My show last night was a huge success. I dare say it was the best performance I’ve turned in to date. The booker for Jimmy Fallon was in the audience, but I haven’t heard a whisper. If he wasn’t impressed, that’s alright. Three years of performing is still young in the world of stand-up, so if my stuff last night wasn’t good enough, I just have to be Zen about my own growth and development as a performer and as a writer.
Now I’ll talk about video games. That always makes me feel better!
I am going to spoil the unholy bejesus out of the things I talk about here, so if you’re uncomfortable with that, don’t read.
Throughout this year I have kept vivid memories of the last mission I played in Fallout 3. When your character stumbles on Vault 112, the scene is quiet but the feeling of the vault is nonetheless haunted. You guide your vault dweller into a simulation chair and in a flash of light you are no longer scavenging the wasteland as a warrior for light or a scourge in the night. You are in Pleasantville, fully black and white, and the air is thick with menace. Welcome to “Tranquility Lane”. I had my first jaunt through Tranquility Lane shortly after Fallout 3 was released, and I was simply playing it at the wrong time of night in the wrong state of mind. It more or less sent me under my bed and refusing to revisit the Capital Wasteland until the beginning of September.
It turns out I turned in my Pip-Boy 3000 just a hair too early. Vault 112 is where your vault dweller finds his erstwhile father, the original wasteland wanderer whose exodus from Vault 101 prompted your character to forge his wayward destiny at the game’s beginning. Remember, kids, never give into fear.
After your character finds Dad, there are a bunch of relatively boring missions that revolve around rebuilding his great scientific work, Project Purity, a machine designed to purify the millions of gallons of irradiated water in the Capital Wasteland (Go fuck yourself, I told you there would be spoilers). After one of these missions he is forced into a corner by the game’s Big Bad, a representative from the putative elected government of the Capital Wasteland. Forced to choose between giving his work to The People or The Bad Guys, Dad sacrifices himself by massively flooding the Project Purity area with radiation, killing the bad guys and giving you time to head for the hills. It’s all very noble, and Dad is played by Liam Neeson, who continues the Bethesda tradition of being a highly paid actor who phones in his video game lines and gets killed off (as Patrick Stewart did in The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion).
Yet I was utterly unmoved. The same game that chilled me in the dead of night failed to elicit any kind of reaction when the main character’s motivational force dies right in front of him. If the same scene played out in the cinema, there would be a close-up and moody lighting. The glass would be fogged with radiation and Dad would be gone… until his hand pounded on the glass and with his final strength he rasped into the intercom, “Run!” Not so in Fallout 3. Your plastic person watches another plastic person lamely collapse to the tune of Liam Neeson’s worst performance.
II. Call of Duty IV: Modern Warfare
COD4 has a slew of amazing death moments. The gameplay treats death like an action movie, although it doesn’t fetishize the violence the same way Fallout 3’s VATS system does with its exploding heads and flying limbs. Nonetheless, there are two jaw-dropping moments that not only highlight the power of the medium but really give death some heft. The first instance is the second mission of the game. The player is dropped behind the eyes of the president of a nameless Arabic country. The president cannot move for the duration of the sequence. He just watches helplessly while his country is overthrown in a military coup. You as the president are eventually tied to a post before a firing squad. There you meet your executioner. He bleats a terrorist screed and raises his pistol. To that point, you the player have had near total control of the camera. No more. The world is out of focus save for that pistol as it’s lowered to the center of your vision…. BOOM.
Later in the game, that same son of a bitch sets off a nuclear bomb in the same country, this time while the player is in control of a U.S. Marine. Your Marine crawls around in the exploded landscape a bit before dying. After that point COD4 is played through the eyes of a British SAS commando, and your job is, more or less, TO AVENGE YOUR OWN DEATH. Rarely has so much emotion been so easily given to a player’s desire to push forward on the control stick and shoot everything wearing an enemy uniform.
III. Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin
George R.R. Martin has acquired a reputation for killing characters. He teaches the reader early not to get attached to anyone who would be an obvious series protagonist in another series. Whatever direction you think the story is going to go, don’t count on it. GRRM will kill that character. Late in Storm of Swords, a brilliant chapter describes a scene of tainted revelry that ends in the death of two major characters, one of whom has been the reader’s point of view for the duration of the story to that point. The scene is shocking and painful to read. I was grasping at my neck while I read in the airport. The characters die within a page of one another. Nothing but black and white on a page, nothing fueling the experience but George R.R. Martin’s imagination fusing with my own. No graphics. No Liam Neeson. No nuclear explosion. Just a punch in the gut unlike anything either of the above games provided.
IV: Final Fantasy
I cried when a.) Aeris died b.) Squall almost missed Rinoa in space c.) Yuna ran through Tidus.
I wasn’t always an avenging advocate for video games as art, despite the less than manly effect Aeris’s death had on me. My eighth grade self’s reaction to a 3D model’s death seemed a far cry from The Godfather. Then I was asked repeatedly what could change the nature of a man. The stink of death is all over your character in this game, and even though each death doesn’t resonate, the meaning of your own mortality is Torment’s raison d’etre. At some point you ask how much of you is the sum of your thoughts, the sum of your actions, or neither. Who are you, and if you are going to be judged, what goes into that ruling. I was raised on a healthy Bible diet, yet it was Planescape: Torment that left me a drooling wreck on the floor with these kinds of questions.
VI.There can be little debate that video games are going to be the most important medium of the 21st century. That said, all art is about synecdoche, about shaving away some sliver of your understanding of the world as you understand it and rendering it in the truest way you know how. It’s tempting to write off the lack of investment I feel in Fallout 3 (or Oblivion for that matter, although the latter never tried anywhere near the personal stakes Fallout 3 aims for) as a response to the character models that are somewhere near the bottom of the Uncanny Valley, but that doesn’t explain the emotional effect of Final Fantasy VII or COD4. Modern Warfare’s characters are animated better than the mannequins in the capital wasteland, yes, but the investment has little to do with the realism of the characters. Did anyone cry when the lieutenant got pwned in Gears of War? Of course not.
It’s heartening and frustrating to watch games evolve but not quite make it. The guys at Bioware say they’re going to make us cry with Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age: Origins, and if anyone can, I believe it’s either those guys or the bad motherfuckers over at Obsidian.
Whether it’s The Notebook or Titanic or Wedding Crashers or Annie Hall or Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamozov or Hamlet or The Aeneid or The Metamorphosis or The Metamorphoses or The Pillowman or Mama Mia!, we have a wealth of entertainment options in the wide world showing us experiences removed from the adrenaline push and competitive accomplishment cycle that define the modern gaming world. The landscape will change as gaming is accepted as just another medium. I can accept that, but it doesn’t stop me from wishing the modelers, coders, and myriad other development personnel who worked on Fallout 3 could sell a moment of climactic horror after their months of development in a moment of climax with the same fluidity that George R.R. Martin was able to render with only a page of text.
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