C-Level (Team Waco): Michael Wilson, Eddo Stern, Jessica Hutchins, Brody Condon und and Peter Brinson
Waco Resurrection Videogame, 2003, www.waco.c-level.cc
Waco Resurrection
is a video game, which investigates the siege of the Mount Carmel
Center of the Branch Davidian sect near Waco, Texas, by the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and the FBI in 1993. Exactly ten
years after the siege, in which 82 members of the sect lost their lives
under circumstances that are still unknown – including the leader of
the sect David Koresh (his real name was Vernon Wayne Howell) – the
artist group C-Level, which has six members, programmed a 3D
multiplayer computer and role-playing game that is played from the
perspective of the sect’s leader Koresh.
For this game, the team developed a hard plastic helmet in the shape of
the sect leader’s head (the so-called “Koresh-skin”), which has an
integrated voice-activated interface. The shape of the Koresh helmet
looks like a vector graphic from a computer game. When a player wears
this helmet, the computer-generated game and the reality surrounding
the player mix in a very irritating way – it almost seems as though
something from Koresh is transferred to the player.
As the
game is based on a great deal of authentic material, C-Level describes
Waco Resurrection as an interactive and “subjective documentary”. For
example, the players are bombarded with the distorted sound of Nancy
Sinatra’s song
These Boots Are Made for Walking, an element of
psychological warfare, which the FBI used during the siege of Waco as
well as recordings of negotiations between a FBI psychologist and David
Koresh – these, too, were played extremely loud towards the property of
the Branch Davidians.
Waco Resurrection aims at the dark side
of the American self-image: “The game commemorates the tenth
anniversary of the siege at a unique cultural moment in which holy war
has become embedded in official government policy. In 2003, the spirit
of Koresh has become a paradoxical embodiment of the current political
landscape – he is both the besieged religious other and the logical
extension of the neo-conservative millennial vision. Waco is a primal
scene of American fear: the apocalyptic visionary — an American
tradition stretching back to Jonathan Edwards – confronts the heathen
‘other’ – in Waco Resurrection, the roles are anything but fixed.”(1)
Inke Arns
(1) www.waco.c-level.cc/, 25. 4. 2007. On the problematic
of depicting traumatic historical events in computer games, see Dyske
Suematsu, Understanding the medium of video game, in: Rhizome, 25. 10.
2003, www.dyske.com/index. php?view_id=793, 25.4.2007
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