by Tom Bissell
The best part of many RPGs is wandering the gameworld and seeing what happens. Many gameworlds are arranged in a way that allows the gamer an almost subliminal sense of where to go: a hallway bathed in reddish light will rarely provide a way out; a hallway bathed in greenish light often will. RPGs frequently neglect to provide such markers in order to encourage exploration, and the gamer often comes to have a bizarrely eidetic familiarity with gameworld landmarks. Any gamer trying to describe to another where something can be found in an RPG will often have directions as longitudinally inviolate as those of a real map: “You know that room with the two guys standing out in front of the door, beneath the staircase by the elevator? Yeah, go straight through it, around that weird partition, and you can find the colony administrator in the back, sitting at his desk.” (I am frequently startled by how well I remember certain gameworlds: which crate to look in, which turn to take, which corner has an enemy around it, where to pause to reload. I often wonder where these mental maps reside in my mind. The same place where I have stored my extensive understanding of Lower Manhattan or my sketchier grasp of central Paris? I was once able to find my way from London’s Trafalgar Square to the British Museum based solely on my experience of playing Team SOHO’s open-world driving game The Getaway, so perhaps so.) Unfortunately, Mass Effect’s achievement in the exploration area is middling. Although the mission-critical planets the gamer must visit are all well designed, full of interest, and quite pretty, the mission-optional planets are pedestrian. There is the snow world, the sylvan world, the rock world, and the other rock world. The skies are different only in terms of their color and texture; cloud patterns are frequently identical. The mission-optional planets are also so underpopulated that they appear to have been neutron-bombed. The biggest problem, however, is that you get around these planets by driving a six-wheeled vehicle known as the Mako, which handles about as well as a luxury cruise liner. Its cannon is also about as combat-effective as a luxury cruise liner: Shooting something found on an incline even a few degrees lower than your position is frequently impossible. While driving around in the Mako, you often encounter a giant burrowing worm called the Thresher Maw. Why this huge carnivorous worm is found on so many planets, and why these planets do not seem to have any other life-forms, is not really explained, unless the Thresher Maw eats everything, in which case, mystery solved. When the Thresher Maw appears, the best but most tormentingly repetitive tactic is to drive around in a circle, shooting it with the dipsomaniacally inaccurate Mako cannon. It is very easy to dislike Mass Effect during such moments—but then some wonderfully odd and redeeming thing will occur, such as my chance discovery of a strange, solitary, bisonic creature on the planet Ontarom in the Newton System. The game refers to this beast as a “shifty-looking cow,” but it seems harmless enough—until you put your back to the thing, whereupon your credits begin to drain. It is difficult to hold anything against a game with an alien cow pickpocket.
With the above flaws acknowledged, and only partially excused, it may be hard to understand why I spent eighty hours playing Mass Effect. One of the best explanations I have concerns the RPG convention of incidental encounter, which Mass Effect integrates into its narrative more seamlessly than any other RPG I have played. In the parts of the gameworld that are densely populated, Mass Effect becomes an aquarium of possibility. All around you people are talking and having conversations, and one of Mass Effect’s nicest touches—if one is lucky enough to have a decent home stereo system—is the way the game tracks these overheard conversations, which float from one speaker to another in startlingly realistic transit. “Overheard” conversations in novels and films invariably sit at the center of inwardly pointing arrows neon with authorial portent, but Mass Effect’s overheard conversations—even though they are cued to begin with some interest-snagging topic or crux sentence—really are overheard. RPGs that lack Mass Effect’s ear for dialogue are often written too broadly for any sense of potential gamer agency to take hold, in which cases interactivity becomes a synonym for “cudgel.” In Fallout 3, for instance, characters you walk past will sometimes turn and look at you, as though in expectation of a greeting. You can fulfill that expectation or keep walking. In an open-world game such as Fallout 3 the narrative must be open enough to accommodate a number of contextual possibilities (have you just been caught attempting to pick that character’s pocket? have you recently injured someone he cares about?), but turning around to have a few words typically results in two kinds of encounters, one frustratingly overdetermined (“Go do this”), the other vague and desultory (“Nice day today”), neither possessing much dramatic fluidity. Free from the demands of imposed, authorial order, gameworld interactions frequently go adrift in a strange dramatic vacuum. A situation that must accommodate many possibilities may not be equipped to satisfactorily depict any of them. While playing Mass Effect, this criticism rarely feels applicable.
My favorite incidental encounter in Mass Effect involves an alien race called the hanar, also known as “jellies,” which resemble the flying toasters of early-screensaver fame. The hanar believe in something called “the Enkindlers” and are persistent evangelists on their behalf. At one point a stroll along a Citadel promenade leads to your overhearing an argument between a hot-gospeling hanar and a turian police officer, who maintains, quite reasonably, that the hanar needs an evangelical permit if he wants to shout news of the Enkindlers. If you choose to intervene, your available responses range from kind (you buy the permit for the hanar), to the Hitchensian (you tell the jelly to scram and have a few rough words with the turian at his expense), to the observant (you argue with the turian in favor of the hanar’s faith). This is one of several Mass Effect interludes that allow you to give voice to Shepard’s religious beliefs, which can run the gamut. I found it difficult to have my Shepard say anything even remotely pro-religion; I took the Hitchensian position every time, despite the fact that during my various Mass Effect play-throughs I have experimented with just about every possibility allowable. I did not blink in the moment I allowed Shepard to procure drugs for an addict or backstab a grieving husband, yet I could not bring myself to buy the hanar a permit or make for it an ecumenical plea. Games such as Mass Effect allow the gamer a freedom of decision that can be evilly enlivening or nobly self-congratulating, but these games become uniquely compelling when they force you to the edge of some drawn, real-life line of intellectual or moral obligation that, to your mild astonishment, you find you cannot step across even in what is, essentially, a digital dollhouse for adults. Other mediums may depict the necessary (or foolhardy) breaches of such lines, or their foolhardy (or necessary) protection, but only games actually push you to the line’s edge and make you live with the fictional consequences of your choice.
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A late Mass Effect mission involves an assault on an enemy stronghold. While you are discussing your strategy, an unexpected revelation of what is inside the stronghold causes one of your squad mates to object to the mission’s objective, which could place the survival of his race in peril. Your attempt to reason with him along “the good of the many” lines causes him to march off and sulk on the strand of a nearby lake. When you walk over to talk some sense into your squad mate, the conversation quickly escalates and, suddenly, you find yourself in a Mexican standoff. The first time I played Mass Effect, I had grown immensely fond of the aggrieved character, and each time a new conversation option appeared I felt a noose of real dramatic concern tighten. Even though all I was doing was selecting lines of dialogue, the experience of doing so became as gripping as a full regimental assault by geth.
Because I had not completed an earlier mission that would have allowed me a way out of this confrontation (a mission I was then unaware of), and because I had not invested my skill points in the areas of persuasion needed to convince the squad member to relent, the encounter ended with my squad mate dead at my feet and my mouth dropped open. I reloaded my last saved game and tried again. Once more, my friend
and teammate took a bullet for his trouble. In my bewilderment I pressed on, and when the menu for squad selection came up, the slot for the dead character was now a darkened silhouette. It seemed as stark and inarguably final as a tombstone.
Later in the same mission, I was confronted with the loss of another squad member. This time there was no way out: Two of my teammates were trapped, and only one could be saved. I had been relying on the firepower and battle prowess of one of the trapped teammates throughout the game, and the other was someone who had taken up with me two of three points of a growingly isosceles love triangle. Complicating matters was the fact that the battle-hardened teammate had recently done something unforgivable and I wanted the romantic relationship with the other trapped character to be consummated. Thus the game took my own self-interest and effectively vivisected it. When decision time came, I literally put down my controller and stared at my television screen.
This is how games get inside of you. Murder mysteries in which you must hunt for clues. Revenge fantasies that force you to pull the trigger. Science-fiction sagas in which you orbit the planet, select your crew, and step off the landing vessel. And yes: love stories in which you have to choose. When games do this poorly, or even adequately, the sensation is that of a slightly caffeinated immediacy. You have agency, yes, but what of it? It is just a game. But when a game does this well, you lose track of your manipulation of it, and its manipulation of you, and instead feel inserted so deeply inside the game that your mind, and your feelings, become as seemingly crucial to its operation as its many millions of lines of code. It is the sensation that the game itself is as suddenly, unknowably alive as you are. As I sat there trying to figure out what to do, Mass Effect, despite its three-hundred-thousand-word script and beautiful graphics, was no longer a verbal or visual experience. It was a full-body experience. I felt a tremendous sense of preemptive loss and anxiety, and even called my girlfriend, described my dilemma, and asked her for her counsel. “You do know,” she said, “that you’re crazy, yes?” On the face of things, she was right. Here I was—a straight, thirty-four-year-old man—worrying over the consummation of my female avatar’s love affair. But she was also wrong. To say that any game that allows such surreally intense feelings of attachment and projection is divorced from questions of human identity, choice, perception, and empathy—what is, and always will be, the proper domain of art—is to miss the point not only of such a game but art itself.
I made my choice. The game, nodding inconclusively, went on.
EIGHT
When I was a Catholic schoolboy, my friends and I spent many recesses playing a game called “Who Can Die the Best?” The rules, which I invented, were simple: One boy would announce the type of weapon he was holding—morning star, lance, M-80, Gatling gun, crossbow, pencil bomb, glaive—and then use it to kill the other boys around him. Whoever died “the best” (that is, with the most convincingly spasmodic grace) was declared winner by his executioner and allowed to pick his own weapon, whereupon a new round commenced.
One day the kind but bubonically halitosic Sister Marie wandered over to inquire why a dozen of her boys were rolling on the ground and screaming about lost limbs. When none of us answered, Sister Marie cagily turned and asked the same question of a nearby girl, who first summarized the rules of “Who Can Die the Best?” and then explained—Sister Marie’s face, by now, glacially white with horror—that what we had been reacting to were grenades from Jeff Wanic’s imaginary bandolier. “Who Can Die the Best?” was, from that moment on, as staunchly forbidden as meat on Friday. We kept playing, of course, but with weapons—hemlock, blowgun, freeze ray—that produced less spectacular death throes. Twenty-five years later I have no explanation for why pretending to kill and die was so much fun, but I do know that a boy alive in 2010 would find “Who Can Die the Best?” about as interesting as mime. To experience the dark gravitational pull of simulated death, that boy could play any number of violent video games in the nunless privacy of home.
This is not to suggest that the video games of my childhood were innocent. As far back as 1982, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop claimed video games were responsible for many obvious “aberrations in childhood behavior.” A fair characterization of circa-1982 video-game violence would be “the collision and disappearance of two blocky abstractions,” and this was disturbing only because it was occurring within a medium universally considered as intended for children. No one feared these games as tickets to instant pubescent frenzy; these games were the subject of long-term, Manchurian Candidate–type fears. Today’s video games are often feared as objects of occult influence, particularly after the Columbine massacre, the perpetrators of which were said to be fans of a modded version of the classic shooter Doom. Any debate about game violence will almost inevitably become a debate about shooters. To many who oppose the video game, the video game is the shooter: A more assailed game genre does not exist. To fans of the shooter, the shooter is the video game: A tighter, less sororal game subculture does not exist.
Yet the shooter has been the messenger of many of the video game’s most important breakthroughs. The very first shooter, Atari’s 1980 stand-up Battlezone, used something called wireframe 3D, which I do not in the least understand but gave the game its distinctive appearance of see-through polygon tanks rumbling across see-through polygon battlefields, past see-through polygon hills. (Playing it felt a little like declaring war on geometry.) However primitive Battlezone looks now, the core of its wireframe technology is still used, and nearly every painted, beautifully dense object within a three-dimensional video-game world was, at one point, a see-through wireframe model. An even more important technological advance was marked by the 1992 appearance of the first first-person shooter, id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D, which provided gamers with their alpha experience of three-dimensional video-game movement. id followed Wolfenstein with the equally influential FPSs Doom and Quake. id’s co-founders, John Romero (a man of thermonuclear charisma and questionable moral probity) and John Carmack (considered by many to be one of the most brilliant programmers of all time), were undeniably gifted, but their games were curiously emblematic of the kamikaze heedlessness of the 1990s, and Romero showed an almost Clintonian talent for self-destruction. Nevertheless, the trail blazed—and shot, stabbed, and chainsawed—by id and its games was soon crowded with other developers seeking to design shooters of maximal mayhem supported by equally maximal technology. The shooter thus came to be known by many adamantine clichés (the grizzled and reluctant hero, the copious gore, the mid-game provision of some especially freaky weapon) and mimeographed narrative goals (steal the plans, secure the area, assassinate him, find more ammo, save her, blow up the bridge, find more health, trust him, suffer betrayal, huge final fight).
A second wave of FPSs suggested that the genre had unexpected riches to mine. In 1997 Rareware’s GoldenEye 007 (the greatest licensed game of all time and one of the greatest games of all time) proved beyond a doubt that the shooter was capable of being something other than an abattoir, with its endorsement of stealth tactics (whereby sneaking past enemies is as legitimate as killing them), its zoomable sniper-rifle scopes and body-part-sensitive damage mechanic (the combination of which brought into existence the immensely satisfying and instantly fatal long-range headshot), its mission-optional objectives (which encouraged replay), and its more freely conceived gameworld (which did away with the hallway-and-tunnel-centric design methodology of previous shooters). The following year, Valve’s Half-Life showed that a shooter could go about its business with a puckish sense of humor (its hero is a theoretical physicist) and real artfulness, as can be seen from its riddance of cut scenes in favor of “scripted events” (whereby the action does not stop, and the gamer remains in control, during narrative-forwarding moments) and a gameworld composed not of disassociated “levels” but a continuous series of locations with clear spatial relationships to one another. Finally, in 2001, Bungie’s Halo: Combat Evolved—in many ways the apothe
osis of the above games, with its conceptual sophistication and feature-film-quality art design—showed that shooters could appeal to just about anyone who played video games.
The rise of the shooter can be understood, in some ways, as an acknowledgment of the video game’s martial patrimony. The man who, in 1958, created what is generally recognized as the first game, Tennis for Two, also designed the timers used in the atom bombs dropped on Japan. The 1962 creation of Spacewar! is partially creditable to military-industrial complex research-and-development funds. The first video games may have grown out of the apparatus of war and defense, but that apparatus was soon using games for itself: Battlezone was modded by the US Army as a Bradley armored fighting vehicle trainer; Doom was modded by the US Marine Corps to attract new recruits; Valve’s Counter-Strike was used by the Chinese government to test the antiterrorist tactics of the People’s Armed Police. Whether these games enhance actual fighting competence is doubtful, but there is no question that shooters train those who play them to absorb and react to incomprehensible amounts of incoming information under great (though simulated) duress.
Shooters are intensely violent, but their violence rarely disturbs me in the way that the violence of a game such as Rockstar’s Manhunt disturbs me. Manhunt is, technically speaking, a third-person stealth game, but it is closer to an interactive snuff film. You hide in shadows, wait for someone to happen by, sneak up on him, and then use, say, a scythe to separate the unfortunate victim from his genitals. Two outstanding questions occurred to me the first (and only) time I played Manhunt. (1) Who thought this up? (2) Who wanted to play it? I endured a single hour of the game before turning it off; I spent another hour performing an exorcism on my PlayStation 2. Manhunt transforms the voyeuristic unease of the slasher film into something incriminatory. Manhunt’s scrotums are not even being mauled for the presumed benefit of flag or country, which is the detergent many shooters use to launder their carnage—quite effectively, too: The Manhunt series crapped out after two games, while the Call of Duty series is, at this writing, on its fifth vendible outing.