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Fifteen Years of Far Cry 2

Five years ago, for Far Cry 2's tenth anniversary, I wrote a whole series of blog posts reflecting on some of the great criticism the game had generated. Today marks the game's fifteenth anniversary, but rather than revisit that exercise, which was a lot of work, I'll leave it to the experts.

Lewis Gordon has written a great retrospective over at The Ringer. He dives into some of the discourse that has surrounded the game, and looks at some of the impact it's had. He also managed to somehow trick some very cool and smart people into saying some nice things about the game, which is very flattering.

Thanks to Lewis, and thanks again to everyone who has brought insight and criticism to the game. It still means a lot.

Dev Game Club Podcast Interview

A few nights ago I had the pleasure of chatting with Tim and Brett at Dev Game Club after they had just spent the past five episodes of their podcast playing and talking about Far Cry 2. The series starts here, and the interview is the last one.

I worked briefly alongside Tim at LucasArts, and have always had a ton of respect for both his and Brett's work, so it was a real pleasure to get to talk to them about mine. It's also interesting to get fresh takes on the game so long after it shipped, and to revisit with a more modern eye and in the context of current sensibilities.

Anyway, if you're looking for good, frank discussion about specific, important games, the podcast is great. They've provided many deep dives into some of my favorite games of all time, including X-Com, Civ III, System Shock 2, Bioshock, GTA III, Thief, Deus Ex, DOOM, and many more - including interviews with their creators in some cases, which is a special treat. If, like me, you're looking for thoughtful discussion about engaging media to listen to while you're making dinner or walking to work or whatever, I can't recommend this podcast highly enough.

Now that I type out that list (which is only a subset of their content) I realize how profoundly humbling it is to have Far Cry 2 added to that list. So thanks Tim and Brett!

The Tin Man of Far Cry 2: Part 7

To conclude this series on my favorite pieces about Far Cry 2, I have chosen a handful of pieces that, for one reason or another, I felt did not ‘fit’ in the Top 10. I chose to keep there pieces separate from the Top 10 for a few different reasons.

For example, a couple of the pieces here are only available in print or for purchase as e-book, and it seemed pointless to blog about them without being able to link directly. I’ve included those here. Included also are a few pieces that were too contemporary to the game - something I largely tried to avoid in the Top 10. Also included is a YouTube clip that is more entertainment than analysis, and a piece of the Far Cry 2 discourse that was so unique that it simply didn’t belong with the rest.

Far Cry 2 and the Dirty Mirror - an essay in Shooter
Disclaimer: I was the author of the forward to this collection of essays edited by Reid McCarter and Patrick Lindsey.
While overall Lindsey’s analysis of Far Cry 2 was fairly standard, and didn’t stray too far from the critical consensus, it was of note that he leaned into the then-emerging discussion of the self-aware shooter. Lindsey discusses Far Cry 2 as an example of a game that uses it mechanics and dynamics, rather than its authored story or cinematics to invite the player to question their actions and their application of violence to achieve their goals. While I think Lindsey’s piece is worth reading on its own, I especially wanted to include it in this list because many of the other essays in the book are also worth reading. If you’re reading these blog posts, and you’re interested in the critical discussion of games in general, Shooter is worth reading.

Extra Lives by Tom Bissell (Chapter 8)
Like Shooter, Bissell’s book Extra Lives is not exclusively about Far Cry 2. Bissell discusses numerous games in the book, and each chapter is devoted largely to a different game. Bissell’s analysis is more personal and intimate that most other pieces written about the game, and the book as a whole reads almost as a travelogue of Bissell’s journey through the medium and his developing understanding of how games achieve their creative aims and (as the subtitle suggests) ‘why video games matter’. Bissell is an accomplished author coming from outside the industry and outside the critical circles of the speciality press, so his take is refreshing (though since the book, Bissell has gone on to write for over a dozen different games). Whether you want to read more about Far Cry 2 or not, I highly recommend Extra Lives.

Three pieces written contemporaneously with the game
One of my criteria in selecting pieces of the Top 10 was to steer clear of pieces written within the six months or so around when the game released. I made this decision for several reasons, but principally, I was more interested in focusing on criticism and analysis more than reviews. This was a tough razor to apply, and ultimately I did end up including a few pieces that were written close to the game’s release. Here are three more that I came across and among the last to get shuffled out of the Top 10.

Seeing Africa Down the Barrel of a Gun by Iroquois Pliskin
Heart of Dimness: Half-baked Nihilism in Far Cry 2 by Anthony Burch
Far Cry 2: The Heart of Darkness Game by L.B. Jeffries

Nick tries to Ambush Far Cry 2 while Chris Remo plays music
The Idle Thumbs gang were big supporters of the game, and I’ve always enjoyed reading their stuff, listening to their podcasts, and talking to them about the game. This two minutes of footage is pure Far Cry 2 gold; one tiny mistake and everything goes to shit. Also, while I absolutely love the games soundtrack by composer Marc Canham, I can only dream of one day playing the game with Chris Remo riding shotgun and providing a real time score.

Permadeath - by Ben Abraham
Finally, it should come as no surprise that Abraham’s permadeath experiment is on this list. Not only was Ben part of the early critical discussion surrounding the game, but his record of his permadeath playthrough inspired many others to play the game the same way. In hindsight, the PDF of his experience is a complete oddity, and utterly unique in video game criticism; it’s 400 pages of screenshots and descriptions of Abraham’s playthrough, culminating in his death (and then his choice to carry on anyway). This is Twitch before Twitch, and had Abraham undertaken this experiment 3 years later, it might have been seen by millions. I read through it again recently and was struck also by the introduction I had written for it at Abraham’s request. It’s interesting for me to re-read those words in consideration of my own mental state when I wrote them. Six months later, I would leave Ubisoft to walk ‘back into the terrible unknown’. Life imitates art, I guess.

Conclusion
So that concludes my celebration of some of the best writing about Far Cry 2. Now that I've done 10 year posts for Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, and for Far Cry 2, I am out of games to write 10 year posts about. I badly wish I could be three years away from putting up a ten year retrospective on some game I made at LucasArts or Valve or Amazon - but the waves just didn't break that way.

That said, I'm working as hard as I can to get you all something you can write about for the next ten years. Thanks so much for all of your support and passion and engagement. Without all of you playing, talking and writing about this game, I very likely would not be here today working on the next one.

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The Tin Man of Far Cry 2: Part 6

I don’t think anyone could have predicted this would be my number one. For all of the number ones you were expecting, you’ll have to check Part 7 once it goes up in a couple of days. Part 7 won’t be so much a list of honorable mentions, as it will be a list of alternate #1s that didn’t seem to fit the rest of the list.

#1 - a post by Akoomsh
‘Never read the comments’, says the popular wisdom. And to be honest, I’m not even sure how I originally came across this obscure post by a random player on the Steam forums. But I saved it to my Instapaper account, and over the past few years since it appeared in 2013, I’ve gone back and re-read it several times.

I think this piece is important for a number of reasons. First, it’s not criticism, so much as opinion writing; it’s not directed at the creators and it doesn’t exist within the established circles of critical discussion. It’s not a reply to someone else’s blog post, article or retrospective. It’s not an attempt to generate clickthroughs or page views. It lives on its own, and from a reach perspective, it may just as well have been written in a diary and tucked under a pillow.

Furthermore, one gets the impression (or at least I make the assumption) from reading it, that the author is not even particularly familiar with the critical discourse surrounding the game. He claims to have read comments - likely forum posts themselves - about the game, but does not seem to be regurgitating other people’s messages from the usual sources. He seems - at least to me - to have arrived at his assessment of the game on his own. The fact that he’s not really saying anything new is not important at all - the fact that he is arriving at his conclusions and his assessment of the game autonomously is what matters to me. His does not appear to be an opinion constructed from exposure to the opinions of others. It feels to me, at least, to be genuine.

It helps, of course, that he is celebrating the experience we intended. I could easily point to a thousand forum posts that are equally detached from the critical discussion that lambast the game for its many unconventional designs. I’m biased in pulling the one forum post in a million from the player who ‘gets it’. I hope you’ll indulge me.

Because in many ways, that’s the entire point of this exercise. For years before Far Cry 2 I frequently asserted that I don’t make games for reviews, or for money, or for any of the superficial reasons that I am a professional game developer. I asserted that the reason I make games is to contribute to the discussion about what games are and what they can be. The thing I have often claimed to value above all is the sincere feedback of other developers, and the opinions and impressions of those players who choose to deeply engage. I have often said that if the games I worked on could change the perspective of one person, it would all be worth it.

Going ten years without having shipped a game has made it enormously difficult to keep believing that. In the first couple of years after Far Cry 2 is was still an easy position to hold. After 5 years and a couple of failed attempts at a couple of different jobs, it became harder. After Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory reached its ten year anniversary, I was pretty full of self-doubt. Maybe just making games for a paycheque should be enough. Maybe I was holding a position that easy to hold for a guy who’d been lucky enough to work on a few critically acclaimed games in a row. Maybe it was only privilege and fluke that allowed me to claim some higher purpose in my work. Maybe I should just shut the fuck up and do some work - put my mouth where the money was instead of vice versa….

But this is the one; Akoomsh is the one player in a million who gets it. And he gets it not because he read all the other articles by the people who are like him, the people with whom he is predisposed to agree. He gets it on his own. By his own admission, he struggled with the game, and he found his own way to what the game is about. Far Cry 2 changed his perception of what games are and what they can be, and what they can say, and how they can say it. Akoomsh, and some invisible minority of people like him, are the reason I make games, and this forum post is worth more to me than a 10/10 on a popular website, or a big bonus earned for hitting a sales target. It’s proof that the things I believe aren’t futile and that I’m not just flailing at windmills.

It’s proof that games are worth fighting for - even if fighting means a decade of losing. And I owe it to all the Akoomshes out there to keep fighting.

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The Tin Man of Far Cry 2: Part 5

The Number Two in my Top 10 definitely breaks my ‘rule’ about not using pieces that were written in the first six months or so if the game’s release. I chose this one, however, because I feel it doesn’t come off as a review so much and it has a timeless quality about.

#2 - Africa Wins Again: Far Cry 2’s Literary Approach to Narrative
I’ve chosen Tom Armitage’s piece because I think it is one of the earliest pieces that comprehensively addresses the major design and narrative elements of the game and structures them around a unified argument. The argument itself; that Far Cry 2’s structure is somehow more literary than that of other games, is not one I necessarily agree with, but it does provide a way for him to structure his criticism.

In many ways, Armitage’s piece presents the core arguments that Keever’s piece in the Number 9 spot counters. A lot of time passed between Armitage’s piece in 2008 and Keever’s in 2017, and many of Keever’s criticisms are interesting and fair - but Keever also makes those criticisms after having played Spec Ops: The Line, and Kane and Lynch 2; games that did not exist when Armitage was writing. Similarly, Keever’s understanding of Ludonarrative Dissonance is much more sophisticated than Armitage’s (or mine) was in 2008, and stands on the shoulders of excellent analysis such as that of Polansky from 2015. If only we knew in 2005 what we know today, Far Cry 2 would have been a much better game.

Overall, I think Armitage’s piece is important, and it earns its place at #2, because I think it is the piece that best encapsulates the favorable side of the commentary around the game when it shipped. I think the more critical commentary around the game in that time frame was far less sophisticated, and it took many years before the criticism of what the game was not succeeding at was finally properly articulated.

I think one of the things that is unique about Far Cry 2 is that it arrived at a time when game criticism was becoming suddenly more sophisticated. As a game that (arguably) merited more sophisticated discussion, its very existence attracted a kind of critic, and a kind of writing that was probably predisposed to be favourable. At least that’s how I interpret the imbalance of critical writing about Far Cry 2, circa 2008/9 with the benefit of hindsight.

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The Tin Man of Far Cry 2: Part 4

These next two pieces have a lot in common. Both are fairly serious criticisms of the ludic and narrative handling of some elements of the game. These pieces call out the game’s allusions to political Realism, the problem of the absence of civilians, and its handling of imperialist and colonialist tropes. These criticisms are tough, given how hard we tried to challenge problematic ideas. But it’s not the purpose of these posts to defend the game, so I’m promoting these pieces in the spirit of embracing well-reasoned criticism - especially criticism that challenges.

#4 - The Politics of Far Cry 2
Jorge Albor’s two part discussion of Far Cry 2’s depiction of politics is framed as ‘not a criticism’. I think this was a common tactic in early games criticism (between about 2006 and 2009). I similarly committed the sin of disclaiming my criticism when I first wrote about Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock. I was wrong when I suggested that piece was not criticism, and I think Albor is wrong here. This piece is absolutely criticism - and ten years later, that’s something I think we can celebrate, and not sweep under the rug.

Among other things, Albor’s piece criticizes the absence of civilians as a missed opportunity to make the player’s decisions more impactful and consequential. This is a common and fair criticism of the game, and I am not sure whether the game would have been better or worse with a robust simulation of civilian presence. I think the argument can be made that the inclusion of civilians might not only create a bunch of thematic noise were the player to needlessly engage in murder, but might also undermine the central framing of the background conflict being depicted as pointless and futile. Other people (including one in an upcoming piece) have discussed this idea at length, so I won’t here, but regardless, Albor’s article remains one of the best and broadest criticisms of the game. Definitely worth a read.

#3 - Unintended Consequences: Malaria and Orientalist Discourse in Far Cry 2(pdf)
The ongoing game writing anthology Well Played, published out of Carnegie Mellon University's ETC Press, consistently brings out some of the very best writing about games, and I was thrilled to discover a piece in Volume 5, Number 1 (page 85), related to Far Cry 2. (Disclaimer: my own piece on Ludonarrative Dissonance was reprinted in the first book in the series).

This excellent piece by Marcus Hensel is much narrower in focus than Albor’s. It examines the game’s depiction of malaria, and its relationship to centuries of imperialist and colonialist discourse related to Africa. This piece was a gut-punch when I read it back in 2016. I think some of the details of his analysis (such as his suggestion that the visual filters used during malaria attacks explicitly reference miasma) are a bit overreaching, but it’s hard not to accept the core of his argument; that elements of the game evoke the Africa of Stanley or Burton.

A key goal for us was to make a game with a deeper physical connection between the land, the objects in the world, and especially the avatar, in order to forge a psychosomatic bond between the player and the avatar that we could then pay off in climactic moments with the buddies. In hindsight, I wish we could have done better at delivering on the aesthetic ambitions of the game without perpetuating some of the very ideas we were trying to challenge. But escaping your cultural biases is difficult - even when you try very hard to examine them.

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The Tin Man of far Cry 2: Part 3

Moving into the middle the pack, the two pieces that occupy fifth and sixth on my list are very different from one another. One, a thoughtful analysis of the game, and the other a meta-analysis of the early reception of the game.

#6 - Opinion: On Far Cry 2's 'Slow Burn’
Chris Remo’s seminal examination of how players seemed to be experiencing the appeared within days of the game’s release. I tried to stay away from pieces that were written in the first months after the launch window, but the way this piece framed people’s thinking about the game can’t be ignored. Pieces about the game written years after the fact (for example, the Alec Meer piece at #7) makes it clear that either Remo’s analysis was right - or that his framing changed the way critics play. Hmmm.

#5 - Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Warfare* But Were Afraid to Ask Far Cry 2
Over the past decade there have probably been thirty pieces that follow a similar structure to this one; walking through the general flow of the game progression and explaining how the various elements of the game and the narrative work together to reinforce the central themes and aesthetics. Leigh Harrison’s piece landed more than six years after the game’s release, and I chose to include it because of all of those pieces over the years, this one is, I think, the most articulate, and most well-written.

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The Tin Man of Far Cry 2: Part 2

The bottom four of my Top 10 represent a pretty diverse set of posts, taken from across a fairly long period of time - including one of the oldest, as well as one of the most recent.

#10 - an essay about the Paradox of Tragedy in Far Cry 2
(Note: if the link doesn't work, paste this into your browser: https://ceasarbautista.com/essays/far_cry.html )
There are several academic, or borderline academic pieces in this list, and this piece by Caesar Bautista, is the first of them. I'm not sure when this piece was written - I think it might have been 2012. The idea that we can 'feel good' about playing a game wherein we do so much terrible stuff is nicely framed in the context of the Paradox of Tragedy, which I had not heard of prior to this article.

#9 - Playlist: Far Cry 2’s Abuses of Body and Story
This piece by Justin Keever from the middle of last year is the most recent piece on my Top 10. I disagree with a lot of Keever's opinions in the piece, which is probably the main reason I chose to include it. There have been many criticisms of Far Cry 2, (and also many criticisms of the idea of ludonarrative dissonance), and for the most part I find the criticism more engaging than the praise.

#8 - War Crimes
This piece by Duncan Fife doesn't actually escape the six month window that surrounded the release of the game, but I felt it worth including because it was one of the first to raise the question of the ethical issues that arise from the absence of civilians in the game world.

#7 - Another Life, Another Time: Far Cry 2 Revisited
Bearing the subtitle "A letter to a younger, angrier me", I always enjoyed the format of this piece. Alec Meer, over at RPS, has a fresh take on a theme that has carried through the Far Cry 2 criticism over the years; that you need to be in a certain mindset in order for the game to 'click' for you - a mindset he wasn't in when he'd played the game 5 years previously, but perhaps was when he wrote the piece.

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The Tin Man of Far Cry 2: Part 1

A few years ago, on the tenth anniversary of the release of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, I posted some thoughts about the development of that game, and the impact it had on my life. Specifically I talked a bit about how the intense stress and long hours on that project affected me. In a follow-up post I clarified some of my own thinking about the complexities of crunch and game development. These challenges are still with us today.

It’s unfortunate that we haven’t figured those problems out yet, but as I said back then - it’s hard and it’s complicated. Oversimplifications of the conversation don’t actually help the people who are living the problem - they are mostly just ideology. What we need to address the problem is discourse, reason and focused effort, not opinions and outrage.

Anyway - I’m not writing today to rehash that debate. I’m writing because another tin anniversary has passed; this, the tenth anniversary of the release of Far Cry 2.

This anniversary has been even harder on me than the last. Far Cry 2 is the last game I shipped; back on October 21, 2008. If you’re a professional game developer reading this, there is a pretty good chance that you have shipped more games than I have in my entire career (3), AND that you have not even been a game developer for the length of time I have gone without shipping.

It probably takes some special kind of self-loathing to frame it in those terms, but this is the kind of twisted shit you can come up with to torture yourself when you’ve got ten years to really make a meal of it. A couple years ago there was a big conversation among game developers about imposter syndrome. I remember thinking at the time “ha ha, fuck all of you fakers! In two years I’ll be writing about how it’s been a decade since I shipped a game! I’m the Original Impostah!”

Well, here we are.

But fortunately, I’m not lost in some dark forest of self-loathing with seized-up joints, unable to move. I wish I could talk about what I’m working on these days, but that will have to wait a while longer. I’m extremely thankful and fortunate to be where I am right now, and I wanted to celebrate this tenth anniversary by sharing some of the things that have kept my heart beating, and have helped me maintain my motivation and focus for a decade, despite so many setbacks and missteps.

For ten years, Far Cry 2 has continued to generate thoughtful responses, meaningful criticism, and increasingly sophisticated analysis. The reviews of the game mostly stopped coming after the first six months. But the critical discourse and the analysis of the game continued, and continues still. In fact, some of the best articles and analyses of the game have been written in the past 18 months. Some people say the game is a ‘cult classic’, some say it was a ‘sleeper hit’, others call it a ‘reference game’. That’s all fine, but what matters to me, and what has kept me going over the years, is the simple fact that ten years later, people are still inspired to play it, to revisit it, and most importantly, to write about it.

So for the tenth anniversary of Far Cry 2, I wanted to share some of the best and most thoughtful criticism of the game that I’ve come across. I went back through old emails, searched the internet, and spent hours organizing my Instapaper account in order to narrow it down to what I feel are the ten best pieces written about Far Cry 2.

In terms of how I filtered them; for the most part I avoided reviews, and tried not to select pieces from the six months that immediately followed the launch of the game (I failed, but I tried). I also tried to avoid pieces that were explicitly comparing Far Cry 2 to other games in the series - there are a lot of those. Part of the reason Far Cry 2 continues to be written about today is, of course, because it stands as a reference for the games that have followed it. But looking back at comparisons - even favorable ones - doesn’t elevate the discourse much, and I wanted to focus on writing about Far Cry 2 outside of the context of other games in the series.

So, over the next few posts, I’ve gathered together my Top 10 articles about Far Cry 2. I could have easily made this a Top 20, and some very great writing didn’t make the cut. That said, within many of the pieces I’ve chosen to share, you’ll find links to other pieces that would have made the Top 20, so they are there if you look for them.

So, thank-you to everyone who has played the game and shared their perspectives and opinions on it over the years. You’ve made a big difference in my life, and without your passion, insight, criticism, and perspective, it’s not clear that I would be where I am today. I owe you all an enormous debt of gratitude, and I look forward to repaying it.

Here we go:
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SHOOTER in StoryBundle

A few months ago I was honored to be invited by Reid McCarter (@reidmccarter) and Patrick Lindsey (@HanFreakinSolo) to contribute the foreward to an anthology they were editing called Shooter. It's a collection of essays about first-person shooters and their place and relevance within the larger context of media and culture. The fifteen chapters are contributed by a talented and diverse collection of some of the smartest critics currently writing about games as culture. I was fortunately enough to get to read a version of the book before it was released, and I found it really engaging and thoughtful.

Cameron Kunzelman had this to say in his review of the book for Paste:

Shooter stands out from the crowd of books about games in its quality, its general accessibility, and its steadfast commitment to critique. It is a serious book that takes serious looks at some genres we don’t always take seriously, and it does a fine job at helping reconfigure some gamer memory that we take as fact. Anyone interested in seeing what critique of games should look like has a great model in the essays in Shooter.

Anyway, the book is currently featured in the StoryBundle, (until the end of this month) which means you can get it along with three other amazing books by even more amazing game critics, and four bonus books from even more amazing writers - all for a very good price. If you want to get up to speed on the state of the art in game critical writing, you should check it out.

To tease you, I agreed with Reid and Patrick to republish my foreward here. Hopefully this will pique your interest and inspire you to grab the bundle. Here it is:

 

On Gunplay

Of all the major professional team sports; football, soccer, basketball, baseball and hockey, I believe pretty strongly that hockey is the best of them. While this is a question of personal taste and preference, hockey, with its speed, its constant back and forth, its ever-changing match-ups, and its balance of positional team play and individual reflex skill, is the most dynamic of the professional sports. The way all the elements come together - particularly at the elite level of play - makes for an exceptionally beautiful game.

While I could discuss at length why I think hockey is better than any of the other major professional sports, that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about shooters - videogames wherein the main player activity involves shooting other (virtual or simulated) players. A well-executed competitive shooter, such as Counter-Strike, is also an exceptionally beautiful game, and here is the thing: while I believe that hockey is objectively better than football or basketball, I don’t think I can say that hockey is better than Counter-Strike. With its speed, its constant back and forth, its ever-changing match-ups, and its balance of positional team play and individual reflex skill, Counter-Strike is as dynamic as the most popular competitive games in the world. Counter-Strike is an exceptionally beautiful game. Like all great competitive games, it is engaging to watch, enriching to play, and highly demanding of the serious player who can endlessly plumb its depths and range over its enormous strategic terrain in a quest for self-betterment that will never, ever end.

Like hockey, Counter-Strike, and competitive shooters in general, challenge a number of player skills; reflexes, strategic decision-making, match-up evaluation, positional knowledge and awareness, and local, tactical decision-making. Because of the dynamic nature of these games, the skills effectively have no ceiling, so the challenge is not to meet some arbitrary, fixed skill bar, but rather to out-perform the opponent. Both Counter-Strike and hockey deliver what I call synthetic meaning: meaning that arises through a ludic dialectic taking place between players constantly proposing and counter-proposing theories of optimal play. Counter-Strike and hockey are ongoing arguments. They are arguments about what it means to be human in the context of the relevant skills.

But if competitive shooters see their meaning synthesized at runtime through a dialectic between players, what does that say about the single-player shooter? Single-player shooters largely challenge the same core player skills as multiplayer shooters; reflexes, strategic decision-making, match-up evaluation, positional knowledge and awareness, and local, tactical decision-making, but because there is no opponent, the challenges are at least broadly (and in some cases quite strictly) authored. The game designers have decided where to fix the skill bar for any given corridor or arena - if the player meets the bar, she continues, if not, she tries again. In this sense the single-player shooter moves away from being a dialogue, and toward being a lecture. More important than that; because the opponent is not another human, but is instead the game itself, the single-player game is not a lecture about what it means to be human, but is instead a lecture about the nature of the game. A single-player game is, in some sense, a prescribed curriculum of drills, gated with tests.

There are a few interesting repercussions that arise from using this framework for thinking about meaning, (and this is only one possible framework for thinking about games in general or shooters specifically - you will encounter others in this book). First, this framework seems to imply that all competitive shooters are necessarily about the same thing; they are about a specific perspective on human existence. It implies that Counter-Strike and Quake are ultimately the same game; they are arguments about the same topic, perhaps being conducted in different languages, but essentially the same conversation. That may sound like a crippling critique of the competitive shooter, but the second repercussion of using this framework implies something equally critical of the single-player shooter: that the authoring of an arbitrary skill bar by a designer makes the skill component of the game only as important to its meaning as any other authored element. In other words, in single-player shooters, the gameplay is only of the same magnitude of importance as the story - the single-player shooter’s ability to express the specific undermines to some extent its capacity to address the universal.

Simply stated, this framework suggests that all competitive shooters are about one universally important and fundamental thing, while each single-player shooter is about something different. If we want to validate that, we can extrapolate the framework to other games and across different media to see whether it is predictive of things we generally hold to be true. For example, we can look at professional boxing and professional MMA fighting - two different but similar competitive combat sports - and determine that, yes, they are broadly ‘about’ the same thing (perhaps ‘the comparative importance of the cerebral cortex and the amygdala’). At the same time, we can look at two different films about boxing - such as Million Dollar Baby and Raging Bull, and see that they express wildly different ideas. The fighting in these films becomes a motive force for the development of the characters and the plot. As in a typical single-player shooter, the range of ‘player skill’ (in this case the boxing capability of the characters) has been authored in service of the story.

Curiously, the documentary When We Were Kings is an authored film that directly examines ‘what boxing is about’ by presenting the idea that the Rumble in the Jungle was essentially an argument between Muhammad Ali’s theory that the cerebral cortex was more important and George Foreman’s theory that it was still the amygdala. Million Dollar Baby and Raging Bull are both excellent films that talk in their own specific ways about human strength and human frailty. When We Were Kings interprets the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire as being a fundamental statement about the triumph of seven million years of human evolution that literally gave rise to everything we know (thankfully Ali won). Million Dollar Baby and Raging Bull are beautiful because I empathize with the things they are about. Boxing is beautiful because I am what it is about.

Back to shooters.

I am not here to throw the single-player shooter under the bus. The best game I ever worked on was a single-player shooter, and while I happily concede that it was not as beautiful a game as Counter-Strike, that does not mean that some theoretical single-player shooter could not be. On the contrary - I think the single-player game is uniquely positioned to leverage the competitive game’s power to address the universal within the context framed by its more authored and specific meanings. The first step toward achieving this, of course, lies in having something to say.

One of the biggest challenges developers of single-player shooters must confront if they hope to achieve this is to escape the potential well of the inherent universal meanings of the competitive shooter. The conventions of the competitive shooter are strong and well-defined, and deviation from them is risky. It’s safer for developers to simply adopt the trappings of the competitive shooter form, accepting along with them the sense of universality that they confer. But it is only a sense of universality; it is only a façade. Without the ludic dialectic of player-versus-player, the argument risks becoming self-indulgent, and the game only pretends to the universality of the themes. For the most part, it seems that the single-player shooters that claim to speak to universal human truths are more often affecting importance than they are actually being important.

This is because, when viewed through this particular interpretive lens, meaning in the single-player shooter does not come from the same places as meaning in the competitive shooter. In both sorts of games, we could say that the meaning comes from the ‘gunplay’ - but in the case of the competitive shooter it comes from the ‘play’, and in the case of the single-player shooter, it comes from the ‘gun’. Whether we want it to or not, meaning inherits significantly from the fiction of the gun itself. In a competitive shooter, meaning comes from the ludic dialectic and the fiction of the gun is much less significant. In a single-player shooter the fictional wrapping of the gun is of central importance. For there to be any hope of saying something important, developers must acknowledge this - anything else is whitewashing.

Fortunately, guns are inherently important. It is not hard - at least conceptually - to say important things with respect to guns. In fact, guns by their very nature amplify the importance of the things they are implicated in. This is probably why they are so commonly and prominently featured in stories and in games. To some, the gun is a heroic symbol of rugged individualism. To others it represents a detached, banal, industrialized form of domination and control. For some the gun is an equalizer; representing the promise of liberty, for others it is a symbol of fear, oppression and violence.

But while guns offer the developers of single-player shooters easy access to an accessible set of universal themes, those themes are also highly politicized. Nearly anything that anyone can meaningfully say about the role of guns and gun violence in human society is heavily entangled in ideological and highly divisive political discourse. You can’t talk about guns or shooting in any meaningful way without pissing someone off.

For the ‘Capital I’ Game Industry of the early 21st Century, this presents a real problem. Shooters demand extreme levels of visual fidelity, high agency simulations, richly interactive environments, and sophisticated AI, all running at high frame rates. They are the most expensive sort of game you can invest in, and presenting a shooter with a divisive theme is a really good way to lose all your money. The problem that needs to be solved in order to elevate the single-player shooter is a problem that gets twice as hard to solve every eighteen months.

At the same time, however, the climate and culture of games is also evolving rapidly. We live in a time when game development is easier than ever. It’s true that the quality bar for a AAA Industry produced shooter is excessively high and demands a development team numbering in the hundreds and a budget in the range of tens of millions of dollars. But this is not the only way games can be made. A small team using free tools and developing for open platforms can set themselves apart more easily than ever before, simply by having something to say.

In parallel to the evolution of the technology, the last decade has seen an explosion of increasingly sophisticated and informed dialogue and criticism relating to shooters specifically and to video games in general. This book is part of a still young, but increasingly strong tradition of discourse that both keeps developers honest, and at the same time encourages and empowers those who have something to say. As you read the essays in this book, I encourage you to consider not only the subject matter of the writing itself, but also how it fits into and supports a tradition that improves not only one genre of videogame, but games and human culture as a whole. As someone who has benefitted, both materially and emotionally from the rising tide of game criticism over the past decade, I can assure you that the words on these pages are as important to future of the medium as are the games themselves.