by Tom Bissell
Many have argued that the shooter offers a sense of twisted consolation to those who will never experience war firsthand. My experience playing shooters in their online, multiplayer mode suggests that their allure is more complicated. A multiplayer round of many shooters is usually thick with active or recently active members of the military. (Their clipped, acronymic manner of speech is the giveaway.) When I was embedded with the Marine Corps in the summer of 2005, I found that nearly every young enlisted Marine I spoke to was a shooter addict, and most of the billets I visited had a GameCube or PlayStation 2. Was this at all spiritually akin to World War I–era soldiers keeping a copy of Homer or Tennyson at the ready? Did the shooter allow these Marines some small, orchestrated sanity within the chaos of war? When I asked a non-shooter-playing lieutenant about this, he reminded me that chess, too, is a war simulator.
I admire plenty of shooters, but after a night of shooter butchery I often feel agitated, as though a drill instructor has been shouting in my ear for five hours. Reflection and thought seem like distant, alien luxuries. I step outside to clear my head, but the information-sifting machine I became while playing the shooter does not always power down. Every window is a potential sniper’s nest; every deserted intersection is waiting for a wounded straggler to limp across it. My stats screens in Dice’s Battlefield 2: Modern Combat and Call of Duty 4 tell me that I have killed many thousands of people. This information affects me about as deeply as looking over my three-pointer percentage in a basketball video game, and I sometimes wonder if shooters are not violent enough. The vomitous Manhunt actually made me contemplate, and recoil from, the messy ramifications of taking a virtual life. Most shooters do no such thing, offering a pathetic creed of salvation-by-M-16, in which you do the right—and instantly apparent—thing and bask in a heroic swell of music. On top of that, the shooter may be the least politically evolved of all the video-game genres, which is saying something. Call of Duty 4 does not even have the courage to name its obviously Muslim enemies as Muslims, making them Russified brutes from some exotic-sounding ethnic enclave.
I do not mind being asked to kill in the shooter: Killing is part of the contract. What I do mind is not feeling anything in particular—not even numbness—after having killed in such numbers. Many shooters ask the gamer to use violence against pure, unambiguous evil: monsters, Nazis, corporate goons, aliens of Ottoman territorial ambition. Yet these shooters typically have nothing to say about evil and violence, other than that evil is evil and violence is violent. This was never the most promising thematic carbon to trace, and yet shooters keep doing so with as little self-questioning as a medieval monk copying out scripture. Shooter images of exploding heads and perforated bodies have been rotated in my mind so many times that nothing takes root. It is all simply light and color. Any shock is alleged. Every cry of pain is white noise. Realism has become a euphemism for how beautifully arterial blood gushes from chest wounds. Death has become a way to inject life into the gameworld. Murder is vitality. For the shooter, slaughter is its north, its south, its east, its west, and nothing—no aesthetic cataclysm—has forced the genre into any readjustment. The shooter goes on as an increasingly sophisticated imitation of a dubious original idea.
So I thought—until I played a shooter so beautiful, terrible, and monstrous that my faith was restored not only in the shooter but in the video game itself.
Some video-game developers cloak their headquarters in anonymity as a way to hold back the job-seeking hordes and add a degree of difficulty to fan-boy pilgrimages. The Paris-based developer Ubisoft is not so reticent. Its Montreal studio, found in the city’s old textile district, is housed within an immense fired-brick building that, like a prison or urban high school, takes up an entire block; UBISOFT is branded upon two of its four sides.
Ubisoft Montreal has occupied this former clothing factory since 1997. When it moved in, it had only a hundred employees and required the use of part of a single floor. Today Ubisoft Montreal employs around two thousand people, the remainder of the building having long succumbed to the company’s expansion. Ubisoft Montreal began modestly, with a focus on small and licensed games. When I asked why this was, I was told that, in 1997, hardly anyone who worked at Ubisoft Montreal had any idea what he or she was doing. Almost no one had any game-design experience at all. In spite (or, just as likely, because) of this, Ubisoft is today one of the most consistently innovative major developers in the world.
Its startling lobby looked as though a ski chalet and a Star Destroyer had crashed into each other and fused: black metal stairs, creaky cherrywood floors, a bank of gleamingly argent elevators, exposed wooden joists. Strategically mounted flatscreen televisions ran a silent reel of Ubisoft commercials. While I waited to be fetched by Ubisoft game designer Clint Hocking, I noted the number of attractive young women wandering about the premises and began to wonder if the company had expanded to include an escort service or modeling agency or both.
Hocking appeared before too long. Dressed in a thermal gray long-sleeved tee, cargo pants, and black canvas sneakers, his skull and jawline dark with stubble, Hocking was slender in the way that writers and musicians are sometimes slender: not out of any desire or design but rather because his days were spent being consumed rather than consuming. He led me through the warrens of Ubisoft, one magnetically sealed door after another popping open with a wave of his security card. We passed meeting rooms named for the cities with Ubisoft offices (Montreal, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sydney, Tokyo, Sao Paolo, Brussels, San Francisco) and large, loftish spaces where the company’s games were developed. As with many companies, each project gets its own large, loftish space in order to allow the creative team constant interaction. At the time of my visit, twenty projects were in different stages of development, and some of the rooms were busier than others.
In the Prince of Persia room, for instance, only a dozen or so people were at their desks, all of whom were working on the (already available) game’s new downloadable content, the release date of which was approaching. Prince of Persia, a brilliant game that did not at all get its critical or commercial due, has the most hauntingly lithium ending of any video game since Team ICO’s Shadow of the Colossus (which Prince of Persia in many ways resembles). In the penultimate scene of Prince of Persia, your love interest, Elika, with whom you have spent the game flirting and bickering, perishes in her successful effort to imprison a great evil. You then have two choices: restore her to life and release the evil or keep the evil imprisoned and turn the game off. I restored her to life. After the resurrected Elika sits up, she asks, grievingly, “Why?” You do not respond. As you carry her away, the world collapses behind you and the game ends, savagely undercutting Kurt Vonnegut’s famous point that any story that concludes with lovers reunited is, even if a million invading Martians are headed toward Earth, a happy ending. (The Prince of Persia downloadable content being worked on during my Ubisoft visit would turn out to be a lengthy, somewhat pointless epilogue.)
We entered something called the Playtest Room—actually, a small, corridorlike space between two separate Playtest Rooms, on either side of which was a tinted one-way mirror. Here Ubisoft’s developers watched and listened to the gameplay reactions of people pulled off the street. The room was fully miked, and for a few minutes we listened to two young men and one young woman discuss their moment-by-moment reactions to Epic’s Gears of War 2. (Ubisoft occasionally canvasses outside opinion on rival games.) I asked if these people were aware that we could hear them. “It’s probably in the fine print,” Hocking said with a laugh. Next we walked by the Quality Testing Room—in which Ubisoft employees test games and game patches—and observed several dozen men and women playing various Ubisoft titles with dronelike industry. The final stop of the tour was a recently completed wing of classrooms. Here, Ubisoft employees between projects could listen to lectures on game-design theory and educate themselves about new technologies. This was intended to prevent layoffs. In all the economic turmoil of the l
ast year, I was told that Ubisoft Montreal had not let a single employee go and had no plans to.
On our way to the meeting room where our interview would take place, Hocking paused in a stairwell and pointed up at the numerous exposed pipes. “A lot of Sam’s moves came from here,” he said. “Ideas about how to climb and hide and ambush people.” “Sam” was secret agent Sam Fisher, lately of the National Security Agency and the hero of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, the first game Hocking worked on, which was released in 2002. Heavily influenced by the Metal Gear Solid series, Splinter Cell is a narratively intricate stealth game, the gameplay of which is founded upon ambush, shadow lurking, sneaking, and evasion. In the meeting room at last, I asked Hocking how he came to be involved with Splinter Cell.
Despite having grown up in Vancouver as a Commodore VIC-20 enthusiast, Hocking “kind of completely dropped out of the gaming world” from high school until well into his university years. In 1996, however, he abandoned his Mac for a PC and began to play “the hardcore PC games of the mid-to late 1990s”: Thief, System Shock, Deus Ex, Duke Nukem, and, finally, Unreal Tournament. The last had a multiplayer-map-editor function with which Hocking became immediately fascinated. “That was really complicated,” he told me. “I was building multiplayer maps and testing them with friends and figuring out how stuff works. I mean, there’s no manual. There’re no instructions on how to do this stuff. It’s really, really hard to use—as difficult as learning to be an architect, I’m sure.”
One day a friend of Hocking’s sent him an e-mail about a job opening at Ubisoft Montreal. Qualifications: knowledge of the Unreal Engine Hocking had spent the last year figuring out. “I think he sent it almost as a joke,” Hocking said of his friend. “I was like, ‘What the hell?’ I literally dragged my résumé into an e-mail and sent it in.” Six weeks later he was living in Montreal and working on Splinter Cell. His good fortune had only begun. After a few months, the game’s designer left the company and Ubisoft asked Hocking if he would take over. Then the scriptwriter left. Again, Hocking was asked to take over because, in his words, “I was one of the only Anglophones on the team and had a master’s degree in creative writing.” (This formal dramatic training sets Hocking apart from many game designers. When I asked which writers Hocking admired, he admitted to having a yen for “weird stuff,” and named Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace—may he rest in peace—as examples.) With these sudden and unforeseen promotions, Hocking was the point man for what Ubisoft hoped would become a flagship title. These hopes were fulfilled: Splinter Cell was, in Hocking’s words, a “megahit.” Recognizing Hocking’s talents, Ubisoft soon asked him to serve as one of the Montreal studio’s creative directors, a job he has held ever since. Of these startling turns of event, Hocking remained circumspect: “How many thousands of guys got their first job in the game industry and worked on a game that got canceled, or was a piece of shit, or no one ever played? I landed on the right game at the right time.”
After Hocking completed the Splinter Cell sequel, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, he was asked to revitalize the Ubisoft first-person-shooter series Far Cry (though the developer of the original 2004 PC Far Cry title was the German company Crytek). The Far Cry series was notable for its visual beauty, paucity of load screens while moving around its South Pacific locales (even when traveling in-and outdoors, which was and remains unusual), the inspiration it siphoned from H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, and not much else. The series had been marred by its umpteen, increasingly colonic iterations: the Crytek PC game Far Cry was followed by the Ubisoft-developed Xbox remake, Far Cry Instincts, which was followed by an Xbox sequel, Far Cry Instincts: Evolution, which was followed by an Xbox 360 remake of the two titles bundled together, which was called Far Cry Instincts: Predator. Rather than stick the gaming audience with Far Cry 5, or Far Cry Instincts 3: Predator 2, Hocking pushed to call the game Far Cry 2, even though it had almost nothing in common with the original Far Cry. It was the first of many wise decisions.
Before Far Cry 2 begins, you peruse what appear to be the case files of nine male mercenaries. The one you select will be the character you control for the game’s duration. These gentlemen include a Chinese from Xinjiang, a Sikh, a Kosovar Albanian, a Native American Oklahoman, a Haitian, and a Northern Irishman. All are former smugglers, bodyguards, paramilitary insurgents, or military contractors. This unsavory roll call does not initially sparkle with originality. Then it dawns on you that all of these men have a historical connection to some kind of colonial conflict, whether distant or contemporary. And how many video games have you played that know what a Sikh, much less Xinjiang, even is?
So…the Haitian? Now you find yourself, with a first-person view of yourself, sitting in the backseat of a Jeep. The purview of most FPSs allows you to see, at most, the parts of your hand that come into contact with your weapon, but while seated in this Jeep you are able to look down at your chest and legs and over at the seat next to you, upon which lies a map and what appears to be a passport. You are aware of your mission (to kill an arms dealer known as the Jackal), but not much else. You do not even know where you are going. All you know is that you are in a troubled, unnamed African country. Your young driver, meanwhile, is starting the Jeep and apologizing for the delay. From him you learn that you are headed to a hotel in a nearby town called Pala.
You are soon chauffeured through countryside so topographically compelling and biologically aswarm with life that you may be forced to remind yourself: This is a video game, not a safari. What you see is an azure-skied afternoon—the sort of day in which the range of human visibility can conceivably compete with that of the divine. The dirt road you travel wends diligently toward the horizon. On the road, tire-squashed piles of animal dung. Along it, wire-fence guardrails anchored by old truck tires. Around it, crop-less khaki waves of the breeze-blown savanna. The zigzag trunks of acacia trees are like lightning strikes from thunderheads of foliage. In the air, flitting cruciform dragonflies. In the distance, anciently knobby rock hills ringed with tonsures of greenery. Above, a plane noisily banks and grows more quietly distant—the last such plane, your driver tells you, out of this country.
This sunlit world suffers a grim and abrupt eclipse. Some Africans are walking toward you, toward the airport, seeking escape. Your driver beeps at them but sadly promises you that they will be disappointed. On your right a river comes sparklingly into view. Later you come across a stretch of savanna that, along with several acacia trees, is angrily ablaze with the most realistic fire effect you have ever seen in a game. The driver’s radio is tuned to something called Liberation Radio, the deejay of which announces, “Speaking the truth for the truth seekers. Beware the evil APR scourge!” The driver flips the radio off: checkpoint ahead. “They’re not fans of the deejay,” he says. These are, apparently, gunmen employed by the UFLL, the APR’s rival militia. Many armed black men quickly surround the Jeep, but it is a white with an Afrikaans accent who steps forward to speak. He is curious about you, but your driver douses that burning fuse by promising to bring the men cold beer on his way back. Once the Jeep is waved along, your driver showers the white man with unctuous gratitude: “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. See you soon, sir.” The moment the checkpoint is cleared, he mutters, “Foreigners.” Quickly he turns to you. “No offense, sir.” Moments later you see several African men standing before a row of tin-roofed shacks to which they have apparently just set fire. They stare at you ominously as you float by. The driver, waving away the smoke, says, “Don’t let this concern you. Just boys letting off steam. You remember how it is.”
I have traveled to a few places in which everyone was, to one degree or another, worried about being violently killed, and I have traveled to other places in which the threat of violence is always in circular, vulturine motion. I have also traveled in Africa. The driver’s affected naïveté, the cable-knit menace of the checkpoint, the helixical entwinement of seeming normality with imminent collapse: All of this rings very tr
ue to me. The details scattered throughout this sequence of Far Cry 2—the longest scripted sequence in the game—do not tell a story, or introduce any characters, or establish any ammo dumps of plot. Because the gamer is in control of the camera, there is no establishing shot and no slow pan. Nor are there any music cues. Video games are very good at using detail to induce awe, but Far Cry 2 understands how smaller details cytoplasmically gather around a moody nucleus of place.
You do not see your driver again. You quickly fall ill with malaria and wake up in your hotel room to find the Jackal reading aloud your assassination orders. Rather than kill you, he tells you of “a book I read a long time ago,” which he proceeds to quote: “Life itself is will to power. Nothing else matters.” After plunging his machete into the wall above your head, the Jackal leaves you there. A gunfight swiftly erupts outside the hotel, which you must now escape. Once this is done, you will spend many hours running errands for fatuous African revolutionaries and forging dangerous relationships with fellow mercs—the very men whose case files you initially perused and passed over for your Haitian. (Had you picked someone else, the Haitian would be among them.) These mercs—whom the game refers to as “buddies” and not, note, “friends”—will frequently request your aid with matters that dirty work will not begin to describe. All of them will eventually betray you and you will betray them. Others will hunt you. You will hide and run. You will kill and do other unspeakable things. And you will do your best to ruin, burn, and otherwise destroy one of the most beautiful gameworlds ever created.