What If I’m Actually Into Biplanes?
A Fugue on Time Pilot, Richthofen’s War & Me
In Dissident Gardens, I wrote about a kid, raised as a Quaker, who’s into video arcade games, but wants to avoid symbolic violence. The kid isn’t me, but his relationship to Time Pilot was derived from my own.
Here’s an excerpt:
What option, for the Quakerest kid at the arcade? First, master Frogger. Guide the frogs across the highway, navigate the floating logs, usher them to safety in the bays, a perfectly nonviolent practice involving stewardship of a small quadrant of the Peaceable Kingdom. Presumably the frogs, having earned grace in a world of snares, could go now to nestle at the feet of the lion. Sergius turned himself into a Frogger savant.
The older kids, on their way out to the alley for a cigarette or a covert beer, would come to marvel at the wunderkind’s score, on a game they’d been too impatient or slaughter-minded to invest enough quarters to master. Watch that little frog go, man — he never misses!
Sergius might be more serious about saving hexagonal frogs than any human walking the earth.
He might be the George Fox of Frogger.
Q-Bert was another option, presenting a universe devoid of guns, bombs, or Pacman cannibalism: the little surrogate creature, dewdrop or booger or whatever he was formed of, merely leaped and dodged, attempting to stay alive in his peculiar world, a floating pyramidal stairstep adrift in outer space. But Frogger and Q-Bert were, at last, too easy and too cartoonish, both games for little children unwilling to confront the universe’s starkness even in arcade form. For the Quakerest kid, neither made much of a statement.
The search for a video game with a gun button, but one he chose to renounce, led Sergius to Time Pilot.
The game was simple: your tiny plane roved the screen’s center, curling in the air, rotating three-hundred-and-sixty degrees, as swarms of tiny planes entered from all sides. They shot at you, and you shot at them. You began by killing World War I biplanes, your airspace steadily filling with sitting-duck Red Barons. Time Pilot, as designed, was a massacre.
When you advanced a level, you moved through time. Next, and faster, were the World War II fighters. Level three, modern Air Force jets. Beyond that and you moved into a Sci-Fi future, the more typical arcade motifs.
Time Pilot as played by the Quakerest kid was even simpler. It might approach a Buddhist exercise of some sort. Sergius ignored the flat red button for firing his guns, stayed centered with his whole being on the joystick — on flying. His plane was Silent. Flown thus, attentively, swirling and diving, evading collisions and the intermittent red fire of his enemies, Sergius found he never had to die. The drowsy action of those prop planes, even when they massed, as they did, in uncountable squadrons, was a cinch for him to evade. Score at zero — Time Pilot’s designers had included no reward for merely staying alive, as opposed to points for kills — he remained stuck in Time. His enemies never grew faster, only kept languorously drifting on-screen, until soon Sergius’s joystick action drew vast clouds of the unkilled along behind, turning as he turned.
If his Frogger achievements had caught notice, now Sergius drew crowds. For one thing, a video game sounded wrong with nothing exploding, with nothing changing. Worse, the affront of the untouched red button. More than one hand reached out in frustration wishing to tap it for him, wrecking the scenario.
“Shit, he’s got the whole German Army on his tail. All you’d have to do now is turn and fire and you’d practically set a record!”
“Yeah, but then he’d move up a level. This way he plays all night on a single quarter.”
“He’s cheating, you mean.”
“Go find your own game and leave him alone.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Find another game or go beat off in the alley. He’s done when he’s done.”
In my current novel-in-progress I wrote about kids playing WWI flying aces a second time. I committed this repetition unconsciously, and only noticed afterwards. It’s too soon to be excerpting this novel, but I lopped out some dialogue, just to offer a taste.
“If it’s all the same to you, why don’t we play Richthofen’s War?”
“Biplanes? Far out.”
“Of course, our aces have a great number of kills under their belt, so you may find them… formidable.”
“What the hell, muthafuckas, let’s give it a go.”
“I’m attacking you.”
“You’re not quite in range.”
“As soon as I am.”
“I’m an Ace. With the bonuses I’ve accumulated you’ll find my Sopwith Snipe is virtually impregnable.”
“Attack!”
“You probably don’t want to come so close to my rear guns. If I’m given the chance to return fire it could be costly.”
“Attack muthafucka attack.”
“Okay, you can stop saying that now. Just roll. I’ll defend. Oh, that’s awkward. At that range I’ve taken six points of damage. Impressive, I’ll admit. Now prepare to accept return fire.”
“What’s that asterisk there?”
“Where?”
“He’s right, you know. He gets to roll from the Critical Hit Table on a twelve at that range.”
“Ah, right.”
“I roll again, right?”
“You roll again.”
“What’s it say?”
“Twelve. Pilot Killed. Aircraft Shot Down.”
“Too bad, I win.”
“He killed you.”
“The dice…you… picked them up… and then dropped them again…”
“No, I rolled them good.”
“You –“
“Look, they’re two feet from my hand, from where I let them go, for fuck’s sake.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I think I understand pretty well, I shot down his plane, right?”
“No, but you don’t understand. He’s been building up that Ace for months.”
“The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”
“I… you shouldn’t have been able to do that. It was a severely lucky shot.”
“Of course it was lucky. They’re dice.”
What was I to make of this unconscious rhyme? Was I actually into biplanes? I’d never consciously identified with any interest in them. I was never a wargames kid, not for real. Hexagons are exhausting.
Then it occurred to me that the sole project I completed in a sixth grade wood shop class was a Red Baron biplane, following a generic set of instructions. Somehow the finished object has stuck around. It hung on a wire in my father’s painting studio for years, and then I reclaimed it as a toy for my own children.
In moving from writing about a video arcade game, in 2011, to writing about a forgotten board game made of laminated cardboard — plus dice, notebooks and pencils — in 2022, I seem to be migrating backwards in cultural time.
The wood shop plane carves further back, to a stage of play rooted in tangible devices — though by the time I constructed it, I was already well past toy vehicles, into comic books, movies, and rock ’n’ roll. (And board games.)
The passage of these biplanes through my writing seems to recapitulate the mysterious interference pattern between digital and material culture that forms my recurrent subject in this writing on Medium.
Of course there’s a common denominator, for anyone roughly my age, when it comes to World War I biplanes.
I never thought of myself as a Snoopy person (I’m more of a Linus guy), but I have tended to ally with Snoopy people on my life’s journey.
One pleasure in doing these pieces is that while googling around for illustrations, I always blunder into aspects of my topic I couldn’t have imagined. In this instance, it was that “Snoopy and the Red Baron” wasn’t only a pop song it was a game, (at least) twice.
Once it was a video game, and once a board game. Go figure.
That’s another rhyme good enough to make me feel I’ve obeyed some unconscious necessity, and for an end to this particular fugue.
