Extra Lives (18 page)

In the
Prince of Persia
room, for instance, only a dozen or so people were at their desks, all of whom were working on the (already available) game’s new downloadable content, the release date of which was approaching.
Prince of Persia
, a brilliant game
that did not at all get its critical or commercial due, has the most hauntingly lithium ending of any video game since Team ICO’s
Shadow of the Colossus
(which
Prince of Persia
in many ways resembles). In the penultimate scene of
Prince of Persia
, your love interest, Elika, with whom you have spent the game flirting and bickering, perishes in her successful effort to imprison a great evil. You then have two choices: restore her to life and release the evil or keep the evil imprisoned and turn the game off. I restored her to life. After the resurrected Elika sits up, she asks, grievingly, “Why?” You do not respond. As you carry her away, the world collapses behind you and the game ends, savagely undercutting Kurt Vonnegut’s famous point that any story that concludes with lovers reunited is, even if a million invading Martians are headed toward Earth, a happy ending. (The
Prince of Persia
downloadable content being worked on during my Ubisoft visit would turn out to be a lengthy, somewhat pointless epilogue.)

We entered something called the Playtest Room—actually, a small, corridorlike space between two separate Playtest Rooms, on either side of which was a tinted one-way mirror. Here Ubisoft’s developers watched and listened to the gameplay reactions of people pulled off the street. The room was fully miked, and for a few minutes we listened to two young men and one young woman discuss their moment-by-moment reactions to Epic’s
Gears of War 2
. (Ubisoft occasionally canvasses outside opinion on rival games.) I asked if these people were aware that we could hear them. “It’s probably in the fine print,” Hocking said with a laugh. Next we walked by the Quality Testing Room—in which Ubisoft employees test games and game patches—and observed several dozen men and women playing various Ubisoft titles with dronelike industry. The final stop of the tour was a recently completed wing of classrooms. Here, Ubisoft employees between projects could listen to lectures on game-design theory and educate themselves
about new technologies. This was intended to prevent layoffs. In all the economic turmoil of the last year, I was told that Ubisoft Montreal had not let a single employee go and had no plans to.

On our way to the meeting room where our interview would take place, Hocking paused in a stairwell and pointed up at the numerous exposed pipes. “A lot of Sam’s moves came from here,” he said. “Ideas about how to climb and hide and ambush people.” “Sam” was secret agent Sam Fisher, lately of the National Security Agency and the hero of
Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell
, the first game Hocking worked on, which was released in 2002. Heavily influenced by the
Metal Gear Solid
series,
Splinter Cell
is a narratively intricate stealth game, the gameplay of which is founded upon ambush, shadow lurking, sneaking, and evasion. In the meeting room at last, I asked Hocking how he came to be involved with
Splinter Cell
.

Despite having grown up in Vancouver as a Commodore VIC-20 enthusiast, Hocking “kind of completely dropped out of the gaming world” from high school until well into his university years. In 1996, however, he abandoned his Mac for a PC and began to play “the hardcore PC games of the mid-to late 1990s”:
Thief, System Shock, Deus Ex, Duke Nukem
, and, finally,
Unreal Tournament
. The last had a multiplayer-map-editor function with which Hocking became immediately fascinated. “That was really complicated,” he told me. “I was building multiplayer maps and testing them with friends and figuring out how stuff works. I mean, there’s no manual. There’re no instructions on how to do this stuff. It’s really, really hard to use—as difficult as learning to be an architect, I’m sure.”

One day a friend of Hocking’s sent him an e-mail about a job opening at Ubisoft Montreal. Qualifications: knowledge of the Unreal Engine Hocking had spent the last year figuring out. “I think he sent it almost as a joke,” Hocking said of his friend. “I was
like, ‘What the hell?’ I literally dragged my résumé into an e-mail and sent it in.” Six weeks later he was living in Montreal and working on
Splinter Cell
. His good fortune had only begun. After a few months, the game’s designer left the company and Ubisoft asked Hocking if he would take over. Then the scriptwriter left. Again, Hocking was asked to take over because, in his words, “I was one of the only Anglophones on the team and had a master’s degree in creative writing.” (This formal dramatic training sets Hocking apart from many game designers. When I asked which writers Hocking admired, he admitted to having a yen for “weird stuff,” and named Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace—may he rest in peace—as examples.) With these sudden and unforeseen promotions, Hocking was the point man for what Ubisoft hoped would become a flagship title. These hopes were fulfilled:
Splinter Cell
was, in Hocking’s words, a “megahit.” Recognizing Hocking’s talents, Ubisoft soon asked him to serve as one of the Montreal studio’s creative directors, a job he has held ever since. Of these startling turns of event, Hocking remained circumspect: “How many thousands of guys got their first job in the game industry and worked on a game that got canceled, or was a piece of shit, or no one ever played? I landed on the right game at the right time.”

After Hocking completed the
Splinter Cell
sequel,
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
, he was asked to revitalize the Ubisoft first-person-shooter series
Far Cry
(though the developer of the original 2004 PC
Far Cry
title was the German company Crytek). The
Far Cry
series was notable for its visual beauty, paucity of load screens while moving around its South Pacific locales (even when traveling in-and outdoors, which was and remains unusual), the inspiration it siphoned from H. G. Wells’s
The Island of Doctor Moreau
, and not much else. The series had been marred by its umpteen, increasingly colonic iterations: the Crytek PC game
Far Cry
was
followed by the Ubisoft-developed Xbox remake,
Far Cry Instincts
, which was followed by an Xbox sequel,
Far Cry Instincts: Evolution
, which was followed by an Xbox 360 remake of the two titles bundled together, which was called
Far Cry Instincts: Predator
. Rather than stick the gaming audience with
Far Cry 5
, or
Far Cry Instincts 3: Predator 2
, Hocking pushed to call the game
Far Cry 2
, even though it had almost nothing in common with the original
Far Cry
. It was the first of many wise decisions.

Before
Far Cry 2
begins, you peruse what appear to be the case files of nine male mercenaries. The one you select will be the character you control for the game’s duration. These gentlemen include a Chinese from Xinjiang, a Sikh, a Kosovar Albanian, a Native American Oklahoman, a Haitian, and a Northern Irishman. All are former smugglers, bodyguards, paramilitary insurgents, or military contractors. This unsavory roll call does not initially sparkle with originality. Then it dawns on you that all of these men have a historical connection to some kind of colonial conflict, whether distant or contemporary. And how many video games have you played that know what a Sikh, much less Xinjiang, even is?

So…the Haitian? Now you find yourself, with a first-person view of yourself, sitting in the backseat of a Jeep. The purview of most FPSs allows you to see, at most, the parts of your hand that come into contact with your weapon, but while seated in this Jeep you are able to look down at your chest and legs and over at the seat next to you, upon which lies a map and what appears to be a passport. You are aware of your mission (to kill an arms dealer known as the Jackal), but not much else. You do not even know where you are going. All you know is that you are in a troubled, unnamed African country. Your young driver, meanwhile, is starting
the Jeep and apologizing for the delay. From him you learn that you are headed to a hotel in a nearby town called Pala.

You are soon chauffeured through countryside so topographically compelling and biologically aswarm with life that you may be forced to remind yourself:
This is a video game, not a safari
. What you see is an azure-skied afternoon—the sort of day in which the range of human visibility can conceivably compete with that of the divine. The dirt road you travel wends diligently toward the horizon. On the road, tire-squashed piles of animal dung. Along it, wire-fence guardrails anchored by old truck tires. Around it, crop-less khaki waves of the breeze-blown savanna. The zigzag trunks of acacia trees are like lightning strikes from thunderheads of foliage. In the air, flitting cruciform dragonflies. In the distance, anciently knobby rock hills ringed with tonsures of greenery. Above, a plane noisily banks and grows more quietly distant—the last such plane, your driver tells you, out of this country.

This sunlit world suffers a grim and abrupt eclipse. Some Africans are walking toward you, toward the airport, seeking escape. Your driver beeps at them but sadly promises you that they will be disappointed. On your right a river comes sparklingly into view. Later you come across a stretch of savanna that, along with several acacia trees, is angrily ablaze with the most realistic fire effect you have ever seen in a game. The driver’s radio is tuned to something called Liberation Radio, the deejay of which announces, “Speaking the truth for the truth seekers. Beware the evil APR scourge!” The driver flips the radio off: checkpoint ahead. “They’re not fans of the deejay,” he says. These are, apparently, gunmen employed by the UFLL, the APR’s rival militia. Many armed black men quickly surround the Jeep, but it is a white with an Afrikaans accent who steps forward to speak. He is curious about you, but your driver douses that burning fuse by
promising to bring the men cold beer on his way back. Once the Jeep is waved along, your driver showers the white man with unctuous gratitude: “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. See you soon, sir.” The moment the checkpoint is cleared, he mutters, “Foreigners.” Quickly he turns to you. “No offense, sir.” Moments later you see several African men standing before a row of tin-roofed shacks to which they have apparently just set fire. They stare at you ominously as you float by. The driver, waving away the smoke, says, “Don’t let this concern you. Just boys letting off steam. You remember how it is.”

I have traveled to a few places in which everyone was, to one degree or another, worried about being violently killed, and I have traveled to other places in which the threat of violence is always in circular, vulturine motion. I have also traveled in Africa. The driver’s affected naïveté, the cable-knit menace of the checkpoint, the helixical entwinement of seeming normality with imminent collapse: All of this rings very true to me. The details scattered throughout this sequence of
Far Cry 2
—the longest scripted sequence in the game—do not tell a story, or introduce any characters, or establish any ammo dumps of plot. Because the gamer is in control of the camera, there is no establishing shot and no slow pan. Nor are there any music cues. Video games are very good at using detail to induce awe, but
Far Cry 2
understands how smaller details cytoplasmically gather around a moody nucleus of place.

You do not see your driver again. You quickly fall ill with malaria and wake up in your hotel room to find the Jackal reading aloud your assassination orders. Rather than kill you, he tells you of “a book I read a long time ago,” which he proceeds to quote: “Life itself is will to power. Nothing else matters.” After plunging his machete into the wall above your head, the Jackal leaves you there. A gunfight swiftly erupts outside the hotel, which you must
now escape. Once this is done, you will spend many hours running errands for fatuous African revolutionaries and forging dangerous relationships with fellow mercs—the very men whose case files you initially perused and passed over for your Haitian. (Had you picked someone else, the Haitian would be among them.) These mercs—whom the game refers to as “buddies” and not, note, “friends”—will frequently request your aid with matters that
dirty work
will not begin to describe. All of them will eventually betray you and you will betray them. Others will hunt you. You will hide and run. You will kill and do other unspeakable things. And you will do your best to ruin, burn, and otherwise destroy one of the most beautiful gameworlds ever created.

Far Cry 2
is not a game about story or character. It is not a game about choice, since almost all the choices it gives you are selfish or evil ones. It is, instead, a game about chaos—which you enable, abet, and are at constant risk of being consumed by. At one point in
Far Cry 2
, I was running along the savanna when I was spotted by two militiamen. I turned and shot, and, I thought, killed them both. When I waded into the waist-deep grass to pick up their ammo, it transpired that one of the men was still alive. He proceeded to plug me with his sidearm. Frantic, and low on health, I looked around, trying to find the groaning, dying man, but the grass was too dense. I sprinted away, only to be hit by a few more of his potshots. When I had put enough distance between us, I lobbed a Molotov cocktail into the general area where the supine, dying man lay. Within seconds I could hear him screaming amid the twiggy crackle of the grass catching fire. Sitting before my television, I felt a kind of horridly unreciprocated intimacy with the man I had just burned to death. Virtually alone among shooters,
Far Cry 2
does not keep track of how many people you have killed. The game may reward your murderous actions but you never feel as though it approves of them, and it reminds you again
and again that you are no better than the people you kill. In fact, you may be much worse.

Africa has not been visited by many video games. Those that have—such as the old stand-up
Jungle Hunt
—have fallen somewhat short of honoring it. Parts of the
Halo
series take place on Zanzibar, but this is a far-future, sci-fi Africa—not really Africa at all.
Resident Evil 5
uses its African setting as a master class in cultural sensitivity, such as when its muscle-sculpture white hero guns down (literally!) spear-chucking tribesmen.
Far Cry 2
escaped the accusations of racism that justifiably dogged
Resident Evil 5
, and I asked Hocking about the potentially controversial—not to mention commercially and aesthetically unusual—decision to set his game in the middle of a contemporary African civil war.