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 apotheosis 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.
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 last 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 true 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.
Far Cry 2 is not a game about story or character. It is not a game about choice, since almost all the choices it gives you are selfish or evil ones. It is, instead, a game about chaos—which you enable, abet, and are at constant risk of being consumed by. At one point in Far Cry 2, I was running along the savanna when I was spotted by two militiamen. I turned and shot, and, I thought, killed them both. When I waded into the waist-deep grass to pick up their ammo, it transpired that one of the men was still alive. He proceeded to plug me with his sidearm. Frantic, and low on health, I looked around, trying to find the groaning, dying man, but the grass was too dense. I sprinted away, only to be hit by a few more of his potshots. When I had put enough distance between us, I lobbed a Molotov cocktail into the general area where the supine, dying man lay. Within seconds I could hear him screaming amid the twiggy crackle of the grass catching fire. Sitting before my television, I felt a kind of horridly unreciprocated intimacy with the man I had just burned to death. Virtually alone among shooters, Far Cry 2 does not keep track of how many people you have killed. The game may reward your murderous actions but you never feel as though it approves of them, and it reminds you again and again that you are no better than the people you kill. In fact, you may be much worse.
Africa has not been visited by many video games. Those that have—such as the old stand-up Jungle Hunt—have fallen somewhat short of honoring it. Parts of the Halo series take place on Zanzibar, but this is a far-future, sci-fi Africa—not really Africa at all. Resident Evil 5 uses its African setting as a master class in cultural sensitivity, such as when its muscle-sculpture white hero guns down (literally!) spear-chucking tribesmen. Far Cry 2 escaped the accusations of racism that justifiably dogged Resident Evil 5, and I asked Hocking about the potentially controversial—not to mention commercially and aesthetically unusual—decision to set his game in the middle of a contemporary African civil war.
“We had a mandate from the company,” he said, “which was to rejuvenate the brand. That meant getting away from the tropical island where the previous Far Crys had been set.” His design team kicked around various locales, but “the one that seemed to be the most powerful was the African savanna. Plain, acacia tree, sun, some herd animals in the background. That’s what we wanted—that iconic, powerful feeling of natural wilderness, themes of man and nature and the darkness inside us, just like Doctor Moreau. As soon as you transplant that to Africa, you go from H. G. Wells to Joseph Conrad. We were making Heart of Darkness the video game. How bad will people be? And why? Let’s not strip the race out of it. Let’s go to Africa and treat it realistically and try to explore it.”
Occasionally, Far Cry 2 gives voice to paleo-liberal pro-Africa sentiment. “This is our struggle. Africa is for Africans,” one militia leader tells you, and the Jackal turns out to be a bit more complicated than a mere arms dealer. When he contemptuously notes that a kid from Iowa who gets killed peacekeeping an African civil war earns more press coverage than fifty thousand dead Africans, the Jackal sounds like Noam Chomsky with a Mac-10. Such sentiment does not last long against the game’s thanatological tidal wave, and it is not supposed to.
What Far Cry 2 explores is not why civil wars occur, or why people engage in evil behavior, or why Africa is so bewilderingly prey to the wicked aims of a few. It explores, in gameplay rather than moral terms, the behavioral and emotional consequences of being exposed to relentless violence. Most shooters only play at making the gamer feel truly assailed. Even in excellent shooters, such as the Gears of War series, the firefights are subject to control: Here is the part where five Locusts spawn, and here is the part where two Boomers appear, and here is the part where five Wretches skitter toward you along the metal catwalk. In Gears, at the end of a skirmish, an electric-guitar power chord—G, I think—rings out to let you know you have cleared the sequence of enemies, are momentarily safe, and can now move on. In the Call of Duty games, the fighting is even more rigorously controlled. During many gunfights, you find yourself sprinting across the battlefield to the invisible spot on the game map that deactivates the spawning mechanism filling the overhead window with snipers.
In Far Cry 2 none of the firefights is scripted. While you have missions, the gameworld is open, and you can travel—by boat, Jeep, car, bus, hang glider, or foot—virtually anywhere you want within its fifty-square-kilometer area, with carefully placed cliffs, rock formations, mountains, and rivers there to complicate things. Militias patrol, independent of where you are in the story. They are always out there, looking for you, and all of them want you dead. Checkpoints are numerous, and if you are as much as glimpsed by those manning them you will be attacked en masse. When a battle in Far Cry 2 begins you have no idea what will happen. Simply because you are fighting five guys does not mean that four more cannot show up and join in. And simply because you successfully make it through one grueling encounter does not mean another will not happen ten seconds later. When Far Cry 2 is set on its highest difficulty level, it becomes as thrillingly challenging as any game I have played. You learn to love and fear the violence in equal measure. Then you listen to a man burning to death in the grass and the game lets you make of that what you will.
I described to Hocking my most memorable Far Cry 2 experience. It was morning—the game has an evocative day–night cycle, with morning suns as bright as magma and night skies buckshot with stars—and I was driving along in a Jeep, on my way to steal a bag of the African narcotic khat for one of my fellow mercs. Around the bend ahead of me came another Jeep. Since almost everyone in the world of Far Cry 2 wishes you ill, I began to think about my course of action. Suddenly a zebra—perhaps headed for the local watering hole for its morning refreshment—ran into the road. I swerved, unsuccessfully, to avoid it and smashed grille-to-grille into the other Jeep, the passenger of which had opened up on me with a .50-caliber mounted machine gun. The zebra, meanwhile, was pinned between us. I jumped out of my vehicle and spun and lobbed a grenade under the Jeeps and will not soon forget the surreal clarity with which the luckless zebra’s blast-launched corpse went sailing past me. It was as bizarre as anything I had ever seen in a video game—and no one had written or programmed one moment of it. I asked Hocking if, when he played Far Cry 2, he ever felt as if he were at the Frankensteinian mercy of some incomprehensible beast of his own creation.
“I have that feeling all the time,” he told me. “The sort of sublime violence and chaos—something rises up out of it that’s shocking. The beautifulness of its horror. It’s incredible how volatile and intense this game can be.” With Far Cry 2, Hocking said, unrelentingness was “a big part of our goal. Playing the game, I’ve learned things about myself. Trying to hold your ground against fourteen or fifteen guys when you’re hidden behind a Jeep with an assault rifle? Your brain is telling you, If you get up and try to run, you’re dead. You’re trying to stay calm: I don’t have enough ammo to miss, so I have to aim at these fucking guys and make sure they’re down. In most games you just kind of charge forward. There’s no real tactics, no real discipline under fire. We wanted to make sure that the potential for that insane stuff was so high that you don’t need to script anything because there would always be insane stuff happening.”
He sat up in his chair, then, roused by the memory of the first time Far Cry 2 was publicly shown at a game convention in Leipzig, Germany. “Alain Corre, the head of Ubisoft marketing in Europe, came to see the game; he hadn’t seen it yet. It’s a very hard game to demo, because nothing is scripted, so you’re always improvising. We were showing him the game and at one point the guy who was playing got into a bad spot. We’re like, ‘Ah, fuck. He’s gonna die in the demo. Great.’ So he’s just spraying machinegun fire and hits this propane tank that was in a weird fluky position. It went flying through the air and the jet caught the three guys who were shooting at him on fire—all in a row. They burst into flames. The propane tank goes sailing out of frame. Then another one caught fire and goes bouncing across the ground and up into a tree, and right when it hit the branches of the tree, the tank exploded. And the tree goes, BOOOF! I’ve never seen a tree come apart in the game like that since. Every branch smashed off the tree in this huge puff of leaves. Because that tank had bounced across the ground and up into the tree, there was this huge line of scorch marks where it had spun through the grass. It was so amazing, this crazy chain of events—and to this day I’ve never seen a chain reaction that was so cool. Everything that happened was totally systemic. There was no way we could have scripted that. And then Alain turned to us and said, ‘Your game is great.’”
Hocking is obsessed with the formal reverberations of game design. “I despise cut scenes,” he told me. “We have a mandate, actually, not to use cut scenes. It’s not necessarily engraved in stone, but most of us believe we need to try to tell a story in an interactive way.” When I brought up Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto IV, the cut scenes of which are generally superb, Hocking nodded and said, “As a player I don’t necessarily dislike them if they’re done very, very well. As a developer, on the other hand, the cost of them is so high. The constraints that they bring are significant. Once a cut scene is built and in the game, you can’t change it. You’re done. A lot of my work on the original Splinter Cell was building cut scenes, which is a massive waste of time. They were taking my time away from making the game more fun.”
Far Cry 2’s maintained first-person point of view tries to supplant the need for cut scenes. Every in-game activity—talking to someone, studying your map, climbing into a car, opening a door, using pliers to remove a bullet from your leg, relocating a broken thumb, popping an antimalaria pill—holds the first-person and places no freeze on the surrounding action. (Hocking swiped this from DreamWorks Interactive’s Jurassic Park: Trespasser, an ambitious but largely unsuccessful game.) Far Cry 2’s devotion to its unbroken first-person point of view may not sound unusual or even noteworthy—until you find yourself running from seven militiamen and trying to consult your map while suffering a simultaneous attack of vision-blurring malarial fever.
The maintained first-person was intended to provide what Hocking calls a psychosomatic “shortcut” to the gamer’s brain. “The reason is twofold. First, you create this bond between the player and the character. When he has to pull a twig out of his arm, he feels some kind of illusion of pain. Second, all of it was designed to build up to that moment when you’re holding your buddy in your arms. It’s this huge chain of connectedness that pays off in that moment.”
Hocking was referring to moments in Far Cry 2 in which one of your merc buddies attempts to come to your rescue, only to be cut down on the battlefield. When you approach severely injured buddies, they beg you to help and curse you if you put your back to them. If you choose to help, you take your wounded buddy in your arms. You then have three choices: abandonment, healing, or mercy killing. If you pull out your sidearm but hesitate to fire, your buddy will sometimes grab the gun barrel, place it to his lips, and demand that you put him out of his misery. These moments are unnerving not because your buddies are deeply imagined characters. They are types, nothing more. What Far Cry 2 seeks to provide with depth is the actual, in-game experience of terminating a life or being the agent of its restoration. This is not a tragic choice, and does not pretend to be. It is a way to lure you deeper into the gameworld’s brutal ethos.
That you can hurt your buddies at all runs counter to the way most shooters deal with friendly characters, who are either magically immune to your bullets or whose death by your hand results in instant mission failure. On this point Hocking grew animated: “I guarantee that the first time you went into one of those interactive scenes in Half-Life, where you had your gun in your hand and were able to point it at Alyx, the first thing you did was line her up and shoot her in the head. And it didn’t do anything. It fired, and you lost your ammo, but the bullet wasn’t there. And then for the rest of the game you never questioned it. All we did was say, ‘Okay, what if you can shoot that person? What happens if this dude shows up to save your life and you turn around and pop him in the forehead? What does that mean?’”
With some sorrow I admitted to Hocking that I did not register my buddies’ passing quite as viscerally as he intended—and I shot a lot of them. Some final emotional tumbler refused to fall into place. Whether this was because the buddies are horrible people, or because Far Cry 2 forgoes the clumsy (but possibly necessary) means of characterization found in other games, I was not sure. Hocking admitted the moment “didn’t work as well as we hoped,” and attributed it to, among other things, how “wooden” the buddies are during interaction. This would mean that my failure to be moved had more to do with the current capability of the video game than Far Cry 2’s failure to realize its vision. Possibly it was both.
Just as possibly, Hocking said, it was neither. “I always assume minor technical problem X prevented us from achieving perfection. I always think, If we just solved X, we would have succeeded in everything beyond X. But you don’t actually know what is behind X. The wall behind X might be impassable.” He went on to agree with the most common complaint lodged against Far Cry 2: Only rarely do you have the faintest fucking clue as to what, narratively, is going on. You have your buddies, but they are as fickle and unforthcoming as house cats, and your interaction with them is fleeting. On top of that, you are working for two different militia factions simultaneously, which neither appears to mind. (They also prepay you for your work, which resembles no merc protocol of which I am aware.) For long stretches of the game you do not know who is related to whom or how or why anyone happens to be doing what they are doing.
“That stuff,” Hocking said, “is being tracked, but it’s all just a bunch of invisible matrices that aren’t exposed to the player. It would have been in our interest to make the game more about the aggregate relationships of all the people and expose who likes who and who dislikes who—making clear to the player that all of these people are interconnected.” A less formally adventurous game would have provided such information in typical video-game fashion: either artificially, such as a chart with the faces of the various characters beside mood-indicating glyphs, or with the marginal dynamism of allowing the gamer to find some miraculously thorough memo. Hocking could not bring himself to resort to such conventions.
I asked him, “So how do you reveal that information?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s the question. And the problem.”
Like approximately everyone else on Planet Earth, Hocking writes a blog. His most famous and impassioned post, “Ludonarrative Dissonance in BioShock,” appeared in late 2007. Although Hocking opens the post by assuring his readers that BioShock is an indisputably great game, he says that, as a game designer, he is unable to overlook its central failure. BioShock invites “us to ask important and compelling questions,” Hocking writes, but the answers it provides “are confused, frustrating, deceptive and unsatisfactory.”
Among the games of this era, BioShock has Himalayan stature. From writing to level design to art direction to gameplay, it is a work of anomalous and distinctive excellence. The story takes place in 1960, in an underwater city known as Rapture, secretly designed and just as secretly overseen by a wealthy madman named Andrew Ryan. Ryan is a cleric of a philosophy clearly intended to resemble the Objectivism of Ayn Rand, and he runs his city accordingly. Rapture is a place, Ryan says, where science is not limited by “petty morality,” where “the great are not constrained by the small.” A mid-Atlantic plane crash leads to the gamer’s unplanned, many-fathomed descent into Rapture, which has been recently torn apart by riots and rebellion; its few surviving citizens are psychopathic. Thanks to a two-way radio, a man named Atlas becomes your only friend and guide through the ruins of Ryan’s utopia, and your first task is to help Atlas’s family escape.
The only thing of any worth in Rapture is ADAM, an injected tonic that grants superhuman abilities such as pyro-and telekinesis. One way to gorge on ADAM is by “harvesting” small, pigtailed girls—known as Little Sisters—who wander Rapture under heavy guard. But Little Sisters can also be restored to uncorrupted girlhood. Thus, whenever the gamer comes into contact with a Little Sister, he must decide what to do with her. This involves taking the girl into your arms. If the gamer saves her, the reward is a moon-eyed curtsy of thanks. If the gamer harvests her, the Little Sister vividly and upsettingly transforms into a wiggling black slug—but the reward is ADAM, which makes you more powerful.
“BioShock,” Hocking writes, “is a game about the relationship between freedom and power….It says, rather explicitly, that the notion that rational self-interest is moral or good is a trap, and that the ‘power’ we derive from complete and unchecked freedom necessarily corrupts, and ultimately destroys us.” The problem is that this theme lies athwart of the game itself. For one thing, there is no real benefit in harvesting Little Sisters, because refusing to harvest them eventually leads to gifts and bonuses of comparable worth. In other words, the gamer winds up in a place of equivalent advantage no matter what decision he or she makes. BioShock was celebrated for being one of the first games to approach morality without lapsing into predictable binaries, but if the altruistic refusal to harvest Little Sisters has no sacrificial consequence, the refusal cannot really be considered altruistic.
For Hocking, this was only the beginning of BioShock’s dissonance: “Harvesting [Little Sisters] in pursuit of my own self-interest seems not only the best choice mechanically, but also the right choice. This is exactly what this game needed to do—make me experience—feel—what it means to embrace a social philosophy that I would not under normal circumstances consider.” But BioShock, Hocking argues, does not follow through with this, as it is designed in such a way as to force the gamer to help Atlas. This does not make sense “if I am opposed to the principle of helping someone else. In order to go forward in the game, I must do as Atlas says, because the game does not offer me the freedom to choose sides.” While the game’s mechanic offers the freedom to luxuriate in Objectivism’s enlightened selfishness, the game’s fiction denies the gamer that same freedom.
Because helping Atlas is “not a ludic constraint” but rather “a narrative one that is dictated to us,” Hocking claims to have felt mocked by BioShock, as though his contract of belief in the gameworld were torn up before his very eyes. The post concludes with Hocking’s acknowledgment that his concerns “may seem trivial or bizarre” and that he “only partially” understands his reaction to BioShock. “It is,” he writes, “the complaint of a semi-literate, half-blind Neanderthal, trying to comprehend the sandblasted hieroglyphic poetry of a one-armed Egyptian mason.”
When I asked Hocking about “Ludonarrative Dissonance in BioShock,” he said he did not have much to add. He admired BioShock and was ambivalent about BioShock. In the end, he said, “I excuse the fact that I don’t have agency in the story for real, because I know it’s a game and I know it is technologically impossible for me to have the kind of agency this game wants me to feel like I have. In a game today, it doesn’t exist.”
Perhaps, I said, that was the point? Rather than mock the gamer, BioShock could just as easily be commenting on itself, its game-ness, thereby allowing the gamer to feel what he or she wants to feel. When I played BioShock, I felt better emotionally rescuing the Little Sisters and would not have stopped doing so even if I was aware that my sacrifice was not a real one. When BioShock told me that I was, in fictional terms, being controlled, I thought hard about the last three days I had spent manipulating photons with a button-encrusted plastic brick. Was not the point that BioShock is rich enough to provoke such divergent interpretations? And was not Far Cry 2 guilty of a ludonarrative dissonance of omission by neglecting to populate its gameworld with civilians and other innocent people? If the theme of Far Cry 2 is the seductive and perverting power of learning how to navigate and prosper within a violent world, why is the gamer denied situations that would truly test the limits of that seduction?
Hocking immediately said, “I don’t know. We didn’t want to be muddying up our themes with a bunch of mass murder for laughs. That would have made it confusing. But more than that, there are social-responsibility issues involved in being able to butcher women and children.” I had read an interview with Hocking in which he had described the “numerous technical and production challenges” that eliminated Far Cry 2’s intended civilian and refugee populations, so I knew it was not only an issue of social responsibility. Here, then, was one of the great vexations of the video game: For games to mean something, they must engage with meaningful subject matter. The subject matter need not be death and slaughter, but if it is, you must ask yourself, as a game designer, how far you are willing to let the gamer go, and why. As technology improves, Hocking said, video-game characters “are going to be so real and believable that when you shoot them with a .556 round, their arms are going to pop off. And it’s going to be horrifying. No one wants that. I don’t want to play that game.” The place where game interactivity and visual fidelity intersect is a kind of moral crossroad at which any sane person would feel obliged to pause.
And here was the other problem. In video games, the assignation of meaning has traditionally seesawed between the game’s author (or authors) and the gamer. Authors had their say in static moments such as cut scenes, and gamers had their say during play. There is no doubt that this method of game design has produced many fine and fun games but very few experiences that have emotionally startled anyone. For designers who want to change and startle gamers, they as authors must relinquish the impulse not only to declare meaning but also to suggest meaning. They have to think of themselves as shopkeepers of many possible meanings—some of which may be sick, nihilistic, and disturbing. Game designers will always have control over certain pivot points—they own the store, determine its hours, and stock its shelves—but once the gamer is inside, the designer cannot tell the gamer what meaning to pursue or purchase. The reason this happens so rarely in games—and struggles to happen even in games that attempt to follow this model—is because, as Hocking said, “The very nature of drama, as we understand it, is authored. Period. The problem is, once you give control of that to a player, authorial control gets broken. Things like pacing and flow and rhythm—all these things that are important to maintaining the emotional impact of narrative—go all willy-nilly. The player’s vision of what might be dramatic or interesting or compelling can be completely at odds with the author’s vision. The whole point of a game is that players have autonomy to do what they want. It might be that the player is motivated to do the opposite of what you want him to do. That’s a legitimate goal in gameplay.”
Hocking was perfectly aware that the social responsibility he felt in preventing the gamer from massacring civilians in Far Cry 2 was a contradictory riptide within his overall design philosophy. He brought up Jonathan Blow’s core criticism—games that do not attempt to harmonize meaning with gameplay cannot succeed as works of art—and said, “I think he’s right in the sense that a lot of people don’t understand dynamical meaning—meaning that arises out of mechanics—because no one really understands it. I don’t even know what that means and it’s my medium of expression! Most people don’t understand it because they can’t understand it, not because they haven’t taken the time to learn it. They’re grappling with it like everyone else. Some people grapple with it more seriously and recognize that it’s a central and fundamental flaw in what we do. I think Jon and I see eye-to-eye on that. Finding a way to make the mechanics of play our expression as creators and as artists—to me that’s the only question that matters.”
Where, I asked, did that leave the narrative game? And could narrative games ever reach a place that was artistically satisfying for their creators and emotionally significant for their players?
Hocking’s hand traffic-copped. “Whoa. I’m not committed to the idea of the authored narrative game. In fact, I’m totally against it. I’m committed to the idea of designing a system wherein you provide useful channels for the player to poke and prod, so that you’re kind of baiting him into narrative paths of his own choosing.” Call of Duty 4, he said, was an example of “a rigidly authored narrative game that has a fairly good story. It pushes some of your buttons and manipulates you and makes you feel stuff. And yet the story you experienced is exactly the same as the one I experienced, with very minor variations that are probably no more different from the minor variations you and I have in our subjective experience of reading a novel. The problem with that approach, in my opinion, is that we already know how good that can be. The best story Call of Duty can ever have is something either very close to or marginally better than the best war movie ever made. The best we can ever hope for, with a narrative game, is to get there. We can’t go beyond it using the tools of film or literature or any other authored narrative approach. The question is, can we go beyond it, way beyond it, to completely different realms, by using tools that are inherent to games? To let the player play the story, tell his own story, and have that story be deep and meaningful? We don’t know the limit to that problem. It could be that the limit to that problem is stories that aren’t nearly as good.”
“But you’ve got to find out,” I said.
“Yeah. I have to find out.”