Extra Lives- Why Video Games Matter - Tom Bissell

PREVIOUS BOOKS BY TOM BISSELL

NONFICTION
Chasing the Sea (2003)

The Father of All Things (2007)



FICTION
God Lives in St. Petersburg and Other Stories (2005)



HUMOR
Speak, Commentary (2003)

(with Jeff Alexander)

For my brother, Johno, at whom I first threw a joystick



And for my nieces, Amy and Natalie,
who I hope will throw them at me

LYSIMACHUS: Did you go to ’t so young? Were you a gamester at five or at seven?

MARINA: Earlier too, sir, if now I be one.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Pericles

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.

—ROY BATTY to RICK DECKARD in Blade Runner

CONTENTS

Author’s Note

ONE: FALLOUT

TWO: HEADSHOTS

THREE: THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF GAMES

FOUR: THE GRAMMAR OF FUN

FIVE: LITTLEBIGPROBLEMS

SIX: BRAIDED

SEVEN: MASS EFFECTS

EIGHT: FAR CRIES

NINE: GRAND THEFTS

Appendix: An Interview with Sir Peter Molyneux

Acknowledgments

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Martin Amis, the author of a fine book about early video games, once said of his predicament as a football fan, “Pointy-headed football-lovers are a beleaguered crew, despised by pointy-heads and football-lovers alike.” In this book I risk a similar sort of beleagueredness to explain why I believe video games matter—and why they do not matter more. It grew out of the last three years of my life, during which I spent quite a bit—possibly even most—of my time playing video games, marveling at the unique ways they affected me and growing frustrated by the ways they did not. Soon enough, I was taking notes, not yet fully aware that what I had actually begun to do was write this book.

Needless to say, it is no easy thing to make a living as a critic of anything, but video-game criticism may be the least remunerative of all. Why this should be is not a great mystery. Count off the number of people of your acquaintance inclined to read criticism at all; chances are lean they will be the same people in your life as the ones playing video games. Yet certain aspects of video games make them resistant to a traditional critical approach. One is that many games are not easily re-experienceable, at least not in the way other mediums are re-experienceable. If I am reviewing a book, I go back and look at my margin notes. An album, I set aside an hour and listen to it again. A film, I buy another ticket. If I am playing a game that takes dozens of hours to complete and has a limited number of save slots, much of it is accessible only by playing it through again, the game itself structurally obligated to fight me every inch of the way. Another problem is that criticism needs a readily available way to connect to the aesthetic past of the form under appraisal, which is not always so easy with video games. Out-of-date hardware and out-of-print games can be immensely difficult to find. Say you want to check on something that happens about halfway through some older game. Not only do you have to find it, you will, once again, have to play it. Probably for hours. Possibly for days.

One might argue that critical writing about games is difficult because most games are not able to withstand thoughtful criticism. For their part, game magazines publish game review after game review, some of which are spritely and sharp, but they tend to focus on providing consumers with a sense of whether their money will be well spent. Game magazine reviewers rarely ask: What aesthetic tradition does this game fall into? How does it make me feel while I’m playing it? What emotions does it engage with, and are they appropriate to the game’s theme and mechanics? The reason game magazine reviewers do not ask these questions is almost certainly because game magazine owners would like to stay in business. But there is a lot of thoughtful, critically engaging work being done on games. It is mostly found on the blogs and almost always done for free. I have my list of the five game critics whose thoughts on the form I am most compelled by, and I am fairly certain that none of these writers is able to make anything resembling a living writing only about games. Certainly, this is the case for the top critics of plenty of other art forms—dance, sculpture, poetry—but none of these art forms is as omnipresent, widely consumed, or profitable as video games.

I say all this up front to signal my awareness that I am far from the first to arrive at this particular party. As a work of criticism, however, this book is somewhat eccentric and, at times, starkly personal. Moreover, its focus falls heavily upon console games (as opposed to personal computer games) released in the last few years, most of which are amply budgeted “story” or “narrative” games, which may displease some readers. From this, no one should assume I am not fond of older games or that I do not play sports games, rhythm games, strategy games, puzzlers, or the like. I am and I do, and moreover will take on any comers willing to challenge me to expert-level drumming in Rock Band or Guitar Hero (unless you happen to go by the gamertag Johny Red Pants, in which case, I bow to you, fair sir). The fact is, most of the games that made me want to write this book are console games of relatively recent issue, as opposed to the classics of the form. Few mediums are as prone to the evolutionary long jump as the video game, and I am aware that my focus on contemporary games puts these pages in danger of seeming, in only a few years, as relevant as a biology textbook devoted to Lamarckism. While the games I examine may be contemporary and somewhat of a piece, the questions they raise about the video-game form are not likely to lose their relevance anytime soon.

There are many fine books about the game industry, the theory of game design, and the history of games, overmuch discussion of which will not be found here. I did not write this book as an analyst of industry fortunes (a topic about which I could not imagine caring less) or as a chronicler of how games rose and came to be, and my understanding of the technical side of game design is nil. I wrote this book as a writer who plays a lot of games, and in these pages you will find one man’s opinions and thoughts on what playing games feels like, why he plays them, and the questions they make him think about. In the portions of the book where I address game design and game designers, it is, I hope, to a formally explanatory rather than technically informative end.

Just what is a video game? Decades into the development of the form, this question remains forbiddingly open. (As does the term’s spelling: video game or videogame? I reluctantly prefer the former. Most game designers and critics favor the latter.) It may be years before anyone arrives at a true understanding of what games are, what they have done to popular entertainment, and how they have shaped the wider expectations of their many and increasingly divergent audiences. In my conversations with game designers, I was sternly informed, again and again, of the newness of their form, the things they were still learning how to do, and of the necessity of discarding any notion of what defines video games. I have come to believe that anyone who can tell you what a game is, or must be, has seen advocacy outstrip patience. One game designer told me that, due to the impermanent and tech-dependent nature of his medium, he sometimes felt as though he were writing his legacy in water. I nevertheless believe that we are in a golden age of gaming and hope this book will allow future gamers a sense of connection to this glorious, frustrating time, whatever path games ultimately take and whatever cultural fate awaits them.

—TCB
June 1, 2009
Escanaba, Michigan

ONE

Someday my children will ask me where I was and what I was doing when the United States elected its first black president. I could tell my children—who are entirely hypothetical; call them Kermit and Hussein—that I was home at the time and, like hundreds of millions of other Americans, watching television. This would be a politician’s answer, which is to say, factual but inaccurate in every important detail. Because Kermit and Hussein deserve an honestly itemized answer, I will tell them that, on November 4, 2008, their father was living in Tallinn, Estonia, where the American Election Day’s waning hours were a cold, salmon-skied November 5 morning. My intention that day was to watch CNN International until the race was called. I will then be forced to tell Kermit and Hussein about what else happened on November 4, 2008.

The postapocalyptic video game Fallout 3 had been officially released to the European market on October 30, but in Estonia it was nowhere to be found. For several weeks, Bethesda Softworks, Fallout 3’s developer, had been posting online a series of promotional gameplay videos, which I had been watching and rewatching with fetish-porn avidity. I left word with Tallinn’s best game store: Call me the moment Fallout 3 arrives. In the late afternoon of November 4, they finally rang. When I slipped the game into the tray of my Xbox 360, the first polls were due to close in America in two hours. One hour of Fallout 3, I told myself. Maybe two. Absolutely no more than three. Seven hours later, blinking and dazed, I turned off my Xbox 360, checked in with CNN, and discovered that the acceptance speech had already been given.

And so, my beloved Kermit, my dear little Hussein, at the moment America changed forever, your father was wandering an ICBM-denuded wasteland, nervously monitoring his radiation level, armed only with a baseball bat, a 10mm pistol, and six rounds of ammunition, in search of a vicious gang of mohawked marauders who were 100 percent bad news and totally had to be dealt with. Trust Daddy on this one.

Fallout 3 was Bethesda’s first release since 2006’s The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Both games fall within a genre known by various names: the open-world or sandbox or free-roaming game. This genre is superintended by a few general conventions, which include the sensation of being inside a large and disinterestedly functioning world, a main story line that can be abandoned for subordinate story lines (or for no purpose at all), large numbers of supporting characters with whom meaningful interaction is possible, and the ability to customize (or pimp, in the parlance of our time) the game’s player-controlled central character. The pleasures of the open-world game are ample, complicated, and intensely private; their potency is difficult to explain, sort of like religion, of which these games become, for many, an aspartame form. Because of the freedom they grant gamers, the narrative-and mission-generating manner in which they reward exploration, and their convincing illusion of endlessness, the best open-world games tend to become leisure-time-eating viruses. As incomprehensible as it may seem, I have somehow spent more than two hundred hours playing Oblivion. I know this because the game keeps a running tally of the total time one has spent with it. I can think of only one personal activity I would be less eager to see audited in this way, and it, too, is a single-player experience.

It is difficult to describe Oblivion without atavistic fears of being savaged by the same jean-jacketed dullards who in 1985 threw my Advanced Dungeon & Dragons Monster Manual II into Lake Michigan. (That I did not even play D&D, and only had the book because I liked to look at the pictures, left my assailants unmoved.) As to what Oblivion is about, I note the involvement of orcs and a “summon skeleton” spell and leave it at that. So: two hundred hours playing Oblivion? How is that even possible? I am not actually sure. Completing the game’s narrative missions took a fraction of that time, but in the world of Oblivion you can also pick flowers, explore caves, dive for treasure, buy houses, bet on gladiatorial arena fights, hunt bear, and read books. Oblivion is less a game than a world that best rewards full citizenship, and for a while I lived there and claimed it. At the time I was residing in Rome on a highly coveted literary fellowship, surrounded by interesting and brilliant people, and quite naturally mired in a lagoon of depression more dreadfully lush than any before or since. I would be lying if I said Oblivion did not, in some ways, aggravate my depression, but it also gave me something with which to fill my days other than piranhic self-hatred. It was an extra life; I am grateful to have had it.

When Bethesda announced that it had purchased the rights to develop Fallout 3 from the defunct studio Interplay, the creators of the first two Fallout games, many were doubtful. How would the elvish imaginations behind Oblivion manage with the rather different milieu of an annihilated twenty-third-century America? The first Fallout games, which were exclusive to the personal computer, were celebrated for their clever satire and often freakishly exaggerated violence. Oblivion is about as satirical as a colonoscopy, and the fighting in the game, while not unviolent, is often weirdly inert.

Bethesda released Fallout 3’s first gameplay video in the summer of 2008. In it, Todd Howard, the game’s producer, guides the player-controlled character into a disorientingly nuked Washington, DC, graced with just enough ravaged familiarities—among which a pummeled Washington Monument stands out—to be powerfully unsettling. Based on these few minutes, Fallout 3 appeared guaranteed to take its place among the most visually impressive games ever made. When Bethesda posted a video showcasing Fallout 3’s in-game combat—a brilliant synthesis of trigger-happy first-person-style shooting and the more deliberative, turn-based tactics of the traditional role-playing video game, wherein you attack, suffer your enemy’s counterattack, counterattack yourself, and so on, until one of you is dead—many could not believe the audacity of its cartoon-Peckinpah violence. Much of it was rendered in a slo-mo as disgusting as it was oddly beautiful: skulls exploding into the distinct flotsam of eyeballs, gray matter, and upper vertebrae; limbs liquefying into constellations of red pearls; torsos somersaulting through the air. The consensus was a bonfire of the skepticisms: Fallout 3 was going to be fucking awesome.

Needless to say, the first seven hours I spent with the game were distinguished by a bounty of salutary things. Foremost among them was how the world of Fallout 3 looked. The art direction in a good number of contemporary big-budget video games has the cheerful parasitism of a tribute band. Visual inspirations are perilously few: Forests will be Tolkienishly enchanted; futuristic industrial zones will be mazes of predictably grated metal catwalks; gunfights will erupt amid rubble-and car-strewn boulevards on loan from a thousand war-movie sieges. Once video games shed their distinctive vector-graphic and primary-color 8-bit origins, a commercially ascendant subset of game slowly but surely matured into what might well be the most visually derivative popular art form in history. Fallout 3 is the rare big-budget game to begin rather than end with its derivativeness.

It opens in 2277, two centuries after a nuclear conflagration between the United States and China. Chronologically speaking, the world this Sino-American war destroyed was of late-twenty-first-century vintage, and yet its ruins are those of the gee-whiz futurism popular during the Cold War. Fallout 3’s Slinky-armed sentry Protectrons, for instance, are knowing plagiarisms of Forbidden Planet’s Robby the Robot, and the game’s many specimens of faded prewar advertising mimic the nascent slickness of 1950s-era graphic design. Fallout 3 bravely takes as its aesthetic foundation a future that is both six decades old and one of the least convincing ever conceptualized. The result is a fascinating past-future never-never-land weirdness that infects the game’s every corner: George Jetson Beyond Thunderdome.

What also impressed me about Fallout 3 was the buffet of choices set out by its early stages. The first settlement one happens upon, Megaton, has been built around an undetonated nuclear warhead, which a strange religious cult native to the town actually worships. Megaton can serve as base of operations or be wiped off the face of the map shortly after one’s arrival there by detonating its nuke in exchange for a handsome payment. I spent quite a while poking around Megaton and getting to know its many citizens. What this means is that the first several hours I spent inside Fallout 3 were, in essence, optional. Even for an open-world game, this suggests an awesome range of narrative variability. (Eventually, of course, I made the time to go back and nuke the place.)

Fallout 3, finally, looks beautiful. Most modern games—even shitty ones—look beautiful. Taking note of this is akin to telling the chef of a Michelin-starred restaurant that the tablecloths were lovely. Nonetheless, at one point in Fallout 3 I was running up the stairs of what used to be the Dupont Circle Metro station and, as I turned to bash in the brainpan of a radioactive ghoul, noticed the playful, lifelike way in which the high-noon sunlight streaked along the grain of my sledgehammer’s wooden handle. During such moments, it is hard not to be startled—even moved—by the care poured into the game’s smallest atmospheric details.

Despite all this, I had problems with Fallout 3, and a number of these problems seem to me emblematic of the intersection at which games in general currently find themselves stalled. Take, for instance, Fallout 3’s tutorial. One feels for game designers: It would be hard to imagine a formal convention more inherently bizarre than the video-game tutorial. Imagine that, every time you open a novel, you are forced to suffer through a chapter in which the characters do nothing but talk to one another about the physical mechanics of how one goes about reading a book. Unfortunately, game designers do not really have a choice. Controller schemas change, sometimes drastically, from game to game, and designers cannot simply banish a game’s relevant instructions to a directional booklet: That would be a violation of the interactive pact between game and gamer. Many games thus have to come up with a narratively plausible way in which one’s controlled character engages in activity comprehensive enough to be instructive but not so intense as to involve a lot of failure. Games with a strong element of combat almost always solve this dilemma by opening with some sort of indifferently conceived boot-camp exercise or training round.

Fallout 3’s tutorial opens, rather more ambitiously, with your character’s birth, during which you pick your race and gender (if given the choice, I always opt for a woman, for whatever reason) and design your eventual appearance (probably this is the reason). The character who pulls you from your mother’s birth canal is your father, whose voice is provided by Liam Neeson. (Many games attempt to class themselves up with early appearances by accomplished actors; Patrick Stewart’s platinum larynx served this purpose in Oblivion.) Now, aspects of Fallout 3’s tutorial are brilliant: When you learn to walk as a baby, you are actually learning how to move within the game; you decide whether you want your character to be primarily strong, intelligent, or charismatic by reading a children’s book; and, when the tutorial flashes forward to your tenth birthday party, you learn to fire weapons when you receive a BB gun as a gift. The tutorial flashes forward again, this time to a high school classroom, where you further define your character by answering ten aptitude-test-style questions. What is interesting about this is that it allows you to customize your character indirectly rather than directly, and many of the questions (one asks what you would do if your grandmother ordered you to kill someone) are morbidly amusing. While using an in-game aptitude test as a character-design aid is not exactly a new innovation, Fallout 3 provides the most streamlined, narratively economical, and interactively inventive go at it yet.

By the time I was taking this aptitude test, however, I was a dissident citizen of Vault 101, the isolated underground society in which Fallout 3 proper begins. My revolt was directed at a few things. The first was Fallout 3’s dialogue, some of it so appalling (“Oh, James, we did it. A daughter. Our beautiful daughter”) as to make Stephanie Meyer look like Ibsen. The second was Fallout 3’s addiction to trust-shattering storytelling redundancy, such as when your father announces, “I can’t believe you’re already ten,” at what is clearly established as your tenth birthday party. The third, and least forgivable, was Fallout 3’s Jell-O-mold characterization: In the game’s first ten minutes you exchange gossip with the spunky best friend, cower beneath the megalomaniacal leader, and gain the trust of the goodhearted cop. Vault 101 even has a resident cadre of hoodlums, the Tunnel Snakes, whose capo resembles a malevolent Fonz. Even with its backdrop of realized Cold War futurism, a greaser-style youth gang in an underground vault society in the year 2277 is the working definition of a dumb idea. During the tutorial’s final sequence, the Tunnel Snakes’ leader, your tormentor since childhood, requests your help in saving his mother from radioactive cockroaches (long story), a reversal of such tofu drama that, in my annoyance, I killed him, his mother, and then everyone else I could find in Vault 101, with the most perversely satisfying weapon I had on hand: a baseball bat. Allowing your decisions to establish for your character an in-game identity as a skull-crushing monster, a saint of patience, or some mixture thereof is another attractive feature of Fallout 3. These pretensions to morality, though, suddenly bored me, because they were occurring in a universe that had been designed by geniuses and written by Ed Wood Jr.

Had I really waited a year for this? And was I really missing a cardinal event in American history to keep playing it? I had, and I was, and I could not really explain why. I then thought back to those two hundred hours I had spent playing Oblivion, a game that had all the afflictions of Fallout 3 and then some. Oblivion’s story has several scenes that are so dramatically overwrought that, upon witnessing one of them, the woman I then lived with announced that she was revoking all vagina privileges until further notice. A friend of mine, another Oblivion addict, confessed to playing the game with the volume turned down after his novelist wife’s acid dinner-party dismissal of the time he spent “with elves talking bullshit.”

What embarrassed me about Oblivion was not the elves; it was the bullshit. Similarly, I was not expecting from Fallout 3 novelistic storytelling and characterization and I was absolutely not expecting realist plausibility. I happily accept that, in the world of Fallout 3, heavily armed Super Mutants prowl the streets, two-hundred-year-old rifles remain functional, and your character can recover from stepping in front of a Gatling gun at full bore by drinking water or taking a nap. All of which is obviously preposterous, but Fallout 3 plays so smoothly that you do not even want to notice. Anyone who plays video games knows that well-designed gameplay is a craft as surely as storytelling is a craft. When gameplay fails, we know it because it does not, somehow, feel right. Failed storytelling is more abject. You feel lots of things—just not anything the storyteller wants you to feel.

What I know is this: If I were reading a book or watching a film that, every ten minutes, had me gulping a gallon of aesthetic Pepto, I would stop reading or watching. Games, for some reason, do not have this problem. Or rather, their problem is not having this problem. I routinely tolerate in games crudities I would never tolerate in any other form of art or entertainment. For a long time my rationalization was that, provided a game was fun to play, certain failures could be overlooked. I came to accept that games were generally incompetent with almost every aspect of what I would call traditional narrative. In the last few years, however, a dilemma has become obvious. Games have grown immensely sophisticated in any number of ways while at the same time remaining stubbornly attached to aspects of traditional narrative for which they have shown little feeling. Too many games insist on telling stories in a manner in which some facility with plot and character is fundamental to—and often even determinative of—successful storytelling.

The counterargument to all this is that games such as Fallout 3 are more about the world in which the game takes place than the story concocted to govern one’s progress through it. It is a fair point, especially given how beautifully devastated and hypnotically lonely the world of Fallout 3 is. But if the world is paramount, why bother with a story at all? Why not simply cut the ribbon on the invented world and let gamers explore it? The answer is that such a game would probably not be very involving. Traps, after all, need bait. In a narrative game, story and world combine to create an experience. As the game designer Jesse Schell writes in The Art of Game Design, “The game is not the experience. The game enables the experience, but it is not the experience.” In a world as large as that of Fallout 3, which allows for an experience framed in terms of wandering and lonesomeness, story provides, if nothing else, badly needed direction and purpose. Unless some narrative game comes along that radically changes gamer expectation, stories, with or without Super Mutants, will continue to be what many games will use to harness their uniquely extravagant brand of fictional absorption.

I say this in full disclosure: The games that interest me the most are the games that choose to tell stories. Yes, video games have always told some form of story. PLUMBER’S GIRLFRIEND CAPTURED BY APE! is a story, but it is a rudimentary fairytale story without any of the proper fairytale’s evocative nuances and dreads. Games are often compared to films, which would seem to make sense, given their many apparent similarities (both are scored, both have actors, both are cinematographical, and so on). Upon close inspection the comparison falls leprously apart. In terms of storytelling, they could not be more different. Films favor a compressed type of storytelling and are able to do this because they have someone deciding where to point the camera. Games, on the other hand, contain more than most gamers can ever hope to see, and the person deciding where to point the camera is, in many cases, you—and you might never even see the “best part.” The best part of looking up at a night sky, after all, is not any one star but the infinite possibility of what is between stars. Games often provide an approximation of this feeling, with the difference that you can find out what is out there. Teeming with secrets, hidden areas, and surprises that may pounce only on the second or third (or fourth) play-through—I still laugh to think of the time I made it to an isolated, hard-to-find corner of Fallout 3’s Wasteland and was greeted by the words FUCK YOU spray-painted on a rock—video games favor a form of storytelling that is, in many ways, completely unprecedented. The conventions of this form of storytelling are only a few decades old and were created in a formal vacuum by men and women who still walk among us. There are not many mediums whose Dantes and Homers one can ring up and talk to. With games, one can.

I am uninterested in whether games are better or worse than movies or novels or any other form of entertainment. More interesting to me is what games can do and how they make me feel while they are doing it. Comparing games to other forms of entertainment only serves as a reminder of what games are not. Storytelling, however, does not belong to film any more than it belongs to the novel. Film, novels, and video games are separate economies in which storytelling is the currency. The problem is that video-game storytelling, across a wide spectrum of games, too often feels counterfeit, and it is easy to tire of laundering the bills.

It should be said that Fallout 3 gets much better as you play through it. A few of its set pieces (such as stealing the Declaration of Independence from a ruined National Archives, which is protected by a bewigged robot programmed to believe itself to be Button Gwinnett, the Declaration’s second signatory) are as gripping as any fiction I have come across. But it cannot be a coincidence that every scene involving human emotion (confronting a mind-wiped android who believes he is human, watching as a character close to you suffocates and dies) is at best unaffecting and at worst risible. Can it really be a surprise that deeper human motivations remain beyond the reach of something that regards character as the assignation of numerical values to hypothetical abilities and characteristics?

Viewed as a whole, Fallout 3 is a game of profound stylishness, sophistication, and intelligence—so much so that every example of Etch A Sketch characterization, every stone-shoed narrative pivot, pains me. When we say a game is sophisticated, are we grading on a distressingly steep curve? Or do we need a new curve altogether? Might we really mean that the game in question only occasionally insults one’s intelligence? Or is this kind of intelligence, at least when it comes to playing games, beside the point? How is it, finally, that I keep returning to a form of entertainment that I find so uniquely frustrating? To what part of me do games speak, and on which frequency?

TWO

So it begins here, in your stepfather’s darkened living room, with you hunched over, watching as a dateline title card—1998 JULY—forcefully types itself across the television screen. “1998 July”? Why not “England, London”? Why not, “A time once upon”? A narrator debuts to describe something called Alpha Team’s in medias res search for something called Bravo Team’s downed chopper in what is mouthfully described as a “forest zone situated in the northwest of Raccoon City.” Okay. This is a Japanese game. That probably explains the year–date swappage. That also makes “Raccoon City” a valiant attempt at something idiomatically American-sounding, though it is about as convincing as an American-made game set in the Japanese metropolis of Port Sushi. You harbor affection for the products of Japan, from its cuisine to its girls to its video games—the medium Japanese game designers have made their own. To your mind, then, a certain amount of ineffable Nipponese weirditity is par for the course, even if the course in question has fifteen holes and every one is a par nine.

A live-action scene commences in which Alpha Team lands upon a foggy moor, finds Bravo Team’s crashed chopper, and is attacked by Baskervillian hounds, but all you are privy to is the puppetry of snarling muzzles shot in artless close-up. To the canine puppeteers’ credit, the hounds are more convincing than the living actors, whose performances are miraculously unsuccessful. The cinematography, meanwhile, is a shaky-cam, Evil Dead–ish fugue minus any insinuation of talent, style, or coherence. Once the hellhound enfilade has taken the life of one Alpha Team member, the survivors retreat into a nearby mansion. You know that one of these survivors, following the load screen, will be yours to control. Given the majestic incompetence of the proceedings thus far, you check to see that the game’s receipt remains extant.

For most of your life you have played video games. You have owned, in turn, the Atari 2600, the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Sega Genesis, the Super Nintendo, and the Nintendo 64, and familiarized yourself with most of their marquee titles. The console you are playing now, the console you have only today purchased, is categorically different from its ancestors. It is called the Sony PlayStation. Its controllers are more ergonomic than those you have previously held and far more loaded with buttons, and its games are not plastic cartridges but compact discs. Previous consoles were silent but your new PlayStation zizzes and whirs in an unfamiliar way as its digital stylus scans and loads.

It is 1997. The PlayStation was released to the American market one year ago. You missed this, having been away, in the Peace Corps, teaching English, which service you terminated in a panic sixteen months short of your expected stay. Now you are back in your hometown, in the house you grew up in, feeling less directionless than mapless, compassless, in lack of any navigational tool at all. You are also bored. Hence the PlayStation.

The live-action sequence has given way to an animated indoor tableau of surprising detail and stark loveliness—like no console game you have hitherto encountered. Three characters stand in the mansion foyer. There is Barry, a husky, ursine, ginger-bearded man; Wesker, enjoying the sunglasses and slicked-back hair of a coke fiend; and Jill, your character, a trim brunette looker in a beret. A brief conversation ensues about the necessity of finding Chris, your fellow Alpha Team member, who has somehow managed to go AWOL in the time it took to step across the threshold of the mansion’s entryway. Soon enough, a gunshot sounds from the next room. You and Barry are dispatched by Wesker to investigate.

The dialogue, bad enough as written (“Wow. What a mansion!”), is mesmerizing in performance. It is as though the actors have been encouraged to place emphasis on the least apposite word in every spoken line. Barry’s “He’s our old partner, you know,” to provide but one example, could have been read in any number of more or less appropriate ways, from “He’s our old partner, you know” to “He’s our old partner, you know” to “He’s our old partner, you know.” “He’s our old partner, you know” is the line reading of autistic miscalculation this game goes with.

Upon entry into the new room, you are finally granted control of Jill, but how the game has chosen to frame the mise-en-scène is a little strange. You are not looking through Jill’s eyes, and movement does not result in a scrolling, follow-along screen. Instead Jill stands in what appears to be a dining room, the in-game camera angled upon her in a way that annuls any wider field of vision. Plenty of games have given you spaces around which to wander, but they always took care to provide you with a maximal vantage point. This is not a maximal angle; this is not at all how your eye has been trained by video games to work. It as though you, the gamer, are an invisible, purposefully compromised presence within the gameworld.

The room’s only sound is a metronomically ticking grandfather clock. You step forward, experimenting with your controller’s (seventeen!) buttons and noting the responsiveness of the controls, which lend Jill’s movement a precision that is both impressive and a little creepy. Holding down one button allows Jill to run, for instance, and this is nicely animated. A pair of trigger buttons lie beneath each of your index fingers. Squeeze the left trigger and Jill lifts her pistol into firing position. Squeeze the right trigger and Jill fires, loudly, her pistol kicking up in response. All of this—from the preparatory prefiring mechanic to the unfamiliar sensation of consequence your single shot has been given—feels new to you. Every video-game gun you have previously fired did so at the push of a single button, the resultant physics no more palpable or significant than jumping or moving or any other in-game movement. Video-game armaments have always seemed to you a kind of voodoo. If you wanted some digital effigy to die, you simply lined it up and pushed in the requisite photonic pin. Here, however, there is no crosshair or reticule. You fire several more shots to verify this. How on earth do you aim?

As you explore the dining room something even more bizarre begins to occur. The in-game camera is changing angles. Depending on where you go, the camera sometimes frames your character in relative close-up and, other times, leaps back, reducing Jill to an apparent foreground afterthought. And yet no matter the angle from which you view Jill, the directional control schema, the precision of which you moments ago admired, remains the same. What this means is that, with every camera shift, your brain is forced to make a slight but bothersome spatial adjustment. The awkwardness of this baffles you. When you wanted Link or Mario to go left, you pushed left. That the character you controlled moved in accordance to his on-screen positioning, which in turn corresponded to your joystick or directional pad, was an accepted convention of the form. Yes, you have experienced “mode shifts” in games before—that, too, is a convention—but never so inexplicably or so totally. So far, the game provides no compelling explanation as to why it has sundered every convention it comes across.

The dining room itself is stunning, though, reminding you of the flat lush realism of Myst, a personal computer game your girlfriend adores but that has always struck you as a warm-milk soporific. You have not played a tremendous number of PC games; it is simply not a style of gaming you respond to. You are a console gamer, for better or worse, even though you are aware of the generally higher quality of PC games. Anyone who claims allegiance to the recognizably inferior is in dire need of a compelling argument. Here is yours: The keyboard has one supreme purpose, and that is to create words. Swapping out keys for aspects of game control (J for “jump,” < for “switch weapon”) strikes you as frustrating and unwieldy, and almost every PC game does this or something like it. PC gamers themselves, meanwhile, have always seemed to you an unlikable fusion of tech geek and cult member—a kind of mad Scientologist.

You glance at the box in which this game came packaged. Resident Evil. What the hell does that even mean? You know this game is intended to be scary. You also know that zombies are somehow involved; the box art promises that much. The notion of a “scary game” is striking you as increasingly laughable. While nothing is more terrifying to you than zombies, calling a zombie-based game Resident Evil is a solecism probably born of failing to fully understand the zombie. Part of what makes zombies so frightening is that they are not evil. The zombie, a Caribbean borrowing, is in its North American guise a modern parable for…well, there you go. Like all parables, zombies are both widely evocative and impossible to pin down. Part of the reason you purchased this game was because you were curious to see what the Japanese imagination had made of the zombie. This was a culture, after all, that had transformed its twentieth-century resident evil into a giant bipedal dinosaur.

On screen, Barry calls Jill over, where he kneels next to a pool of blood. (“I hope it’s not…Chris’s blood.” ) He orders you to press on looking around while he completes his investigation. You are no criminologist, but gleaning the available information from a small, freestanding blood puddle would seem to you an undertaking of no more than three or four seconds. Barry, though, continues to ponder the hell out of that blood. You have two options. Leave the dining room to go back and explore the foyer, where Wesker presumably awaits your report, or go through a nearby side door. You take the side door. Anytime you go through a door in this game you are presented with a load screen of daunting literalness: the point of view reverts to an implied first-person, the door grows closer, the knob turns, the door opens, which is followed by the noise of it closing behind you. Considerable investment has been placed in a dramatic reproduction of this process: The knobs sound as though they were last oiled in the Cleveland administration, and the doors themselves slam shut as though they weigh five hundred pounds.

The load screen complete, Jill now stands in a long narrow hallway. The camera looks down upon her from an angle of perhaps seventy degrees, which leaves you unable to see either ahead of or behind her. You turn her left, instinctively, only to hear something farther down the hall. You hear…chewing? No. It is worse than that. It is a wet, slushy sound, more like feasting than chewing. The camera has shifted yet again, allowing you to look down the hall but not around the corner, whence this gluttonous feasting sound originates. There is no music, no cues at all. The gameworld is silent but for your footsteps and the sound you now realize you have been set upon this path to encounter. You panic and run down to the other end of the hall, the feasting sound growing fainter, only to find two locked doors. No choice, then. You walk (not run) back toward the hallway corner, then stop and go to a subscreen to check your inventory. Your pistol’s ammunition reserves are paltry, and you curse yourself for having shot off so many bullets in the dining room. You also have a knife. You toggle back and forth between pistol and knife, equipping and unequipping. You eventually go with the pistol and leave the inventory screen.

Jill stands inches before the hallway corner, but it suddenly feels as though it is you standing before hellmouth itself. Your body has become a hatchery from which spiderlings of dread erupt and skitter. Part of this is merely expectation, for you know that a zombie is around that corner and you are fairly certain it is eating Chris. Another part is…you are not sure you can name it. It is not quite the control-and-release tension of the horror film and it is not quite actual terror. It is something else, a fear you can control, to a point, but to which you are also helplessly subject—a fear whose electricity becomes pleasure.

You raise your pistol—and this is interesting: You cannot move while your pistol is raised. You had not noticed this before. You should be able to move with your pistol raised, and certainly you should be able to shoot while moving. That is another convention of the form. In video games, you can shoot your sluggish bullets while running, jumping, falling off a cliff, swimming underwater. On top of this you have exactly five rounds. Zombies are dispatched with headshots. You know that much. But how do you shoot for the head when the game provides you with no crosshair? A “scary game” seems a far less laughable notion than it did only a few moments ago.

You turn the corner to yet another camera change. You have only a second or two to make out the particulars—a tiny room, a downed figure, another figure bent over him—before what is called a cut scene kicks in. The camera closes on a bald humanoid, now turning, noticing you, white head lividly veiny, mouth bloody, eyes flat and empty and purgatorial. There the brief cut scene ends. The zombie, now approaching, groans in thoughtless zombie misery, a half-eaten corpse behind it. You fire but nothing happens. In your panic you have forgotten the left trigger, which raises your weapon. This blunder has cost you. The zombie falls upon you with a groan and bites you avidly, your torso transforming into a blood fountain. You mash all seventeen of your controller’s buttons before finally breaking free. The zombie staggers back a few steps, and you manage to fire. Still no crosshair or reticule. Your shot misses, though by how much you have no idea. The zombie is upon you again. After pushing it away—and there is something date-rapeishly unwholesome about the way it assaults you—you stagger back into the hallway to give yourself more room to maneuver, but the camera switches in such a way as to leave you unaware of the zombie’s exact location, though you can still hear its awful, blood-freezing moan, which, disembodied, sounds not only terrifying but sad. You fire blindly down the hall, toward the moaning, with no guarantee that your shots are hitting the zombie or coming anywhere close to it. Soon pulling the trigger produces only spent clicks. You go to the inventory screen and equip your knife. When you return to gameplay, the zombie appears within frame and lurches forward. You slash at it, successfully, blood geysering everywhere, but not before it manages to grab on to you yet again. After another chewy struggle, you back up farther, the camera finally providing you with a vantage point that is not actively frustrating, and you lure the zombie toward you, lunging when it staggers into stabbing range. At last the creature drops. You approach its doubly lifeless husk, not quite believing what is happening when it grabs your leg and begins, quite naturally by this point, to bite you. You stab at this specimen of undead indestructibility until, with a final anguished moan, a copious amount of blood pools beneath it. What new devilry is this?

None of it has made sense. Not the absurd paucity of your ammunition stores, not the handicapping camera system, not the amount of effort it took to defeat a single foe, not that foe’s ability to play dead. You know a few things about video-game enemies. When they are attacked they either die instantly or lose health, and for foes as tough as this one you are typically able to track the process by way of an onscreen health bar. This zombie, however, had no health bar. (Neither do you, properly speaking. What you do have is an electrocardiographic waveform that is green when you are at full health, orange when you are hurt, and red when you are severely hurt. Not only is this EKG stashed away in the inventory subscreen, it provides only an approximate state of health. Right now your health is red. But how red? You have no idea. This game is rationing not only resources but information.) When video-game characters die, furthermore, they disappear, like Raptured Christians or Jedi. Your assailant has not disappeared and instead remains facedown in a red pool of useless zombie plasma. This is a game in which every bullet, evidently, will count. This is also a game in which everything you kill will remain where it falls, at least until you leave the room. You stab it again. Revenge!

You flee the hallway and return to Barry. Before you can tell him what has happened, the door behind you opens. The zombie whose deadness was a heliocentric certainty has followed you. You (not Jill: you) cry out in delighted shock. Your worried stepfather, a few rooms away, calls your name, his voice emanating from a world that, for the last half hour, has been as enclosing but indistinct as an amnion. After calling back that you are okay, you are newly conscious of the darkness around you, the lateness of the hour. For the first time in your life, a video game has done something more than entertain or distract you. It has bypassed your limbic system and gone straight for the spinal canal. You lean back, cautiously. You are twenty-three years old. You have played a lot of games. Right now, all those games, all the irrecoverable eons you have invested in them, seem to you, suddenly, like nothing more than a collective prologue.

The critic Robert Hughes called it “the shock of the new”: the sensation of encountering a creative work that knocks loose the familiar critical vocabularies and makes them feel only partially applicable to what stands before you. It is the powerful, powerless feeling of knowing your aesthetic world has been widened but not yet having any name for the new ground upon which you stand. Hughes was talking about visual art, but there is no reason to confine the shock of the new to any particular medium. When it comes to video games, the shock of the new came to me through Capcom’s Resident Evil, though other gamers will have their own equally resonant examples. The first time I played Resident Evil is the only instance in which I was acutely aware of being present at the birth of a genre (that of “survival horror”), and it was one of a handful of occasions that a medium I believed I understood felt objectively, qualitatively new—and not merely new to me.

At first glance Resident Evil seemed to be imitating horror films: the grindingly familiar character types; the shifting camera angles; the elongated, tonal creepiness occasionally punctuated by sudden, decisive scares; the brilliant—absolutely brilliant—use of sound. But it also took core inspiration from primitive video-game progenitors. Much of Resident Evil involves finding objects (a lighter, herbs of various colors, sheet music, jewelry) and figuring out how to use them and where, a this-quest-opens-that-quest structure similar to some of the earliest text-based computer adventures, one of which was actually called Adventure. Resident Evil’s reliance on gunplay—it was originally envisioned as a first-person shooter—came from games too numerous to mention. When it was not borrowing horror-film decor, Resident Evil frequently resembled, as mentioned, Myst. None of these constituent parts was new, but the unlikely whole they formed was. No game had ever before combined so many disparate strands of popular entertainment; few had pointed more evocatively to what was possible within the video-game form.

Oddly, not many games chose to follow where Resident Evil pointed. Its innovations were selectively scavenged rather than swallowed whole, even within subsequent Resident Evil titles. The intentional clumsiness of the controls (cardiac-event-inducing when surrounded by shambling, moaning zombies) was abandoned by Resident Evil 4, as was the cinematically relocating camera. The former was dropped because it was no longer an interesting hindrance; gamers had learned to adapt to it. The latter was dropped because the game’s designers settled upon more direct ways to alarm gamers than by the obscurantism of shifting camera angles. In Resident Evil 4, they simply throw more enemies at you than you can ever hope to kill.

The innovations that did survive are a mixed bag. Most narrative games today require the player to “save” his or her progress. In early games you were often given a password to allow you to start where you last left off; later games did the saving for you, automatically. Resident Evil’s save system—which involved, for some deeply mysterious reason, finding in-game typewriter ribbons, which one then used to save one’s progress on an in-game old-fashioned manual typewriter—was about as frustrating as typing on an out-of-game old-fashioned manual typewriter. You could save only in special typewriter-having locations, and your severely limited inventory space meant you could only carry so many items at once (fewer still if you picked Jill to control rather than brawny Chris), the upshot of which was spending half the game muttering profanities while running back and forth through rooms filled with undead to “save” rooms and then swapping out items to make space for your latest stumbled-upon typewriter ribbon and then running back to fetch it. Saving your game at every opportunity became an imperative as biologically intense as food or sleep. I have had friends and relatives die, lovers stray, and money run out, but I think I would still place being torn apart by zombies with an hour and a half of unsaved Resident Evil gameplay behind me in the upper quartile of Personally Miserable Experiences. While the satanically complicated save system certainly upped the tension of Resident Evil’s gameplay, it did so artificially, and for years a number of games, especially Japanese games, made saving one’s progress a similarly and uselessly time-consuming ordeal. This succeeded grandly in making games harder but did nothing to make them more enjoyable. (Ten years later, another Capcom zombie game, Dead Rising, would have an even more infuriating and niggardly save system. As much as I love Dead Rising, I still wish ill upon everyone involved with its save-system implementation. Honestly. Those people can go to hell.)

One of Resident Evil’s more influential innovations did not concern gameplay per se. Games were violent before Resident Evil, certainly, but they were violent in two ways: operatically (as in Mortal Kombat’s “Finish him!” finale scenes) or iteratively (the mow-’em-down mindlessness of just about everything else). The violence of Resident Evil was surprisingly occasional but unbelievably brutal. It was also clinical, which encouraged a certain wicked tendency to experiment. As you found and used new weapons, it turned out that zombies reacted to them in varied ways. A shotgun could blow the legs out from under a zombie, and the well-placed round of a .38 could take its head right off. I do not claim to be a historian of video-game dismemberment, but I am fairly sure that no game before Resident Evil allowed such violence to be done to specific limbs. It provided gamers with one of the video-game form’s first laboratories of virtual sadism, and I would be lying if I did not admit that it was, in its way, exhilarating. (They were zombies. You were doing them a favor.)

But Resident Evil was influential in a final, lamentable way, and this has to do with its phenomenal stupidity. How stupid was Resident Evil? So stupid that stupidity has since become one of the signatures of the Resident Evil series. So stupid, in other words, that stupidity became something not to address or fix but a mast of tonal distinction to which the series lashed itself. I have already quoted some of the game’s dialogue, which at its least weird sounds as though it has been translated out of Japanese, into Swahili, back into Japanese, into the language of the Lunar Federation, back into Japanese, and finally into English. As for the plot, I have played through the game at least half a dozen times and could not under pain of death explain its most rudimentary aspects. I know that the plot provides a stage for the considerable malversation of your erstwhile teammate Wesker. I also know that it involves an evil corporation known as Umbrella and a terrible biotoxin known as the T-virus. This is where the cinematic sweep and texture of Resident Evil least resemble cinema. Great horror movies are almost always subterranean in effect. They are the ultimate compulsion—you must watch—and they transubstantiate social anxieties more sensed than felt. The sensed, rather than the felt, is the essence of the horror film. Another way of saying this is that good horror films are about something not immediately discernible on their surface. On its surface, Resident Evil is about an evil corporation known as Umbrella and a terrible biotoxin known as the T-virus. Beneath that surface is a tour de force of thematic nullity. All the game really wants to do is frighten you silly, and it goes about doing so with considerable skill. Playing it for the first time was easily as scary as any horror movie and frequently much scarier. But was it horrifying? For me, horror is the departure of conscious thought, and Resident Evil collapses wherever thought arrives.

This brilliantly conceived game of uncompromising stupidity was, in retrospect, a disastrous formal template. Terrible dialogue? It was still a great game. A constant situational ridiculousness that makes The Texas Chain Saw Massacre seem like a restrained portrait of rural dysfunction? It was still a great game. And it is a great game, and will be ever thus. It was eventually remade, more than once, most notably for release on the Nintendo GameCube, with better graphics and voice actors and a script translated by someone who had occasionally heard spoken English. It, too, was a great game. But the success of the first Resident Evil established the permissibility of a great game that happened to be stupid. This set the tone for half a decade of savagely unintelligent games and helped to create an unnecessary hostility between the greatness of a game and the sophistication of things such as narrative, dialogue, dramatic motivation, and characterization. In accounting for this state of affairs, many game designers have, over the years, claimed that gamers do not much think about such highfaluting matters. This may or may not be largely true. But most gamers do not care because they have been trained by game designers not to care.

Without a doubt, Resident Evil showed how good games could be. Unfortunately, it also showed how bad games could be. Too amazed by the former, gamers neglected to question the latter. It rang a bell to which too many of us still, and stupidly, salivate.

THREE

I have been publishing long enough now to look back on much of what I have written and feel the sudden, pressing need to throw myself off the nearest bridge. Every person lucky enough to turn a creative pursuit into a career has these moments, and at least, I sometimes tell myself, I do not often look back on my writing with shame.

I am ashamed of one thing, however, and that is an essay I contributed to a nonfiction anthology of “young writing.” I was encouraged to write about anything I pleased, so long as it addressed what being a young writer today felt like. I wrote about video games and whether they were a distraction from the calling of literature. Even as I was writing it, I was aware that the essay did not accurately reflect my feelings. Recently I wondered if the essay was maybe somewhat better than I remembered. I then reread it and spent much of the following afternoon driving around, idly looking for bridges.

“As for video games,” I wrote, “very few people over the age of forty would recognize them as even a lower form of art. I am always wavering as to where I would locate video games along art’s fairly forgiving sliding scale.” Video games are obviously and manifestly a form of popular art, and every form of art, popular or otherwise, has its ghettos, from the crack houses along Michael Bay Avenue to the tubercular prostitutes coughing at the corner of Steele and Patterson. The video game is the youngest and, increasingly, most dominant popular art form of our time. To study the origins of any popular new medium is to become an archaeologist of skeptical opprobrium. It seems to me that anyone passionate about video games has better things to do than walk chin-first into sucker-punch arguments about whether they qualify as art. Those who do not believe video games are or ever will be art deserve nothing more goading or indulgent than a smile.

I think that was what I was trying to say. But I was then and am now routinely torn about whether video games are a worthy way to spend my time and often ask myself why I like them as much as I do, especially when, very often, I hate them. Sometimes I think I hate them because of how purely they bring me back to childhood, when I could only imagine what I would do if I were single-handedly fighting off an alien army or driving down the street in a very fast car while the police try to shoot out my tires or told that I was the ancestral inheritor of some primeval sword and my destiny was to rid the realm of evil. These are very intriguing scenarios if you are twelve years old. They are far less intriguing if you are thirty-five and have a career, friends, a relationship, or children. The problem, however, at least for me, is that they are no less fun. I like fighting aliens and I like driving fast cars. Tell me the secret sword is just over the mountain and I will light off into goblin-haunted territory to claim it. For me, video games often restore an unearned, vaguely loathsome form of innocence—an innocence derived of not knowing anything. For this and all sorts of other complicated historical reasons—starting with the fact that they began as toys directly marketed to children—video games crash any cocktail-party rationale you attempt to formulate as to why, exactly, you love them. More than any other form of entertainment, video games tend to divide rooms into Us and Them. We are, in effect, admitting that we like to spend our time shooting monsters, and They are, not unreasonably, failing to find the value in that.

I wrote in my essay that art is “obligated to address questions allergic to mere entertainment….In my humble estimation, no video game has yet crossed the Rubicon from entertainment to true art.” Here I was trying to say that what distinguishes one work of art from another is primarily intelligence, which is as multivalent as art itself. Artistic or creative intelligence can express itself formally, stylistically, emotionally, thematically, morally, or any number of ways. Works of art we call masterpieces typically run the table on the many forms artistic intelligence can take: They are comprehensively intelligent. This kind of intelligence is most frequently apparent in great works of art created by individuals. Unity of artistic effect is something human beings have learned to respond to, and for obvious reasons this is best achieved by individual artists. Many games—which are, to be sure, corporate entertainments created by dozens of people with a strong expectation of making a lot of money—have more formal and stylistic intelligence than they know what to do with and not even trace amounts of thematic, emotional, or moral intelligence. One could argue that these games succeed as works of art in some ways and either fail or do not attempt to succeed in others. “True” art makes the attempt to succeed in every way available to it. At least, I think so.

My ambivalence goes much deeper, though. A few years ago I was asked by a magazine for my year-end roundup of interesting aesthetic experiences, among which I included 2K Boston’s peerless first-person shooter BioShock, which, I wrote, “I would hesitate to call…a legitimate work of art,” even though “its engrossing and intelligent story line made it the first game to absorb me without also embarrassing me for being so absorbed.” Seeing that halfhearted encomium in print, with my name attached to it, about a game I adored, obsessed over, and thought about for weeks drove home the plunger of a fresh syringe of shame. Was I apologizing to some imaginary cultural arbiter for finding value in a form of creative expression whose considerable deficits I recognize but which I nevertheless believe is important? Or is this evidence of an authentic scruple? On one hand, I love BioShock, which is frequently saluted as one of the first games to tackle what might be considered intellectual subject matter—namely, a gameworld exploration of the social consequences inherent within Ayn Rand’s Objectivism (long story). On the other hand, what passes for intellectual subject matter in a video game is still far from intellectually compelling, at least to me, and I know I was not imagining the feeling of slipping, hourglass loss I experienced when I played BioShock ten hours a day for three days straight. If I really wanted to explore the implications and consequences of Objectivism, there were better, more sophisticated places to look, even if few of them would be as much fun (though getting shot in the knee would be more fun than rereading Atlas Shrugged). When I think about games, here is where I bottom out. Is it okay that they are mostly fun? Am I a philistine or simply a coward? Are games the problem, or am I?

I came to this once-embarrassed, formerly furtive love of games honestly. Because the majority of the games I have enjoyed most as an adult tell stories, I was always comparing those stories with the novels and films I admire. Naturally, I found (and find) most video-game stories wanting. But this may be a flagrant category mistake. For one thing, no one is sure what purpose “story” actually serves in video games. Games with any kind of narrative structure usually employ two kinds of storytelling. One is the framed narrative of the game itself, set in the fictional “present” and traditionally doled out in what are called cut scenes or cinematics, which in most cases take control away from the gamer, who is forced to watch the scene unfold. The other, which some game designers and theoreticians refer to as the “ludonarrative,” is unscripted and gamer-determined—the “fun” portions of the “played” game—and usually amounts to some frenetic reconception of getting from point A to point B. The differences between the framed narrative and the ludonarrative are what make story in games so unmanageable: One is fixed, the other is fluid, and yet they are intended, however notionally, to work together. Their historical inability to do so may be best described as congressional.

An example of such narrative cross-purpose can be found in Infinity Ward’s first-person shooter Call of Duty 4. In one memorable sequence, moving forward the framed narrative requires you and a computer-controlled partner to crawl and sneak your way through the irradiated farmlands of Chernobyl in order to assassinate an arms dealer. The ludonarrative, meanwhile, is the actual (and, as it happens, pretty thrilling) process of getting there. If you choose to be a dick and frag your partner, it has only ludonarrative consequences. At worst, you have to start the mission over. No matter what you do, the framed narrative does not change: You and he need to get there together. Call of Duty 4 is a game with little to no ambition to change the emotional outlook of anyone who plays it. It is a war-porn story of good and evil. All the same, the chasm between its framed narrative and ludonarrative calls attention to the artificiality of both. While the former attempts to be narratively meaningful, the latter is concerned only with being exciting. The former grants the player no agency and thus has no emotional resonance because the latter, with its illusion of agency, does nothing to reinforce what that resonance might be, other than that shooting your friend in the head is bad news. Believing in the game’s fiction often becomes as difficult as obeying orders issued by a world-class hypocrite. For a game of Call of Duty 4’s simplistic themes, this is a problem of glancing consequence. For games of greater ambition, however, the problem becomes exponentially larger. (Call of Duty 4 does offer a couple of formally compelling experiences. One is that it kills off the character you assume you will control for the duration in a mid-game helicopter crash, but not before allowing you to take a few disoriented steps from the wreckage—altogether an eerie sequence. Another is the game’s opening, which grants the gamer the helpless first-person POV of a man being driven, it becomes increasingly evident, to his execution. This sequence ends with the gamer being shot, jarringly, in the face.)

Several games have lately been experimenting with allowing decisions made during the ludonarrative to alter the framed narrative, most notably in Fallout 3 and Lionhead’s Fable II, but this is mainly expressed in how you are perceived by other characters. Once a game comes along that figures out a way around the technical challenges of allowing a large number of ludonarrative decisions to have framed-narrative-altering consequences—none of which challenges I understand but whose existence several game designers sighingly confirmed for me—an altogether new form of storytelling might be born: stories that, with your help, create themselves. There is, of course, another word for stories that, with your help, create themselves. That word is life. So would this even be a good thing?

I am not so sure. When I am being entertained, I am also being manipulated. I am allowing myself to be manipulated. I am, in other words, surrendering. When I watch television, one of our less exalted forms of popular entertainment, I am surrendering to the inevitability of commercials amid bite-sized narrative blocks. When I watch a film, the most imperial form of popular entertainment—particularly when experienced in a proper movie theater—I am surrendering most humiliatingly, for the film begins at a time I cannot control, has nothing to sell me that I have not already purchased, and goes on whether or not I happen to be in my seat. When I read a novel I am not only surrendering; I am allowing my mind to be occupied by a colonizer of uncertain intent. Entertainment takes it as a given that I cannot affect it other than in brutish, exterior ways: turning it off, leaving the theater, pausing the disc, stuffing in a bookmark, underlining a phrase. But for those television programs, films, and novels febrile with self-consciousness, entertainment pretends it is unaware of me, and I allow it to.

Playing video games is not quite like this. The surrender is always partial. You get control and are controlled. Games are patently aware of you and have a physical dimension unlike any other form of popular entertainment. On top of that, many require a marathon runner’s stamina: Certain console games can take as many as forty hours to complete, and, unlike books, you cannot bring them along for enjoyment during mass-transit dead time. (Rarely has wide-ranging familiarity with a medium so transparently privileged the un-and underemployed.) Even though you may be granted lunar influence over a game’s narrative tides, the fact that there is any narrative at all reminds you that a presiding intelligence exists within the game along with you, and it is this sensation that invites the otherwise unworkable comparisons between games and other forms of narrative art.

Yes, as difficult as it sometimes is to believe, games have authors, however diminutive an aura he or she (or, frequently, they) might exude. What often strikes me whenever I am playing a game is how glad I am of that hovering authorial presence. Although I enjoy the freedom of games, I also appreciate the remindful crack of the narrative whip—to seek entertainment is to seek that whip—and the mixture of the two is what makes games such a seductive, appealingly dyadic form of entertainment. A video game whose outcomeless narrative is wholly determined by my actions—as in, say, World of Warcraft, which is less a video game than a digital board game, and which game I very much dislike—would elevate me into a position of accidental authorship I do not covet and render the game itself a chilly collation of behavior trees and algorithms. I want to be told a story—albeit one I happen to be part of and can affect, even if in small ways. If I wanted to tell a story, I would not be playing video games.

A noisy group of video-game critics and theoreticians laments the rise of story in games. Games, in one version of this view, are best exemplified as total play, wherein the player is an immaterial demiurge and the only “narrative” is what is anecdotally generated during play. (Tetris would be the best example of this sort of game.) My suspicion is that this lament comes less from frustration with story qua story than it does from the narrative butterfingers on outstanding display in the vast majority of contemporary video games. I share that frustration. I also love being the agent of chaos in the video-game world. What I want from games—a control as certain and seamless as the means by which I am being controlled—may be impossible, and I am back to where I began. Reload.

The purpose story serves in video games is complicated, then. Less complicated is how many gamers view story. For many gamers (and, by all evidence, game designers), story is largely a matter of accumulation. The more explanation there is, the thought appears to go, the more story has been generated. This would be a profound misunderstanding of story for any form of narrative art, but it has hobbled the otherwise high creative achievement of any number of games. Frequently in work with any degree of genre loyalty—this would include the vast majority of video games—the more explicit the story becomes, the more silly it will suddenly seem. (Let us call this the Midi-chlorian Error.) The best science fiction is usually densely realistic in quotidian detail but evocatively vague about the bigger questions. Tolkien is all but ruined for me whenever I make the mistake of perusing the Anglo-Saxon Talmudisms of his various appendices: “Among the Eldar the Alphabet of Daeron did not develop true cursive forms”—kill me, please, now—“since for writing the Elves adopted the Fëanorian letters.” As for horror films, the moment I learned Freddy Krueger was “the bastard son of a thousand maniacs” was also the final moment I could envision him without spontaneously laughing. The impulse to explain is the Achilles’ heel of all genre work, and the most sophisticated artists within every genre know better than to expose their worlds to the sharp knife of intellection.

A good example of a game that does not make that mistake is Valve’s cooperative first-person shooter Left 4 Dead, which offers yet another vision of zombie apocalypse. Unlike the Resident Evil series, which goes to great narrative pains to explain what is happening and why (culminating in one of the most ridiculous moments in video-game history, when the hero of Resident Evil 4 discovers an enemy document helpfully titled OUR PLAN), Left 4 Dead abandons every rational pretext and drops you and three other characters into the middle of undead anarchy. Almost nothing is explained; the little characterization there is comes in tantalizing dribs; and all that is expected is survival, which is possible only by constantly working together with your fellow gamers: covering them while they reload, helping them up when they are knocked down, and saving them when they are trapped in the eye of a zombie hurricane. Left 4 Dead is one of the most well-designed and explosively entertaining games ever made. While its purpose is incontinent terror, its point is that teamwork is, by definition, a matter of compulsion, not choice. Left 4 Dead’s designer, Michael Booth, had the maturity to grasp the power that narrative minimalism would provide his game. The speedy and acrobatic zombies of Left 4 Dead have no plan more refined than kicking you to death and sucking the marrow from your femur. As a scenario, it is as ridiculous as any forged by the Vulcans of video-game conceit, and yet, from start to finish, Left 4 Dead is as freefallingly unfamiliar and viscerally convincing as the worst dream you have ever had.

Capturing what playing Left 4 Dead feels like is not easy. But set Left 4 Dead to its highest difficulty level, recruit three of its best players you can find, push your way through one of the game’s four scenarios, and make no mistake: What will go down will be so emotionally grueling, it will feel as though you have spent an hour playing something like full-contact psychic football. The end of the game, however it turns out, will feel epic to no one who did not take part in it, but those who did take part will feel as though they have marched, together, through a gauntlet of the damned.

The game’s refusal to explore the who, what, why, or how of its zombie citizenry is emblematic of the unusually austere approach to narrative in many Valve games, which the company may not have invented but has certainly come close to perfecting. The four controllable characters in Left 4 Dead are all common video-game types: the girl, the black guy, the biker, the elderly Vietnam vet. They are not, however, blank canvases. (I play as—in order of preference—the girl, the black guy, and the biker. I absolutely refuse to play as the Vietnam vet. For some reason I absolutely hate the guy. Tactics that failed in the jungles and swamps of the Mekong Delta have no place against an army of the undead.) The object of the game is to fight your way through scenarios that are themselves divided into five stages, all of which, but for the scenarios’ finales, conclude with the players’ slamming shut a safe house’s thick red metal door. The problem, of course, is that between these safe houses are devastated locales (a high-rise hospital, a train yard, an airport, a traffic tunnel, among others) filled with literally thousands of zombies looking to attack you—and even, sometimes, one another. (You want a weird video-game experience? Creep around a corner in the sewers adjacent to the hospital, say, and you might find, to your fascinated horror, a couple of unawares zombies casually beating each other up.) These zombies attack singly or in groups or in what the game calls “the horde.” Standing in the middle of a darkened city street while a horde of zombies pours up out of a subway station and clamors over and around parked cars to get to you is about as unnerving as video games get. And these are just the rank-and-file zombies. The far more perilous “special infected” is where Left 4 Dead begins to glitter.

These special infected come in five nightmare flavors: the Hunter (a hoodied zombie who pounces upon and then tears into his prey, rendering the pouncee helpless until a friend comes along to shoot or push the Hunter off); the Smoker (a coughing, shambolic, elastically tongued zombie who operates much like a sniper, extending his tongue to pluck survivors from the pack); the Boomer (an obese and suppurating slob zombie who is as fragile and explosive as a Pinto but whose vomit and bile attract the dreaded horde, and whose vomit, on top of that, is blinding, so that during a well-coordinated attack you cannot see the Hunter tearing to pieces your screaming friend right in front of you); the Tank (as advertised, a steroidally distended zombie as tough as an armored car, but who mercifully appears only a few times a game); and, finally, the Witch (a crying lost-soul zombie who seems the very picture of helplessness, until she is startled by a flashlight or loud noise, upon which she uses her razored manicure to instantly kill the survivor who startled her, and whom you must try to sneak past, and who is as upsetting and inspired a video-game nemesis as any). What is so brilliant about these special infected is the way they tap into distinct types of emotional unease. For the Hunter it is shock and for the Smoker helplessness. For the Boomer it is panic and for the Tank flight. For the Witch it is a strange combination of alarm and paranoia and blame. These emotions, aroused as they are alongside other, living gamers, are part of what makes a game with no traditional narrative to speak of such a dynamically fertile experience to look back on. Left 4 Dead creates, within a structure that is formally storyless but highly controlled, a game that feels to those playing it as harrowingly and expertly designed as a first-rate horror film.

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

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

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

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

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

DMU Timestamp: January 18, 2013 04:18