Authors: Tom Bissell
Extra Lives (23 page)
Cocaine has its reputation as aggression unleaded largely because many who are attracted to it are themselves aggressive personalities, the reasons for which are as cultural as they are financial. What cocaine does is italicize personality traits, not script new ones. In my case, cocaine did not heighten my aggression in the least. What it did, at least at first, was exaggerate my natural curiosity and need for emotional affection. While on cocaine, I became as harmlessly ravenous as Cookie Monster.
This stage, lamentably and predictably, did not last long. Doing cocaine for more than a couple of days is a little like falling in love with someone who is attractive, friendly, adoring, devious, manipulative, evil, and congenitally incapable of loving you in return. But this person feels so unnaturally good, and makes you feel so unnaturally good about yourself, that you accept this as a fair bargain. When the deal you make with cocaine sours—and it will—your mind is as empty as a pasture, your basal ganglia shredded. You are now the moon to cocaine’s sun: With it, you are bright indeed; without it, you are nothing more than a cratered rock stupidly afloat in space. You want to glow again. You do more cocaine. You do not glow—but you do feel somewhat normal. Soon you are doing cocaine not to feel radiant but to feel like yourself. Cocaine is no longer a sun but a hangman; this is how his noose tightens. And around my neck the rope tightened more quickly than I could have imagined.
A large portion of my last two months in Las Vegas was spent doing cocaine and playing video games—usually
Grand Theft Auto IV
. When I left Vegas, I thought I was leaving behind not only
video games but cocaine. During the last walk I took through the city, in May 2008, I imagined the day’s heat as the whoosh of a bullet that, through some oversight of fate, I had managed to dodge. (I was on cocaine at the time.) Even though one of the first things I did when I arrived in Tallinn was buy yet another Xbox 360, I had every intention to obey one of my few prime directives: rigorous adherence to all foreign drug laws. I had been in Tallinn for five months when, in a club, I found myself chatting with someone who was obviously lit. When I gently indicated my awareness of this person’s altered state, the result was a magnanimous offer to share. Within no time at all I was back in my apartment, high on cocaine, and firing up my Xbox 360. By the week’s end, I had a new friend, a new telephone number, and a reignited habit. I played through
Grand Theft Auto IV
again, and again after that. The game was faster and more beautiful while I was on cocaine, and breaking laws seemed even more seductive. Niko and I were outlaws, alone as all outlaws are alone, but deludedly content with our freedom and our power. Soon I was sleeping in my clothes. Soon my hair was stiff and fragrantly unclean. Soon I was doing lines before my Estonian class, staying up for days, curating prodigious nosebleeds, and spontaneously vomiting from exhaustion. Soon my pillowcases bore rusty coins of nasal drippage. Soon the only thing I could smell was something like the inside of an empty bottle of prescription medicine. Soon my biweekly phone call to my cocaine dealer was a weekly phone call. Soon I was walking into the night, handing hundreds of dollars in cash to a Russian man whose name I did not even know, waiting in alleys for him to come back—which he always did, though I never fully expected him to—and retreating home, to my Xbox, to
GTA IV
, to the electrifying solitude of my mind at play in an anarchic digital world. Soon I began to wonder why the only thing I seemed to like to do while on cocaine was play video games. And soon I realized what
video games have in common with cocaine: Video games, you see, have no edge. You have to appreciate them.
They
do not come to
you
.
The world of
GTA IV
is not as open as it initially seems. The number of buildings you can enter is negligible; those few you can rarely provide anything to do other than walk in, look around, and maybe steal the cash from the register.
GTA IV
’s mini-games—darts, bowling, billiards, strip-club lap dances—are uninteresting, and one sorely misses the taxi and ambulance driver mini-games of
Vice City
and
San Andreas
(which if nothing else provided outlets for socially beneficial behavior). Liberty City’s comedy club has in rotation several rather good five-minute stand-up bits by Katt Williams and Ricky Gervais, and its television and radio stations are always entertaining, but these are not very gamelike activities. Rather, they are examples of traditional entertainment that happen to be embedded in a video game, though they are no less commendable for that. Once you have played
GTA IV
long enough, it occurs to you that, as real as Liberty City seems, you have no hope of even figuratively living within it. Accident or no, this is thematically coherent: Niko is a newcomer to and outsider in Liberty City, much of which is as fictionally inaccessible to him as it is literally inaccessible to us.
Although Niko has a cell phone, and an ever-fattening docket of friends to call, only a few can be rung up out of mission and asked out on “dates.” You can then go play darts, bowl, or play billiards; visit the comedy club, strip club, or cabaret club; drink in a bar or go get something to eat at a surprisingly limited number of establishments. None of these activities are taken up because they are fun. They are taken up, rather, to win the influence of your friend or date, and I frequently wondered why such a prominent
part of the game was handled in such a repetitive manner and supported by such a dearth of options.
Almost all of my fondest memories of
GTA IV
are anecdotal. The time I sniped the pilot of a zooming-by news chopper while standing on the GetaLife (read: MetLife) building and watched it whirlingly plunge down into the street and explode. The time a collision launched me from my motorbike and sent me sailing harmlessly through the girders of the Algonquin Bridge and into the East River hundreds of feet below. The time I used a few errantly parked city buses and garbage trucks to create a massive traffic jam in Star Junction Square, dropped a single grenade, and ran like hell as the cars blew up, one after another, for what felt like minutes. (The really violent stuff I did in games whose progress I did not save, so as to preserve my Niko’s moral integrity.) The wonderful thing about the earlier
GTA
games was that they allowed anecdotally arresting things to occur while engaged in an otherwise scripted mission.
GTA IV
selectively, and thus frustratingly, abandons this idea. Some scripted chase-fights offer enemies who are inexplicably immune to damage until they reach a certain point on the game map. This is a problem because the game gives you no inkling as to which kind of enemy you are facing. Some narratively important chase-fights are not regulated in this way and some narratively unimportant chase-fights are. In one (important) chase, you have to swerve around a garbage truck that abruptly pulls out in front of you. Exciting the first time, frustrating the third, boring the fifth—and the game forces you to avoid the garbage truck because the enemy and his car cannot be damaged until after he passes it. In another (unimportant) chase-fight, you have to pursue two men on motorcycles through Liberty City’s subway system. The first biker can be taken down quickly but the second refuses to take any damage, no matter how
many times you shoot him, until you have dodged enough oncoming subway cars. The first time I played
GTA IV
I thought this mission was one of the most amazing I had ever experienced. When I realized that the first biker you damage becomes vulnerable, thereby making the other invulnerable, the once-thrilling chase seemed contaminated, arbitrary. Missions such as this nullify gamer skill and creativity because they force him to experience scripted events in an unalterable way, which goes against the whole spirit of what made earlier
GTA
games so revelatory.
The least interesting parts of the game are those that show the strongest authorial hand—and yet the part of
GTA IV
that affected me most is authored with an unopposed authorial hand, which brings me up short from being able to say with confidence that games are affecting
because
of gamer agency. This scene occurs near the end of the game, when Niko comes face-to-face with the man who betrayed their unit back in the Balkans, and who is now a pathetic, drooling, sore-covered, drug-addicted wretch. It would be pointless to describe the scene in much detail, but I will say that it is so well acted, written, and staged that it would not be out of place in any violent masterpiece, whether filmic or literary. What gives the scene its power is Niko’s imploded recognition of his own moral ruin when he learns why this man betrayed him and his friends, which Niko had obviously imagined as an act of wicked grandeur. “You killed my friends for a thousand dollars?” Niko asks quietly, his voice breaking. Every time I have watched this scene, no matter how hard I fight it, tears fill my eyes when Niko’s voice cracks, and they did again, just now, while thinking about it. When the scene concludes, you have your choice: kill the traitor or walk away. I struggled with my decision, and it feels almost too personally revealing to share what I did my first time through
GTA IV
. (I will share what I did my second time through: I walked away, hopped in a nearby semi, and ran the man over
repeatedly.) Until this point, the radio has been your great companion—you have fishtailed into flocks of pedestrians to MC Lyte’s “Cha Cha Cha,” evaded SWAT teams to Philip Glass’s “Pruit Igoe,” and enjoyed hooker tug jobs to R. Kelly’s “Bump N’ Grind,” sometimes scratching your head at the music–moment dissonance and sometimes winning the equivalent of a music–moment lottery—but while driving away from the aftermath of his decision, Niko, for the first and only time in the game, turns the radio off and tells his cousin, Roman, to stop talking. The wound this scene has left is too dirty to sterilize with anything other than silence. On the long ride home, Niko has only your thoughts to accompany him.
There are times when I think
GTA IV
is the most colossal creative achievement of the last twenty-five years, times when I think of it as an unsurpassable example of what games can do, and times when I think of it as misguided and a failure. No matter what I think about
GTA IV
, or however I am currently regarding it, my throat gets a little drier, my head a little heavier, and I know I am also thinking about cocaine.
Video games and cocaine feed on my impulsiveness, reinforce my love of solitude, and make me feel good and bad in equal measure. The crucial difference is that I believe in what video games want to give me, while the bequest of cocaine is one I loathe and distrust. As for
GTA IV
, there is surely a reason it was the game I most enjoyed playing on coke, constantly promising myself “Just one more mission” after a few fat lines. (In Vegas and Tallinn, “One more mission” became the closest thing I have ever had to a mantra.) For every moment of transcendence there is a moment in the gutter. For all its emotional violence there are long periods of quiet and calm. Something bombardingly strange or new is always happening. You constantly find things, constantly learn things,
constantly see things you could not have imagined. When you are away from it, you long for its dark and arrowy energies. But am I talking about video games or cocaine? I do know that video games have enriched my life. Of that I have no doubt. They have also done damage to my life. Of
that
I have no doubt. I let this happen, of course; I even helped the process along. As for cocaine, it has been a long time since I last did it, but not as long as I would like.
So what have games given me? Experiences. Not surrogate experiences, but actual experiences, many of which are as important to me as any real memories. Once I wanted games to show me things I could not see in any other medium. Then I wanted games to tell me a story in a way no other medium can. Then I wanted games to redeem something absent in myself. Then I wanted a game experience that points not toward but
at
something. Playing
GTA IV
on coke for weeks and then months at a time, I learned that maybe all a game can do is point at the person who is playing it, and maybe this has to be enough.
I still have an occasional thought about Niko. When I last left him he was trying to find all the super jumps hidden around Liberty City, which is a strange thing for a wanted fugitive to be doing. I know he is still there, in his dingy South Bohan apartment (my Niko is definitely a South Bohan kind of guy. That penthouse near Middle Park? I never let him near the place), waiting for me to rejoin him. In early 2009 Rockstar released some new downloadable content for
GTA IV, The Lost and Damned
, in which you follow the narrative path of Johnny Klebitz, an incidental character in Niko’s story (his most memorable line: “Nothing like selling a little dope to let you know you’re alive!”) but whose story, it turns out, intersects with Niko’s in interesting ways. I played this new
GTA IV
story for a few hours but gradually lost interest and finally gave up. I realized, dismayingly, that a lot of what powered me
through
GTA IV
had been the cocaine, though it is still my favorite game and probably always will be. I was no longer the person I had been when I loved
GTA IV
the most and, without Niko, Liberty City was not the same.
Niko was not my friend, but I felt for him, deeply. He was clearly having a hard go of it and did not always understand why. He was in a new place that did not make a lot of sense. He was trying, he was doing his best, but he was falling into habits and ways of being that did not reflect his best self. By the end of his long journey, Niko and I had been through a lot together.
Anyone who plays video games will probably have a list of titles that he or she wishes I had talked about in this book. As it happens, I myself have such a list. Games I did discuss but wound up cutting include
Shadow of the Colossus, Half-Life 2
, and
Assassin’s Creed
, while games I intended to discuss but never found a way to include
Indigo Prophecy, Ico, Perfect Dark, Mirror’s Edge
, and
Eternal Sonata
. (This is to say nothing of some wonderful games I have played since finishing the book, including EA’s
Dead Space
and Naughty Dog’s
Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.
*
Two of the games I was most eager to discuss before I began this book were Hideo Kojima’s
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
and Lionhead’s
Fable II
, both of which, to my regret, turn up in
Extra Lives
only in passing.
I generated many pages of notes and observations about both games and spent two very enjoyable evenings with the video-game critic Leigh Alexander—the Western world’s resident Hideo Kojima expert—playing
Metal Gear Solid 4
, which manages to be as graphically beautiful and mechanically complex as any game ever and, at the same time, somehow deliberately backward-looking aesthetically (not to mention its many mescaline-grade weirdnesses, which include a smoking monkey in a silver lamé diaper). Alexander’s take on why
MGS 4
is this way is so interpretively brilliant that, as she spun it out for me, my skeptical frown gave way to a dropped jaw and many thoroughly persuaded nods. Unfortunately, as Alexander admits, the story of the
Metal Gear Solid
games is “incomprehensible” to anyone not deeply steeped in its lore, and trying to summarize that story here would be akin to a one-page encapsulation of
War and Peace
. The following, then, taken from my interview with Alexander, is for
Metal Gear Solid
brown belts and above:
ALEXANDER:
I don’t see the game as being solely metaphorical but I think there’s an intended subtext, which is the journey of the game designer whose methodology is out of date. After
Metal Gear Solid 3
, Kojima said, “I don’t want to make
Metal Gear
games anymore.” But here was this new PS3, and it looked like it might allow Kojima to execute his vision to the fullest. Remember, Kojima is a national hero in Japan, and Sony, a Japanese company, approached him and said, “Do you really want to stop when you could make the ultimate stealth game on this piece of ultimate hardware?” So here’s Snake, a man who doesn’t believe he’s a hero, with one more job to do, and technology is what’s going to make it possible. But the promises of technology are always inhuman and disappointing—and Kojima has pretty much said that the PS3 did not live up to what he was promised it could do. In
Metal Gear
Solid 4
, additionally, Snake is old. The player is very deliberately made to feel sympathy for this guy who used to be so strong and unstoppable and is now just a relic. The cinematography of the game—whether or not you hate the epic cut scenes—creates a ridiculous amount of empathy for this old guy being constantly eclipsed by younger, faster guys, like Johnny. By ending up with Meryl at the end of the game, Johnny begins to visually resemble the young Snake—even down to the mullet! The subtext is obvious: Meryl likes Johnny because he reminds her of a young Snake. I believe that this is Kojima’s concession to having been eclipsed by Western game developers. You have this young, dumb, blond guy who used to be a fuckup, and he’s the one who gets the girl. What is the most interesting thing about Johnny? He had not been corrupted by the promises of new technology. He was dumb, but he was pure. So Kojima is taking this buffoon and saying, “Man, the stupid white kid knew better all along, and now he’s taken over.” The war in the game is the
console
war.
Because I could not say this better, and because I admire
Metal Gear Solid 4
more than I enjoy playing it, I found I had no way
into
discussing its gameplay other than by cribbing Alexander’s extremely persuasive analysis of what it means.
I had a related problem with
Fable II
, another game I deeply and genuinely admire. When the time came for me to write about it, however, I froze. I could never find a solid place from which to explore a game for which I
mostly
felt admiration. This was especially disappointing because
Fable II
’s legendary designer, Sir Peter Molyneux, was kind enough to grant me an interview at the 2009 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
Fable II
is an open-world fantasy RPG that allows you to quest, pose for sculptures, get married, have children, get
gay
married, cheat on your spouse, use condoms, get sexually transmitted
diseases, get fat, slim down, own a dog, find treasure, buy houses, teach your dog tricks, gamble, work as a bartender, fight, learn spells, pay bards to sing epic songs of your exploits, chop wood, decorate your house, save the world, and kill a friend.
Fable II
’s refusal to traffic in video-game clichés (its final boss fight is one of the most swiftly and unexpectedly resolved in game history), its mischievousness (rarely has any game with a “bad–good” behavior mechanic made being bad so guiltlessly fun), and its sense of humor (“Why,” one aristocratic woman said when my female character sexually propositioned her, “I haven’t done that sort of thing since my dormitory days!”) make it, without question, a game of rarefied formal sophistication—a strange claim to make for a game that uses a cartoony “expression wheel” as its character-to-character interface. In short, when you want to “talk” to someone in
Fable II
, you hold down a button, bring up the expression wheel, select which “emotion” you would like to communicate (happiness, aggression, playfulness, amorousness), and then select a distinct expression of that emotion (laughing, muscle-flexing, farting, bedroom eyes). Communication in
Fable II
is thus largely gestural, the audacity of which is especially daring when one considers the difficulty video games have had with using gesture as a meaningful element of the game experience.
What held me back from finally loving
Fable II
in the heedless way I love other, less admirable games, I am not certain. I went into my interview with Molyneux—one of the nicest and most intelligent people I met while researching this book—hoping, in part, to get an answer. I am not sure I got one. But I did discover why Molyneux’s reputation as one of the few undisputed geniuses of game design undersells him if it does anything at all.
What follows is a lightly abridged transcript of our conversation.
TCB:
Down at the expo hall this morning I was playing
Resident Evil 5
and thinking a lot about the benefits and deficits of photorealistic representation—that is, the problems and solutions photorealism creates for games—and I realized that one of the many things that bugs me about
Resident Evil 5
is that the quality of the representation graphically is inconsistent with the cartoonish results you get when you’re shooting people, which is what the whole game is based around. Enemies just go flying like Looney Tunes characters. Then I thought of
Fable II
, which is, representationally, a realistic game—storybook realism, I would say—but which also has this wonderfully unrealistic expression wheel. Somehow, though, the gamer never senses this same kind of dissonance. Could you speak to how you walked that line?
MOLYNEUX:
When we first started with the
Fable
franchise we looked around for a visual style that wouldn’t be too exact. It’s not just the pixels on the screen; as you say, it’s the animation, it’s the speech, it’s the timing, it’s the fighting—all of those things have to come together. We’re very close to realism, but the closer we are, the further we are away, weirdly enough. So the visual style we picked for the first
Fable
was Tim Burton’s
Sleepy Hollow
, which had that same kind of mixture. It’s almost abstract; the colors are a little bit brighter. I think that, subconsciously, that keeps you from thinking,
Hey, that person’s eyebrows are not moving in the right way
. When we came to
Fable II
, we looked around for a bit of a change in that visual style, but not to go too far over that line. We chose a film called
Brotherhood of the
Wolf. Again, you look at it and you know that maybe this never was a place you could go to or visit, but it was close enough to reality that you weren’t estranged by it.
TCB:
So would you agree with the idea that when realism is the goal, it also becomes the problem?
MOLYNEUX:
Absolutely, it is. To really achieve realism, what you’re dealing with, when it comes down to it, is something called neurolinguistic programming. There are hundreds of thousands of tiny little messages that our brains are picking out from faces, the environment, the lighting, the time of day, the amount of dust in the atmosphere, which gives us, at best, a
sense
of reality. And whilst we’re making strides to achieve that in games—and I have no doubt we will achieve that—we are still a ways off. Some people call it the Uncanny Valley. I don’t think the Uncanny Valley exists
if you choose the right stage
. If you chose the wrong stage…it’s like trying to cast a Shakespearean play with cats. It doesn’t work. One of the things you’ve got to remember is that games are made by people who are, first, computer-game developers. It has taken the film industry and the television industry and the theater decades and decades and decades to get some principles right. The problem we had with
Fable II
, and it is a problem a lot of games have, is that when you come to the “story,” you have to wait, because there’s all this technology that’s being created. You have to create your scripting engine, you have to create your environments, you have to create your gameplay, you have to create your controls…you’re going away all along, and all of that stuff is not finished until, probably, two months before the end. Well, guess what? That’s when you’ve got to start editing your story, and that’s just not enough time.
TCB:
It’s a weird process.
MOLYNEUX:
It’s a
very
weird process. It’s kind of like trying to shoot a film and spending 90 percent of your time making the set and 10 percent of the time shooting the actors. In film they shoot a huge amount of footage and edit that down. In
Fable VV
, what we did was, first, realize that we were really
rubbish
at telling stories.
Then we found this director who was willing to actually talk to us about staging. And that was: You have a script. You have some actors. You figure out how to position them and what their gestures are going to be and how they will behave and where certain things are going to happen. We hired a soundstage, a place called Shepperton, and went into a huge white room, put all the actors in there, gave them all the script, sat back, and watched this director
direct
all this stuff. And, my god, it was just an amazing moment when we realized that the nuances we were trying to communicate, the emotion we were trying to get into our characters, was driven
solely
and
purely
by dialogue. And a lot of what we had written would have worked much better on the radio than it would have on the screen. This director would say, “Right, let’s have this person walk here, and let’s ask this actor, ‘What would you do if you just heard this piece of news?’” Watching the actors improvise and get into the characters was an incredible experience. We did that for the entirety of the story, so that we could
feel
what the story was like before it was implemented in the game. What we discovered—which was quite amazing and is so true about a lot of video games—is that the story we had written was so wordy, and so slow-paced and turgid, that a lot of the dialogue we could rip out. We already
had
a lot of the emotion. We didn’t have to ram it down the audience’s throat. As human beings, we’re used to getting a
feel
of what people are thinking by their gestures, but now we’re using that technique in games and in a position to achieve something very special.
TCB:
The use of the expression wheel is a way around needing huge amounts of dialogue, then?
MOLYNEUX:
The expression wheel is a way for the player to emote, but I’m not terribly happy with it. There’s an enormous
amount more that could be done with it. The way it works is that it cuts down on the necessity of dialogue, yes, but the way it didn’t work was when it did not provide the right emotional connection and came across as a little bit trivial. The great thing about it is the stories people were able to make up in their own minds about what they were doing. I’ll give you an example. There was this journalist that came in about two hours ago who was talking about something that happened to him and his wife while they were playing
Fable II
, and it was all to do with the child they had had in the game. They went off adventuring and came back to see their son for the first time. And so they thought, “What expression should we do for this child?” This child was saying, “Mommy, Mommy—you’re home! Where have you been?” So they decided to make the little kid laugh and tried to do the “sock puppet” expression. But they messed it up in doing it, picked the wrong expression, and ended up punching the air. Their kid got really scared and said, “Mommy, don’t hurt me!” That moment became unbelievably emotional for them. And that, I think, is where the expression wheel worked, because it allowed people to make their own stories up without it being totally encapsulated by what I wanted to do. And that is an amazing place for us to get to.
TCB:
I can tell you that when I played
Fable II
I became a slutty lesbian bigamist who had tons of children, all of whom I abandoned.
