A Gaming Education: Mass Effect

“Erm,” I text to my friend, eruditely. “I think I have the hots for that blue alien who got pooed out of the sentient plant in Mass Effect.”

How embarrassing. And not just because I got mixed up with characters, and actually meant the blue alien I found down the mine, not the one excreted by the killer triffid. It’s embarrassing because falling in love with an imaginary alien creature from a roleplaying videogame set in a sci-fi universe … Well, does that sentence even need completing? It’s self-evident: falling in love with imaginary aliens is axiomatically Not Cool.

But I’m totally cool! I’ve got a cool hat, I’ve got yellow boxer-shorts with red robots on. I’ve got Dolly Parton on my Spotify playlist. Hats and robot undies and Dolly Parton are axiomatically more cool than loving blue aliens is not cool.

And besides, Liara isn’t just some blue alien. She’s different. Come, let me take you on a journey through love, loss and upgradeable ammo types…

Mass Effect is a series of sci-fi action roleplaying games featuring squad-based combat, developed by BioWare. Sheesh, genre definitions, eh? Us gamers can be boring at times. Basically the series aims to combine games where you chat to people and fiddle with your inventory with games where you shoot dudes in the face. The first game was a bit dull but occasionally thrilling. The second was tighter, but dropped some of the roleplaying complexity for more streamlined shooting-of-dudes-faces. The third is out ANY TIME NOW OH GOD HYPE HYPE.

No, this is not an article of hype, but of measured criticism. For Mass Effect has some deep flaws, the most fascinating of which for me concern the way it presents its narrative. I find these flaws emblematic not just of storytelling issues in BioWare games, but within Western RPGs in general. My experience with Liara is interesting because it is, conversely, one of the few examples I can cite of the genre truly arousing my emotions.

Here’s the issue, as I see it. The designers of Western RPGs confuse narrative density with narrative depth. All the writing time is spent amassing lore — piling up mountains of data on myriad invented species, on byzantine wars and political shifts and treaties, on companies, alliances, councils and organisations. Then the act of turning the data into emotion — of telling the story — seems almost an afterthought. The data gets vomited right into your face, through codex entries and utterly flat dialogue, and you’re expected to wipe it off, pick through the chunks, then assemble it into something meaningful yourself.

RPG fans, inevitably, will disagree with me. But they’re the sorts of people who read videogame tie-in novels and write Babylon 5 fan fiction on the internet. As the ever-insightful Tom Bissell notes:

“Asking an expository-lore-loving gamer whether there should be expository lore in a game … is like asking an alcoholic if he’d like a drink. (He would.)”

To be clear, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the sorts of people who write Babylon 5 fan fiction. I am a man sitting in robot-festooned underwear about to explain how he fell in love with an imaginary blue alien. I judge no one.

What I am saying is that satiating a very niche market’s desire for reams of invented data is not the same thing as telling a story. That background lore is important, of course. But only to the designers. It’s the leg-work the designers should be doing to ensure they know their world inside out. And then their job is to go away and decide what to tell the player, what to hint at, what to leave mysterious.

Because the truth is that a game — or a novel or a film — is not the story. It is the source document. The story comes alive in the audience’s mind. The source document is the magical spell that can conjure up the story. As such it needs to be crafted with care.

Or to use another metaphor, it is like composing a song. A musician isn’t judged on their ability to cram as many varied notes as possible into a piece, they’re judged on how they discriminate — on choosing the right notes at the right times, in order to evoke an emotional response from the listener.

The lore of an RPG is like the scale a musician plays within. It is the sum total of the raw material to work with, but it is not the song itself.

So it was that in Mass Effect I didn’t much care that Liara was an asari, or that she was Matriarch Benezia’s daughter — who was sort of a baddie but was being mind-controlled by the other baddie so it wasn’t really her fault. The fact I found Liara in the Artemis Tau cluster, researching a long-extinct species on a mining site on Therum, was neither here nor there. I didn’t even remember that, I used the Mass Effect wiki to read up on it just now. My brain has this weird thing where it instantly forgets information that isn’t beautiful or meaningful.

What I cared about with Liara was that she was socially awkward.

After she joined my crew I found her in the medical bay of my ship when I was exploring between missions. I started talking to her. She told me how her previous job had been solitary, how she liked that because sometimes she just needed to get away from other people.

You and me both, I thought.

Then she accidentally let slip that she found me (I’m Commander Shepard by the way, humanity’s last hope for … rescuing the Smurfs from Skeletor or some shit) fascinating. She got all flustered trying to explain what she’d meant. She made it worse. Her eyes went big, she stammered, looked away.

And she had me. What can I say? I find embarrassment sexy. Probably because it means we’ll have plenty of common ground.

Over the remainder of the game Liara and I grew closer, became intimate. I’d trudge through repetitive missions, force myself to engage with a fiction that didn’t interest me, learn which type of ammo to slot into my combat rifle, solely so that when I got back to my ship there would be new dialogue options available with my blue alien in the medical bay.

I’d grow frustrated when she had nothing new to say, get worried something might happen to her when she was part of my squad for missions, find myself excited by words from her that sounded loaded with double-meaning.

One time she told me about the mating rituals of her species. Love-making for the asari was a deep and spiritual event, forming a “connection that transcends the physical universe.” I wondered what our wedding song would be. Into the Mystic, probably. I wanted to rock her gypsy soul.

Then, the night before the game’s climactic battle, Liara came to visit me in my quarters. I chose dialogue options in the affirmative, and she and Shepard had sex. It was a tasteful cut-scene. The kind of thing you wouldn’t mind your kids watching in a PG film.

So why do I feel awkward writing this? Why would I have squirmed if someone had walked in at any of the times I was pursuing Liara?

We’re drawn to romance in fiction. Scriptwriters may learn to ensure love scenes reveal more about the characters, are integral to the plot (something BioWare should work on), but that’s not the reason Hollywood producers will rarely green-light a script without a romantic sub-plot.

Human beings are lonely animals looking for a way home. We spend our days as solitary ships tossed on a violent sea. But forming a connection with another — or watching a film about it happening to someone else, or playing a game simulating it — momentarily reminds us that we’re not little ships at all, that at the root of our consciousness we are the waves themselves, and the shared ocean stretching ceaselessly below.

Maybe it’s the interaction involved in a videogame that unnerves us. Isn’t wooing a pretend woman who responds to my input a little like … well … owning a robotic sex-doll or something?

Except the romance in Mass Effect has nothing to do with sexual gratification. I wasn’t flirting with Liara so I could see her polygonal breasts. I was thrilled by the feeling of a connection. Liara may have been pretend, but the people who created her are real. The voice-actor, the designers, writers, animators … The magical spell they used may have been in the shape of a blue alien, but the emotion they conjured was entirely real.

I’m playing Mass Effect 2 at the moment. The early events of its narrative force Shepard apart from his old crew. I have a new ship now, a new mission. Mass Effect 2 found save files from the first Mass Effect on my hard drive, so it remembers the decisions I made in that game. When I enter my quarters now, nestled among the model spaceships, data terminals and mission-critical dossiers, sits a framed photograph of Liara. Looking at it I feel a sense of loss, as, I believe, does Shepard.

We’re cool with games that simulate the orgiastic joy of combat, the satisfaction of silent take-downs, the horror of mutilated corpses. Why do we still feel so uncomfortable enacting a simulation of two people connecting with one another?

A Gaming Education: Dungeons of Dredmor

The problem with writing about videogames is that sometimes you meet people to whom you have to explain that you write about videogames. Visiting my sister recently in London — a bizarre fantasy realm of rooftop-terrace bars and bohemian homes, where you’re never more than two metres from a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, and everyone has their own personal assistant, even personal assistants, which leads down an infinite regression that’s best not to think too hard about — I encountered just such an issue.

We were in my cousin’s underground bohemian kitchen, marble work surfaces awash with Latin American travel guides and bowls of rare Picholine olives, and a party began to happen. Not like the parties we have Up North, brimming with recreational drugs and regret, but one with home-made salsa and chit-chat.

After a glass of wine or two, the conversation turned to careers. One girl was a personal assistant at an influential banking firm. Another worked for a major publishing house, as a personal assistant. A third helped fundraise for a charity, though she confessed her personal assistant did most of the real work.

Heads turned towards me. Now I know you should never be ashamed of who you are, as Willem Dafoe tells the Oscar-nominated actor, sex-symbol and Yale PhD student James Franco in the film Spider-Man … but this was one tricky predicament I found myself in. Because the truth I wanted these Oyster-Card-toting, Sauvignon-swilling fashionistas to comprehend, was that when I went home I would be working on an article about Dungeons of Dredmor, a videogame literally about creating an axe-wielding fire mage and leading him down into catacombs to battle monsters in turn-based combat.

I shifted my feet around, and coughed. “I work in a pub,” I said.

Videogame designers worry about many things. How budding games journalists will validate their chosen profession to girls at sophisticated London parties does not, sadly, appear to be one of them. Fire mages are about as suitable a topic for light party conversation as DIY enemas. Probably worse actually, as you can’t make ice-breaking jokes about the time you had a fire mage.

I don’t blame the fashionistas. Everyone who writes about games, if they’re even remotely self-reflective, will have had nights when they’ve lain awake questioning their basic sanity. I could be spending my twenties pitching articles to the Guardian about links between Eastern philosophy and current theories on hemisphere-competition in the brain, or blogging about Terrence Malick films, or penning short stories about sophisticated personal assistants who leave their native London and fall in love with bearded northern writers. But instead I’m working on an article about Dungeons of Dredmor, a game, as I’ve said, literally about creating a fire mage and leading him down into catacombs to battle monsters in turn-based combat.

Identity plays a part in it. Gaming has contributed to my sense of self since childhood, and I owe it a lot. And critiquing something I enjoy, among like-minded individuals, is always pleasurable.

Yet there’s more to it than this. I may currently write within the milieu of videogames, but ultimately I don’t think it matters where you plant your flag. What matters is what you do on the terrain you’ve claimed.

Any subject can be fascinating, can yield truth, if explored deeply. It is as if all facts exist on the surface of a great sphere. Like … a grapefruit. And whichever point you choose to dig in, so long as you burrow down far enough, will eventually lead to a delicious core of truth, which is shared and constant.

Take Dungeons of Dredmor, for example. There’s lots I could say about it to my gaming friends — that it’s a colourful, exuberant dungeon-crawler; that the visual style pays homage to classic LucasArts adventures; that a rich vein of parody runs through the game, with motivation posters for the monsters “brought to you by Lord Dredmor”, and a recent patch that has given the little bats you fight the ability to occasionally shout the battlecry from Skyrim at you as they attack.

But keep digging, and you get to analysis that is, I think, more universal. Dungeons of Dredmor is a “roguelike” — a member of a sub-set of roleplaying game both ancient and staunchly uncommercial, focusing on the two key mechanics of procedural level generation, and permanent death.

Here’s what that means. In a roguelike you custom-build a unique character and set off to explore a unique environment, partially constructed by the computer to ensure its individuality. On your travels you encounter many obstacles, and when one finally gets the better of you — and it will — your character dies. Not dies like “goes back to the last checkpoint”. Not dies like “forces you to reload your save game”. Dies like oblivion.

And okay, these roguelikes are the product of inarguably nerdy minds. The characters you build will be fire mages, or hobbit archers, or cyber-punk ninjas. The environments will be medieval dungeons or ninja lairs. But the bodywork isn’t important. It’s what’s happening under the hood that matters.

You’re deep inside a dungeon, right? Creeping down a torch-lit corridor. You come to a door. No idea what’s on the other side. Could be piles of gold. Could be that enchanted breastplate you’ve heard about. Could be a fucking menagerie of mutant beasties, ready to jam their tentacles down your throat and rip your pantaloons off through your colon. And if it’s that last one — well it’s goodbye to brave Bertie the Barbarian, and goodbye to this funny world that’s become your home, your existence, for the last three hours. All vanishes into the black-lacquered mystery that is not ours to comprehend.

Yet what you feel, poised by this door, not knowing what’s coming next, is the thrill of living. The liberation of the present moment. You feel the conflicting tug of two of our most fundamental, primeval emotions — shared memories passed down to us from ancestors who huddled by dying fires and looked out into worlds wild and hostile and free. The very fabric of your DNA vibrates in recognition. You feel fear, and you feel curiosity.

This is a valuable experience. We’re a society that has lost its roots to the earth that grows us. We feel ourselves to be these mighty, immutable beings — protected from the brutalities of life by our central heating and our Sky+ boxes and the number of Likes on our Facebook status updates. We’re saturated with knowledge — what time the 97 bus arrives, how long Tesco ready-meals take in the microwave, the reasons Rihanna is so lusted-over (because her bland-yet-overt sexuality appeals to the aspirational model of symmetrical perfection shoved down our throats by companies who want us to buy more magazines and hygiene products, thanks for asking!)

But this sense of dominion over chaos, over nature, is misguided. We will all still die. Worms will pick out our eyeballs. And as our bodies decompose and our bones fall to dust, it’s going to matter not one jot whether the iPhones still clasped in our skeletal hands, their screens flickering out a backlit display to the rocks and lonely winds, broadcast the final message: “7 billion people like this status.”

And I lied before. Dungeons of Dredmor isn’t really a game about fire mages. It’s a game about facing the great unknown, and measuring yourself against it. It allows you to reconnect with the sense of wonder and terror felt from an existence where you don’t know what will happen next. And that’s pretty cool, I reckon.

Though if you meet any sophisticated personal assistants, just tell them it’s about Javier Bardem or something. It’ll be easier.

One Toke Over the Line: How I Passed Through Skyrim and Lived to Tell the Tale

Cannabis is a drug that feeds off misery and elation with indiscriminate zeal. It cares not whether it carries you to Elysian fields or infernal caverns of the soul, so long as it carries you somewhere.

As the more perspicacious among you will no doubt be aware, I have not published a blog post since September. With the months preceding this drought filled with links to my blog from larger websites, words of praise and encouragement from my journalistic idols, emails of thanks from an increased readership, you would be forgiven for assuming I’ve simply been busy working on exciting projects for outlets other than this one.

But you would be wrong. I have spent much of the last four months in a private hell, struggling to find reason for leaving my bed. I have frequently slept until four in the afternoon. I have subsisted on take-aways and supermarket pizzas. I have written sporadically, and been filled with revulsion at the words produced. Evenings have been killed watching Channel Five documentaries about truckers, and drinking wine until the world has gone glassy and underwater, the edges have softened, and life has become blurry enough to deal with.

The days I have spent smoking weed. I am liberal and inquisitive, fascinated by the nature of being and the self-discovery afforded by explorations to the antipodes of the mind (to borrow Huxley’s phrase) — clearly I have always smoked weed. But this drug that was once a companion leading me on cheery Zen-like wanderings, gradually became instead a partner in crime — an all too-willing-accomplice entering with me into a pact of mutual-immolation. We slashed palms, mingled blood, then I incinerated the weed and the weed incinerated me, until I was no more than an automaton, shuffling on because I had always shuffled on.

So, inexorably, in a daze of habitual spliff-smoking, the winter months churned by. Then, halfway through my convalescence, I discovered a new element to add to my languorous routine — a discovery that would eventually lead to the writing of this article. One cold day in November I walked into town and bought a newly-released videogame by the name of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

***

The Elder Scrolls is a series of fantasy roleplaying games, its roots sprouting from that mist-enshrouded quagmire known as the 80s PC gaming scene. If you have a friend with a D&D rulebook and sets of Lego Star Wars figurines displayed prominently in his bedroom, he’ll tell you all about the early Elder Scrolls games — how the first two struggled to find their identity, that third game Morrowind was the series’ high point. But for the rest of the world (or at least the subset of it that owns Xbox 360s), it was The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion that brought the franchise into public consciousness.

Oblivion was sublime, and sublimely flawed. At turns gargantuan, restrictive, overwhelming, bloated, intricate and bland, it was an open-world sandbox experience offering seemingly-boundless vistas and ornate medieval towns to explore, filled with some of the most tedious quests and generic, clichéd characters imaginable.

I appreciated Oblivion, but could never fully give myself to it. There was too much else on my plate. The effort it required to burrow beneath the high fantasy drivel, to the freeform mechanical richness in its crust, was more than I could muster.

And then, five years later, arriving to expectations as high as for any RPG before, came Skyrim. And this time, I had countless hours of dead time that needed eating up. This time I’d cast off or lost all other commitments and responsibilities. This time I was stoned. This time I was ready.

Skyrim is, first and foremost, sumptuous. Set among the pine forests and snow-capped peaks of the Elder Scroll‘s far north, it is filled with vicariously-experienced waterfalls you can almost believe are wetting your face, snow-drifts that cause you to shiver and stamp your feet in solidarity with your hardy avatar.

Exiting its tutorial dungeon — an opening-section, it must be said, remarkably belligerent in its desire to emphasise none of the game’s strengths — you emerge into a crisp, undisturbed forest, the thrill of discovery hanging palpably in the air. You can wind your way down to the nearest village and continue the “main story” (I use this phrase out of convention, though within Skyrim the linear progression of the central quest-line is far from its raison d’etre); you can stalk off into the woods to hunt bears and fall off cliffs and get attacked by giant crabs; you can pick any point on the map — say the furthest city from you — and try to get there; or you can simply amble to and fro, picking flowers, watching sunlight dapple through trees, listening to water bubble along a distant brook.

The sense of freedom is intoxicating. My first ten or so hours were spent roaming the countryside wide-eyed — creeping through caves, my body stiff with dread and foreboding — pinballing between buildings in the town I regularly returned to, trying to remember which one belonged to the blacksmith I needed. This was another world, devoid of the self-loathing and anxiety that coloured my own, and I wanted not just to visit it, but to relocate there.

Gradually, however, a creeping dissatisfaction arose in me. Clouds of frustration began to darken the game’s blue skies. For, slowly, disorganised rambling gives way to routine, and you realise Skyrim‘s world is not as wild or spontaneous as first appears. The dungeons — be they spider-infested grotto, underground dwarvern city or drauger crypt — all follow the same template, with one route looping back on itself, a combination of light and medium enemies, culminating in a boss battle, and finally a chest containing appropriate recompense. Likewise, after a few encounters with the dragons so central to the game’s marketing, their defeat becomes rote, as you watch them circle, land and attack the way they always do. Villagers, you soon realise, play out their lives and spout their pre-programmed dialogue with a mechanical deadness.

This is not really another world, with all its myriad, breathtaking permutations, but a rudimentary simulacrum of one. It is a system not chaotic but neatly ordered — and it isn’t long before you map out this order, and so gain dominion over the system.

Of course, all videogames are simulacra. You can’t reason with the enemy soldiers of Call of Duty, they can’t write letters home, or desert the battlefield to buy a small farm and live out their days with a newfound respect for life. But as players we accept this simplified model because the systems it does simulate are well-implemented, don’t have to be constrained by the laws of our own world, and allow a space to experiment, to play. War-games get my adrenalin pumping, force me to make split-second decisions that feel as if my life depends on them … and ultimately contain none of the troublesome ethical-ickiness that sullies real-world conflict.

Call of Duty is a simplification, but it still expertly simulates the thrill of combat. Portal simulates puzzle-solving. GTA simulates being allowed to go flipping mental in a massive city.

Yet, with Skyrim, it’s tricky to identify where the appeal lies. Fighting is adequate but hardly electrifying. The writing is woeful. Puzzles are unfathomable. The “humour” I’ve had to put in quotation marks there to designate as such, because you’d be hard-pressed to notice otherwise.

Rather, I feel, what Skyrim is supposed to engender is the sense of existing as a small cog in a larger world. Yet, for all its environmental and architectural beauty, this world desperately lacks the spark necessary to bring it alive.

Bethesda, developers of Skyrim, have always struck me as a company heavy on engineers and light on artists. This game does little to change my mind. Dialogue is flat. Story is splurged over your face rather than revealed gradually and cunningly. The drama as a whole unfolds with all the verisimilitude of a school play enacted by marionettes, controlled via those robotic arms that weld doors onto assembly-line cars.

It’s tempting to say Bethesda’s approach simply isn’t suited to rendering dramatic tension — put simply, if you let players go where they want, it’s inevitable they’ll be looking the wrong way when the King is murdered and the pivotal argument plays out — but I think this is making excuses. A deftness of touch, a filmmaker’s acumen for visual storytelling, could make all the difference. Let players loose on Romeo and Juliet‘s balcony scene and they may run off to tea-bag the bushes, but act out some decent Shakespeare and those that care will know where to watch. Timing matters, vocal performance matters, mise-en-scene matters.

Yet for all this, Skyrim is an addictive piece of work. I played for over forty hours. My housemate — who has no nagging sense of writing he’s failing to complete — has clocked up hundreds of hours so far with the game. If so many of its systems are so dissatisfactory, what is its draw?

Worryingly, I believe a large part of it comes down to that oldest of RPG tricks: a web of abstract numbers shrewdly misappropriated to stand as a gauge for your sense of self. Or, to put it in terms relatable within the parlance of our field, it comes down to levelling-up.

Start a player in a world and tell them they are represented by a label that reads “Level 1″. Let them click buttons for a while, then — accompanied by a euphonious little jingle — tell them they’ve ascended to Level 2. That gaping chasm in the centre of their hearts will momentarily fill up, the aching of their lives will fade into the background, and they will become what, in their injured and consumerism-warped brains, they have learned to identify as “happy”. Pretty soon, of course, they’ll start to feel miserable again. Except now they’re aware Level 3 is just round the corner, then Levels 4, 5 and 6. No matter how monotonous the actual activities, how lacking in intrinsic merit, you’ll have them hooked.

In its worst moments, Skyrim can feel like little more than a framing mechanism for this kind of insidious player-manipulation, a grandiose, blockbuster version of the insipid social games Ian Bogost so successfully satirised with his Facebook application Cow Clicker. For a long time I wasn’t playing Skyrim because I enjoyed it, but because playing Skyrim had become what I did.

***

On the train down to visit my family this Christmas, watching out of the window as geese flew in the clear air, and the red in the sky dissolved into the horizon, I decided to stop smoking weed. That was a month ago. So far, so good.

Cannabis is, I shouldn’t need to point out, a plant. And plants are — to the best of my knowledge — morally-neutral beings. Weed isn’t a great evil thrust upon the world, nor is it a saviour to heal all our ills. It’s just an aspect of life, and, like everything else, it can be used or abused. It can enliven creativity, help you wind down after a rough day, or it can ruin your life.

I don’t hate weed. My relationship with it will no doubt grow and mature, ebb and flow, as I sail down the tributaries and rivers of life, back towards the great ocean at the centre of all things. But, for the moment, it is taking me only into dead-end pools and swampy marshes, and it is time to let it go.

And Skyrim? It is not a game devoid of enjoyment, or of beauty. Much pleasure can be gained from getting lost in its voluminous world, from exploring this way and that, fighting giants, riding horses, catching butterflies — losing track of time and realising another evening has passed in the company of insane gods, wooly mammoths and blood dragons.

Nevertheless, I don’t feel I can recommend it any more than I can recommend smoking weed. Initially I plunged into Skyrim with an insatiable appetite, but, as the days passed, I began to feel my time with it was becoming less and less enriching. Maybe your experience will be different. It has many problems — an arrogant disregard for the importance of skillful storytelling, a deep-routed belief that the destination is more significant than the journey — but it is still a fascinating and curious beast, an influential landmark on the vista of gaming. I am confident that I will continue to visit it for years to come.

Dissecting Corpses; the World Behind the World: A Review of Deus Ex: Human Revolution

It’s eight in the morning, or thereabouts, which any self-respecting writer will tell you is a rotten, despicable, ungodly time to be awake.

I’m up because I’ve got Deus Ex: Human Revolution and I want to play it before I go to work. I am a lazy, sleepy man; videogames do not usually make me do this.

I’m in the first city-hub and I’ve talked my way into a police station, to find evidence in the morgue. I need the evidence because … a girl was killed … and everyone says she must have been caught in the propeller of a speedboat, but I know it was really a great white shark, secretly terrorising our beachfront community … and soon I’ll have to ram a gas canister into its mouth and shoot it from the mast of my sinking boat.

No, that’s Jaws, isn’t it? Okay, I’ve already forgotten why I’m finding evidence in the morgue. Human Revolution does not tell a good story. You wouldn’t want to watch it on film. But videogames aren’t films, and what Human Revolution does, elegantly, is let you live a good story.

I’ve gone in the front of the police station. I could have jumped a fence into the alley next to the station and climbed the fire escape ladder and snuck in, except I didn’t take the jumping augmentation, so that was out. I could have navigated the sewers, shot or snuck past some thugs, then hacked the basement door into the station, deactivating the alarm systems on the way. Except my hacking skill is low, and besides, I hate the sewers, so screw that. I could have just unholstered my upgraded combat rifle and shot my way in, but that seemed a little gauche for a man of my unfettered sophistication.

So I talked my way in. The officer on the front desk was an old buddy, racked with guilt over a case that went sour and led to a kid getting killed, and with my knack for canny dialogue choices, combined with a little pheromone augmentation, I was able to alleviate his grief and persuade him to let me through.

Now I’m crawling through air vents into the first floor offices and hacking into computers and reading everyone’s emails. I’m a sneaky, seductive snooper. I’m ace!

So ace, in fact, that I forget about that whole “outside world” thing, and end up late for work, and receive the Disapproving Look from my boss. I know the Disapproving Look well — sometimes I feel it is my only friend — but, again, it is a long time since its cause was a videogame.

My mammoth bar shift sludges by in a slow-motion blur of scraped plates, squawking customers and abject sadness. Then I come home and turn Human Revolution back on. I eat in front of the screen and play past an indecent hour right round to a decent hour. What I mean is I play until morning. Once again: a game hasn’t made me do this in ages.

Here’s one thing I do in that time: I play a parallel universe.

In the police station I find a room marked “Armory”. It’s off-limits, protected by a guard and a security camera and a locked door. I’m playing as a good guy and the cops are my friends (I’m spying on their emails and stealing credits from their drawers, but hey, that’s what friends are for) … but even so, this armo(u)ry is enticing me.

I quick save in the corridor outside, then go for it. I sidle up against the wall and creep past the camera’s dead zone. I pull out my tranquiliser rifle and take aim at the back of the guard’s head. The camera is facing the corridor, I have a few seconds to take down the guard, rush in and drag his unconscious body out of view, before the camera arcs back round. Then it’s a simple matter of hacking the computer with the code I picked up in one of the offices, and unlocking the armo(u)ry door to get at the riches within.

Except — shit — I miss with my first dart. The guard shouts. I reload, hit, and he’s down. But too late — I’ve stumbled back in panic, right into view of the camera. It turns red, an alarm sounds, and I hear all the cops in the world rushing to my position.

I pile boxes in front of the door to the corridor, dash to the computer, shit, fumble the password … backspace, retype … and I’m in. Camera 1: shutdown. Camera 2: shutdown. Armoury door: open.

Red triangles scuttling across my radar. Cops. Enemies now. Inside the armoury I find some kind of experimental weapon — just time pick it up, equip, load ammo — and the barricade is knocked away and the first wave of cops rushes in.

I swing the weapon’s sights up and fire. A crackling ball of electricity pulses from the barrel, hits the middle cop in the chest. All three men fly backwards, thud into wall, limp bodies fall to floor.

Hell of a thing.

I grab a shotgun from the locker, take ammo from the sprawled bodies. More cops arrive. I charge them, blow one away, blast other right over balcony down into main office. Swap to my combat rifle. Take cover behind balcony and aim down into office. Headshot. Chest-shot. Headshot. Unload rest of clip into guy ducked behind desk. Reload. Barambarambaram. Bullets flying. Health low. Out of ammo. Switch to pulse gun — smash two men across room. One somehow stands back up — I switch to my pistol and take him out.

Falls quiet. I turn — two cops coming up stairs. Blam-blam-blam. More in side offices. Blam-blam. Three from corridor into main office. Blamblamblamblam.

Really quiet now. I creep down and into the main room. Bodies everywhere. Collect ammo.

Then I see the kid. A punk, a thug, just some dude, slumped back in a chair next to a desk. Arrested and halfway through processing? Or an informant, brought in under false pretenses? Or a witness? A victim? Whatever. He’s dead.

I’ve killed him. The cops were red triangles and they were shooting at me so I shot back. How animals work. How videogames work.

But this kid was just sat there, doing whatever, and he got caught in the crossfire and now he’s dead. I’ve killed him.

He didn’t even have time to stand up.

I stay there a long while, looking at him. Then I press Escape and Load and Load Last Quicksave, and I’m back in the corridor to the armoury, and none of the last twenty minutes has happened.

I turn back, let the armoury go, and head downstairs. Cops chatting, laughing, smiling at me. In the main room I walk past the punk in the chair. “You my lawyer? You don’t look like a lawyer,” he says. He’s got attitude, sounds like a dick. But he’s alive.

And yet … I can still see him, slumped, lifeless. And I get this weird sensation, as if that parallel existence is still going on somewhere. Shudder down my spine. I feel, momentarily — and it’s gone before it even registers — like I’ve just touched some great truth, been close to the movement of the universe, seen the hidden world that exists behind our world.

And I think that’s pretty cool — that a game can do that. I really do.

***

I’ve been struggling with the concept of reviews recently. I hate reviews, they bore the utter hell out of me. It’s not the fault of the writers — many of whom humble me with their talent. It’s the form itself — the idea that a good review must list all features of a game, appraise the implementation, give a mark out of ten.

Writers shouldn’t list. Writers should use combinations of scratches on a page, or a screen, to uncover truth that alludes the common eye. As simple, and as gloriously unattainable, as that.

Here’s why reviews bore me, why I never read to the end of them, why this thing deep inside me flares with anger at them: videogames are alive; reviews assume them to be dead.

A microwave oven is dead. It is a utensil, a functional object designed to make our lives easier. Videogames — and movies and books and paintings and songs — have never been about making life easier. They are the very reason we live.

Games are raw, fleshy things, brought to life when they are played. Not corpses to be dissected on cold slabs.

I could tell you about Human Revolution’s inventory system. I could bullet-point the transhumanist plot, give you the lowdown on protagonist Adam Jensen, comment on how the game is set in Blade Runner, but not as good.

I don’t feel the need to do any of that though. You’ll figure that out if you play the game, and explaining it all first lessens the mystery, cheapens our medium, sends out the message that games aren’t magical pieces of art, but fucking toasters or something.

(Incidentally, neither will I refer to Human Revolution as DXHR, like the rest of the gaming press does. That type of shorthand is so esoteric and inscrutable, so off-putting to outside audiences. CoD, GoW, BFBC2 — writers are supposed to love words, not codes.)

Anyway. Here’s what I want to tell you about Human Revolution:

It is a sequel — but from an entirely different team — to one of the most highly regarded PC games of all time. The original Deus Ex had that Velvet Underground thing going on — little mainstream appeal, but influential to people who really knew games. Its freeform structure, emphasising player choice (short version: kill people or talk to them or sneak past), inspired many of the game designers working today. The entire industry, in fact, is still learning from the innovations Deus Ex (along with bedfellows Thief and System Shock) made over a decade ago.

Human Revolution isn’t as fresh or as exciting as the first Deus Ex, but it’s more polished, more approachable. As a Guns & Conversation game I prefer it to Fallout 3 and Mass Effect. As a role-playing game I believe in my role more than in The Witcher 2 or Dragon Age.

And that polish — I think that matters. Critics often lament that videogame architects rarely use their medium to design towering monuments to the human spirit. Where are our Angkor Wats? Our Hagia Sophias? Our Parthenons?

Except I’d argue we have more prosaic worries for the moment. The Taj Mahal can wait — right now we’re struggling to even get buildings with windows at the right height to see out of, with doors that don’t scrape across skirting boards, with walls sufficiently insulated. We’re still, to be honest, wrestling with what a building is, and what it should do.

Human Revolution makes strides in the right direction. There are occasional missteps — the equivalent of the odd plug socket placed awkwardly, say — but by and large this is a confident construction, enjoyable to move through, entertaining to live with.

It may not thrust its delicate minuets as far into the sky as the original Deus Ex did, its buttresses may be less ornate — but at the subterranean level, the foundations are pleasingly solid.

***

As for my role in recommending the purchase … I’m not convinced that should be my role at all. There is no objectivity. I don’t know you, or your tastes. Maybe you hate games that give you freedom and ask you to take responsibility for your actions. Maybe a plane will drop out of the sky and squash you on your way to the game shop, and I’ll have caused your death. Maybe you live underwater and have no thumbs.

Who knows? What I do know is that I’ve been feeling shit recently, deep down glum, drowning in self loathing — probably because I lie awake half the night worrying about dumb things like whether the game review is a valid form of expression — and in the depths of my despair Human Revolution has been a life raft to carry me through.

I’ve lost myself in it, forgotten my woes and really enjoyed sneaking and talking and shooting and exploring. For all the highfalutin intellectual discourse within the gaming press, it’s this that I play games for. I want to lose myself. I want to stop worrying about life and just live life — even if it’s the simulated life of a biomechanically-augmented security specialist embroiled in a globe-spanning conspiracy.

I can’t speak for any of you, I wouldn’t want to be that presumptuous — but for me, just for me, at this moment in time, Deus Ex: Human Revolution is my game of the year.

I reckon you should play it.

A Gaming Education: Limbo

Limbo is out now on PC. An opportune time, then, to buy it for my PlayStation 3.

It’s the controls, see. Apparently they’re rubbish with a keyboard, and I don’t have a joypad to plug in, so I had no choice but to brave the lawless wastes of the PlayStation Store (you basically just shout your credit card details at Sony now, and hope no thieves are listening) to get my hands on this lugubrious, elegiac puzzle-platformer from developers Playdead.

It was more bloody expensive than on Steam as well! Granted, not as much as the PC version and a PC joypad would have been, but still a full third as much again for the base game. Or … it was £9.99 rather than £6.99. Is that a third as much again? Seven into ten … carry the four … multiply out the brackets …

Maths is not my strong suit. But my point is you’ve gotta pay extra to play on console, and I have a sneaking suspicion this is because Sony demand tithes in return for access to their exclusive bummers’ club. Tithes and HUMAN SACRIFICE. Or just tithes.

Well, how interesting. I just Googled “tithes”, and the word literally means “tenths”, referring to the ten-percent contribution from earnings voluntarily paid to an organisation. So what would a tenth of … £9.99 divided by £6.99 be then? Or is it £6.99 times by a factor of one-tenth, plus the difference of £9.99 minus remainder two?

According to my calculations, Playdead have had to pay Sony … sixty billion to the power of n dollars to host their game on the PlayStation Network. Those poor souls.

BUT WHAT OF THE GAME ITSELF? I hear you cry. Yes we’re getting there. Enjoy the perambulation whydontcha? Rushing yourself to the grave, you are.

Welllllllllllllll. Although Limbo looks genetically formulated to tickle my fancy, I’m sad to report that my fancy remained decidedly untickled. No, incorrect. Limbo did tickle my fancy. It’s just every stimulation was accompanied by a forceful elbow to the balls.

This is a conflicted game. On the one hand, it wants to create an oppressive, lonely mood with its monochrome visuals and delicate ambient sounds, contrasting the vulnerability of the young boy you control against a bleak landscape, evoking an ethereal sense of an overwhelming, uncaring universe.

On the other hand, it enjoys dropping a banana peel beneath your feet and laughing as you break your back.

The challenges in Limbo are designed with a philosophy for completion you might term trial-and-error. I would term it the-developers-are-dicks.

Example: one room you have to traverse, filled with pressure pads. Some of the pads kill you if you stand on them, others kill you if you don’t stand on them. There’s no way to know which are which beforehand. You just have to barrel through, dying again and again, until you memorise the pattern.

This is essentially how you advance through most of the game. You watch your character being eviscerated, beheaded, crushed and impaled, by traps impossible to anticipate, and you restart and you restart, and gradually you make progress.

I can see why Playdead thought it would work. The idea of this mounting pile of deaths towering over you, draining any goodwill from the world, sounds like a clever way of ensuring the tone is engendered as much by the player’s actions as by the melancholic visuals and affecting ambient score.

That’s not how it plays though. For a start, the mocking nature of the traps feels distinctly personal, distinctly human, the cruel hands of the designers evident moving behind the scenes, destroying the illusion of a detached yet hostile land.

And for the deaths to mean anything they would have to hold consequence. In reality all that happens is you respawn at the start of the same screen and try again. While the reload time is annoyingly slow, and many puzzles require some labourious set-up before the actual obstacle is faced — pulling a crate up a slope and rushing up ladders as it slides back, say — the result is irritation, more than anything else. As a punishment from a brooding world perhaps set on the edge of Hell, irritation is hardly the most shocking of outcomes.

All of which is a shame, because under that irritation is a haunting, majestic game. The section known to veterans as That Fucking Spider Bit is one of the most terrifying, revolting, inspired moments in gaming. The vignette where you negotiate a deep pool by climbing across the corpses of dead children is shocking and powerful. The ambiguous minimalism of the story allows you to read just as much into it as you wish.

So it’s a pity to see the mournful tone bulldozed by a loud yet prosaic sense of frustration, a wave of anger that threatens to engulf all the subtleties the game works so hard to inspire.

By the hundredth time you see your boy torn apart on the blades of a buzzsaw positioned in exactly the wrong place, you start to wonder what you can have done to the designers in a past life to deserve this abuse.

Less Limbo, then, and more Purgatory. I hope I’ve worked off my sins come Playdead’s next release.

[To see the conflict at the heart of Limbo given voice by two of games journalism's brightest rising stars, I recommend this post on the quaint Rock, Paper, Shotgun. That "Kieron" fellow sure swears a lot. Can't see him making much headway as a videogame critic.]

Gaming in Other Boys’ Bedrooms

It begins in your friend Dom’s house, when you are five years old. You are together in Dom’s attic bedroom, the details of which you cannot now picture clearly, because your memories have intertwined and fused with images from the first Home Alone film, which you watched many times with Dom during these years.

Friends’ bedrooms are alien worlds, fascinating in their glimpses of other lives, the subtly different moral and aesthetic preferences of your families made incarnate in carpets, bedspreads, the arrangement of bookcases, the variety of toys …

The toys in Dom’s room are great. They have been handed down from his older brother, and as such all lack breastplates or spring-loaded missiles or caterpillar tracks — but in your eyes this just adds to their totemic beauty.

There is the Millenium Falcon, no windshield over the cockpit; a Ninja Turtles action figure: Leonardo, missing katana; even a replica of the fire station base from Ghostbusters, pink flakes peeling from the roof where homemade slime has been poured in and left to dry.

You sit for endless stretches of time arranging the figures into opposing armies, then arguing over which of them are the Good Guys, and who gets to play as the Good Guys, and whether Lion-O could beat He-Man in a fight.

And then one day there is something else. Under Dom’s small television, on a mount halfway up one wall: a robust grey box with the word “Nintendo” written on it in red. Dom calls it his “NES”, which he pronounces “Nez”, not “N-E-S”.

At this age, all toys are magnificent. Anything plastic, with poseable joints or whirring mechanisms or appendages shaped like bazookas, is brilliant. But this NES is a whole new kind of magic.

You sit with Dom on the end of his bed and fall forwards into the mesmerising, primordial worlds of Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda and Duck Hunt. You feel like an explorer stepping foot on an undiscovered continent. There is a profound elegance to the archetypal, symbolic lands of pixels you charge through, a deep allure to the evocative bleeps emanating from the television’s speakers.

These afternoons in Dom’s room, in a dimension separated from the rest of the house by six miles of stairs, are your first taste of videogames. You feel, it is fair to say, an instant attraction.

The years that follow see you drift apart from Dom, who is in another class at school and moves in different groups. But you find other friends, other bedrooms.

There is Kev, three doors up from you, whose mother evidently cleans his room when he’s out. It is just too neat. There is a Star Fox poster on the wall, and another poster with something to do with guns and roses, which you don’t understand. There is Kev’s Game Gear, packed pristinely in its carry case, its batteries that you have to take out after each use to prevent them melting and dripping through the floor, like the toxic blood in Alien. And there is a Mega Drive, Fifa International Soccer and NBA Jam and Cool Spot stacked in boxes underneath.

Jim lives on the next street along. He is part of the other gang, your sworn enemies, but one day you have a territorial war and it transpires one of their members has a drive that’s great for footie, and Kev has a Mitre football, so a truce is called for the Greater Good. You play Star Wars with Jim on his Master System, spending whole days on the rubbish Tatooine level, always hoping to reach the fabled bit in the manual where it promises you can fly an X-Wing, always getting killed trying to deactivate the tractor beam on the Death Star, always having to restart again from the very beginning.

In Year 5 there is Flint, captain of your roller hockey team. His room is a marshland of crumpled clothes and VHS tapes and broken axles from Bauer Fx3s. You watch the video of Terminator one morning, then spend the afternoon playing Jurassic Park on his SNES, a low-level anxiety pinning you both to your seats as you anticipate the inevitable moment when a velociraptor will leap out and devour you whole.

Then comes secondary school. You and your friends are eleven, as grown-up as it is possible to get. You wear Lynx deodorant and compare armpit hair in the showers after P.E., and swear with a determination that makes up for in ferocity what it lacks in nuance. You watch the Year 9 girls walking past, their hips undulating hypnotically, the straps of their shoulder bags running between actual, honest-to-goodness breasts, and the world is yours for the taking.

But there is also a floundering, gasping self-doubt, a gnawing fear, a burning desire to belong.

You all have N64s, and weekends bring group sleepovers at your friend Malik’s. They are bitter struggles for acceptance. Your status for the week ahead depends entirely on your performance in Snowboard Kids, Top Gear Rally, Extreme-G, Vigilante 8, Bomberman 64. Play badly and you become a pariah, suffering ritual humiliations, insults so corrosive they threaten to sear through your flesh.

Sometimes a tiny thing within you snaps, faintly, and you put down your controller and go off to read N64 Magazine in the corner, sick of the caterwauling, the venomous jabs. You feel yourself to be separate somehow, disconnected from your friends, and you are hounded by a torturing loneliness.

Other times you stand tall on the top level of Stack, armed only with a PP7, every screen but yours sanguine, and when the timer ticks down you’re awarded Most Professional and Most Deadly in the same round. You drink in the victory, bask in the knowledge that, although you may be distrusted for your idiosyncrasies, you are respected for your prowess with a pistol.

The years pass, and acne arrives, and the botched conversations with girls in your class accumulate. Neither school nor home are happy places. You feel as if you have become dislodged in a way you don’t understand, and are aware of a gradual yet inexorable sensation of slipping downwards. You still game, all the time, except now it feels less like exploration, and more like escape.

Then comes a night in your own bedroom. A friend staying over. Your parents’ conversation rises through the floorboards, muffled, surreptitious. There is an element to the noise you do not like, some note that causes the blood to beat in your ears, yanks tight a knot in your stomach. You’ve got a sixth-sense for it, by now. Your friend is playing Mario Party and hasn’t noticed anything.

The voices raise in pitch, intensity. Hers becomes harried, corybantic; His is Danger. Your friend must know what’s going on now, though you’ve shifted on your top bunk so you can’t see him. On the television screen, Yoshi skips round a path on a giant birthday cake. Showers of coins burst forth.

The screaming reaches a crescendo, breaks. The walls rock with the force of a door slammed almost off its frame. Footsteps outside, fading into the night.

You lie there, skewered. You pretend to be asleep, though there’s no way you could be. Your friend plays a while longer, then turns the N64 off. You lie there for hours, and eventually the house grows silent, and dark. Your friend’s breathing becomes steady. You lie there and you lie there, waiting for returning footsteps, the reassuring fumble of the key in the lock. You decide to stay awake all night.

But then it’s the morning, and you realise you must have slept. Your friend is up already, playing the Frigate level on Goldeneye. You swing your legs over the bunk and jump down. You sit on the floor and watch the game. You don’t know what to say, how to start it off.

But after a while your friend gets lost looking for the engine room, so you tell him to turn around and go back down the stairs. You tell him not to shoot the computers in the engine room, because it’ll detonate the bomb. Then you say that was weird last night wasn’t it, and he says yeah, and you say it happens sometimes, and he says stay at my house anytime you like, the TV in my room is way bigger than this one anyway, and you say cool.

Then your friend shoots a hostage up the bum and the hostage jumps in the air and you both laugh. And you know then that things might be pretty fucked up, but they’ll probably turn out alright in the end.

On Pauses and Steps Forward

I’m not going to be writing my pigeon articles for a while. In light of the widespread rioting and looting in our capital and around other parts of the country over the last few days, it just feels grossly insensitive for me to produce fiction based, in large part, upon rioting and looting. I thought about going ahead with the pieces and curbing some of the excesses the game presents, but playing Grand Theft Auto with its excesses curbed is pretty patently a pointless activity. I also thought about going down the balls-out, meta route, and discussing the riots and my feelings about them as I played. Then I thought again, and realised this would be a really crass thing to do.

I understand some of you probably hold the opinion that we should get on with enjoying videogames as we always have, that the opportunity for play is one of the hallmarks of a civilised society, that gaming together will bring us together. But I can’t write about stealing cars and smashing windows and beating people up right now. Not with so many friends and family members in London. Not with games journalists I admire posting jokes on Twitter that bravely yet barely mask the obvious fear they’re experiencing as they watch the streets they live on descend into war zones. Right now, the thought of even loading up GTA IV ties my stomach in knots.

So Kicking Pigeons is on hold. Not for long, I hope — all being well events will begin to calm as the pressure tap loses steam, and I’ll be back to running around a make-believe city like a twerp before you know it.

Until then I’ll focus on other posts for the blog. Nice posts, ones that remind us that, although we may make our homes on tectonic plates floating upon oceans of chaos, and though a single crack can bring geysers of magma spewing forth, our homes themselves should be places of joy and happiness.

I don’t want to game in isolation from the outside world, but I do want to carry on gaming, and writing about my exploits. I hope you want to carry on reading.

In other news, I’ve accepted a tentative position as Games Editor for the about-to-be-created Technology section of a friend’s website. I’ll post more about that as it develops, but suffice to say I’m excited/scared by the possibilities of writing for as large an audience as the website commands. Excited/scared is a good feeling. It’s the feeling of life moving forwards.

So, until next time, stay safe, and keep being lovely to each other.

Peace and hugs x

P.S. If you want to read more about the riots, I can’t recommend any piece more highly than Laurie Penny’s “Riots on the streets of London”.