Learning to love mass murder

When I looked north from the marching band's starting position, I saw a woman standing alone near the base of a long flight of stairs. She was wearing white pants and a bright blue top with gold trim.

She was a member of the band. The woman appeared unhurt, but seemed to have lost her saxophone. How had she escaped the fire? And what was I going to do about it?

I was out of gasoline by then, but I still had the shovel.

The woman screamed when she saw me holding the shovel and screamed more, looking over her right shoulder, when I chased her up the stairs and along the path beside the coin laundry.

After I hit her three times, she stopped screaming. The shovel gave a ringing clang, and her body went one way, limbs all out of kilter, and her head another. There was a strange silence, as though my own head had been thrust underwater, and an awful lot of blood.

Why would I do such a thing? Even in a game, why would I do such a thing? In real life, I'm a peaceful fellow. I've started exactly one fight in my life, and it wasn't even much of a fight. (That was 35 years ago, when I was in junior high school, and I was provoked.) I wasn't angry -- at least not in my conscious mind -- or trying to work out in the game world something that had happened in the real one. The band members didn't have anything I wanted. They hadn't hurt me. I didn't mind the music they played, the looks on the marchers' faces, or the uniforms they wore. And the whole notion of a band marching through a three-dimensional game was a novel and appealing one.

At the time, I was too close to the event to sort this out. I recognize now that the shovel attack was the action of someone who has already gone so far that it no longer matters how far he goes. After a serial killer has murdered a dozen people, is he likely to fret over the 13th?

And the destruction of the band? I didn't see innocent characters marching in peaceful formation. I saw an opportunity to sow chaos.

I've had that impulse in games before. Usually, it is born of boredom or desperation. In flight simulations, eager to make something happen, I used to steer planes into buildings. In racing games, toward the back of the pack, I sometimes bump other cars in the hope of causing a spectacular crash. When the tide turned against me in the old strategy game "Balance of Power" and a recent one, "Rise of Nations," I deliberately propelled the world toward nuclear Armageddon. I didn't care that I was ending the game. That was the whole idea: Push the game into the abyss and see what's down there.

In "Postal 2," it almost seemed that I was supposed to mess with the band -- that a lamb had been deliberately released into a lion's den. Was this procession inserted into a shoot-'em-up simply so it could march by unobstructed?

Of course, I didn't have to take the bait. I could have kept watching the band. But in a virtual world, where every player action is anticipated and every game reaction is preordained, chaos gave me at least the illusion of control. It was chaos, but it was my chaos.

Or half mine. Even the chaos was choreographed -- albeit with a broad brush. The creators of "Postal 2" creators had anticipated my evil thought. They imbued the gas and band members with certain properties. (They burn like rocket fuel.) They placed the shovel in the shed, the gas can in the bathtub, and the band in my path.

I'm not blaming the designers. They only set the stage. I picked up the gas can. I poured the gas. I lit the match. On discovering I hadn't killed off the whole band, I picked up the spare.

In retrospect, firing a gun in the air or even just brandishing a weapon within view of the marchers would have worked as well. But I didn't have a gun at the time. As mentioned earlier, I had deliberately avoided picking up obvious weapons. What I didn't have, I wouldn't be tempted to use.

Instead, I set the band on fire. I embraced this paradox. I pushed my conscience off a cliff, and then waited for it to hit the pointy rocks at the bottom. And when I was done, I walked down the stairs to get a better look at the detached head.

The killing ended as suddenly as it had begun. I'd allowed Tuesday morning's events to play out a third time. This was not an attack of niceness but academic curiosity: What would happen to the band if I didn't intercede?

It turned out to be doomed. As the procession turned a corner at the far end of the business district, a man with a turban and a beard ran from a tunnel at its rear, raced to the head of the parade, and blew himself up. (Paradise is home to a vast terrorist cell.) The explosion killed several band members outright and set others on fire. The survivors screamed and scattered.

I had preempted a terrorist attack. In fact, casualty for casualty, I had performed the terrorist's job more effectively than the terrorist himself.

This grim thought made me play through the day once more. This time, I found a shotgun, positioned myself at the final turn in the band's route and killed the terrorist before he could blow himself up. When I fired, the marchers screamed and scattered. I'd wrecked the procession (which was about to be wrecked in any case), but I hadn't killed anyone who wasn't himself planning to kill.

I didn't get away with murder this time. Two police officers witnessed the shooting. I dropped the gun, stood still as one of them handcuffed me and took me into custody, and wound up in a third-floor cell in the police station with only my matches.

This seemed a sly comment on my earlier transgression, and I waited here for quite some time, pacing between bars and cot, before I realized that I'd reached a dead end and would have to escape.

I can't say any of this repaired my prior bad acts. I had still done what I had done. I can still see that burned figure crawling along the road and the headless body at the top of the stairs. Saving the band didn't save me.

Could anything have rescued me from myself? Not in "Postal 2." I was damned the moment I threw that match.

But, lately, I've been imagining a different game. In this game, I do not burn down the band. In this game, I have other fish to fry.

Given the potential freedom that games afford, it's astonishing how few meaningful decisions are left to players. For every "Grand Theft Auto III" that allows you to roam far and wide, there are dozens of games that force the player into a gantlet. You may follow a slightly different route and perform tasks in a different order while wearing a different type of armor than the next fellow, but, in essentials, everyone's experience is roughly the same.

And the fact is that, while I hated what I did in "Postal 2," I liked having the freedom to do it. The game didn't force a single approach on me. I could run from combat and spare every life that could be spared. I could defend myself when attacked. Or I could be the Angel of Death --using weapons that ranged from my booted foot to a toxin stored in a severed bull's head.

However, I do wish my options had extended beyond killing or not killing, and that the forces of order had a better shot at coming out on top.

Identifying bad guys in "Postal 2" is cut and dried. They're the ones shooting at me. Making them dead or avoiding them is basic to my survival.

The innocent characters don't shoot at me. That's the sum total of their innocence. But they also don't actively entice me to behave well. In essence, the band didn't give me a reason not to set it on fire.

I'm being only a little facetious here. In the real world, people don't have to advertise their innocence. For most of us, it's the normal way of being. But in Paradise -- where a significant percentage of the population is packing heat, institutions are routinely under attack, and certain businesses engage in savage enterprises -- I need some extra inducement to be gentle.

For instance, suppose that, instead of a gasoline can, "Postal 2's" creators had placed a saxophone in that neighbor's bathtub, and that I could play the sax by pressing the keys on the computer keyboard. I could have taken lessons. I could have auditioned for the band. I could have marched with it.

Perhaps I would have played badly, gotten fired again, and this time people all over town would have laughed at me. Or perhaps I'd have played well, and earned a spot as featured soloist in a theoretical Paradise Symphony Orchestra.

Maybe I could have even moved out of that trailer.

Either way, I'd have an inducement to keep the band members alive. Either way, I'd have achieved something nonlethal -- even if that just meant making an ass of myself in public. And I doubt I'd have cut off someone's head. In the game I envision, each of those 13 dead bodies would represent a lost opportunity.

It's a nice fantasy, anyway. And it helps me forget that, in the actual game, I did cut off someone's head.

But it's kicking that head that bothers me most of all. The other events are distant enough now that I can blow off the fire as a would-be hotfoot that got wildly out of hand, and sometimes even rationalize the decapitation as simply finishing what I had started.

But the kick seems a barbaric act any way I look at it, and it still haunts me. It creeps up out of my memory late at night, just before I fall asleep, pricks me with a pin, and taunts me: "You are not who you think you are."

When, in a made-up world, you do something meaningless that seems meaningful in the real world, what does it mean? Does it even mean anything? I don't know, and I don't really want to know. It's enough that it made me doubt myself. I can't recall another game that did that.

I suppose this was why I kept playing "Postal 2" -- to try and reconnect with my old, peaceful self.

It seemed to work. For the next two days, I did as little harm as possible to the people of Paradise. When I escaped the police lockup, the police shot me a dozen or more times, but I did not return fire. (However, I did take the doughnuts and cash off the chief's desk. My conscience was still oblivious to virtual theft.) Later on, when the cops showed up at the mall to arrest the virtual Gary Coleman, and Coleman suddenly produced an automatic weapon, I quickly made for the exit.

I did get into a running gun battle with anti-book protesters while escaping the burning library and had to mow down a small army of terrorists when leaving the church. They were bad guys, and I'm used to shooting bad guys.

But later in the week, I went to the parade grounds south of town. Elephants were on display. An evil thought slipped unbidden into my head. This time I had a gun, and I opened fire.

The elephants charged and killed almost everybody.

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