Attempting to Appreciate Gears of War

Original Post: August 24, 2010

Where to begin with Gears of War? Yes, its a big-budget, AAA console action type game, which are meant to be just the kind of thing I’m mostly focused on, but I have only just played through it.  Having played it now, I feel only slightly more inspired to write about it than I did before playing it.  Tom Bissell explores videogames in a deeply personal way in his book Extra Lives, and comes to the conclusion that Resident Evil made it possible for videogames to be stupid.  If Resident Evil paved the Roman road, this makes Gears of War a German autobahn. Yet in the same book, Bissell makes a long claim for Gears of War as something slightly more than what it appears to be on a superficial, surface level.  Can this game serve as a case for critics to put their ludological money where their mouth is?  What do we find if we look past the aesthetics of the game, to the purportedly more important mechanics?

These COGs, armoured piles of man-meat with voices so guttural they would make the movie voice-over guy sound about as tough as Orlando Bloom are just about as uninspiring characters as I have ever personally witnessed.  I couldn’t be farther from ‘identifying’ with these creatures, nor do I even want to.  Many commentators have observed the power fantasies that videogames tend to offer–this certainly is one, but it is not mine.  This hyper-masculinity screams homo-eroticism to me, in the same way that I never understood locker room behaviour.  Indeed, the parallel this videogame shares with sport, particularly American NFL is and spelled out in the first 20 minutes or so by the ‘Cole Train.’  In some sort of hideously mutated hero-worship we see a sports star transformed into a war machine; equating the senseless headlong charging into one another on the football field with the senseless charging into each other on the battlefield.  That Cole’s voice sounds very much like it has been passed through a pitch-shifter to make it even more manly than the actor’s voice presumably is did not go unnoticed either.

Physically these men could not possibly exist–no more than Barbie could.  I spent a lot of time during the game trying to decide if their armour and other gear bulked them up, or if I was to believe they really were that buff, and I am undecided.  The necks and bare arms seem to indicate hefty size, but the impossible size of their feet makes me picture ogres or Sasquatch.  The COGs were, for all intents, identical to their enemies, another sporting parallel.  The bipedal Locusts would have even been based on the same wireframes and animation skeletons the COGs were.  Their similarity brings me back to the opposing teams of the football field.  These huge lumbering beasts of similar attire and build squaring off against one another in some noble conflict the purpose of which is a forgone conclusion.

I have yet to do any further research or reading on Gears, other than what is found in Bissell’s book, and at this point, I have no idea what the Locusts are, what that device Baird picked up that had all the map data in it was, when the Lightmass Bomb wound up on a train, how the hell a footsoldier like Marcus Fenix was in possession of an estate as large as his, or why that estate looked like it had been hit by a tsunami.  I don’t know why a Lightmass Bomb was able to destroy those Locusts it did, when the only ones seemingly affected by UV light were the Kryll.  I haven’t got a clue what imulsion is or why it would be valuable, other than to the Locusts who might use it to mutate various kinds of Wretches. All this is to say that despite the game’s rich graphics and eye-catching presentation layer, there’s very little substance to the game at all.

This all culminates in my initial assessment of Gears as exactly what Bleszinski says it is, “cool.”  The trouble is, I don’t like what the American mainstream thinks is cool most of the time, things like football, guns, Wipeout, beer in cans and Hooters.  I don’t have a hero-worship complex for sports stars and I don’t confuse quarterbacks with military tacticians.  Bleszinski says in Extra Lives that he feels his job is to make gaming cool–part of his whole gamer image being coupled with a ‘cool guy’ persona that drives a sports car and likes guns and other macho stuff.  Fine, I say.  That’s great.  But that means that this game will appeal to exactly the kind of person I’ve spent most of my life not being.  I’ve never worried about the coolness of whatever hobbies I pursued, and I pursued a number of decidedly un-cool past-times (videogames, reading, writing, etc etc).

While Bissell goes some way to redeem both the game and the designer, I still can’t help but dislike the game.  The most telling quotes from Bleszinski are when he speaks of being in a purgatory between geeky and cool, where he seems to find himself today.  The game that Gears is presents little more than the mad-dash testosterone-fest.  Yet Bleszinski speaks of a melancholy embedded in it, especially within Marcus Fenix.  The advertisement backed by Gary Jules’ version of Mad World does speak of something “else” within the mind of the developer, but his game doesn’t.  Not loudly enough.  Not in the language of videogames.  In the end Marcus and the other COGs are too brutal, too masculine, and too effective to be viewed as tragic in any way.  Why am I to believe that Marcus has any sense of loss or pain, why would he ever question his motives or methods when they prove so unrelentingly efficacious?  The mantra of “show don’t tell” instructs us to look for demonstrations of Fenix’s weaknesses, and I don’t see them.

Perhaps this game is decidedly intertextual, and can be saved.  Perhaps one must view this game in and of its time: the very early 7th generation title, that followed hot on the heals of Epic Games’ own Unreal Tournament frag-fests, but also Halo 1 and 2, early Call of Duty, and of course Quake 3, Doom 3 and other frantic, competitive PC-based shooters.  Is the cover mechanic, so banal now as to be difficult to even notice, the hint of Fenix’s weakness?  Despite his seemingly impregnable armour and hyper-masculine toughness, he hides as often as he shoots.  No player could get through Gears without hiding from most of the enemies he encounters at least briefly.  This, as opposed to the literal headlong charge into battle typified by earlier shooters, where there was no such built-in mechanic suggesting to the player that taking cover might be advisable, rather than simply holding down the fire button.  Perhaps the painfully long reload times are a commentary on Fenix’s dependence on his equipment, especially when he fails to ‘active reload’ it properly.  Could the outward hyper-masculinity and toughness be a facade for the more accurate, mechanic-based description of Fenix as a vulnerable target entirely dependent on his not-so-perfect Lancer rifle?

Possibly.

Something About Starcraft

Original Post: August 2, 2010

To jump on a hyped-up bandwagon: StarCraft.  That long-awaited sequel to a game I did actually play, rather religiously, back when it was current.  I can’t say that I was among those eagerly awaiting its return, but it is a bit like an old friend you haven’t seen in a long time, and he’s aged rather well. That said, SC2 is a wonderful example for any of those theorists still in the games-aren’t-stories camp, because SC2, despite its substantial overhaul of narrative delivery technique, still doesn’t do it very well.  The “game” bit of StarCraft really, really does not want to tell a story, while the story bits aren’t game-like at all.

I will keep the recap very very brief as I’m sure most of us are familiar with the narratology vs. ludology ‘debate’ that took place–and if you aren’t, look up First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game, and you’ll get the gist.  Essentially the argument is that because narratives are constructed by an author to be accessed by a reader in a particular order and at a particular pace, they deliver story in a very precise, author-controlled way.  Games on the other hand are rule-bound systems which are by their nature very unpredictable and largely place control in the hands of the player.  While neither of these statements are unequivocally true, StarCraft would be a great example of how stories-in-videogames simply doesn’t work.  (I have maintained for a while now that videogames are not just games, so we can’t judge them purely on their game-like qualities.  Keep that in mind.)

What is the game of StarCraft?  Mostly when we ask this question we can refer to rules, as in basketball or poker.  We can say that the former is a sport played by two teams of 5 players, on a court with a ball and two hoops.  You put the ball in the hoop and stop the opposition from doing the same etc.  The rules of the game are spelled out pretty clearly in handbooks and such.  The ‘game’ of StarCraft is really problematic to define.  Usually, one would describe it as a real-time strategy game about base construction, resource management and large-scale combat tactics.  The Terran, Protoss and Zerg factions are defined in certain ways by their units and building possibilities.  Yet throughout the campaign portion of the game, the rules change quite dramatically.  Where is the resource management or base-building in the missions revolving around Zeratul?  Several of those involve controlling him, and only him, throughout much of the mission.

The Prophecy missions focusing on Zeratul are probably the most plot-heavy in the game, where Jim Raynor is actually reliving the memory of the Protoss Templar.  So essentially, Raynor and the player are ‘hearing a story’ in so far as the events have already happened and are being relayed as a narrative.  To do this, Blizzard remove all the player’s capacity to strategize–a fairly large chunk of the game–and we are left with a crappy third-person action-adventure sequence that I’d much rather play the way I play Assassin’s Creed (for example) and not in a top-down click-click-click format.  Through these missions, we proceed through a very narrow set of objectives, moving from Point A to Point B mostly.  We, as Zeratul, are really just moving across a number of different planets to consult with various important NPCs, from the Immortal Protoss historians to the dying Zerg Overmind.  These tasks are reminiscent of the story-filling quests in any number of RPG-styled videogames.

The other major storytelling device is the ever-popular cinematic.  Admittedly these 2010 cinematics are quite a bit more pleasant to sit through than the between-mission briefing screen conversations throughout the first game, but they leave something to be desired.  They fall far behind in terms of aesthetic competence in comparison to contemporary videogames, like Uncharted 2 or even Assassin’s Creed (I have yet to see anything that compares to Uncharted 2, just quietly).

The sum of these two elements is the ‘proof’ that an RTS can’t actually tell a story, because to do the story-telling stuff you have to remove all the RTS.  First pare back all the in-game abilities that typify the genre, by eliminating the base, the construction, and the resources and bind the player to one character.  Then just take out the game altogether and use the trusty cinematic.

This kind of talk would come as a surprise to anyone familiar with my general stance that videogames can be quite capable story-telling media.  I still believe that to be the case, only that the kind of story they tell needs to agree with the kind of game they are.  Videogames are a communicative medium, no doubt, but they rely on a systematic, functional logic that will inevitably govern how the aesthetic content is experienced.  Novels have a systematic rule also, they just happen to (almost) all be the same rule: read from page one to the last page, top to bottom left to right.  Those are rules that govern how the narrative is experience.  Videogames can change those rules, play with them, activate them and make them part of the experience.  StarCraft has those rules, but chooses to tell a story that runs across the grain rather than with it.

The game of StarCraft is about war–the story is about individuals.  The game of StarCraft teaches the player not to care much for the individuals, the story asks us to identify with their personalities, or empathise with their desires, fears and ambitions.  The videogame asks something rather difficult when we are meant to empathise with Raynor, or even Tychus, immediately following a battle in which we ‘build’ then send hundreds marines charging into the open maw of doom in the middle of a Zerg base.  The gameplay experience, during the missions, is largely detached from the ‘humanity’ of warfare, as we are suspended as an omniscient non-presence above the battlefield.  There is no suggestion that we are occupying Raynor himself while controlling the flow of battle, as he himself turns up (as a Marine, rather than a Vulture, perhaps trying to humanise him from vehicle into identifiable man?) on the battlefield early on.

The tentative questions I ask here are what else do we do?  Narratives about war are almost inevitably about the individuals.  Especially modern war films, such as Blackhawk Down or Saving Private Ryan are all about the individual humans caught up in a larger-than-them conflict.  Television series like M*A*S*H were shot almost entirely on the hospital site, and never depicted actual battle–it was about the people there, not about the war.  The game of StarCraft is absolutely about the war, in a more engaging way than a film or novel probably can be.  A forty-minute long battle scene in a movie would be pretty excruciating, where a forty-minute StarCraft battle can be gripping.  Especially given the medium’s ability to suspend us over the battlefield, and put us in control, we are able to experience what a large-scale battle is, in and of itself, as opposed to the individual’s experience of that chaos.  The player of an RTS is not experiencing an individual’s perspective on warfare, because no individual, not even the commanding general, can have the kind of perfect perspective over everything, in real time, that the computer-chair general can.

The key is to communicate through that experience, not the supposed introspection of Raynor as portrayed in the cinematics.  There was one point in which I felt this was executed: in Zeratul’s final mission, the Fall of Aiur.  This mission puts the player in command over the last of the Protoss forces–a considerable army, with considerable resources–to defend their home planet from the Zerg onslaught.  The mission is designed to fail, and so the player simply does not have enough time/resources to actually overcome the Zerg army.  Nothing in the system changes, the player doesn’t lose abilities, or through some other deus ex machina lose half their base, they are simply overrun.  The mineral deposits finally run out, and the player can’t build reinforcements.  They lose the mission naturally, as it were, and instead of being told: “The Zerg attack was relentless, it seemed as though for every one that fell, two more would take its place,” this experience is actually shown to the player, on a large scale.

The question I have is how do we position the player?  Could the player become a Commander who through some technological conceit (I’m thinking Ender’s Game here) can be aware and in control of the whole battlefield?  Is that where we could place Raynor, and then the player inside his head?  If so, could we tell story through some introspective audio ‘thoughts’ in a similar way that Bioshock et al. use the audio logs?  Or do we continue to develop along the disembodied presence above-it-all logic and attempt to transcend the human character with which the player will identify and empathise with?

Kerrigan, Queen of Blades

Kerrigan, Queen of Blades

Final note is that when many people speak of StarCraft, they speak of the multiplayer aspect of the game, which is, to me, another wholly different experience.  The rules change again, down to the available machines of war.  There are quite a few more in the campaign than there are in the ranked matches I’ve played, to ensure a balanced play experience one assumes–or simplifying the experience for those in the lower leagues.  I honestly do not know at this point.

There simply must be a more nuanced use of the word ‘game’ when talking about videogames.  Videogames are not only games, and may in fact contain several ‘games’ in the traditional sense, within the software.  StarCraft is indeed a great game–its more than one great game in fact–but it is also going to be a poster boy for critics (such as myself) explaining why story doesn’t work in videogames.