Extra Lives

by Tom Bissell

  Credit here is due to the so-called AI Director that Valve designed specifically for Left 4 Dead. It is, most basically, a piece of in-game computation that monitors the gamers, judges their performance, and complicates things as it deems advisable. If things are going really swimmingly for the survivors, why not inflict upon them a Tank? If the survivors are hurting, why not drop in an extra health pack? The AI Director, which could not work in a game with an inflexible narrative structure, also ensures that the survivors are never attacked in the same place by the same number of enemies. The revelatory quality of this innovation cannot be overstated. Gamers often learn how to master a game by memorization, but Left 4 Dead is impossible to master in this way. All one can do is hone strategies, which, especially on the highest difficulty level, have a toothpick-house fragility.

  You do not get a delivered narrative in Left 4 Dead. What you get is a series of found narratives. How do these found narratives in Left 4 Dead work, and what gives them their resonance? Well, as it happens, I have a Left 4 Dead story and it occurred while playing the game’s versus mode, in which two human teams (one survivor, one zombie) have at each other. Playing against human-controlled special infected takes the robotically inflicted havoc of the AI Director and turns it into something far more wonderfully and personally vicious. In versus mode, the object is to reach the safe house with as many living survivors as possible. The more survivors that make it, the more points your team receives. One night, at the end of the first stage of the “Dead Air” campaign, I and three fellow survivors (two of whom were friends, one of whom had just jumped in) had come to realize that we were up against a vilely gifted and absolutely devastating team of Left 4 Dead tacticians—the Hannibal, Napoleon, Crazy Horse, and Patton of zombies. They attacked with insurgent coordination and to maximum damage, and it was only our own skill that had managed to hold them off as long as we had. By the time the first-stage safe house came into view, we—four extraordinarily good Left 4 Dead veterans—were limping, hobbled, and completely freaked out. Then, another coordinated attack, led by the Boomer puking on us, blinding us, and summoning the horde. While we staggered around, the Smoker took hold of one friend while a Hunter pounced on another. The other remaining survivor and I decided to break for the safe house door. Before getting there my remaining friend was pounced on by yet another Hunter. Although I freed him, I was still mostly blind, and my friend, despite having been released, was under assault by at least a dozen rapacious normal zombies. Deciding that one of us making it was better than none of us making it, I stepped inside the safe house and closed the door. Outside, the friend I had left behind managed to fight his way out of the horde and kill the Smoker and Hunter ripping apart the other survivors, who were now incapacitated, incapable of getting up without help, and quickly bleeding out, which is to say, dying. Unfortunately, the heroic friend was himself incapacitated while doing this. While my three downed friends could shoot their sidearms, they could not rise. They needed me for that. In a minute or so, they would be dead, and from the shelter of the safe house I watched their health bars steadily drain away. Meanwhile, the opposing team had begun to respawn. A lone survivor against even two special infected opponents would stand no chance, as all it would take to end the round would be a Hunter or Smoker incapacitating me. So I stayed put. Better one of us than none of us.

  My downed friends failed to see it this way. Over my headphones, they vigorously questioned my courage, my manhood, the ability of my lone female survivor to repopulate the human world on her own, and my understanding of deontological ethics. On the other side of the safe house door, I could hear the Boomer belching, farting, and waiting for me to come out. “You dick!” one of my friends called out. He had just finished bleeding out, a skull appearing beside his onscreen name. My remaining friends were now seconds away from the same fate. I looked within, did not like what I saw, steeled myself, and fired several shotgun rounds through the door, safely killing the Boomer (who it must be said behaved with uncharacteristic carelessness). When I opened the door I saw a Hunter a few feet away, in the corner, waiting to pounce, but I killed him before moving out of the safe room and into the street. The second Hunter was better prepared, but with miraculous good luck I managed to blast him out of the air in mid-pounce. I quickly helped up the first survivor and together we made it out to the final remaining survivor, who was down to his last droplets of virtual existence. While I helped up the final survivor, my friend, covering me, eliminated the lurking Smoker, and with glad cries the three of us made it back into the safe house. At great personal risk, and out of real shame, I had rescued two of my three friends and in the process outfaced against all odds one of the best Left 4 Dead teams I had and have ever played against. I realized, then, vividly, that Left 4 Dead offered a rare example in which a game’s theme (cooperation) was also what was encouraged within the actual flow of gameplay.

  The people I saved that night still talk about my heroic action—and, yes, it was, it did feel, heroic—whenever we play together, and, after the round, two of the opposing team’s members requested my online friendship, which with great satisfaction I declined. All the emotions I felt during those few moments—fear, doubt, resolve, and finally courage—were as intensely vivid as any I have felt while reading a novel or watching a film or listening to a piece of music. For what more can one ask? What more could one want?

  I once raved about Left 4 Dead in a video-game emporium within earshot of the manager, a man I had previously heard angrily defend the position that lightsaber wounds are not necessarily cauterized. (His evidence: The tauntaun Han Solo disembowels in The Empire Strikes Back does, in fact, bleed.) “Left 4 Dead?” he asked me. “You liked it?” I admitted that I did. Very, very much. And him? “I liked it,” he said, grudgingly. “I just wished there was more story.” A few pimply malingerers, piqued by our exchange, nodded in assent. The overly caloric narrative content of so many games had caused these gentlemen to feel undernourished by the different narrative experience offered by Left 4 Dead. They, like the games they presumably loved, had become aesthetically obese. I then realized I was contrasting my aesthetic sensitivity to that of some teenagers about a game that concerns itself with shooting as many zombies as possible. It is moments like this that can make it so dispiritingly difficult to care about video games.

  FOUR

  Epic Games is a privately owned company and does not disclose its earnings. But on a Monday morning in late April 2008, while standing in Epic’s parking lot at Crossroads Corporate Park in Cary, North Carolina, where I was awaiting the arrival of Cliff Bleszinski, Epic’s design director, I realized that my surroundings were their own sort of Nasdaq. Ten feet away was a red Hummer H3. Nearby was a Lotus Elise, and next to it a pumpkin-orange Porsche. Many of the cars had personalized plates: PS3CODER, EPICBOY, GRSOFWAR.

  Released in late 2006, Gears of War, a third-person shooter, was quickly recognized as the first game to provide the sensually overwhelming experience for which the year-old Xbox 360 had been designed. Gears won virtually every available industry award and was the 360’s best-selling game until Bungie’s Halo 3 came along a year later. Bleszinski, along with everyone else at Epic, was currently “crunching” on Gears of War 2, the release date of which was six months away. Its development, long rumored, was not confirmed until the previous February, when, at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Bleszinski made the announcement after bursting through an onstage partition wielding a replica of one of Gears’s signature weapons—an assault rifle mounted with a chainsaw bayonet.

  Bleszinski, who is known to his many fans and occasional detractors as CliffyB, tends to stand out among his colleagues in game design. Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby’s Smartbomb recounts the peacockish outfits and hairstyles he has showcased at industry expos over the years. In 2001 he affected the stylings of a twenty-first-century Tom Wolfe, with white snakeskin shoes and bleached hair. In 2002 he took to leather jackets and an early-Clooney Caesar c
ut. By 2003, he was wearing long fur-lined coats, his hair skater-punk red. In recent years he let his hair grow shaggy, which gave him the mellow aura of a fourth Bee Gee.

  Bleszinski drove into Epic’s parking lot in a red Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder, the top down despite an impending rainstorm. His current haircut was short and cowlicked, his bangs twirled up into a tiny moussed horn. He was wearing what in my high school would have been called “exchange-student jeans”—obviously expensive but slightly the wrong color and of a somehow non-American cut. Beneath a tight, fashionably out-of-style black nylon jacket was a T-shirt that read TECHNOLOGY! His sunglasses were of the oversized, county-sheriff variety, and each of his earlobes held a small, bright diamond earring. He could have been either a boyish Dolce & Gabbana model or a small-town weed dealer.

  Bleszinski suggested that we go to a local diner. He professed an aversion to mornings, and to Monday mornings especially, but seemed dauntingly alert. “This car’s like a wake-up call,” he said. “By the time I get to work, my heart’s pumping and I’m ready to crank.” Before we were even out of the parking lot, we were traveling at forty-five miles an hour. At a stoplight, Bleszinski exchanged waves with the driver of an adjacent red Ferrari—another Epic employee. When we hit a hundred miles per hour on a highway entrance ramp, Bleszinski announced, “Never got one ticket!” On the highway, he slowed to seventy-five. “One of my jobs in life,” Bleszinski said, cutting over to an exit, “is to make this look a little cooler.” By “this,” he meant his job. He is adamant that young people interested in gaming should seek to make it their career. After five minutes in Bleszinki’s company I was beginning to wonder why I had not attempted to make it my career.

  Bleszinski’s brand of mild outrageousness—the “Cliffycam” on his blog page, which, some years ago, allowed visitors to observe him online while he worked; the photographs of him on his MySpace page alongside the splatter-film director Eli Roth and the porn stars Jenna Jameson and Ron Jeremy—qualifies him as exceptional in an industry that is, as he says, widely assumed to be a preserve inhabited by pale, withdrawn, molelike creatures.

  There is some emotional truth to this stereotype. “This industry,” Bleszinski told me, “is traditionally filled with incredibly intelligent, talented people who don’t necessarily like a lot of attention.” In illustration he brought up Bungie’s Jason Jones, the primary creative force behind the Halo series. “Really, really great guy. But he’s shy. He’s almost like this Cormac McCarthy–type character. One interview every ten years.” When he was young, Bleszinski said, “I wanted to know who these people were creating these games. And I was like, ‘You know what? If I do a great job making games, maybe people will find it interesting.’”

  The CliffyB nickname, he told me, was bestowed on him by some “jock kid,” when he was a small, shy teenager, and was meant as a taunt. Bleszinski took the name and fashioned a tougher persona around it, but, after spending a little time with him, I had the sensation of watching someone observing himself. Video games are founded upon such complicated transference. Gamers are allowed, for a time, all manner of ontological assumptions. They can also terminate their assumed personalities whenever they wish, and Bleszinski had lately been asking game-industry journalists if they might not “sit on” the CliffyB moniker “for a while.”

  Bleszinski was born in Boston, in 1975. His father, whom Bleszinski describes as a “very stressed-out guy,” died when he was fifteen. Bleszinski still remembered what game he was playing when he learned of his father’s death: the Nintendo game Blaster Master. He never played it again.

  In 1991 Bleszinski’s mother bought him a computer. “I’m not that technical of a guy,” Bleszinski told me. “I started off programming my own games and doing the art for them, but I was a crappy coder and a crappier artist. But I didn’t want to let that stop me. I was going to kick and scream and claw my way into the business any way possible.” He thinks that it was perhaps only the death of his father that allowed him to do this. “If he hadn’t passed, he probably would have made me go to Northeastern and become an engineer.”

  In 1992, a year after Bleszinski had taught himself the rudiments of computer programming, he sent a game submission to Tim Sweeney, the twenty-two-year-old CEO of Epic MegaGames, who had recently dropped out of a mechanical-engineering program at the University of Maryland. (Epic’s original name, Sweeney told me, was “a big scam” to make it look legitimate. “When you’re this one single person in your parents’ garage trying to start a company, you want to look like you’re really big.”) Sweeney fondly recalled Bleszinski’s submission, a PC game called Dare to Dream, in which a boy gets trapped, appropriately enough, inside his own dreamworld. “At that time,” Sweeney said, “we’d gotten sixty or seventy game submissions from different people and we went ahead with five of them, and Cliff was one of the best.” Once his game was in development, Bleszinski became more involved with the company. Sweeney said, “We’d have four or five different projects in development with different teams, and every time one started to reach completion we’d send it off to Cliff, and he’d write off his big list of what’s good about this game and what needs to be fixed. Cliff’s lists kept growing bigger and bigger.” Bleszinski was only seventeen. When I asked Sweeney if he had had any reservations about entrusting his company’s fate to a teenager whose driver’s-license lamination was still warm, Sweeney said, “That’s what the industry was like.”

  Upon its release, Dare to Dream, in Bleszinski’s words, “bombed.” His second game for Epic, released a year later, featured what he calls a “Rambo rabbit” named Jazz, who carried a large gun and hunted frenetically for intergalactic treasure. Jazz Jackrabbit, which imported to a PC platform a type of gameplay previously exclusive to Sega and Nintendo consoles, made Bleszinski’s reputation. Epic had begun as a company churning out somewhat réchauffé fare—pinball simulators, clone-ish retreads, but also a popular shooter known as Unreal Tournament, the updated and augmented engine of which has since been adopted by hundreds of games. It was Bleszinski, along with the Unreal Engine, that helped to fill Epic’s parking lot with sports cars.

  At the diner I asked Bleszinski which games had most influenced him. Super Mario Bros., he said, “is where it really kicked into high gear.” Indeed, the first issue of Nintendo Power, published in 1988, listed the high scores of a handful of Super Mario devotees, the thirteen-year-old Bleszinski’s among them. “There’s something about the whole hidden element to Mario,” Bleszinski said, “where you jump and hit your head on a block and just out of nowhere secret things would appear. They made you feel like a kid in the woods finding god knows what.”

  Released in 1985, Super Mario Bros. was a game of summer-vacation-consuming scope and unprecedented inventiveness. It was among the first video games to suggest that it might contain a world. It was also hallucinogenically strange. Why did mushrooms make Mario grow larger? Why did flowers give Mario the ability to spit fire? Why did bashing Mario’s head against bricks sometimes produce coins? And why was Mario’s enemy, Bowser, a saurian, spiky-shelled turtle?

  In film and literature, such surrealistic fantasy typically occurs at the outer edge of experimentalism, but early video games depended on symbols for the simple reason that the technological limitations of the time made realism impossible. Mario, for instance, wore a porkpie hat not for aesthetic reasons but because hair was too difficult to render. Bleszinski retains affection for many older games, but he says, “If you go back and play the majority of old games, they really aren’t very good.” He suspects that what made them seem so good at the time was the imaginative involvement of players: “You wanted to believe, you wanted to fill in the gaps.”

  A game like Gears of War differs so profoundly from Super Mario Bros. that the two appear to share as many commonalities as a trilobite does with a Great Dane. Super Mario requires an ability to recognize patterns, considerable hand–eye coordination, and quick reflexes. Gears requires the ability to think t
actically and make subtle judgments based on scant information, a constant awareness of multiple variables (ammunition stores, enemy weaknesses) as they change throughout the game, and the spatial sensitivity to control one’s movement through a space in which the “right” direction is not always apparent. Anyone who plays modern games such as Gears does not so much learn the rules as develop a kind of intuition for how the game operates. Often, there is no single way to accomplish a given task; improvisation is rewarded. Older games, like Super Mario, punish improvisation: You live or die according to their algebra alone.