Space Invaders

So, I have a theory about Space Invaders.  I believe that the Space Invaders are coming to Earth, potentially to destroy it, but they are motivated to invade because of our poor typing.  In the game’s attract mode, there are a few typos.  At one point the Y in play is upside down, and on another screen coin is spelt with two Cs.  In both instances, a space invader comes along and fixes the error.  In fact, the coin typo is solved when the alien shoots one of the Cs.  From this, I believe their intent becomes more apparent.  Us flawed Earthlings are prone to making all sorts of typing errors.  If it wasn’t for spell check features built into word processors, my writing would be an absolute mess.  Things would have been even worse in the game’s release year, 1978, when spell check programs were less developed and more people were still using typewriters.  Sensing an aura of grammatical and typing errors emanating from Earth, the Space Invaders have come to address the issue.  Of course, the game doesn’t give us all of the details so we have room to speculate or craft our own interpretation of what this means in the context of the game.  Maybe these aliens are benevolent creatures who are coming to Earth to lend us a helping hand, but the itchy trigger fingers of Cold War humans fired on the unidentified creatures before realizing they came to give us aid.  This is a tragic interpretation that speaks to the folly of human aggression and its tendency to cause the loss of innocent life.  

Critics of this interpretation might argue against the benevolence of the Space Invaders because they attack and destroy the player.  Additionally, when the player inevitably runs out of lives “game over” appears on screen, which has negative connotations.  However, the game leaves us in the dark about a lot of these details.  Maybe the player doesn’t play as a human, but as an unmanned turret platform, either acting autonomously or under remote control.  Perhaps the Space Invaders would object to taking human life, but feel justified in attacking machines, especially once it starts firing on them.  As far as I can see through a quick Google search, the cabinet’s art doesn’t depict the player’s ship, but if one looks a little bit at some contemporary paratextual material, one flier depicts what looks like a cannon platform, though it’s impossible to say if it’s manned or unmanned.  As for the game over screen, the game doesn’t really show what happens after the player’s failure.  Unlike Missile Command, which ends unambiguously with nuclear destruction, the ending of Space Invaders is far less clear cut.  Interpretations for what comes after the game over include many possibilities, spanning from a utopic future derived from the above reading, but it also includes less positive outcomes.  

It is possible that these Space Invaders aren’t entirely benevolent, though the specifics of their potential malevolence are debatable.  Perhaps the Space Invaders aren’t a biological species, but are actually machines.  Perhaps aliens existed at one point, and like us they made spell checkers, and eventually they had the idea to make a giant superintelligent AI who was asked to fix all spelling mistakes.  As AI researchers have pointed out, a superintelligent AI with godlike powers that is given an ill defined task could go about accomplishing its mission in an ultimately harmful way, and in the case of this spellchecker AI, perhaps it concludes that eradicating all life is the best way to prevent spelling errors (Barten and Meindertsma, 2013).  This AI might have access to war machines and production facilities, turning this alien species’ constructions against them.  Even after the AI destroyed its creators, it would then continue its task, not only eliminating linguistic errors in its own language, but in every language in the universe.  The godlike spell checker could develop probes to explore for life and study any languages it comes across, and once the language is understood the actual invasion starts, granting the AI even more resources to use to make probes and continue fulfilling its programmed objective.  Here, Space Invaders is still tragic, but is also a cautionary tale about the perils of AIs beyond our own comprehension.  Or maybe the aliens just care about grammar way too much and are coming to impose an authoritarian status quo on the human population.

Ultimately, the one thing that’s clear about the Space Invaders is that they fix spelling errors and oppose the player.  The minimalist style of the story was probably inspired by the technical limitations of arcade hardware from the time, but that doesn’t change the reality of what the game is.  Just as some literary theorists consider the author to be unimportant for a text’s artistic interpretation, perhaps hardware should also be “dead” with regards to how we read narratives (Barthes, 1951).  Looking at the textual details, the game does withhold a lot of context, but this leaves room for the player to find narrative for themselves.  In this regard, Space Invaders is reminiscent of minimalist narrative games like Ico and Hyper Light Drifter that construct their world by suggesting a wide variety of details, but leaving enough unsaid that inquisitive players can imagine their own possibilities for the world.  As I played the game, I started considering these possibilities, and these are some of the answers and potential readings I came to.  Going into the game, I was expecting Space Invaders to be a narratively fairly straightforward game.  After all, many arcade games feature players heroically fighting off aliens, so it’s natural to expect that of such an early game too, but with just one simple attract mode detail, the narrative possibility of Space Invaders became a lot more intriguing.  

As for my scores, on my best run I scored 1200 points, only making it to the second screen.  

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author”. A Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, W. W. Norton & Company, 1951, pp.1322-1326

Berten, Otto and Meindertsma, Joep. An AI Paise Is Humanity’s Best Bet For Preventing Extinction. Time. https://time.com/6295879/ai-pause-is-humanitys-best-bet-for-preventing-extinction/