Welcome to part 3. We’ve reached an impasse between the conscious interrogation of the story writing and the unconscious joy of the gameplay. The big remaining question is this: What can we make of the meeting of these two parts?
The conversation of being “self-aware” or “critical of violence” as a video game is generally very infantilizing. Games are only allowed to be self-aware in this way if they’re broadcasting a giant flag that tells you how they feel. Games that take for granted that violence is bad, and that you should feel at least a little bad about engaging with it, dominate the conversation. Games like Spec Ops: The Line and Hotline Miami are willing to really push the player on certain questions. They directly ask, respectively, “Why are you having fun with this?” and “do you like hurting people?” I like this — meta stuff is always fun — but it’s more of an internal interrogation, depriving a player of interpretive elements. Counterintuitively, these games simplify conversations on the role of violence in video games by leaving very little to analysis.
This idea is what I touched on in my first article talking about the shallowness of revolutionary aesthetics in first-person shooter games. From this perspective, a game can’t really find an appropriate dialectical use of violence outside of self-criticism, because the questions “Who are we killing?” and “Why is it fun?” always come after “What kind of game are we making?”
I don’t even think there are FPS games that are true masterclasses in terms of this kind of artistic depth, but there are absolutely glimpses. I’ve established a couple games as anticlimaxes in this category, but I’d like to go back and examine them a little closer.
HROT accepts the absurdity of violence completely. Its perspective on things is necessarily a bit detached. It is funny and charming. Because of this, it removes the context of Quake’s tools and renders it all a very engaging space for play. It breaks away from the genre convention of dismissing violence, even halfheartedly. There is no “Do you like hurting people?” or grand justifications; you are using the gun to move forward in the play area. It’s decidedly basic, but in such a way that the game becomes profound, creating jokes and fun despite its violent subject matter. This is one answer to the question.
Cruelty Squad, on the other hand, is a primal scream masked with a faux wink and nod. It begs you to be disgusted by the violence, the organ markets and the capitalists using chemical weapons on Helsinki ghettos to “cleanse” them for real estate development. It is funny, but only as a necessary mask for its anger. The violence is discordant; human life is so worthless that it cannot be earnestly connected with anymore. It asks sorrowfully, in the small gaps between its overwhelming humor, “What would you do if you were certain humanity was beyond saving?” The violence is background, but necessary — the ease and fun that comes from swinging by your appendix and shooting a man with a riot gas canister is contrasted by the obviously horrific grotesquery. The humor bleeds into horror as the violence bleeds into the fun. It is a game that hurts too much to look at to play unironically.
SPRAWL quietly accepts the violence. It builds toward a big twist, but in the end, the voice in your head doesn’t stab you in the back: he asks you to assist in his suicide [z: this is a little unclear to me, I’m assuming because there’s some context from the game that’s missing. I would try to include that]. In one of the most bizarre final levels I can think of, you climb through his [z: who’s?] massive supercomputer, shotgun jumping and bunnyhopping through little resistance. You kill every villain in the world, and then you and the character set up as the big bad sit in a self-destructing building, killing you both. SPRAWL is at peace with its violence. It accepts wholeheartedly that oppression can’t be fought completely peacefully, or at least this oppression can’t. You can simply kill all of the bad people and then die yourself, and people can be free after that. I don’t necessarily agree with it, but it’s a fascinating answer to the question.
ULTRAKILL is the third and final game that inspired me to write about first-person shooters. It is the black hole at the end of the genre. The cold pitch is this: ULTRAKILL is the most fun I have ever had playing a game. It is constructed with beautiful, machine-like precision to feel as good as possible. There are so many things to talk about here: The game is saturated with movement and weapon tech, little optimizations that are difficult but make your playing that tiny bit more effective. It’s frantic: You move fast, enemies die fast and it provides the same runway for player expression and mastery that made Neon White so eye-catching.
If fun is making meaningful decisions, ULTRAKILL is tailor-made to give the player as many points of choice as humanly possible: what weapon to use, what tech, who to kill first. It’s all built around a style mechanic — the game constantly urges you to try cooler and more difficult techniques. In the harder levels, the game requires multiple decisions per second, each one vital for survival. Do I cut through a crowd of enemies to deal higher damage and risk getting hit? Or do I keep my distance and risk prolonging the fight, giving me more chances to mess up? Do I try to time a high risk parry for a higher reward, or a lower risk dodge that could make my stamina too low to escape the next attack? Reading these sentences takes longer than making the actual choices. Your only road to victory is fully accepting the game into your subconscious mind. In motion, it’s fantastic. It incentivizes risk by encouraging you to coat yourself in the blood of your enemies.
In ULTRAKILL, Blood is fuel. Brutality — killing in the most messy, explosive way possible — nets you more health. Pulverizing corpses with your shotgun ekes out just a little more survivability. You are a killing machine that is literally driven forward by blood. You are fighting your way deeper into hell, killing demons, fighting angels and slaughtering other meat robots like yourself. The story is primed to answer the titular question in a way that is subtle and complex.
Now, I need to say the other thing about ULTRAKILL that I’ve been withholding. It’s not finished. ULTRAKILL is a beautiful work of art as it stands right now — I would unilaterally recommend it — but it is in early access, being built bit by bit. The first two acts of three are content-complete, but there are at least another nine of the game’s expansive levels yet to be released. This emptiness, the game’s current non-conclusion, is what’s at the core of this series. I have been allowed to sit for so long with so many questions. How, after building the perfect engine for violence, can you satisfy the intellectual part of the brain? The game’s writing is good, but do I trust it more just because it’s fun? Why does this game, though unfinished, feel like it has so much more to say than its contemporaries? What is the end result of dialing up all of the subconscious parts of my brain to 11?
The death of art — the violent, sad death of art — comes when people are too tired to think about anything anymore, but they still need to consume. Every minute I play a first-person shooter with a podcast on or a TV show on my second monitor, I grow a little less capable of answering this question, or thinking anything about it at all. It’s daunting to try to care about everything you’re putting into your head. It’s not always feasible, but with little exercises like these questions, you can train that muscle. That’s what this is: my own personal interrogation of something I’ve allowed myself to do thoughtlessly for far too long. One foot in front of the other, in the pattern of the human brain.
The question that this series was really meant to answer is this: How do we, as creators and interpreters of art, deal with the dissonance between real-world violence and depicted violence? This is a problem far, far older than video games. We’ve grown into a culture that is more critical of war and interpersonal violence than any before us, but here, in our art, it remains. First, the determination to carry on as we were, but with a few tweaks to make it less uncomfortable. Now, the violence is only targeted at bad people. Now, the violence is only targeted at monsters. In spite of all this, we’re still using the icon of real world slaughter: the gun. I have a grave feeling that I could write about the gun as the great American symbol for an entire lifetime and never run out of things to say.
Second, we face it with beauty and choreography. Isn’t this all beautiful? Doesn’t it feel good to replace a demon with gore in an instant, or to use a grappling hook to save yourself at the last second before falling to your death? There’s an art in that feeling alone. Movement games, bunnyhopping and all that lies beneath the surface. And still, there’s a gun in our hand. It’s part of the genre, inextricably linked.
Now, over the course of this project, I’ve assumed that we’re all more or less on the same page. I have assumed a single position that we are ideologically opposed to violence, have similar political beliefs, etc. The question “How do we reckon with the dissonance between the violence and the fun in our entertainment?” is predicated on that as a solution. I knew going in that even that question, heavily fixed as it is, isn’t really possible to answer, so I’m going to do away with it now and attempt to speak to something broader. Rather than ask a variety of specific questions, I’m going to ask a single broad one: “Where do we go from here?”
Each point along this journey feels to me like it could be the last, and that’s because any of them could be. Each game represents the endpoint of a single artistic process, the result of a person or group of people working towards a goal just as messy and serpentine as the questions I’ve asked are. As silly as it feels to say, each of these games represents an answer, though they’re hard to simplify to parts as small as a sentence. Still, I’d like to try.
HROT is near-built from assembly — it’s a bespoke engine. It has a fully featured astrological clock that is lovingly programmed and modeled at the end of it. The surreal violence of the game gives way to a single piece of craft, both literal and metaliteral. The violence is insignificant next to the joy of creating a piece of tangible art, not just a painting on a wall, but 60 paintings a second of tactile sepia fantasy. Answer: The act of creation is the art, and it encourages a playful rejection of the rules of the genre. Everything can mean what it means, every gun is still a gun, and it will be meaningful for its place as a piece of craftsmanship.
SPRAWL is so ideologically simple it’s disarming. Violence is a means to a justified end. I’m sick of calling games fun — it’s rhythmic, tactile and engaging. It’s not an exciting or rhetorically complex game, but it’s a game that believes in shooting capitalists and building skill in everything, even movement. It codes for a sort of speed runner’s instinct. Answer: The art is in the skill, in building the rhythms into yourself and moving in a practiced line towards a singular comprehensible goal.
ULTRAKILL is Dante’s “Inferno.” It is a game that meticulously answers any question you throw at it. It is built out of systems built to feel better than their match in any other FPS, all put together into a single piece that is as engaged with a player’s muscle memory and reflex as the “Divine Comedy” is with verse. Answer: The story isn’t finished, but no matter how it ends, it is at least 66% tasteful, complex, bloody and exciting.
It’ll keep getting pushed further. How much of a story can you tell with the buttons you ask a player to push? If you couldn’t tell already, I’m not going to stop playing first-person shooters. In each one, in each piece of art, there is a complete and final answer to every question you’re willing to ask.
Summer Senior Arts Editor Holly Tsch can be reached at htsch@umich.edu.
The post First-person shooter games part 3: Where do we go from here? appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
Leave a Reply