Friday, May 16, 2008
While missiles crashed around him, Zeyad struggled to keep Crash Bandicoot alive. Today, he continues to play, even as Baathist holdouts rage on and his frustrated countrymen demand a better future.
Jan 20, 2004 | While the shock-and-awe bombing raged outside, Zeyad spent a lot of time playing "Crash Bandicoot" on his Playstation. Bandicoot is a humanoid fox who must escape the dangers coming at him from all sides (polar bears, lethal blowfish and so on), and as the walls of Zeyad's family home in Baghdad trembled from the precision-guided aftershocks, the dental student kept putting the agile mammal through his paces.
"It was really strange," Zeyad tells me now by e-mail. "But it was better than having to listen to the bombings." So he played it with the volume blasting. In his hands, Bandicoot died and was reborn, then died again. Meanwhile, outside, airstrikes kept ripping the sky. And so, as he recently wrote of "Crash Bandicoot" on his blog Healing Iraq, "I experience dèjá vu whenever I play it now."
While millions of gamers have their own associations with the game, Zeyad is surely among the first to couple "Crash" to a massive military campaign. But he's likely not the only one -- during the invasion of Iraq, reporters observed American soldiers hunched in the steel wombs of Bradleys and M1s, engrossed in their own portable game consoles, as they rumbled by night toward Zeyad's hometown.
The invasion has been a boon to the country's high-tech consumer market, according to Zeyad. "After the war," he says, "computer and console prices dropped drastically and became available for a larger section of Iraqis. You can get the fastest Pentium IV PC with the best components and accessories at $500, whereas it usually cost $800 before the war ... As to consoles, the cheapest are the Dreamcast at around $80 (or less) and the Playstation at an average of $100. Playstation 2's are more expensive and therefore less common (around $200-$250)."
That the PS2 is openly sold at all is actually another benefit of the war's aftermath, for under U.N. sanctions, units of the Sony console were apparently classified "dual use" devices which Saddam's scientists might bundle up to create a supercomputer, for use in long-range missile guidance. But Zeyad says the PS2 was still available under the dictator's regime, despite that interdiction: "They were smuggled through Jordan and Turkey. Most of these came from Southeast Asia and the United Arab Emirates."
Despite postwar price drops, he continues, "Computers and consoles are not affordable for the majority of Iraqis, and that is why there are so many Internet, LAN, and console cafes opening all over Iraq for people who can't afford them." For as he recently wrote on Healing Iraq, "Iraqis are hardcore gamers. Almost every neighborhood in Baghdad has what you might call a 'videogame cafe' with several consoles where people can play for about a dollar an hour ... . We have a special gamers' district at Bab Al-Sharj at the heart of the city, where you can find hundreds of videogame vendors." (Maybe that's where Hans Blix should have sent his weapon inspectors, since they could have verified evidence of dual use violations by digging up copies of "Grand Theft Auto III.")
Zeyad describes a Baghdad that few in the West know -- certainly not from reports that seem only to depict a Third World city beset on all sides by anarchy, ethnic and religious conflict, and terrorist attack. When the world media reports on Iraqi anger over the Coalition Provisional Authority's failure to restore the electric grid, for example, little is written about what Iraqis are using the power for. There is a difference between reporting that Iraqis are angry at a neighborhood power outage and reporting, say, that a lot of them are irked because the blackout interrupted a killer session of "Counter Strike" at their local LAN cafe.
So Zeyad's insights into his country's burgeoning digital culture provide a missing piece in the American dialog on Iraq's reconstruction, and Iraqis' own perception of Americans. And in his account of that subculture -- and by his own efforts as a wired blogger -- one perceives an Iraq that is ready and essentially equipped, despite temporary appearances, to join the interconnected tapestry of modern democracy.
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