Extra Lives (17 page)

W
hen I was a Catholic schoolboy, my friends and I spent many recesses playing a game called “Who Can Die the Best?” The rules, which I invented, were simple: One boy would announce the type of weapon he was holding—morning star, lance, M-80, Gatling gun, crossbow, pencil bomb, glaive—and then use it to kill the other boys around him. Whoever died “the best” (that is, with the most convincingly spasmodic grace) was declared winner by his executioner and allowed to pick his own weapon, whereupon a new round commenced.

One day the kind but bubonically halitosic Sister Marie wandered over to inquire why a dozen of her boys were rolling on the ground and screaming about lost limbs. When none of us answered, Sister Marie cagily turned and asked the same question of a nearby girl, who first summarized the rules of “Who Can Die the Best?” and then explained—Sister Marie’s face, by now, glacially white with horror—that what we had been reacting to were grenades from Jeff Wanic’s imaginary bandolier. “Who Can Die the Best?” was, from that moment on, as staunchly forbidden as meat on Friday. We kept playing, of course, but with weapons—hemlock, blowgun, freeze ray—that produced less
spectacular death throes. Twenty-five years later I have no explanation for why pretending to kill and die was so much fun, but I do know that a boy alive in 2010 would find “Who Can Die the Best?” about as interesting as mime. To experience the dark gravitational pull of simulated death, that boy could play any number of violent video games in the nunless privacy of home.

This is not to suggest that the video games of my childhood were innocent. As far back as 1982, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop claimed video games were responsible for many obvious “aberrations in childhood behavior.” A fair characterization of circa-1982 video-game violence would be “the collision and disappearance of two blocky abstractions,” and this was disturbing only because it was occurring within a medium universally considered as intended for children. No one feared these games as tickets to instant pubescent frenzy; these games were the subject of long-term,
Manchurian Candidate–type
fears. Today’s video games are often feared as objects of occult influence, particularly after the Columbine massacre, the perpetrators of which were said to be fans of a modded version of the classic shooter
Doom
. Any debate about game violence will almost inevitably become a debate about shooters. To many who oppose the video game, the video game
is
the shooter: A more assailed game genre does not exist. To fans of the shooter, the shooter
is
the video game: A tighter, less sororal game subculture does not exist.

Yet the shooter has been the messenger of many of the video game’s most important breakthroughs. The very first shooter, Atari’s 1980 stand-up
Battlezone
, used something called wireframe 3D, which I do not in the least understand but gave the game its distinctive appearance of see-through polygon tanks rumbling across see-through polygon battlefields, past see-through polygon hills. (Playing it felt a little like declaring war on geometry.) However primitive
Battlezone
looks now, the core of its wireframe technology
is still used, and nearly every painted, beautifully dense object within a three-dimensional video-game world was, at one point, a see-through wireframe model. An even more important technological advance was marked by the 1992 appearance of the first first-person shooter, id Software’s
Wolfenstein 3D
, which provided gamers with their alpha experience of three-dimensional video-game movement. id followed
Wolfenstein
with the equally influential FPSs
Doom
and
Quake
. id’s co-founders, John Romero (a man of thermonuclear charisma and questionable moral probity) and John Carmack (considered by many to be one of the most brilliant programmers of all time), were undeniably gifted, but their games were curiously emblematic of the kamikaze heedlessness of the 1990s, and Romero showed an almost Clintonian talent for self-destruction. Nevertheless, the trail blazed—and shot, stabbed, and chainsawed—by id and its games was soon crowded with other developers seeking to design shooters of maximal mayhem supported by equally maximal technology. The shooter thus came to be known by many adamantine clichés (the grizzled and reluctant hero, the copious gore, the mid-game provision of some especially freaky weapon) and mimeographed narrative goals (steal the plans, secure the area, assassinate him, find more ammo, save her, blow up the bridge, find more health, trust him, suffer betrayal, huge final fight).

A second wave of FPSs suggested that the genre had unexpected riches to mine. In 1997 Rareware’s
GoldenEye 007
(the greatest licensed game of all time and one of the greatest games of all time) proved beyond a doubt that the shooter was capable of being something other than an abattoir, with its endorsement of stealth tactics (whereby sneaking past enemies is as legitimate as killing them), its zoomable sniper-rifle scopes and body-part-sensitive damage mechanic (the combination of which brought into existence the immensely satisfying and instantly fatal long-range
headshot), its mission-optional objectives (which encouraged replay), and its more freely conceived gameworld (which did away with the hallway-and-tunnel-centric design methodology of previous shooters). The following year, Valve’s
Half-Life
showed that a shooter could go about its business with a puckish sense of humor (its hero is a theoretical physicist) and real artfulness, as can be seen from its riddance of cut scenes in favor of “scripted events” (whereby the action does not stop, and the gamer remains in control, during narrative-forwarding moments) and a gameworld composed not of disassociated “levels” but a continuous series of locations with clear spatial relationships to one another. Finally, in 2001, Bungie’s
Halo: Combat Evolved
—in many ways the apotheosis of the above games, with its conceptual sophistication and feature-film-quality art design—showed that shooters could appeal to just about anyone who played video games.

The rise of the shooter can be understood, in some ways, as an acknowledgment of the video game’s martial patrimony. The man who, in 1958, created what is generally recognized as the first game,
Tennis for Two
, also designed the timers used in the atom bombs dropped on Japan. The 1962 creation of
Spacewar!
is partially creditable to military-industrial complex research-and-development funds. The first video games may have grown out of the apparatus of war and defense, but that apparatus was soon using games for itself:
Battlezone
was modded by the US Army as a Bradley armored fighting vehicle trainer;
Doom
was modded by the US Marine Corps to attract new recruits; Valve’s
Counter-Strike
was used by the Chinese government to test the antiterrorist tactics of the People’s Armed Police. Whether these games enhance actual fighting competence is doubtful, but there is no question that shooters train those who play them to absorb and react to incomprehensible amounts of incoming information under great (though simulated) duress.

Shooters are intensely violent, but their violence rarely disturbs me in the way that the violence of a game such as Rockstar’s
Manhunt
disturbs me.
Manhunt
is, technically speaking, a third-person stealth game, but it is closer to an interactive snuff film. You hide in shadows, wait for someone to happen by, sneak up on him, and then use, say, a scythe to separate the unfortunate victim from his genitals. Two outstanding questions occurred to me the first (and only) time I played
Manhunt
. (1) Who thought this up? (2) Who wanted to
play
it? I endured a single hour of the game before turning it off; I spent another hour performing an exorcism on my PlayStation 2.
Manhunt
transforms the voyeuristic unease of the slasher film into something incriminatory.
Manhunt
’s scrotums are not even being mauled for the presumed benefit of flag or country, which is the detergent many shooters use to launder their carnage—quite effectively, too: The
Manhunt
series crapped out after two games, while the
Call of Duty
series is, at this writing, on its fifth vendible outing.

Many have argued that the shooter offers a sense of twisted consolation to those who will never experience war firsthand. My experience playing shooters in their online, multiplayer mode suggests that their allure is more complicated. A multiplayer round of many shooters is usually thick with active or recently active members of the military. (Their clipped, acronymic manner of speech is the giveaway.) When I was embedded with the Marine Corps in the summer of 2005, I found that nearly every young enlisted Marine I spoke to was a shooter addict, and most of the billets I visited had a GameCube or PlayStation 2. Was this at all spiritually akin to World War I–era soldiers keeping a copy of Homer or Tennyson at the ready? Did the shooter allow these Marines some small, orchestrated sanity within the chaos of war? When I asked a non-shooter-playing lieutenant about this, he reminded me that chess, too, is a war simulator.

I admire plenty of shooters, but after a night of shooter butchery I often feel agitated, as though a drill instructor has been shouting in my ear for five hours. Reflection and thought seem like distant, alien luxuries. I step outside to clear my head, but the information-sifting machine I became while playing the shooter does not always power down. Every window is a potential sniper’s nest; every deserted intersection is waiting for a wounded straggler to limp across it. My stats screens in Dice’s
Battlefield 2: Modern Combat
and
Call of Duty 4
tell me that I have killed many thousands of people. This information affects me about as deeply as looking over my three-pointer percentage in a basketball video game, and I sometimes wonder if shooters are not violent
enough
. The vomitous
Manhunt
actually made me contemplate, and recoil from, the messy ramifications of taking a virtual life. Most shooters do no such thing, offering a pathetic creed of salvation-by-M-16, in which you do the right—and instantly apparent—thing and bask in a heroic swell of music. On top of that, the shooter may be the least politically evolved of all the video-game genres, which is saying something.
Call of Duty 4
does not even have the courage to name its obviously Muslim enemies as Muslims, making them Russified brutes from some exotic-sounding ethnic enclave.

I do not mind being asked to kill in the shooter: Killing is part of the contract. What I do mind is not feeling anything in particular—not even numbness—after having killed in such numbers. Many shooters ask the gamer to use violence against pure, unambiguous evil: monsters, Nazis, corporate goons, aliens of Ottoman territorial ambition. Yet these shooters typically have nothing to say about evil and violence, other than that evil is evil and violence is violent. This was never the most promising thematic carbon to trace, and yet shooters keep doing so with as little
self-questioning as a medieval monk copying out scripture. Shooter images of exploding heads and perforated bodies have been rotated in my mind so many times that nothing takes root. It is all simply light and color. Any shock is alleged. Every cry of pain is white noise.
Realism
has become a euphemism for how beautifully arterial blood gushes from chest wounds. Death has become a way to inject life into the gameworld. Murder is vitality. For the shooter, slaughter is its north, its south, its east, its west, and nothing—no aesthetic cataclysm—has forced the genre into any readjustment. The shooter goes on as an increasingly sophisticated imitation of a dubious original idea.

So I thought—until I played a shooter so beautiful, terrible, and monstrous that my faith was restored not only in the shooter but in the video game itself.

Some video-game developers cloak their headquarters in anonymity as a way to hold back the job-seeking hordes and add a degree of difficulty to fan-boy pilgrimages. The Paris-based developer Ubisoft is not so reticent. Its Montreal studio, found in the city’s old textile district, is housed within an immense fired-brick building that, like a prison or urban high school, takes up an entire block;
UBISOFT
is branded upon two of its four sides.

Ubisoft Montreal has occupied this former clothing factory since 1997. When it moved in, it had only a hundred employees and required the use of part of a single floor. Today Ubisoft Montreal employs around two thousand people, the remainder of the building having long succumbed to the company’s expansion. Ubisoft Montreal began modestly, with a focus on small and licensed games. When I asked why this was, I was told that, in 1997, hardly anyone who worked at Ubisoft Montreal had any idea what he or she was doing. Almost no one had any game-design
experience at all. In spite (or, just as likely, because) of this, Ubisoft is today one of the most consistently innovative major developers in the world.

Its startling lobby looked as though a ski chalet and a Star Destroyer had crashed into each other and fused: black metal stairs, creaky cherrywood floors, a bank of gleamingly argent elevators, exposed wooden joists. Strategically mounted flatscreen televisions ran a silent reel of Ubisoft commercials. While I waited to be fetched by Ubisoft game designer Clint Hocking, I noted the number of attractive young women wandering about the premises and began to wonder if the company had expanded to include an escort service or modeling agency or both.

Hocking appeared before too long. Dressed in a thermal gray long-sleeved tee, cargo pants, and black canvas sneakers, his skull and jawline dark with stubble, Hocking was slender in the way that writers and musicians are sometimes slender: not out of any desire or design but rather because his days were spent being consumed rather than consuming. He led me through the warrens of Ubisoft, one magnetically sealed door after another popping open with a wave of his security card. We passed meeting rooms named for the cities with Ubisoft offices (Montreal, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sydney, Tokyo, Sao Paolo, Brussels, San Francisco) and large, loftish spaces where the company’s games were developed. As with many companies, each project gets its own large, loftish space in order to allow the creative team constant interaction. At the time of my visit, twenty projects were in different stages of development, and some of the rooms were busier than others.