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.