans are our emotions and moral imagination. And at least in DNFM,  we can still have the power to make our own way in the world.

Personal thoughts (spoiler of the game included)

The reason why I named the title “We sons of Eichmann” (an open letter to Klaus Eichmann, the son of the noted Nazi bureaucrat and genocidaire written by Günther Anders ) is inspired by one of the surveillance in the game is about a former Nazi bureaucrat who missed “the good old days.” In addition, in Anders’ era, the most evident proof of Prometheanism is the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII.

At the beginning of the game, we just happen to receive a message from the secret club asking us to start the “surveillance” job, reporting information to the club routinely even though we don’t even know what the purpose of the club is, and we are asked not to show our sympathy or support to that in-need. As Anders and Hannah Arendt wrote about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the cruelest crime is executed by the most ordinary people; to what extent can we see ourselves playing this kind of role in the game when we want to keep the game going? (Well, you can choose not to help the club, but the games will end immediately) On the other hand, our obedience to technology, using all kinds of surveillance technology to surveil everything we want to keep, also somewhat reflects we are escaping our anxiety about uncertainty, the future, and our incompetence as humans through technology.

References:

Schwarz, E. (2019). Günther Anders in Silicon Valley: Artificial intelligence and moral atrophy. Thesis Eleven, 153(1), 94–112. https://doi-org.eur.idm.oclc.org/10.1177/0725513619863854

Müller, C. J., & Mellor, D. (2019). Utopia inverted: Günther Anders, technology and the social. Thesis Eleven, 153(1), 3–8. https://doi-org.eur.idm.oclc.org/10.1177/0725513619865638