Review: Best Before, ICA

Written for Culture Wars

There are so many sides to Rimini Protokoll’s live-videogame that it inevitably raises a great number of thoughts. At different levels it speaks, simultaneously, of life, game-playing, political rule and much more besides. While that’s impressive – and, certainly, I went through a rigorously reflexive process in its wake – I can’t help thinking that it would benefit from picking its battles a bit. Smaller aims and a tighter focus would overcome its privileging of breadth over depth.

The 120 of us in the ICA auditorium are about to become citizens of Bestland, a plain box of a land that appears of the screen at the back of the stage. Row by row, our avatars drop from the sky and, for the next two hours, we take charge of our globular citizen, guiding them through a series of choices from cradle to grave. As we play alongside one another – probably not with one another – it forms a microcosm of a (mostly) democratic society.

Essentially, it’s little more than a multiple choice questionnaire. It allows you to select a route through a life in real time. Do you, aged 15, hop into bed with another avatar or remain chaste? Do you chose university and the accompanying debts or launch into a career? Elsewhere, particularly early on, the choices are broader. What sort of person do you want to be? Smart or stupid? Lazy or slothful? What are your values? Each choice, of course, comes with consequences. Irv, my avatar, ended up something of an unemployed bum, more or less on the basis of an uncharacteristic experiment with heroin (I had previously abstained from both alcohol and cannabis). A stint in jail followed, then came abject poverty and, by the time I found myself running for election, outright rejection. Everyone has their own individual frustrations and regrets.

So, sure, it goes some way to demonstrating the accountability each of us has day by day. Perhaps it even makes us better people, turning our gaze on ourselves and the choices that led to this point or, more importantly, the choices we make from this point. The wonder is that one needs reminding at all. Ultimately, Best Before involves spending two hours in a toy world making choices with consequences within that framework, when you could just as well spend that time making real choices with real consequences. Sure it’s diverting, but how much does it all matter?

But then there’s the other level: Best Before as game. Surely it contains (and ponders) its own self-defeating futility, no? It asks us why we spent time in this way and what that particular life-choice entails. Moreover it begs the difference between life’s choices and those made in the context of a game, where playfulness leads and the need for consistency flies out of the window. Add in this feeling of being curtailed and controlled by those running the game and you get a whole manner of questions about the ways in which we’re manipulated, both by the gaming industry (at one point we’re told that a recent Need for Speed game included scenographical advertising that was part of the official Obama election campaign) and, in real life, those that rule the country.

As with all constructed microcosmic systems, however, it cannot but fall short of reality. The computer programme can never become more than a reflection of the intelligence that created it. That gives Best Before, which attempts little more than replication, a certain banality. It seems simplified and flattened. When you start comparing it to actual computer games, the structure begins to look Neanderthal. Perhaps that’s unfair, given that onstage the game becomes framed as an object of enquiry, but there is a nagging naivety at play.

Interspersed neatly throughout the game are monologues in which the controller-performers talk about their life-choices. One gave up a job in journalism to flag traffic, another left politics for gaming. Yet, thought the company can only work with what they’ve got, these feel arbitrary and unnecessary, as if tacked on to draw out a point already inherent.

I’ll admit that Best Before raised questions. In fact, it raised an extraordinary number and range of questions, both reflexive and reflective. But if I’m being honest, I can’t say that it sparked anything new or tackled any issue with real penetration. It is what it is: quietly interesting and an enjoyable diversion, but it’s also too banal and too fuzzy to really make a difference.