The biggest-selling computer game of 2009, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, became notorious among the non-gaming public at its release for two things: an unprecedentedly glitzy premiere, red carpet and all, and a wave of controversy over its exceptionally violent content.  Labour MP Keith Vaz, no stranger to moral outrage, felt moved to raise a question in Parliament about what measures would be taken to prevent it from getting into the hands of children.  In fact he’s continued to bring it up on numerous occasions.  Perhaps he missed the part about the game carrying an 18 certificate.  Or, to be fair, he may be aware that many parents still disregard this advice under the false thinking that computer games are all children’s toys.  Modern Warfare 2 (MW2) is undoubtedly an ‘adult’ game, but what’s really adult about its most controversial content is not its violence, but its attempt at using the medium itself to raise difficult questions in the player.

“It’s only a game.”

The moral indignation surrounds one level in particular in which the player, as a ‘good guy’ soldier working undercover, accompanies a group of terrorists on a massacre of civilians in a Russian airport.  The player can join in and shoot the civilians or just follow, watching.  [There’s a video of the level here, though I warn you that it’s pretty grim stuff.]  The scene acts as justification for war to break out between Russia and the US (which gives you some idea of the contemporary, imaginative thinking that hasn’t gone in to it) and has no other purpose in the wider context of the game.  And it takes place shortly after a guns-blazing mountain chase on skidoos.  As such, it is an incongruous and tasteless episode in an otherwise harmless piece of mindless, gung-ho action.  The Call of Duty series is very well established, with no need to draw attention to itself by gleefully courting controversy.  So why is the level there at all?

The massacre scene is where MW2 stops trying to behave like an action film and tries to behave like a game.  The most affecting part of the level is knowing as a player that you have the option to join in or not, a dilemma that could not occur in any non-interactive medium.  It may be heavy-handed, but this is the game’s way of showing you that it knows it is a game, and that it wants you to think about what that means.  Contrary to expectations, it doesn’t want to draw you further in to its fiction, but to break the sense of immersion – in a first-person genre which relies on reflexes and concentration, this is a game’s equivalent of breaking the theatrical fourth wall.  By forcing the player to commit or watch terrible fictional acts, the game is challenging them to think about whether it is acceptable to simulate killing for entertainment.  Gamers, or rather people who happen to include games in their entertainment diet, have no less sense of what is and isn’t acceptable in real life than anyone else, but they do have the unique opportunity to ask themselves: is it really okay for me to enjoy pretending like this?  And how would I act if this really were me?

These are grown up questions about the relationship between audience, author and text, and they’re being brought up in a way that only games can achieve.  This tells us that games have started to find and exploit their specificity – that set of attributes distinguishing one art form from all others.  This self-awareness represents a major step forward in the maturity of the form.

Boarding the ghost train

To understand how it is subverted, we need to come to terms with how narrative in games generally works.  For many years, plot was either something trivial you inferred in a matter of seconds (“You are a short plumber with a long moustache.  You really need to rescue the princess from the spiky tortoise thing.  Lucky you’re good at jumping.”) or it came from a few screens of expositional text (“You are a prisoner of war.  There is a giant Hitler robot with machine guns.  There is no place for giant Hitler robots in civilised society.  Lucky you’ve got a big gun.”).  Even games which really did have proper plots used glorified versions of the ‘screens of text’ model.  These were either in dialogue with other characters, or in ‘cut-scenes’, when the game would ‘cut away’ to an expositional animation.

But in November 1998 a game called Half-Life was published for the PC, in which someone had the bright idea to let you continue playing during the scenes of exposition.  There were no screens of text, and no cut-scenes in the traditional sense.  The camera stayed behind the eyes of the player’s character at all times, from the beginning of the game to the end, and the player kept control of the character’s movement throughout.  The effect of this was to give you, the player, ownership of the narrative.  Suddenly you feel as though you are the author, making your own story – sitting in the designers’ sandpit and using their box of toys.

The beginning of Half-Life was a grand statement of intent: a five-minute monorail ride into work, at a major science facility, with no weapons, no antagonists, and no interactivity that could affect your progress. It was, in effect, still a cut-scene.  You couldn’t go anywhere else, you had to wait: you were being shown important scene-setting events.  But the game allowed you to move about inside the train car and look around, which instantly made you feel like you were seeing what you chose to see, no matter how limited your options really were.  And even when, eventually, you left the car and the action kicked in (experiment goes wrong, aliens invade, you get hold of a weapon or six, and you start shooting up said aliens), you were still being hurried down a fundamentally linear path.  It was like walking through a ghost train on foot – you could explore all around you, but sooner or later had to progress through one particular door into one particular area, and from there to the next.

Plot was developed around you: in this besieged facility you’d see and hear non-combatant scientists talking to each other about how the army was going to come to save them, then later you’d see the army arrive, then you’d see the army start to shoot the scientists.  And thus you’d realise, under the illusion of working it out for yourself, that the army was there to cover up what was happening at the facility.  It’s not exactly sophisticated plotting, but it’s a giant leap for interactive storytelling method: by being shown rather than told, we feel in control of the information we receive, piecing together a narrative from the fragments we are viewing.  This is my story.

Ludo ergo sum

Your character, though, your role in Half-Life really wasn’t terribly important.  You were Gordon Freeman, PhD, theoretical physicist (with gun).  The relevance of Gordon’s MIT education to your playing was no more important than Mario’s NVQ in plumbing.  That you would empathise with, and feel immersed in, the character you were portraying could be taken for granted, though.  This is a natural part of the game-playing experience.

In a sense, all games are role-playing games: we think about, and talk about, experiences in games in terms of the role we play.  Think how often you hear “You’re a soldier/wizard/mighty pirate…”.   “You are a…“  Even management games like The Sims are still sometimes known as ‘god games’, a label that takes the player’s role to be the key generic signifier.  Moreover, when we talk and write about games we do so by describing the player’s experience of the fiction.  We don’t say “I held down the W key and wobbled the mouse around, which moved the camera through the 3D model tunnel, then I clicked the left mouse button a lot which caused a graphic of a gun to fire”, we say “I ran down the tunnel shooting”.  We naturally take ownership of our experience in the game – and never more so than when playing from a first-person perspective.

The other side of this is just as important: the game itself, by its very nature of demanding that challenges be overcome before the narrative can progress, takes on the role of adversary.  Single-player, narrative-led games are ‘completed’, yes, but they’re also ‘beaten’.  When we acquire the necessary skills of co-ordination and reaction to work through the narrative, we’ve ‘mastered’ the game.  We might even personify the game’s random elements: “I died because the game just wouldn’t give me any health packs, and then sent about fifty zombies at me.”

There’s no other medium in which the relationship between the audience and the author is so adversarial.  By convention it is a friendly rivalry between the designers who lay down challenges and the player who must overcome them.  That convention has only relatively recently been challenged in high-profile, big-budget games.

Only following orders

Developed by different companies, behind closed doors, and released within months of each other in 2007, BioShock and Portal represent recent high watermarks for interactive storytelling.  The really uncanny thing about them, though, is that the mechanics of their plots are identical.  (With that in mind, please be aware that there will be major spoilers for these two games ahead.)

In their narrative construction, both games take as their starting point the ‘ghost train’ model of Half-Life.  You are, once again, funnelled down their corridors in order, picking up the plot along the way as it happens around you.  You are guided in both games by a character who speaks to you over a radio or tannoy, and gives you instructions to help progress through the levels.  This is a perfectly natural function of the ‘author’ in a game – the player must be told how to play and what to do to progress.  If that information can be conveyed by a character within the game’s own fiction, then so much the better.

In BioShock this mediator/instructor was established as a non-playable character, Atlas, a voice over a radio who provided exposition and instructions on what to do next.  Pick up a weapon, shoot the mutants, then we can escape… that sort of thing – a guide through the fiction and an instruction manual at the same time.  The big surprise of the game came when it was revealed that your character was a ‘sleeper agent’ (like The Manchurian Candidate) who was unable to refuse Atlas’s orders when given with the activation phrase “would you kindly”.  You suddenly remembered that he’d been using that phrase all along, and you’d thought it was just his Irish idiom.  The very next thing you were commanded to do was brutally murdering Atlas’s enemy, for which all control of the character was removed from you, while the game forced you to watch.

[Here’s the scene: again, it’s a violent one.  Note the aesthetically unfortunate (but probably technically unavoidable) way the user interface elements disappear and the screen narrows – classic signifiers that we’re in a ‘cut-scene’.  If they’d wanted to really scare people they should have made it so that the interface looked the same as normal but stopped responding to input.]

Jumping the rails

Atlas’s motives had turned out to be sinister and corrupt and you had found yourself complicit.  In one stroke, you were caused to question whether any of the actions you’d had your character perform over the course of the game were morally acceptable, at the same time as realising that you’d actually had no choice but to do them – both within the fiction and in the mechanics of the game.  You remembered that you’d killed an awful lot of mutants to get to this stage, and you’d have been stuck very early on if you hadn’t.

The knowledge that you must play a game by its own rules and mechanics of course involves a necessary suspension of disbelief, but that suspension is fundamental to the experience of playing games, and to have it shaken so successfully was a major postmodernist statement.  You were made explicitly aware of the conventions you were adhering to while playing a game.  Your next objective became to find a way to break free of Atlas’s control and defeat him (which unfortunately involved simply obeying orders from a different source instead, the gameplay remaining alas unchanged – BioShock’s floundering artistic collapse after its big twist has become almost as notorious as the twist itself).

Portal was more coherent.  Similarly, it had as its mediator/instructor figure a sentient computer named GLaDOS, who would speak to you over a tannoy and instruct you how to use your only tool, a ‘portal gun’.  For the first half of the game, that tool was used to solve a series of elaborate puzzles in the environment of a scientific testing facility.  After each puzzle was completed, the player would move on to the next room and the next puzzle.  Slowly, though, it became apparent that GLaDOS was losing whatever the computer equivalent of sanity is, and sure enough, the final puzzle-room concluded by leaving you on a seemingly-inescapable moving platform heading into a fiery pit: GLaDOS, you realised, was in control of the environment and was trying to kill you.

Once again, you changed priorities to defeating the mentor who had previously been trusted.  This time you were able to escape from the fiery pit and progress through the back-rooms of the facility by improvising with the portal gun, while the mentor attempted to dissuade you from coming up with the new ways of operating the game which were essential for victory.  In welcome contrast to BioShock, this increase in player freedom running alongside the quest to defeat the mentor made for a final act that was both satisfying to solve and aesthetically coherent.

Game Over

On a basic level, you could say that both Portal and BioShock have simply used the familiar trick of the unreliable narrator.  But because of the uniquely interactive relationship that exists between the player and the projected ‘author’ of the game – that amalgam of the designers who have created the narrative and the mentor character who exposits it – a far more sophisticated result is achieved.  In both cases, the player was made to achieve a certain level of self-awareness, defeat a previously omnipotent mentor, and win the game by escaping their control.

You can imagine what theologians have done with this: it’s deicide.  Or Freudians: it’s patricide.  I’d suggest (if you’ll permit me the pomposity) that what’s happening is interactive Barthesianism: the game reveals its author and has you kill it.  Having had it revealed that you’re not the author of your own adventures after all, you’re given the opportunity to figuratively seize back control of your narrative.

“It’s a game only.”

So the major twist of both these hugely successful and influential games was that they made explicit to you, the player, that the designers had been holding your hand all along, and any sense of free will you had had was an illusion.  Of course, this guiding hand is an unavoidable part of this ‘ghost-train’ style of game narrative, but to be so open about the artificiality of the convention is to toy with the player’s perception of the relationship between themselves, the first-person character they are controlling, and the game world.

Viewed in the light of this trend, the civilian massacre in Call of Duty can be given the benefit of the doubt.  It is an attempt to challenge conventions of complicity in gaming, in the light of a form which has recently become considerably more self-aware.  Its primary aim is not simply to cause tabloid disgust, but to challenge players to think about the nature of obeying orders, whether they come from a commanding officer in reality, or a game designer in fiction.

It’s encouraging for the future that the designers of a game with such a massive audience are willing to even think about including such a self-consciously subversive scene.  Even though the level in fact turns out to be ham-fisted and tasteless, its presence suggests that the designers have at least been working under the assumption that a significant proportion of their vast audience is prepared to take it in the spirit they intend. MW2’s lapse into horrendous bad taste isn’t childishly unknowing, it’s adolescently over-reaching.  The critical, commercial, and artistic successes of Portal and BioShock – the really grown-up games – show that this is a form that has come to know and understand its place among the arts, and is now finding ways to exploit its conventions and limitations, and make statements that can only be made in games.  That is a greater sign of maturity than any amount of violence and horror.  That is how we know that games can truly be made for grown-ups, with or without an 18 certificate.

Game Over by James Randell