Welcome to part 3. I find myself stuck between the conscious questions of story writing and the subconscious joys of gameplay. The big question that remains is: how do I combine the two?
Talk of video games being “self-aware” or “critical of violence” is generally very childish. The only time a game is allowed to be this self-aware is if it's flying a giant flag stating how it feels. Games that take it for granted that violence is bad and that we should feel at least a little bad about engaging with it have dominated the conversation. Games like Spec Ops: The Line and Hotline Miami are willing to really press the player with specific questions, directly asking “Why do you enjoy this?” and “Do you enjoy hurting people?”, respectively. I like this, and meta stuff is always fun, but it's more of an internal interrogation, and it takes away an element of interpretation from the player. Counterintuitively, these games simplify the conversation about the role of violence in video games by leaving very little room for analysis.
This idea is one I touched on in my first article when I mentioned the shallowness of revolutionary aesthetics in first-person shooters: from this perspective, games cannot find a proper dialectical use of violence outside of self-criticism, because the questions “Who are we killing?” and “Why is it fun?” always come after “What kind of game are we making?”
I don't think there's any FPS game that can be considered a true masterclass in terms of this kind of artistic depth, but we can certainly get glimpses. I've listed some disappointing games in this category, but I'd like to return to them and explore them in a bit more detail.
HROT fully embraces the absurdity of violence. It's a slightly detached way of looking at things, necessarily. It's funny and engaging. This takes the context out of Quake's tools, making it all a very engaging play space. It breaks away from the genre convention of downplaying violence, even if only halfheartedly. There are no “do you like hurting people?” or grandiose justifications. You use guns to advance in the play area. They're obviously basic, but they allow the game to have depth, generate jokes and fun, despite the violent subject matter. That's one answer to the question.
Cruelty Squad, on the other hand, is a primal scream veiled in fake winks and nods. It begs the audience to feel disgust for violence, for the organ market, and for the capitalists who use chemical weapons to “cleanse” the Helsinki ghetto for real estate development. It's funny, but only as a necessary mask to hide its rage. It can't really be seriously engaged anymore, because the violence is incongruous and human life is worthless. Between bursts of crushing humor, it plaintively asks, “What would you do if you were convinced that humanity was beyond salvation?” Violence is in the background, but it's essential. The lightheartedness and enjoyment you get from shaking your appendix and shooting people with riot gas grenades contrasts with the obviously horrifying grotesqueries. The humor is steeped in horror, the violence in fun. It's a game that's too painful to watch to play without irony.
SPRAWL quietly embraces violence. It's building towards a big plot twist, but at the end the voice in his head doesn't betray you: he asks you to help him commit suicide. [z: this is a little unclear to me, I’m assuming because there’s some context from the game that’s missing. I would try to include that]In one of the strangest final levels I can think of, [z: who’s?] Giant supercomputers, shotgun jumps, and bunny hopping with little resistance. You kill every bad guy in the world, then you and the villain sit on a building that self-destructs, killing you both. SPRAWL embraces violence with aplomb. It wholeheartedly accepts that oppression cannot be fought entirely peacefully, at least not this kind of oppression. If you kill all the bad guys and you die, people will be free after that. I don't necessarily agree with that, but it's a fascinating answer to the question.
ULTRAKILL is the third and final game that inspired me to write about first-person shooters. It's the black hole of the genre's demise. To sum it up calmly, ULTRAKILL is the most fun game I've ever played. It's built with beautiful, machine-like precision to make it feel as good as possible. There's a lot to say here. The game is saturated with movement and weapon technology, with little optimizations that make playing something difficult just that little bit more effective. It's hectic, moves quickly, enemies die quickly, and offers the same runway for player expression and mastery that made Neon White so eye-catching.
If making meaningful decisions is fun, then ULTRAKILL is built to give players as many choices as possible: which weapon to use, which technique to use, who to kill first, and so on. Everything is built around style mechanics, with the game constantly pushing players to try cooler and more difficult techniques. At harder levels, the game demands multiple decisions every second, each one essential to survival. Do you mow down swarms of enemies to deal higher damage and risk being hit? Or do you keep your distance, risking prolonging the fight and increasing your chances of failure? Do you time a risky parry for a higher reward, or try a low-risk dodge so your stamina is too low to escape the next attack? Reading these sentences takes longer than making the actual choice. The only path to victory is to fully embrace the game into your subconscious. It's great when you're in action. It encourages risk by pushing you to coat yourself in the blood of your enemies.
In ULTRAKILL, blood is fuel. Brutal acts – killing in the dirtiest, most explosive ways possible – earn you more health. Crushing corpses with a shotgun slightly increases your chances of survival. You are literally a blood-driven killing machine. Fight your way into the depths of hell, slaying demons, fighting angels and slaughtering meat robots just like you. The story seeks to answer the title question in a subtle and complex way:
Now, I have to say one more thing about ULTRAKILL that I have been meaning to say. It's not over yetULTRAKILL is a beautiful work of art in its current state. I unreservedly recommend it, but it's still in Early Access and building piece by piece. The first two parts of the trilogy are content complete, but at least nine more of the game's vast levels remain to be released. This emptiness, the game's current incompleteness, is the very heart of the series. I've been sitting with a lot of questions for a long time. How do you satisfy the intellectual part of your brain after building a perfect engine of violence? The game's writing is good, but is it more trustworthy just because it's fun? Why does this game, despite being unfinished, feel like it has more to say than its contemporaries? What is the end result when you turn every subconscious part of your brain up to 11?
The death of art, a violent and sad death, comes when people are tired and can no longer think, but still need to consume. Playing a first-person shooter with a podcast on or watching a TV show on a second monitor makes it a little harder to answer this question, or to think at all. Caring about everything that comes to mind is a daunting task. It's not always feasible, but little exercises like these questions can help you build that muscle. This is exactly my own personal questioning of what I've been doing mindlessly for so long: putting one foot in front of the other, a pattern of the human brain.
What this series was really trying to answer is the question of how, as creators and interpreters of art, do we deal with the dissonance between real-world violence and depicted violence? This is a question that is much older than video games. We have grown into a culture that is more critical of war and interpersonal violence than any culture before us, but in our art, it remains. First, the determination to carry on as we have always done, but with a few tweaks to make it less jarring. Now violence is only directed at bad people. Now violence is only directed at monsters. Despite all this, we still use a symbol of real-world carnage: the gun. I have a grave hunch that I could spend my whole life writing about the gun as a great American symbol and never run out of things to say.
Secondly, we confront it with beauty and choreography. Isn't this all beautiful? Doesn't it feel good to replace a demon with blood in an instant, or to use a grappling hook to save yourself just before falling to your death? That feeling alone is art. A game of movement, bunny hopping, and everything that lies beneath the surface. And yet we have a gun in our hands. It's part of the genre, inseparable from it.
Now, throughout this project, I've assumed that we're all more or less the same way; that we're all ideologically opposed to violence, have similar political beliefs, etc. I've assumed a single position. The question, “How do we address the incongruity between violence and enjoyment in entertainment?” presupposes that solution. Even that question is pretty fixed and I knew from the start that it was impossible to answer, so I'm going to stop asking that question for now and talk more broadly. Instead of asking a variety of specific questions, I'm going to ask one broad question: “Where do we go from here?”
It feels to me like any point on this journey could be the last, because any point could be the last. Each game represents the end of an artistic process, the result of an individual or group working toward a goal as messy and meandering as the question I asked. It sounds silly to say, but each of these games represents an answer, though it's hard to simplify into pieces as small as sentences. And yet, I'm willing to try.
HROT is a custom-built engine, built almost from the ground up. It has a fully-functioning astrological clock, lovingly programmed and modeled to last. The surreal violence of the game gives way to one of craft, both literal and meta-literal. The violence is insignificant compared to the joy of creating a tangible work of art, not a painting on a wall, but 60 tactile sepia-toned fantasy paintings per second. Answer: The act of creation is art, and it encourages a playful rejection of genre rules. All things can have meaning, and every gun is still a gun, and it has meaning in its status as a work of craftsmanship.
SPRAWL is so ideologically simple that it leaves you feeling powerless. Violence is a means to a just end. I'm tired of calling games fun. The game is rhythmic, tactile, and engaging. It's not an exciting or rhetorically complex game, but it's a game about shooting capitalists and mastering every skill, even movement. It encodes something like a speedrunner's instinct. Answer: Art is about skill, about internalizing rhythm, moving along practiced lines toward a single, understandable goal.
ULTRAKILL is Dante's Inferno. It's a game that answers every question you have. It's built with systems that are designed to feel better than any other FPS, all wrapped up in a single piece that appeals to your muscle memory and reflexes just as much as The Divine Comedy. It's poetry. Answer: The story isn't over yet, but however it ends, at least 66% of it will be flavorful, complex, gory, and exciting.
It's only going to get further. How many stories can you tell with buttons you ask the player to press? If you haven't noticed yet, I have no plans to stop playing first-person shooters. Each game, each work of art, has the complete and final answer to every question the player wants to ask.
Holly Tsch, Summer Senior Art Editor, can be contacted at Email:.
