Extra Lives

by Tom Bissell

  PREVIOUS BOOKS BY TOM BISSELL

  NONFICTION

  Chasing the Sea (2003)

  The Father of All Things (2007)

  FICTION

  God Lives in St. Petersburg and Other Stories (2005)

  HUMOR

  Speak, Commentary (2003)

  (with Jeff Alexander)

  For my brother, Johno, at whom I first threw a joystick

  And for my nieces, Amy and Natalie,

  who I hope will throw them at me

  LYSIMACHUS: Did you go to ’t so young? Were you a gamester at five or at seven?

  MARINA: Earlier too, sir, if now I be one.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Pericles

  I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.

  —ROY BATTY to RICK DECKARD in Blade Runner

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  ONE: FALLOUT

  TWO: HEADSHOTS

  THREE: THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF GAMES

  FOUR: THE GRAMMAR OF FUN

  FIVE: LITTLEBIGPROBLEMS

  SIX: BRAIDED

  SEVEN: MASS EFFECTS

  EIGHT: FAR CRIES

  NINE: GRAND THEFTS

  Appendix: An Interview with Sir Peter Molyneux

  Acknowledgments

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Martin Amis, the author of a fine book about early video games, once said of his predicament as a football fan, “Pointy-headed football-lovers are a beleaguered crew, despised by pointy-heads and football-lovers alike.” In this book I risk a similar sort of beleagueredness to explain why I believe video games matter—and why they do not matter more. It grew out of the last three years of my life, during which I spent quite a bit—possibly even most—of my time playing video games, marveling at the unique ways they affected me and growing frustrated by the ways they did not. Soon enough, I was taking notes, not yet fully aware that what I had actually begun to do was write this book.

  Needless to say, it is no easy thing to make a living as a critic of anything, but video-game criticism may be the least remunerative of all. Why this should be is not a great mystery. Count off the number of people of your acquaintance inclined to read criticism at all; chances are lean they will be the same people in your life as the ones playing video games. Yet certain aspects of video games make them resistant to a traditional critical approach. One is that many games are not easily re-experienceable, at least not in the way other mediums are re-experienceable. If I am reviewing a book, I go back and look at my margin notes. An album, I set aside an hour and listen to it again. A film, I buy another ticket. If I am playing a game that takes dozens of hours to complete and has a limited number of save slots, much of it is accessible only by playing it through again, the game itself structurally obligated to fight me every inch of the way. Another problem is that criticism needs a readily available way to connect to the aesthetic past of the form under appraisal, which is not always so easy with video games. Out-of-date hardware and out-of-print games can be immensely difficult to find. Say you want to check on something that happens about halfway through some older game. Not only do you have to find it, you will, once again, have to play it. Probably for hours. Possibly for days.

  One might argue that critical writing about games is difficult because most games are not able to withstand thoughtful criticism. For their part, game magazines publish game review after game review, some of which are spritely and sharp, but they tend to focus on providing consumers with a sense of whether their money will be well spent. Game magazine reviewers rarely ask: What aesthetic tradition does this game fall into? How does it make me feel while I’m playing it? What emotions does it engage with, and are they appropriate to the game’s theme and mechanics? The reason game magazine reviewers do not ask these questions is almost certainly because game magazine owners would like to stay in business. But there is a lot of thoughtful, critically engaging work being done on games. It is mostly found on the blogs and almost always done for free. I have my list of the five game critics whose thoughts on the form I am most compelled by, and I am fairly certain that none of these writers is able to make anything resembling a living writing only about games. Certainly, this is the case for the top critics of plenty of other art forms—dance, sculpture, poetry—but none of these art forms is as omnipresent, widely consumed, or profitable as video games.

  I say all this up front to signal my awareness that I am far from the first to arrive at this particular party. As a work of criticism, however, this book is somewhat eccentric and, at times, starkly personal. Moreover, its focus falls heavily upon console games (as opposed to personal computer games) released in the last few years, most of which are amply budgeted “story” or “narrative” games, which may displease some readers. From this, no one should assume I am not fond of older games or that I do not play sports games, rhythm games, strategy games, puzzlers, or the like. I am and I do, and moreover will take on any comers willing to challenge me to expert-level drumming in Rock Band or Guitar Hero (unless you happen to go by the gamertag Johny Red Pants, in which case, I bow to you, fair sir). The fact is, most of the games that made me want to write this book are console games of relatively recent issue, as opposed to the classics of the form. Few mediums are as prone to the evolutionary long jump as the video game, and I am aware that my focus on contemporary games puts these pages in danger of seeming, in only a few years, as relevant as a biology textbook devoted to Lamarckism. While the games I examine may be contemporary and somewhat of a piece, the questions they raise about the video-game form are not likely to lose their relevance anytime soon.

  There are many fine books about the game industry, the theory of game design, and the history of games, overmuch discussion of which will not be found here. I did not write this book as an analyst of industry fortunes (a topic about which I could not imagine caring less) or as a chronicler of how games rose and came to be, and my understanding of the technical side of game design is nil. I wrote this book as a writer who plays a lot of games, and in these pages you will find one man’s opinions and thoughts on what playing games feels like, why he plays them, and the questions they make him think about. In the portions of the book where I address game design and game designers, it is, I hope, to a formally explanatory rather than technically informative end.

  Just what is a video game? Decades into the development of the form, this question remains forbiddingly open. (As does the term’s spelling: video game or videogame? I reluctantly prefer the former. Most game designers and critics favor the latter.) It may be years before anyone arrives at a true understanding of what games are, what they have done to popular entertainment, and how they have shaped the wider expectations of their many and increasingly divergent audiences. In my conversations with game designers, I was sternly informed, again and again, of the newness of their form, the things they were still learning how to do, and of the necessity of discarding any notion of what defines video games. I have come to believe that anyone who can tell you what a game is, or must be, has seen advocacy outstrip patience. One game designer told me that, due to the impermanent and tech-dependent nature of his medium, he sometimes felt as though he were writing his legacy in water. I nevertheless believe that we are in a golden age of gaming and hope this book will allow future gamers a sense of connection to this glorious, frustrating time, whatever path games ultimately take and whatever cultural fate awaits them.

  —TCB

  June 1, 2009

  Escanaba, Michigan

  ONE

  Someday my children will ask me where I was and what I was doing when the United States elected its first black president. I could tell my children—who are entirely hypothetical; call them Kermit and Hussein—that I was home at the time and, like hundreds of millio
ns of other Americans, watching television. This would be a politician’s answer, which is to say, factual but inaccurate in every important detail. Because Kermit and Hussein deserve an honestly itemized answer, I will tell them that, on November 4, 2008, their father was living in Tallinn, Estonia, where the American Election Day’s waning hours were a cold, salmon-skied November 5 morning. My intention that day was to watch CNN International until the race was called. I will then be forced to tell Kermit and Hussein about what else happened on November 4, 2008.

  The postapocalyptic video game Fallout 3 had been officially released to the European market on October 30, but in Estonia it was nowhere to be found. For several weeks, Bethesda Softworks, Fallout 3’s developer, had been posting online a series of promotional gameplay videos, which I had been watching and rewatching with fetish-porn avidity. I left word with Tallinn’s best game store: Call me the moment Fallout 3 arrives. In the late afternoon of November 4, they finally rang. When I slipped the game into the tray of my Xbox 360, the first polls were due to close in America in two hours. One hour of Fallout 3, I told myself. Maybe two. Absolutely no more than three. Seven hours later, blinking and dazed, I turned off my Xbox 360, checked in with CNN, and discovered that the acceptance speech had already been given.

  And so, my beloved Kermit, my dear little Hussein, at the moment America changed forever, your father was wandering an ICBM-denuded wasteland, nervously monitoring his radiation level, armed only with a baseball bat, a 10mm pistol, and six rounds of ammunition, in search of a vicious gang of mohawked marauders who were 100 percent bad news and totally had to be dealt with. Trust Daddy on this one.

  Fallout 3 was Bethesda’s first release since 2006’s The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Both games fall within a genre known by various names: the open-world or sandbox or free-roaming game. This genre is superintended by a few general conventions, which include the sensation of being inside a large and disinterestedly functioning world, a main story line that can be abandoned for subordinate story lines (or for no purpose at all), large numbers of supporting characters with whom meaningful interaction is possible, and the ability to customize (or pimp, in the parlance of our time) the game’s player-controlled central character. The pleasures of the open-world game are ample, complicated, and intensely private; their potency is difficult to explain, sort of like religion, of which these games become, for many, an aspartame form. Because of the freedom they grant gamers, the narrative-and mission-generating manner in which they reward exploration, and their convincing illusion of endlessness, the best open-world games tend to become leisure-time-eating viruses. As incomprehensible as it may seem, I have somehow spent more than two hundred hours playing Oblivion. I know this because the game keeps a running tally of the total time one has spent with it. I can think of only one personal activity I would be less eager to see audited in this way, and it, too, is a single-player experience.

  It is difficult to describe Oblivion without atavistic fears of being savaged by the same jean-jacketed dullards who in 1985 threw my Advanced Dungeon & Dragons Monster Manual II into Lake Michigan. (That I did not even play D&D, and only had the book because I liked to look at the pictures, left my assailants unmoved.) As to what Oblivion is about, I note the involvement of orcs and a “summon skeleton” spell and leave it at that. So: two hundred hours playing Oblivion? How is that even possible? I am not actually sure. Completing the game’s narrative missions took a fraction of that time, but in the world of Oblivion you can also pick flowers, explore caves, dive for treasure, buy houses, bet on gladiatorial arena fights, hunt bear, and read books. Oblivion is less a game than a world that best rewards full citizenship, and for a while I lived there and claimed it. At the time I was residing in Rome on a highly coveted literary fellowship, surrounded by interesting and brilliant people, and quite naturally mired in a lagoon of depression more dreadfully lush than any before or since. I would be lying if I said Oblivion did not, in some ways, aggravate my depression, but it also gave me something with which to fill my days other than piranhic self-hatred. It was an extra life; I am grateful to have had it.

  When Bethesda announced that it had purchased the rights to develop Fallout 3 from the defunct studio Interplay, the creators of the first two Fallout games, many were doubtful. How would the elvish imaginations behind Oblivion manage with the rather different milieu of an annihilated twenty-third-century America? The first Fallout games, which were exclusive to the personal computer, were celebrated for their clever satire and often freakishly exaggerated violence. Oblivion is about as satirical as a colonoscopy, and the fighting in the game, while not unviolent, is often weirdly inert.

  Bethesda released Fallout 3’s first gameplay video in the summer of 2008. In it, Todd Howard, the game’s producer, guides the player-controlled character into a disorientingly nuked Washington, DC, graced with just enough ravaged familiarities—among which a pummeled Washington Monument stands out—to be powerfully unsettling. Based on these few minutes, Fallout 3 appeared guaranteed to take its place among the most visually impressive games ever made. When Bethesda posted a video showcasing Fallout 3’s in-game combat—a brilliant synthesis of trigger-happy first-person-style shooting and the more deliberative, turn-based tactics of the traditional role-playing video game, wherein you attack, suffer your enemy’s counterattack, counterattack yourself, and so on, until one of you is dead—many could not believe the audacity of its cartoon-Peckinpah violence. Much of it was rendered in a slo-mo as disgusting as it was oddly beautiful: skulls exploding into the distinct flotsam of eyeballs, gray matter, and upper vertebrae; limbs liquefying into constellations of red pearls; torsos somersaulting through the air. The consensus was a bonfire of the skepticisms: Fallout 3 was going to be fucking awesome.

  Needless to say, the first seven hours I spent with the game were distinguished by a bounty of salutary things. Foremost among them was how the world of Fallout 3 looked. The art direction in a good number of contemporary big-budget video games has the cheerful parasitism of a tribute band. Visual inspirations are perilously few: Forests will be Tolkienishly enchanted; futuristic industrial zones will be mazes of predictably grated metal catwalks; gunfights will erupt amid rubble-and car-strewn boulevards on loan from a thousand war-movie sieges. Once video games shed their distinctive vector-graphic and primary-color 8-bit origins, a commercially ascendant subset of game slowly but surely matured into what might well be the most visually derivative popular art form in history. Fallout 3 is the rare big-budget game to begin rather than end with its derivativeness.

  It opens in 2277, two centuries after a nuclear conflagration between the United States and China. Chronologically speaking, the world this Sino-American war destroyed was of late-twenty-first-century vintage, and yet its ruins are those of the gee-whiz futurism popular during the Cold War. Fallout 3’s Slinky-armed sentry Protectrons, for instance, are knowing plagiarisms of Forbidden Planet’s Robby the Robot, and the game’s many specimens of faded prewar advertising mimic the nascent slickness of 1950s-era graphic design. Fallout 3 bravely takes as its aesthetic foundation a future that is both six decades old and one of the least convincing ever conceptualized. The result is a fascinating past-future never-never-land weirdness that infects the game’s every corner: George Jetson Beyond Thunderdome.

  What also impressed me about Fallout 3 was the buffet of choices set out by its early stages. The first settlement one happens upon, Megaton, has been built around an undetonated nuclear warhead, which a strange religious cult native to the town actually worships. Megaton can serve as base of operations or be wiped off the face of the map shortly after one’s arrival there by detonating its nuke in exchange for a handsome payment. I spent quite a while poking around Megaton and getting to know its many citizens. What this means is that the first several hours I spent inside Fallout 3 were, in essence, optional. Even for an open-world game, this suggests an awesome range of narrative variability. (Eventually, of course, I made the time to go back an
d nuke the place.)

  Fallout 3, finally, looks beautiful. Most modern games—even shitty ones—look beautiful. Taking note of this is akin to telling the chef of a Michelin-starred restaurant that the tablecloths were lovely. Nonetheless, at one point in Fallout 3 I was running up the stairs of what used to be the Dupont Circle Metro station and, as I turned to bash in the brainpan of a radioactive ghoul, noticed the playful, lifelike way in which the high-noon sunlight streaked along the grain of my sledgehammer’s wooden handle. During such moments, it is hard not to be startled—even moved—by the care poured into the game’s smallest atmospheric details.

  Despite all this, I had problems with Fallout 3, and a number of these problems seem to me emblematic of the intersection at which games in general currently find themselves stalled. Take, for instance, Fallout 3’s tutorial. One feels for game designers: It would be hard to imagine a formal convention more inherently bizarre than the video-game tutorial. Imagine that, every time you open a novel, you are forced to suffer through a chapter in which the characters do nothing but talk to one another about the physical mechanics of how one goes about reading a book. Unfortunately, game designers do not really have a choice. Controller schemas change, sometimes drastically, from game to game, and designers cannot simply banish a game’s relevant instructions to a directional booklet: That would be a violation of the interactive pact between game and gamer. Many games thus have to come up with a narratively plausible way in which one’s controlled character engages in activity comprehensive enough to be instructive but not so intense as to involve a lot of failure. Games with a strong element of combat almost always solve this dilemma by opening with some sort of indifferently conceived boot-camp exercise or training round.