"(A)n impalpable grayness" of Moral Terror: Ruminations on Spec Ops: The Line

I killed a mob of civilians. Not out of gleeful delight. Not because I had to. I chose to gun them down because of something they did, and my squadmate followed my example. I didn't feel better afterwards, not justified or avenged or anything. I did not even have time to regret my actions because I needed to push forward because...now I forget. It must have been important, though. But I remember how they ran and they screamed, these piles of pixels draped in colors resembling flesh and blood. I remember explosions of red of cries of pain. I'm sure they deserved it. Two days ago, I killed a mob of virtual civilians in a video game, and I'm still thinking about it.

Yager's Spec Ops: The Line would not have even been a blip on my radar had it not been for significant press about the game's story. Military shooters like SOCOM, Ghost Recon, or Call of Duty never hold my interests. I recognize the near flawless controls of Call of Duty, but I'll likely not purchase another one because I cannot get into the multiplayer. On the surface, Spec Ops is one of these games, and it stays this way just long enough for the player to realize this, pitting the player, who controls a more macho Nathan Drake, against non-white enemies alongside trash-talking grunts in some desert wasteland. At some point in the game, though, things go from status quo to FUBAR--I just can't pinpoint the exact moment.

Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.--Joseph Conrad, "Heart of Darkness"

I think the fact that I cannot find the locus at which the story shifts is testament to the writing behind this game--or at least its source material. Drawing from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (the game has more in common with the latter), Spec Ops: The Line builds its narrative around two works that are giants in their respective media of literature and film. The problem I faced going in, though, was that I knew what to expect because I've read the novella and seen the film countless times. It's an ambitious project, perhaps one that stands a bit too comfortably on the shoulders of giants, but it is a successful one. The story is damn good and worth the time and money I invested in the game. Its elements were familiar, but the specifics were unique. It's more homage than re-imagining, which works in the narrative's favor.

The game's initial concept is simple, if not a bit stupid. Dubai has been hit by a sandstorm of biblical proportion, and the 33rd Battalion, led by John Konrad, tries to help evacuate those left behind, eventually staying behind after the U.S. asked them to come back. The United Arab Emirates declare Dubai a lost disaster zone until a transmission from Konrad breaks the radio stormwall, prompting the U.S. to send a Delta Force reconnaissance team into Dubai. At first, I questioned the plausibility of radio silence in the year 2012 when the game starts off as a standard military shooter in a hyperreal environment, but what begins as routine jingoistic, macho-military combat erodes into existential battles against former American soldiers. About midway through the game, I realized that "reality" (or some Baudrillardian "hyperreality") had broken down down, buried under piles of corpses and sand. Spec Ops never strives for realism that Call of Duty or Splinter Cell or numerous others attempt; instead it offers a surreality, a parallel military narrative that uses the tropes of other games in the genre only to undo them. The shifting sands, the hallucinations, and the psychedelic rock music all build an atmosphere on "unreality" in a genre that seems so focused on realism. To say much more would venture into spoiler territory--though shame on you if you've never read Heart of Darkness or seen Apocalypse Now.

The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there — there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were, — No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it — this suspicion of their not being inhuman. --Joseph Conrad "Heart of Darkness"

As with all games, though, the narrative's effectiveness leans heavily on the actual gameplay. Here, I found the game's mechanics to be somewhere between adequate and good. Gears of War and Max Payne 3 offer more competent cover mechanicsthan Spec Ops does, but I cannot help wondering if Spec Ops' simple controls are by design. Just as Conrad parodied the adventure novel and Coppola parodied the epic war film, the team at Yager Development may be lampooning the controls of the third-person cover shooter--with the addition of elementary squad commands. If so, it works. In fact, the enemy AI is far too good for the cover mechanics to offer any sort of unreliability. The gameplay is nothing revelatory, but it crashes so beautifully with the narrative that I can't help asking myself, "Why the hell am I playing this game?" I know nothing good will happen at the end, but I want to see where it all is going. To do that, I have to put myself through what feels like mediocre gameplay but opens up as I realize its importance. Each explosion carries meaning as you tear apart a city that once stood for excessive decadence and architectural beauty. The ruinous Dubai setting is perfect for a game hell-bent on dealing with the very idea of mindless destruction and its repercussions.

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. --Joseph Conrad "Heart of Darkness"

And while the city crumbles, so too does your platoon of Not Nathan Drake and his two Not Nathan Drake's Buddies. While they start out with quippy banter and stupid machismo, their bonds are stretched and eventually snapped. While I've harped on Nolan North's over-exposure in the game industry, he delivers a stellar performance as Capt. Walker. The overall voice work is excellent, and it evolves too, in-game. Walker's reaction to suppressing enemy fire changes from an initial call for cover to a growling, "Fuck you," delivered toward the approaching enemy. A lot of times, I found myself uttering the same thing in tense firefights, resulting in looks from wife that fell somewhere concern and annoyance. It was a bit more sobering than I thought it would be.

I've made it fairly obvious here that I've a fascination with video game violence. I've discussed it's purpose in God of War and Red Dead Redemption, but rarely does a game so blatantly turn that violence outward, so much to tell the player, "You know you're a bit messed up for playing this, right?" It's a big question and one that needs asking. While I can't say I enjoyed the game without admitting my own appreciation of the macabre, I can recommend it, and I can do so highly. It warrants your attention if only to give you an abyss to stare into to see what looks back. In Apocalypse Now, Colonel Kurtz posits in what is likely the most chilling monologue in cinema history, "Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies." Perhaps this game will make a worthy introduction to both of them.

Cheers,

--David

Gaming the West in Red Dead Redemption

Likely the most instantly recognizable genre in any form, the Western has endured through the 20th century by undergoing transformations as varied as the stories told around campfires built in the moonlit night of the American frontier. From the gratuitous spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone to the revisionist novels of Cormac McCarthy, the genre shifts and bends according to the person behind the camera or the pen, but the fixed archetypal elements remain present enough for the viewer/reader to understand the work's function in its generic history. The Man With No Name trilogy gave Hollywood Clint Eastwood's iconic portrayal of the titular hero (aka "Blondie"), the quintessential "drifter" character living outside the law. McCarthy's Blood Meridian depicts the West as a place steeped in myth and blood. Due to the versatility of its elements, it amazes me how seldom they are used in video games.

The first Western-themed game I played was LucasArts' Outlaws (1997), a first-person shooter in which a retired U.S. Marshal hunts down the evil railroad baron who killed his wife and kidnapped his daughter. Though I never really liked the in-game cartoonish graphics (this was before cel shading solved the problem of placing cartoons in a 3D envioronment), the cutscenes made the atmosphere come alive. Outlaws spins a good yarn, and would be my favorite traditional Western game until 2010, when Rockstar released Red Dead Redemption, an award-winning game that I'm sure everyone who is reading this has played. Finally, a developer nailed the genre in look, atmosphere, and overall feel. The writing, the voice work, the mechanics, all of them crystallized in a near pitch-perfect work of genre fiction that paid homage to its inspirations while carving out a new niche for games in the Western genre. John Marston's journey toward redemption seems like standard fare for the Western genre, but Rockstar gave us a way to pick apart a genre the only way an open world video game can: we control how John Marston lives.

Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been.
His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again
in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous
to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to
man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.
--Blood Meridian

Red Dead Redemption's New Austin is violent...extremely violent. When the player first control Marston, the character is already wounded and bloody, barely a survivor of his first encounter with Bill Williamson. Even the household chores, as anyone who grew up on a farm (myself included) can attest, involve a fair degree of violence as you shoot vermin to protect crops or livestock. Violence in the frontier is unavoidable. Through these simple gameplay elements, the game invests meaning in the most mundane daily activities. Roping and breaking broncos, driving cattle, hunting, they all involve violence or danger in some form or fashion, and it is in these situations where the video game breaks from the Western film genre and becomes more novelesque.

I think that Red Dead Redemption owes just as much influence to Cormac McCarthy as it does John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. In his Western novels (particularly his Border Trilogy), McCarthy finds significance in almost every aspects of daily life in the American West. For instance, this passage from All the Pretty Horses shows how the protagonist, John Grady Cole comes to a deep, metaphysical understanding of pain and existence simply by listening to the horse eat:

He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened
to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and
die in the darkness at the edge of the world as he lay there the agony in his heart
was like a stake. He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being
seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew
what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless
and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits.
--All the Pretty Horses

McCarthy's language is elegaic, tragic, and hauntingly beautiful. But the language of Red Dead Redemption (and video games at large) functions much more differently, namely through gameplay. Every task that Marston performs raises questions about control and motivation. The men forcing Marston to hunt down his former gang members are metonymous for the player's physically controlling Marston. The person with the controller is, of course, just as culpable as Edgar Ross in Marston's torment. We make John Marston kill, we make him hunt, we make him go to missions in Mexico and New Austin. Marston, as he gets pulled into the Mexican Revolution, even admits to Abraham Reyes, "I'm a semi-literate farmer. I ain't in the power game," a meta-narrative comment that, by no coincidence, calls attention to his position as a character in a game. Yet we, too, are limited by the game's scope in what we can do. In these moments of the game, we can pause to enjoy a Western sunset or have drink at the local bar because the game allows us certain freedoms, but those freedoms are bound to the system of the game just as Marston is bound to Edgar Ross. Thus, performing the mundane task of shooting rabbits gains significance about what constitutes gameplay. Can chores be made fun if they're performed in virtual space? The game asks these questions, if tacitly, through its gameplay and mission structure.

The similarities between McCarthy's Border Trilogy and Rockstar's Western do not end in the world of the mundane--these texts are elegies for the American West. In All the Pretty Horses, for example, John Grady Cole, a young man who grew up on his grandfather's ranch until his grandfather's death in 1949, elects to, rather than to live in town after the ranch's closing, to leave his home on horseback in search of work on a ranch in Mexico. Cole begins his journey as a romantic believer in the ethos of the Old West, but he finds the same inescapable truth that Marston does--that the West was settled through blood and political corruption rather than through ideals of American exceptionalism. McCarthy explores this concept broadly in Blood Meridian as well, setting the novel in pre-Civil War America where the West becomes a place of unfathomable horror and grotesque cruelty.

He can neither read nor write and in him already there broods a taste for mindless violence.
All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.
--Blood Meridian

It's easy to see Red Dead Redemption as a spaghetti Western, but I find the powerful narrative and gameplay work to create something more powerful than films or (most) novels are capable of manufacturing. The game does not just question Marston's actions or the actions of his enemies. It makes us participants in the founding of a virtual Modern America, working for or against the closing of the frontier and inhabiting the American West during its twilight years. In my very first post, I used Marston's story as an example of ludonarrative dissonance. Yes, he can tie a nun and leave her on a railroad track, and the game still tells you that you are a tragic hero and bandit-turned-family-man. But perhaps that's why the game is something special. It gives you the story structure and shootout gameplay of a Sergio Leone movie as well as the contemplative depth of a Cormac McCarthy novel. Red Dead Redemption casts a long shadow over the genre of Western fiction, and I don't see any text coming out of the dust to challenge its place anytime soon.

Cheers,

--David

Playing through the Payne: The Issues of Max Payne 3

Warning: Here there be spoilers.
It happened in the decaying favela slums of Sao Paulo.  It had been a good few weeks since I picked up the controller to play Max Payne 3, so I figured why not go back.  Max Payne 3 has perhaps the most polished gunplay I have ever experienced--it's almost as satisfying as a real trip to the gun range.  In my second playthrough, the shooting and movement still felt dynamic as the first time, but in the streets of the ghetto, while Max undergoes a "hangover sent straight from Mother Nature," something felt off.  After his employer is killed and the building burns down around him, Max has a life-changing epiphany--no more booze until he puts a bullet in the brain behind this convoluted plot involving organ harvesting and political corruption.  The plot takes off in a very clear, direct path for redemption and brutal execution...but the gameplay stays the same.

Here is a textbook example of ludonarrative dissonance (shameless plug for the title of my blog).  From the beginning of the game, we know Max Payne bathes in alcohol and derides himself for being a washed-up loser.  Yet he moves with the practiced grace and precision of ballet dancer, placing shots between the eyes of his would-be killers with surgical accuracy.  It's hard to buy that Max is simultaneously a booze-soaked, pill-popping slob (he even tells his partner "I'm not slipping, I've slipped") and a grotesquely efficient killer.  Is this really the performance of a pilled-up drunk with a gun?:

Tom Bissell, one of the most established game critics I've read, writes about this in his article on Max Payne 3, saying that the game is "quite possibly the most ludonarratively dissonant video game ever made" and arguing that, in the end, the game "appears to be trying to say something about regret and death and slaughter and addiction, but, of course, can't."  I tend to agree.  The game sacrifices synchronicity in favor of a well-polished shooting system.  After all, who the hell cares if a game's story syncs up perfectly at the expense of gameplay?  Controlling a drunk, stumbling Max Payne for the first few hours of the game would not a happy gamer make.  Nevertheless, if a developer chooses to make a game as narratively driven and brutal as Max Payne, then said developer should work to elevate the purpose behind having a player kill hundreds of virtual people, drunk or sober.  One way to alleviate this issue would have been a cosmetic change to the gameplay--other than Max's shaving his head and donning a Hawaiian t-shirt.  Something as simple as making the gunplay a bit sloppier in the first half of the game by using more motion blur or by eliminating kill cams altogether would make Max's narrative shift better.  Imagine playing the game for a while and enjoying the crisp gunplay, just without the exquisite detail (because Max is drunk), only to be completely blindsided by the clarity of the the death animations in the latter half of the game when Max sobers up.  The impact would be narratively and ludologically synchronous--Max's clarity would be the player's clarity.  The trade-off would be significant, to be sure, but if the gameplay were still crisp and the visuals dialed down in the first few chapters, the transition could be extremely effective.

But the heavy themes the game introduces would still need to be resolved.  Max Payne 3 raises the issues of poverty, redemption through violence, and the carelessness of the rich without offering any type of ludological investigation of how to deal with them. The only issue explored in gameplay is extreme violence, and even then, mostly through the slow cam close-up.  The game forces the player to witness up close and in incredible detail countless bodies' being torn and shredded in gory, beautiful detail.  Only in these instances does the player have the opportunity to understand what exactly all this killing begets in the form of dynamic death animations brilliantly crafted to respond to where the bullet pierces the body.  The player also has the ability to slow down the camera to see with greater clarity the character's last movements as well as the ability to keep firing at the body even though the enemy is dead.  Affording the player with the ability to slow down and view pieces of metal ripping and tearing the human body allows the player to reflect on the means he/she employs to accomplish Max's goal.  But after about the hundredth time I saw a slow motion death sequence, it no longer induced a wince from me; I kept wondering what is the purpose behind it.  Am I supposed to feel guilty?  Am I supposed to gain some sort of insight about the human propensity to violence?  Is the message that violence only begets more violence?  Or am I simply asked to enjoy the carnage?  Entertaining any one of these questions seems like a logical critical step, but upon execution, the results are unsatisfying.  The game, in this respect, seems a missed opportunity.

It's brutal, it's disgusting, it's beautifully rendered, and it's provocative. But what does it mean?

Let me reiterate, though, that Max Payne 3 boasts the most responsive and satisfying shooting mechanics I've ever experienced. Nevertheless, if games are going to be elevated to the artistic standard we so fervently argue they do, the questions regarding video game violence and ludonarrative dissonance must be addressed. The interaction on part of the player redirects the moral responsibility of executing a person-shaped pile of ones and zeroes back on the one holding the controller.  The role of the critic, then, should be to unpack the meaning embedded in the code as pixels explode across the screen.  Performing such an exercise on Max Payne 3 yields mixed results, but the game may be compelling precisely because of this problem.  There's no way to synthesize violence and meaning here; the game drags you down into a blood-spattered critical hell and challenges you to climb back out--bullet by bullet.  Perhaps that's commentary enough.

Cheers,

--David