Extra Lives (9 page)

Discussion at Epic is collegial and to the point; modern game design is too complex and collaborative for any individual to feel proprietary about his or her own ideas. At one meeting I attended, a disagreement about weaponry was swiftly resolved. “There’s no direct counter to the flamethrower,” Ray Davis, the game’s lead programmer, pointed out, with exasperation. Lead gameplay designer Lee Perry, who had obviously heard this before, sighed. “I
don’t know. I think it’s a superweapon,” he said. Then someone else observed that the boomshot, another devastatingly fatal weapon, had no direct counter, either, and Davis recognized with a grin that his argument had been destroyed. Bleszinski took the opportunity to raise a singular annoyance of the boomshot, familiar to anyone with experience of the multiplayer version of
Gears:
the impossibility of knowing whether someone you are charging toward happens to be carrying a boomshot. “The boomshot needs something to
warn
you your opponent’s got it,” Bleszinski said. He suggested adding small glowing lights around its four barrels, which everyone agreed was a fine solution. Davis, who worked most directly with the programmers and was therefore most familiar with what remained janky, brought up the “inconsistent, unfun lethality” of frag grenades. This segued into
Gears 2
’s inclusion of ink grenades, which create a highly damaging toxic cloud—the proper gameplay use of which no one, so far, had been able to decide.

Bleszinski and the other Epic designers came to this form as children. Growing up playing games, they absorbed the governing logic of the medium, but no institutions existed for them to transform what they learned into a methodology. Gradually, though, they turned a hobby into a creative profession that is now as complex as any other. I realized, watching them, that part of what they had done was help to establish the principles of one grammar of fun.

Before leaving Epic, I was invited to take part in the daily playtest, which occupies an hour or two of every afternoon. That day the team was testing the multiplayer modes of
Gears 2
. One of the most common criticisms of video games is that they can wrap those who play in enforced and occasionally deranging solitude, but to take part in a multiplayer game is to give a game new life
every time one plays, because one is matched against human players, whose ingenuity and deviousness no computer can hope to equal, and because one can exchange with one’s fellow players advice, congratulations, and taunts (mostly taunts). A dozen Epic employees gathered in the test lab and signed in to the individual consoles that lined the walls. The battle would pit one side of the room against the other. I was assigned my slot and selected my avatar—a Drone Locust.

Testing is among the more consuming aspects of modern game design. I was told that
Gears 2
would be subject to roughly forty thousand hours of testing before its release. This is an impressive number—until one realizes that the first forty thousand people who buy and play
Gears 2
will, in one hour, equal that amount of testing.
Gears 1
was released with a few bugs—instances in which the game behaves in a way that was not intended—a fact that many at Epic remain bitterly embarrassed about, even though it is nearly impossible to completely eliminate bugs from any game. Testing of multiplayer modes involves something more sociological than purely technical assessment: learning what tendencies a given environment fosters. If there are places to hide, they must always have a fatal weakness. If a particularly powerful weapon is hidden somewhere, it must be difficult and risky to reach. If large numbers of players are being killed at a certain location, the game designers must ask themselves why, and decide whether to correct for this. The aim is to eliminate all ineradicable advantages, but this goal is seldom attained. Two weeks after the release of the first
Gears
, Bleszinski told me, “I’d go online and get completely destroyed by everybody.”

In our first multiplayer game, which was called “Guardian,” one had to kill the opposing team’s leader and all those who protect him. By the end, a teammate and I happened to be the only survivors (I achieved this status largely by hiding), and we
encountered Bleszinski crouching behind a stack of sandbags. We decided to charge. Bleszinski popped out from cover and, with a shotgun, expertly exploded the head of my teammate before beating me to death as I rounded the edge of his hiding place. Bleszinski ended the game with twenty-one kills; I had three.

The next contest, then known as “Meatflag” but since renamed, amounted to a game of capture the flag—though the flag was, bracingly, a human being. In this match, I was simultaneously chainsawed to death by three people, a spectacle that everyone in the room claimed never to have seen before, in all their hours of play. Our final game was called “Wingman,” which is played in pairs. Bleszinski and I buddied up, and I shouted across the room to him for some general guidance. “Basically,” he said, “kill anyone who doesn’t look like you. Our foreign policy.”

I fared miserably again, and pride compelled me to point out that I had finished
Gears 1
on its most challenging difficulty level. No one was listening, and Bleszinski stood up. “Now’s the fun part,” he said. “Figure out what’s a bug and what’s not a bug.” He conferred in a huddle with the other designers about what to enter into the defect-tracking database. “You tell people what you do for a living,” Bleszinski said later, “and they’re like, ‘Oh, you play video games for a living.’ No, I play a game that’s not as fun as it should be, that’s broken, until it’s no longer broken. Then I give it to other people to have fun with.”

T
o learn what the video-game industry at large thought of itself and where it believed it was going, I went to Las Vegas, a city to which I had moved two years earlier for a ten-month writing fellowship. I had not expected to enjoy my time in Vegas but, to my surprise, I did. I liked the corporate diligence with which upper-tier prostitutes worked the casino bars and the recklessness with which the Bellagio’s fountains blasted the city’s most precious resource into the air a dozen times a day, often to the chorus of “Proud to Be an American.” Some days I sat on my veranda and watched the jets float in steady and low over the city’s east side, bringing in the ice-encased sushi and the Muscovite millionaires and the husky midwesterners and the collapsed-star celebrities booked for a week at the Mirage. I even liked the sense I had while living in Las Vegas that what separated me from a variety of apocalyptic ruins was nothing more than a few unwise decisions.

Las Vegas itself is as ultimately doomed as a colony of sea monkeys. One vexation is water, of which it is rapidly running out. Another is money, of which it needs around-the-clock transfusions. The city’s murder-suicide pact with its environment and
itself is in-built, congenital. Constructed too shoddily, governed too erratically, enjoyed and abused by too many, Las Vegas was the world’s whore, and whores do not change. Whores collapse.

Collapsing was what Las Vegas in the winter of 2009 seemed to be doing. The first signs were small. From my rental car I noticed that a favorite restaurant had a sign that read
RECESSION LUNCH SPECIAL.
Laundromats, meanwhile, promised
FREE SOAP.
More ominously, one of Vegas’s biggest grocery store chains had gone out of business, resulting in several massive, boarded-up complexes in the middle of stadium-sized parking lots, as indelible as the funerary temples of a fallen civilization. Entire office parks had been abandoned down to their electrical outlets. Hand-lettered
SAVE YOUR HOUSE
signs marked every other intersection, while other signs, just below them, offered
FORECLOSURE TOURS.
At one stoplight a
GARAGE SALE BEHIND YOU
notice turned me around. I found a nervous middle-aged white woman selling her wedding dress ($100) and a small pile of individual bookcase shelves ($1). She smiled hopelessly as I considered her wall brackets ($.15) and cracked flowerpots ($.10), all set out on an old card table ($5).

This was not the Vegas I remembered, but then most of my time there was spent playing video games. A game I played only because I lived in Vegas was Ubisoft’s shooter
Rainbow Six Vegas 2
, one of many iterations of a series licensed out in the name of the old scribbling warhorse Tom Clancy.
Rainbow Six Vegas 2
is mostly forgettable, though it is fun to fight your way through the Las Vegas Convention Center and take cover behind a bank of Las Vegas Hilton slot machines. It was also fascinating to see the latest drops of conceit wrung from
Rainbow Six
’s stirringly improbable vision of Mexican terrorists operating with citywide impunity upon the American mainland. The game’s story is set in 2010. While no one will be getting flash-banged in the lobby of Mandalay
Bay anytime soon, driving around 2009 Las Vegas made the game’s casino gunfights and the taking of UNLV seem slightly less unimaginable.

Out at Vegas’s distant Red Rock hotel and casino, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences was throwing its annual summit, known as DICE (Design Innovate Communicate Entertain), which gathers together—for the purpose of panels, networking, an awards show, and general self-celebration—the most powerful people in the video-game industry. With the Dow torpedoed, layoffs occurring in numbers that recall mass-starvation casualties, and newspapers and magazines closing by the hour (including the game-industry stalwart
Electronic Gaming Monthly)
, DICE held out the reassurance of mingling with the dukes and (rather more infrequently) duchesses of a relatively stable kingdom—though it, too, had been bloodied. Electronic Arts, the biggest video-game publisher in the world, lost something like three-quarters of a billion dollars in 2008. Midway, creators of the sanguinary classic fighting game
Mortal Kombat
and one of the few surviving game developers that began in the antiquity of the Arcade Age, had been recently sold for quite a bit less than a three-bedroom home on Lake Superior. One of the still-unreleased games Midway (with Surreal Software) had spent tens of millions of dollars in recent years developing is called
This Is Vegas
, an open-world game in the
Grand Theft Auto
mode that, according to some promotional material, pits the player against “a powerful businessman” who wants to turn Vegas “into a family-friendly tourist trap.” The player, in turn, must fight, race, gamble, and party his or her “way to the top.” In today’s Las Vegas, the only thing one could hope to party his way to the top of is the unemployment line, and the game’s specter of a “family-friendly” city seemed suddenly, even cruelly, obtuse.

Upon check-in every DICE attendee received a cache of swag that included a resplendent laptop carrying case, an IGN.com water bottle (instructively labeled
HANG OVER RELIEF
), a handsome reading light–cum–bookmark, the latest issue of the industry trade magazine
Develop
(President Obama somehow made its cover, too), and a paperback copy of a self-help business book titled
Super Crunchers
. Shortly after receiving my gift bag, I ran into a young DICE staffer named Al, who responded to my joke about the Obama cover (“Yes Wii Can”) by reminding me of the Wii that currently occupied the White House rec room. “By 2020,” Al told me, “there is a very good chance that the president will be someone who played
Super Mario Bros
. on the NES.” I had to admit that this was pretty generationally stirring. The question, I said, was whether the 2020 president-elect would
still
be playing games. Maybe he would. The “spectacle” of games, Al told me, was on its way out. Increasingly important, he said, was “message.”

Many have wondered why a turn toward maturity has taken the video game so long. But has it? Visual mediums almost always begin in exuberant, often violent spectacle. A glance at some of the first, most popular film titles suggests how willing film’s original audiences were to delight in the containment of anarchy:
The Great Train Robbery, The Escaped Lunatic, Automobile Thieves
. Needless to say, a film made in 1905 was nothing like a film made twenty years later. Vulturously still cameras had given way to editing, and actors, who at the dawn of film were not considered proper actors at all, had developed an entirely new, medium-appropriate method of feigned existence. Above all, films made in the 1920s were responding to other films—their blanknesses and stillnessess and hesitations. While films became more
formally
interesting, video games became more
viscerally
interesting. They
gave you what they gave you before, only more of it, bigger and better and more prettily rendered. The generation of game designers currently at work is the first to have a comprehensive growth chart of the already accomplished. No longer content with putting better muscles on digital skeletons, game designers have a new imperative—to make gamers
feel
something beyond excitement.