videoludica. game culture 

The Warriors, Rockstar's videogame based on the 1979 movie by Walter Hill, is one of the best experiences you can now buy in a media store. For three reasons.

It wouldn't be an exaggeration to claim that it can be seen as of one the best playable versions of a feature film in the history of videogames. Something has changed for the better: this game is not the average transposition, generally lacklustre or devoid of its own medium soul, but a real prequel with respect to the movie. The game is one intertextual and metatextual project which delves inside the movie's narration, spirit and vision to widen and broaden it into the shape of a playable world, bringing the movie's meaning towards a different expressive register. Rockstar's The Warriors doesn't just make it possible for us to actually play the New-York crossing, desperate escape of Walter Hill's Warriors, headed to their hideout in Coney Island as they are accused of the murder of a super-boss during a mega-meeting of street gangs that would have taken the city to total social subversion. On the contrary, Rockstar Games started from the movie's narration and made a playable experience that, at the same time, re-mediates, emulates, integrates and makes bigger the original one in a way that's both absolutely genuine and definitely enjoyable.

The second reason to appreciate Rockstar's game is the fact that The Warriors is a revival operation that makes a point in a history of aesthetic and linguistic influences between the cinematographic and videoludic media. A history that started with Hill's movie. Many have spoken about The Warriors as a videogame movie ante litteram, due to its structure in stages similar to those of videogames and its street violence themes. Actually, though, it is The Warriors that inspired the classic, coin-operated, Double Dragon-like, typical arcade product of the early eighties. The history of the videoludic violence of beat'em up games has borrowed both figures and themes from a cinematographic genre in which Hill's work stands out as a first. Today, the videogame medium is paying a long-awaited tribute to its original inspiration. And in doing so, it is also revitalizing and pushing in a new direction a genre - that of massive beat'em up games - that had been abandoned for years and is lately becoming the subject of a renewed but superficial revival following the general resurgence of 80s' fashion.

The most important reason to hit on Rockstar's game, however, is the way it manages to act as the latest, carefully planned act of the company to push the envelope of what's visible in the popular, contemporary representation of violence via the video-ludic medium. The digital ultraviolence The Warriors emanates and makes sensible and playable has a different quality with respect to Rockstar's previous attempts. It's gang violence that unveils a new, twisting feel. It plays half-way between the colossal Grand Theft Auto or the savage Manhunt, while expressing gang violence by playable means to produce a new, notable amount of identification. The Warriors' violence is less surreal and massive than Grand Theft Auto's pulp excesses, and it's not comparable to the snuff-movie extremisms of Manhunt. However, its being gang against gang inside an inspired narrative program makes this playable violence truly unique. Rockstar's game, nonetheless, is much more violent than its cinematographic source. In 1979, probably due to rating issues and censorship problems, all Walter Hill had to give to those who were looking for real horrorshow was red paint being thrown in the face of a guy, and only then a punch to the same face. Today, Rockstar can indulge almost freely in the representation of blood and violence at the price of a mere rating sticker. However, the point of excellence in the game experience is the fact that its representation of violence isn't just a tribute to its illustrious literary sources of inspiration: it almost manages to be an instigation for the pursuit of violence outside the game's screen.

A disclaimer is in order here, acting as an important specification on the subject of playable violence. We don't have any intention, in fact, to condemn in any way any representation of violence in the videoludic medium. No way. Furthermore, we are not going to be critically indulgent to those who claim the violence in videogames is something that needs to be stigmatized. In other words, we are in favour of violence being represented and made playable by videogames. Much has been said lately about the evolution of videogames' expressive potential and their need to be acknowledged as not just harmless toys but as works permeated with axiology and cultural, semantic, social and communicative contents. These theories, however, can't go on without a parallel support for those videoludic works that take on themselves the burden of expressing contents as provocative as they can be. Obviously, rating systems are still at work and this article, along with the game, shouldn't in any way be construed as an apology for real sufferings. But on the other hand, speaking about how just and even artistically necessary the depiction of violence is, or seeing in its cathartic moment a necessary part of the creative work, is something that should sound ultimately as being taken for granted. This is something so obvious that the attempt to even examine it seriously would actually make it too complex.

The Warriors is a rejoicing of digitally subversive, ultra-violent potential. The ancestral, baby gang dream living in the contemporary age, populating yesterday's literature and made finally playable. The thumb-controlled vertigo of Burgess' queer thrilling and chilling. However, the game has one own flaw. It enables the player to make up his own street gang, but it doesn't offer full customization or the radical personalization of its appearance. Therefore, it is going to force the writer into leaving the controller home and looking for ultra-violent mates in real life. Is this part of a hidden agenda?