Extra Lives Page 6
Gears is largely the story of a soldier, Marcus Fenix, who, as the game begins, has been imprisoned for abandoning his comrades (who are known as COGs, or Gears) in order to save his father, who dies before Fenix can reach him. He is released because a fourteen-year war with a tunnel-using alien army known as the Locusts has depleted the human army’s ranks. This much we glean in the first two minutes of the game; the next ten hours or so are an ingeniously paced march through frequent and elaborately staged firefights with Locusts, Wretches, Dark Wretches, Corpsers, Boomers, three blind and terrifying Berserkers, and the vile General Raam. Along the way, players can treat themselves to the singular experience of using the chainsaw bayonets on their Lancer assault rifles to cut their enemies in half, during which the in-game camera is gleefully splashed with blood. (Gears is one of the most violent games ever made, but Bleszinski maintains that it contains “very much a laughable kind of violence,” like “watching a melon explode in a Gallagher show.”)
The story line and the narrative dilemmas of Gears are not very sophisticated. What is sophisticated about Gears is its mood. The world in which the action takes place is a kind of destroyed utopia; its architecture, weapons, and characters are chunky and oversized but, somehow, never absurd. Most video-game worlds, however well conceived, are essenceless. Gears feels dirty and inhabited, and everything from the mechanics of its gameplay to its elliptical backstory has been forcefully conceived, giving it an experiential depth rare in the genre.
Much of the resonance of Gears can be directly attributed to the character of Fenix. Video-game characters tend to be emptily iconic. Pac-Man, for instance, is some sort of notionally symbolic being. Mario (who was originally known only as Jumpman) is merely the vessel of the player’s desired task. Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft is either the embodiment of or a satire on female objectification. Halo’s Master Chief is notable mainly for his golden-visored unknowableness. Fenix, encased within armor so thick that his arms and legs resemble hydrants, his head covered by a black bandanna, and his eyes as tiny as BBs, is different. He shows constant caution and, occasionally, fear. Although he can dive gracefully, his normal gait has the lumbering heaviness of an abandoned herd animal. His face is badly scarred, and his voice is a three-packs-a-day growl less angry than exhausted. Unlike the protagonists of many shooters, the Fenix of the first Gears rarely seems particularly eager to kill anything. The advertising campaign for Gears of War was centered on a strangely affecting sixty-second spot in which Fenix twice flees from enemies, only to be cornered by a Corpser, a monstrous arachnoid creature, on which he opens fire. But it was the sound track—Gary Jules’s spare, mournful cover of the 1982 Tears for Fears song “Mad World”—that gave the spot its harsh–tender dissonance. This helped signal that Fenix was something few video-game characters had yet managed to be: disappointedly adult.
When I asked about the melancholy at the core of Gears, Bleszinski said, “I was never geeky enough for the geeks and I was never cool enough for the cool people. I’ve always been in that weird purgatory.” That slight feeling of identity crisis apparently persisted. A few years ago, Bleszinski divorced his high school sweetheart. “I woke up one day, and had the two Labs, and the house in the suburbs, and I’m like, What the hell am I doing here?”
Bleszinski admitted that much of Gears is, in its way, autobiographical. Its look and its aesthetic, for example, were influenced by his first trip to London, taken when he was in his late twenties. There he climbed to the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral and, with “a shitty little camera,” snapped a picture of a yolky sun setting over the Thames, the sky streaked with nursery blues and pinks. Bleszinski’s London photograph is one of the reasons that much of Gears takes place in twilight—a lighting condition prized by cinematographers but comparatively neglected in video games. Bleszinski asked his artists to create a “sci-fi” hybrid of London and Washington, DC, but advised them to keep the futuristic well balanced with the historical. The big flaw in most depictions of the future, he says, “is that they always forget to leave in the past. Everyone always assumes that the entire world would just explode and be rebuilt in this kind of super-futuristic style. I still see old cars from the ‘30s and ‘40s around, right next to things that look like they’re from the year 2000. It’s that mix that makes things interesting.”
Gears also contains what Bleszinski calls a “going home” narrative: “There’s a sublevel to Gears that so many people missed out on because it’s such a big testosterone-filled chainsaw-fest. Marcus Fenix goes back to his childhood home in the game. I dream about my house in Boston, basically every other night. It was up on a hill.” In Gears of War the fatherless Fenix’s manse is on a hill, too, and getting to its front door involves some of the most harried and ridiculously frantic fighting in the game. When I told Bleszinski that Fenix’s homecoming was one of my favorite levels in Gears, he asked if I knew where its title, “Imaginary Place,” had come from. I thought for a moment, attuned to the possibility of an altogether unexpected window into his imagination. Was it from Auden? No. It was a reference to a line from Zach Braff’s film Garden State, in which family is defined as “a group of people who miss the same imaginary place.” When you start to peel back the layers of the Gears world, Bleszinski told me, “there’s a lot of sadness there.” Indeed, the centaur tanks the COGs ride into battle in Gears of War 2 greatly resemble the tanks from Blaster Master—the game Bleszinski was playing when he learned of his father’s death—which Bleszinski claimed not to have realized until someone else pointed it out to him.
In addition to the prevailing mood of wistful savagery, the singularity of Gears of War resides in the “feel” of its game mechanics. (The procedures and rules of a game are what are meant, broadly speaking, by the term game mechanics. As the game designer Jesse Schell writes, “If you compare games to more linear entertainment experiences [books, movies, etc.], you will note that while linear experiences involve technology, story, and aesthetics, they do not involve mechanics, for it is mechanics that make a game a game.”) The importance of game-mechanic feel is something that Bleszinski has made his special focus and passion. “I’m looking for a fun core-loop of what you’re doing for thirty seconds over and over again,” he told me. “I want it to grab me quick and fast. I want it to have an interesting game mechanic, but I also want it to be a fascinating universe that I want to spend time in, because you’re spending often dozens of hours in this universe.” The best example of “an interesting game mechanic” is Gears’s take on the hoary conceit of reloading one’s weapon: A well-timed reload briefly rewards the gamer with enhanced damage infliction. Rod Fergusson, an Epic senior producer who, with Bleszinski, oversees the continuity of the Gears universe, told me that Bleszinski is “a designer by feel” who conceives of games in “big-picture” terms “yet tweaks the smallest things.” He said, “If you look at people who tried to copy Gears’s mechanics, they don’t have that guy doing that hands-on, touchy-feely way of designing. They kind of get the broad strokes, but they don’t get the little detaily things.”
Evidence of this can be detected in Gears’s famous “cover” system, which demands that the player move with chesslike care and efficiency around the battle space, using walls, doorways, barricades, and the scorched husks of vehicles as cover. Bleszinski told me that a paintball match had impressed upon him the ludicrousness of how most shooters operated, with players running around in the open, strafing their enemies and jumping to avoid being shot. It occurred to him that a shooter based on the idea of taking cover would be a more realistic and primal experience. Namco’s 2003 shooter kill.switch was the first game to attempt a cover system, but Bleszinski, an adroit borrower, streamlined and improved the concept. In Gears, an exposed player is actively punished by the game, as the damage inflicted by enemy bullets and explosives spikes nastily whenever cover is abandoned. Bleszinski became fixated on making sure that, when cover is taken, the right amount of dust is kicked up against the controlled chara
cter’s back and that the character’s grunt has just the right timbre and volume. In this way, the reward for seeking cover becomes subliminally sensory.
The most frequently imitated aspect of Gears is a feature known as the “roadie run,” so named for the crouch into which a player’s hustling character lowers himself, and which Bleszinski thought resembled a rock-show roadie’s attempt to move discreetly across the stage. While in roadie-run mode, the in-game camera goes jitteringly handheld and fish-eyed and sinks into a miasma of dust. It is difficult to see exactly where one is going, and the overall effect is that of intense panic. Bleszinski calls it “the Falluja follow-cam,” and likens it to the viewpoint of an embedded journalist. Yet in roadie run the player is traveling only one and a half times faster than normal. The feature is both a brilliant distortion of perspective and a cunning approximation of the confusion of combat.
If one were to commission a very bright and unusually tasteful adolescent to design his ideal workplace, Epic’s headquarters would probably be the result. Its many blacks, grays, and corrugated-metal surfaces might best be labeled Bachelor Futurist, even though, by now, most of Epic’s male employees wear wedding rings. The office furnishings come in three styles: Neo–Living Room (easy-rocking, lever-activated recliners), Casual Satanist (black leather couches), and Romper Room Gothic (beanbag chairs). The aroma of lingering adolescence carries over into the mementos, knickknacks, and emblems that Epic’s employees use to decorate their offices. Tim Sweeney, with the earnestness of a teenage boy, has a prominent Ferrari flag hanging in his office—though Sweeney, unlike most teenage boys, actually owns a Ferrari. Chris Perna, the art director of Gears 2, displays on one of the shelves in his office a foot-high silver-cast Darth Vader Pez dispenser. Bleszinski’s office resembles a toy-store yard sale. These are boyish affectations, certainly, but boyishness is the realm in which these men seek inspiration, not a code by which they live.
A Microsoft employee who works closely with Epic described the company as having a “band dynamic.” Staff turnover is low, and many of Epic’s most senior employees have been friends for more than a decade. This does not seem a very long time until one sits in on an Epic meeting and realizes that anyone over the age of thirty-five achieves the temporal stature of Methuselah. Epic’s recent growth is regarded with wary gratitude by many of its employees, though some miss the old days, when, as Sweeney put it, “we were just a bunch of kids who had some cool ideas and were doing neat things.”
When surrounded by his colleagues and discussing the gravities of gameplay, Bleszinski discarded his self-consciously laid-back manner, and the precision of his gaming mind quickly became apparent. A colleague told me that Bleszinski’s “huge strength is his basic ability to just get it—pick something up and give you a one-minute usability report.”
It is unusual for any game company to allow an outsider access to its meetings, for fear of a game’s features being prematurely disclosed. While discussing Gears 2’s new “crowd” system, which allows an unprecedented number of individually functioning enemies to flock across the battle space, Bleszinski mentioned how excited he was to open fire upon them with Gears 2’s mortar. Within minutes, I was pulled aside by a Microsoft representative and informed that the mortar’s existence would not be confirmed until later in the summer and could I please refrain from mentioning it to anyone. (That I had once been allowed to sit in on classified intel meetings while embedded with the Marine Corps in Iraq did not, at Epic, carry much weight.) The gaming media is largely made up of obsessive enthusiasts, and the carefully planned release of information tantalizes them with the promise of insider knowledge. The game industry is more or less leakproof and possesses a strange kind of innocence: It guards its secrets as guilelessly as a boy might hide from his mother—but not from his brother and sister—the extraterrestrial living in his bedroom.
I was warned, before attending a play-through of one of Gears 2’s unfinished levels, that it was still “janky.” Although the level was fully voice-acted, it was only partially scored, and many sound effects had yet to be added. Some of the virtual lighting was not yet functional, and the onscreen Fenix flickered. From time to time, the game crashed altogether. Nonetheless, we watched Dave Nash, the level’s lead designer, guide Fenix through what looked to be an enthusiastically mortared office building. Ahead, in the shadows, numerous monsters scrambled—the goose-bumpy Gears warning that a violent engagement was somewhere ahead. By the third iteration of this, Bleszinski was shaking his head: “Enough monster foreplay.” When Fenix and a comrade had to walk a bomb to a door in need of obliteration, Bleszinski said that they should be moving “10 to 15 percent faster.” When the play-through was complete, he said that too much of the level involved going into one room to hit a switch that activated a door in another. The otherwise superlative Grand Theft Auto series is particularly afflicted with this mouse-coaxed-through-a-maze problem, and Bleszinski’s only complaint about the GTA games, which he admires, is that they can sometimes “feel like work.” This emphasis on making players aware of why they were choosing certain paths without being reminded that their choice was essentially illusory made me think of the “vivid and continuous dream” that John Gardner once spoke of concerning fiction.
In a discussion of another level of the game, known as “Hospital,” Bleszinski, sitting by himself on a long couch, wondered if, in the online multiplayer version of the level, a hospital sprinkler system could be used to extinguish the pilot light of an opponent’s flamethrower. “Wouldn’t that be cool?” he asked. A similar moment resulted in one of Gears 1’s most notorious features. One day, late in the game’s production, Bleszinski expressed his frustration at having to finish off downed enemies by shooting them. “You know,” he said, “I just want to stomp on his head!” From this came the game’s gratuitously fatal coup de grâce: the “curb stomp,” whereby a player crushes his opponent’s skull beneath the anvil of an enormous metal boot. Rod Fergusson later told me, “I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the next two weeks, there’s a hallway with a sprinkler system that puts out the pilot light of the flamethrower.” (And there would be.)
Discussion at Epic is collegial and to the point; modern game design is too complex and collaborative for any individual to feel proprietary about his or her own ideas. At one meeting I attended, a disagreement about weaponry was swiftly resolved. “There’s no direct counter to the flamethrower,” Ray Davis, the game’s lead programmer, pointed out, with exasperation. Lead gameplay designer Lee Perry, who had obviously heard this before, sighed. “I don’t know. I think it’s a superweapon,” he said. Then someone else observed that the boomshot, another devastatingly fatal weapon, had no direct counter, either, and Davis recognized with a grin that his argument had been destroyed. Bleszinski took the opportunity to raise a singular annoyance of the boomshot, familiar to anyone with experience of the multiplayer version of Gears: the impossibility of knowing whether someone you are charging toward happens to be carrying a boomshot. “The boomshot needs something to warn you your opponent’s got it,” Bleszinski said. He suggested adding small glowing lights around its four barrels, which everyone agreed was a fine solution. Davis, who worked most directly with the programmers and was therefore most familiar with what remained janky, brought up the “inconsistent, unfun lethality” of frag grenades. This segued into Gears 2’s inclusion of ink grenades, which create a highly damaging toxic cloud—the proper gameplay use of which no one, so far, had been able to decide.
Bleszinski and the other Epic designers came to this form as children. Growing up playing games, they absorbed the governing logic of the medium, but no institutions existed for them to transform what they learned into a methodology. Gradually, though, they turned a hobby into a creative profession that is now as complex as any other. I realized, watching them, that part of what they had done was help to establish the principles of one grammar of fun.
Before leaving Epic, I was invited to take part in the daily play
test, which occupies an hour or two of every afternoon. That day the team was testing the multiplayer modes of Gears 2. One of the most common criticisms of video games is that they can wrap those who play in enforced and occasionally deranging solitude, but to take part in a multiplayer game is to give a game new life every time one plays, because one is matched against human players, whose ingenuity and deviousness no computer can hope to equal, and because one can exchange with one’s fellow players advice, congratulations, and taunts (mostly taunts). A dozen Epic employees gathered in the test lab and signed in to the individual consoles that lined the walls. The battle would pit one side of the room against the other. I was assigned my slot and selected my avatar—a Drone Locust.
Testing is among the more consuming aspects of modern game design. I was told that Gears 2 would be subject to roughly forty thousand hours of testing before its release. This is an impressive number—until one realizes that the first forty thousand people who buy and play Gears 2 will, in one hour, equal that amount of testing. Gears 1 was released with a few bugs—instances in which the game behaves in a way that was not intended—a fact that many at Epic remain bitterly embarrassed about, even though it is nearly impossible to completely eliminate bugs from any game. Testing of multiplayer modes involves something more sociological than purely technical assessment: learning what tendencies a given environment fosters. If there are places to hide, they must always have a fatal weakness. If a particularly powerful weapon is hidden somewhere, it must be difficult and risky to reach. If large numbers of players are being killed at a certain location, the game designers must ask themselves why, and decide whether to correct for this. The aim is to eliminate all ineradicable advantages, but this goal is seldom attained. Two weeks after the release of the first Gears, Bleszinski told me, “I’d go online and get completely destroyed by everybody.”