HARDCORE KILLOGRAPHY
(This essay contains spoilers for the 1996 game Harvester, which contains and depicts explicit and violence subject matter such as: cannibalism, gore, sexual violence. Reader discretion is advised.)
Harvester is the seven hour buildup to a punchline.
A woman peers into a dark room, where a young man hunches over a clunky desktop, loudly typing away. He’s playing the game Harvester itself, and when she expresses her disapproval, he mumbles “it’s cool,” in detached monotone. The mother grimaces, then says the iconic lines:
“You’ll rot your mind playing games like that. Don’t you know people that watch violence become violent themselves?”
And her son, who at this point, is a serial killer, responds “That’s bullshit, mom.”
Harvester was the swan song for Dallas based games studio DigiFX Interactive, released in 1996, a year before the studio’s dissolution. It was pitched, by and according to writer and lead developer Gilbert P. Austin, to make a splash, to be so out there and high concept it would make video games art, put DigiFX (at the time Future Vision) up there with the big boys. This seemingly never happened. Harvester, released just at the precipice of major technological leaps, was quickly displaced, both in games and media technology. Unfortunately, it’s tough to scale just how well Harvester performed upon release (though the closure of DigiFX may grant some clues). The internet, still young, was yet to harbor the brunt of gaming culture, and much of the game’s immediate paratext came by way of magazine and newspaper coverage. The game itself, a point and click adventure with middling FMV graphics was quickly overshadowed by newer, shinier displays of virtual violence. And made for the MS-DOS, it is too old for modern hardware to run, so its current version on games distributor sites Steam and GOG come in with a built in emulator, which blows up the screen into barely-decipherable pixels. Like everything within the game, Harvester itself is anchored into its time.
The game follows Steve, an eighteen year old boy from the 90s who is whisked away to the town of Harvest, a surreal simulacrum of 1950s suburbia. He wakes there one day, having lost his memory, and as he meanders through his home and speaks to his odd, stilted family, he learns that he’s getting married in two weeks. Attempting to uncover his lost identity invites confusion, anger, and maybe the stock phrase: “You’ve always been a kidder Steve.” The core gameplay loop involves Steve traveling through different locales in Harvest and talking to the eccentric townsfolk. The player will quickly pick up that one: the people of Harvest are seemingly obsessed with observing, contemplating, or performing acts of sex and violence, and that two: there is a shadowy, enigmatic organization in charge called The Lodge. As Steve investigates further, the more he is convinced that infiltrating The Lodge will grant him answers, and the game follows that progression as he completes tasks for his initiation. These tasks will escalate in severity, beginning as benign pranks and ending in violent crime.
By the end of the game, Steve will be a serial killer. Kind of.
In this sense, Harvester has remained stubbornly topical: it is a videogame that tries to tackle the question of whether games cause violence. Released in 1996, three years after DOOM and two years before Columbine, Harvester spilled its gore and viscera onto a hotbed of public discourse. Politicians like Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman and Wisconsin Senator Herbert Kohl were making the question of videogame violence a point on their platforms. Two years prior, fervor over the violence in Mortal Kombat led to the creation of the ESRB. The same year Harvester was released, psychologist David Walsh founded advocacy NPO the National Institute on Media and the Family. The developers at DigiFX knew this all too well: in one publicity stunt, producer Lee Jacobson tried to get Harvester onto one of NIMF’s watchlists. This too was unsuccessful, though the game was banned in Germany.
This is due in no small part to what’s perhaps the reason it’s been able to cultivate a strong cult following: the horrible incredible unmitigated violence of its FMV cutscenes. FMV, or full-motion video, are pre rendered video scenes that were commonly used to save on memory, or simply to break out of graphical limitations. (Take for example, early 3D games where the quality of character and background models shift noticeably between cutscenes and gameplay.) In Harvester, every single character is represented by live action actors. In gameplay they’re represented by portraits and animated sprites, but in the FMV scenes they are rendered in full motion, further enhanced by Harvester’s low-poly 3D backgrounds, dated effects, and acting of varying quality. There’s a kind of fun to trying to find all the bizarre ways Steve can die. He can get shot by his mother when walking in on her doing a BDSM scene, he can get shot by the ten year old paperboy, he can even be shot by a trigger happy WWII veteran, who at the exact same time sets off a nuclear armageddon in Harvest’s missile base, which is there for some reason. However, the game does not revolve around Steve, violence is integral to Harvest, and will appear without him. It is often in these moments that the game leans into its exploitative aspects, gore and violence on full display. In one infamous cutscene from the tail end of the game, a woman lies on the ground half naked, three children dressed like Steve tearing into her thighs. She laments her loneliness as a mother, how no one seems to understand how tough it is to raise children. Meanwhile the children chorus: “mmm mommy you are good!”
Harvester takes the comparison between horror and humor and runs with it, its surreal humor often deployed alongside the game’s odd and stilted scenes of violence. Early on, the player will stumble onto the school, and it quickly becomes apparent due to the teacher’s voice delivery and the bloody baseball bat in the corner of the room, that she is sadistically beating the children. During a nuclear bomb drill, the children are instructed to duck in the hallway and cover their heads, and as the teacher goes by, surveying the students, one sits up and asks, “if an A-bomb hits, what good does it do to duck and cover?” The game bafflingly cuts to a Loony Toons-esque transition of the child’s face spinning, before cutting to a shot of his shattered head. Later, Steve, upon learning of the death of a familiar townsperson and ally, runs to her house, to find a bloody head and spine in her bed. The sheriff declares she’s died of natural causes. Steve naturally responds with shock, to which the Sheriff simply shrugs and says: “You can’t live without a spine son, nothing more natural than that.”
These quirks feed into a larger aspect of the game’s tone. Simply put: it’s janky as hell, constantly in a gray zone where it’s awkward enough to feel off, but not so awkward as to be intolerable. Steve’s walk cycle is infamously strange. He is stiff in all the wrong places, and walks like he’s had an accident in his pants. The combat mechanics in the game are regrettably unpolished for a major gameplay aspect, Steve’s hits having all the precision of a pachinko machine. Harvest itself is delightfully strange, straddling the line between incoherency and surreal whimsy. It isn’t a “so bad it’s good” object, there’s a lot of work that went into the game and paid off. It all comes together to take on an almost Sontagian “naive camp” quality, the game trying and failing at presenting a cohesive unit. This naivete is cinched, made almost tragic, by how Harvester wants to be so much more than a Twin Peaks-esque small town mystery. This was going to be the game that put DigiFX on the map. Gilbert P. Austin wanted to make capital letter Art.
Unfortunately, remarkably, Harvester has ambitions beyond gory schlock. By the end of the game, Steve will be a serial killer.
One of the first characters Steve encounters is his supposed younger brother, Hank, seated in front of the TV, where he’ll remain for the rest of the game. He’s a petulant brat of a child, constantly threatening to tell on Steve for distracting him from his show: Range Ryder’s Cowboy Roundup. Starring the titular Range Ryder, the show is about “heathen injuns” meeting gruesome ends. Steve is horrified as they watch Ryder shoot a man in the stomach, intestinal spaghetti flowing out of the cavity “Your mother lets you watch that stuff?” “Sure. It’s part ‘a history, what made America great.” Later on, Steve can meet Ryder in the flesh. It’s unclear where the actor ends and the character begins, and when Steve confronts him about the nature of his show, Ryder defends it with patriotic dogma. America, he declares, would not exist without the sheer destruction leveled against the land’s indigenous population. Those who worry about violent media, he says, do so because their communities are already built on so much blood they don’t even need to contemplate the role violence has played in their lives. Considering that it is a 1953 town, it’s hard not to tie his speech to white flight. Steve echoes contemporary politicians when he asks Ryder about studies that correlate violent media consumption with violent behavior. He “wins” the argument by default: Ryder isn’t really a person, what with his cowboy outfit and constant TV announcer voice. When he speaks about genocides against native Americans, he is evoking racist phrases and tropes while saying criticisms of America with an affirmative affect. He’s a strawman, his character evoking “Cowboys versus Indians” and old Hollywood westerns. Designed to lose, he deflects the argument, saying that if a child watches his show, it reflects on the child, not him. It is a particularly systemic vision of violence: the violence performed by Ryder and later conducted by Hank himself aren’t some kind of national conspiracy, or even due to the machinations of The Lodge, rather they do what they do out of intense dedication to American hegemony. It is a criticism of the American project, that it was borne from the blood, sweat and bones of its racialized members, that’s not wrong. It is in fact very ahead of its time within videogames in this respect, but Harvester doesn’t really care to follow this thread to its conclusion. Violence that exonerates the state is not really what the game cares about.
In late 2003, Dr. David Walsh of NIMF suggested a new term to describe media with brutal violence, media like Range Ryder’s Cowboy Roundup. “Killographic” is what he came up with, the neologism likening such media to pornography. He asks parents to think of the children, asks them to consider why should children be exposed to killography, considering that we’ve generally understood that they should be kept from pornography. He notably does not illuminate why pornography is not shown to children, instead appealing to a nebulous common sense. His thoughts on pornography can be easily inferred through this comparison and the nigh-apocalyptic ways he describes the proliferation of killography, referring to the times as those of “sorrow, anger, or disgust,” calling it an “epidemic,” likening media to disease. And diseases aren’t dealt with through consideration and interesting discussion, but with annihilation. There is a cynical impression that Walsh is intentionally trying to piggyback off of American sexuality taboos to essentially attack art he does not agree with, Walsh worked closely with Senators Lieberman and Kohl, and porn is a heavily contested and stigmatized genre. What results is the unspoken belief that killography creates in children violent behavior, essentially grooms them into violence.
It is through such a reading that one can infer that Ryder, a symbol of the violent state and the town’s premier killographer, grooms Hank and other children like him into violence. But if Hank is groomed by Ryder, and Ryder by the metaphysical America itself, then who turned Steve? The answer is technically The Lodge, the tasks they hand to Steve–scratching a car, retrieving cloth, stealing from the barbershop, burning down the only diner in town (and indirectly causing the murder suicide of owner and her daughter), and crypt theft–building up to inevitable violence. And my god, the violence. The last section of the game, taking place within the physical structure of The Lodge, is a gauntlet of surreal landscapes and hostiles. Steve will encounter cannibal chefs, prostitutes, even one of his neighbors, just to name a few, and he will fight through all of them. The onus however is placed entirely on Steve as the active participant, unlike Range Ryder The Lodge as the villainous party is both blamed by default and yet impervious to blame. The Lodge, like Ryder, is just a device, but for a different reason entirely.
The word I’m currently using in conjunction with killography is “grooming.” While I mean to evoke the apocalyptic, moral panic nature of David Walsh’s views on videogames and unspoken views on pornography, it bears emphasizing that words have meanings, and this word’s meaning has been misused more than most. Grooming is a charged word, it’s the term used to describe how pedophiles abuse and acclimate children to that abuse. In the last fifty years however, its meaning has been conveniently stretched: “groomer libel,” “pedojacketing,” are terms coined to describe the practice of accusing queer people of child abuse, that their presence “grooms” children to become queer, in ways mirroring how movies, comics, and videogames have been accused of making children violent. In more niche fandom discourse, grooming has become a particular point of concern, a growing contingent of fans using grooming as a rhetorical tactic against “problematic” ships and topics in fanwork. This bears keeping in mind, because Harvester isn’t only about violence: it seemingly considers violence and sexuality as the two sides of the same coin, the town of Harvest a hive of degeneracy.
Stephanie Pottsdam, aged 18, is the girl that Steve is supposed to marry. She too, has amnesia, and has been grounded by her parents. She’s deathly afraid of Harvest however, and tells Steve to steer as far away from the townsfolk and The Lodge. Her feelings are not unfounded: her father, Ralph Pottsdam, is the closest the game gets to a miniboss, a lecherous man who watches Stephanie through a peephole in the bathroom and molests Karin, the eight year old daughter of the diner owner. The great twist of Harvester is that it was all a videogame: Steve and Stephanie have been abducted and placed in a VR system designed by mad scientists looking to create serial killers. But Stephanie is not a subject of this experiment: she’s an object through which the game ties violence and sexuality. Where Steve grows more violent, she becomes more sexual. As the game goes on, she begins to demand sex from Steve, by the end, she lives exclusively in a set of black lingerie. She’s wearing that black lingerie, simpering on the floor of The Lodge, when the Sergeant-at-Arms informs Steve’s place in the world, and tells him the key to leaving the simulation is Stephanie’s skull and spine. This is the site of the player’s only real choice: kill Stephanie and return to the real world, or die in Harvest, die in the simulation. The entire point of Stephanie then is to further Steve’s arc into violence, in her vulnerability and death she is both the sexual object and the violent object. The whole point of her character is to be a lamb to the slaughter, to, in a scene that references Mortal Kombat’s “spine rip,” become Steve’s first real kill.
In Stephanie’s blood Steve is inoculated, the horror he expressed earlier at Range Ryder’s becomes joy. He hitchhikes home, kills the driver, then goes into his room to play Harvester. Interestingly, Harvester plays with the “real” in numerous ways. The player loses control of Steve once he escapes Harvest, but the effort to meticulously film and animate every single real person sprite in Harvest has lent the town its own flavor of reality. In some ways, Steve was a serial killer before he reached Stephanie, but with the revelation she becomes the most real person he ever encounters. Her eroticized death is the point of no return, the final shot of the “bad” ending reveals that not only has he killed the driver, he’s consumed them too, and he returns to Harvester to get his fix. Killography or pornography, Steve has been made an addict. The other ending is nothing to write home about. Steve and Stephanie fast forward through their saccharine lives, they marry, they have a child, while in the real world the scientists shrug at one another and decide that maybe next time’s the charm.
This is what makes Harvester a pinnacle of trashy media, it’s gratuitous, it’s exploitative, it is of varying degrees of quality while it ultimately affirms the moralistic condemnations made towards its medium. Subversive, but without bite. It is a piece of killography, marketed as a violent game, but cannot resist the pull of irony. If it ever did make it to one of David Walsh’s watchlists, the joke would have written itself. The fascinating tragedy of Harvester is that it is earnest, earnest in ways that are funny, confusing and admirable. It’s earnest in its bad taste, revels in it even. The game is 28 years old, and there exist dedicated fanpages that are still finding new information about it to this day. It would be a discredit to the myriad programmers, actors and designers to simply reduce it to an insincere, irony poisoned nothing. Rather, it is particularly hipster-esque in that in the discursive landscape of 1996, Harvester was and remains unflinchingly exploitative, a state that arguably is inherently hollow. It is seven hours to tell the irony poisoned joke: what if a violent videogame was about how videogames make people violent?
Works cited:
Aburime, Samantha. “Hate Narratives, Conditioned Language and Networked Harassment: A New Breed of Anti-Shipper and Anti-Fan –…” Researchgate, May 8, 2023. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370602240_Hate_narratives_conditioned_language_and_networked_harassment_A_new_breed_of_anti-shipper_and_anti-fan_-_antis.
Austin, Gilbert. Interview — Gilbert Austin. Interview by Aarno Malin (Lodge Level 4). Facebook, March 14, 2021. https://www.facebook.com/notes/715113205773615/.
Carey, Maya. “Anti-LGBTQ+ Rallies Buoyed by Big Right-Wing Money.” Southern Poverty Law Center, October 20, 2023. https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2023/10/20/anti-lgbtq-rallies-buoyed-big-right-wing-money.
DigiFX Interactive. Harvester. Merit Studios. MS-DOS. 1996.
Lieberman, Joe. What is Senator Lieberman’s Problem with Videogames? Interview by Next Generation. Internet Archive, 1996. https://archive.org/details/NEXT_Generation_28/page/n13/mode/2up?view=theater.
Lodge Level 4. “Harvester (PC Game).” Facebook, January 27, 2011. https://www.facebook.com/lodgelevel4.
“While not directly cited, Aarno Malin of Lodge Level 4 has been an incredible help and resource in tracking down information and rumors surrounding Harvester.”
Midway. Mortal Kombat. Midway. Arcade. 1992.
Sontag, Susan. “2 ‘Notes on “Camp.”’” In Camp, edited by Fabio Cleto, 53–65. Edinburgh University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9781474465809-006.
Walsh, David and National Institute on Media and the Family. “MediaWise Column: Killographic Entertainment.” MediaWise.org, 2003. https://web.archive.org/web/20061213144323/http://www.mediafamily.org/mediawisecolumns/ke_mw.shtml.
