Authors: Tom Bissell
“We had a mandate from the company,” he said, “which was to rejuvenate the brand. That meant getting away from the tropical island where the previous
Far Crys
had been set.” His design team kicked around various locales, but “the one that seemed to be the most powerful was the African savanna. Plain, acacia tree, sun, some herd animals in the background. That’s what we wanted—that iconic, powerful feeling of natural wilderness, themes of man and nature and the darkness inside us, just like
Doctor Moreau
. As soon as you transplant that to Africa, you go from H. G. Wells to Joseph Conrad. We were making
Heart of Darkness
the video game. How bad will people be? And why? Let’s not strip the race out of it. Let’s go to Africa and treat it realistically and try to explore it.”
Occasionally,
Far Cry 2
gives voice to paleo-liberal pro-Africa sentiment. “This is our struggle. Africa is for Africans,” one militia leader tells you, and the Jackal turns out to be a bit more complicated than a mere arms dealer. When he contemptuously notes
that a kid from Iowa who gets killed peacekeeping an African civil war earns more press coverage than fifty thousand dead Africans, the Jackal sounds like Noam Chomsky with a Mac-10. Such sentiment does not last long against the game’s thanatological tidal wave, and it is not supposed to.
What
Far Cry 2
explores is not why civil wars occur, or why people engage in evil behavior, or why Africa is so bewilderingly prey to the wicked aims of a few. It explores, in gameplay rather than moral terms, the behavioral and emotional consequences of being exposed to relentless violence. Most shooters only play at making the gamer feel truly assailed. Even in excellent shooters, such as the
Gears of War
series, the firefights are subject to control: Here is the part where five Locusts spawn, and here is the part where two Boomers appear, and here is the part where five Wretches skitter toward you along the metal catwalk. In
Gears
, at the end of a skirmish, an electric-guitar power chord—G, I think—rings out to let you know you have cleared the sequence of enemies, are momentarily safe, and can now move on. In the
Call of Duty
games, the fighting is even more rigorously controlled. During many gunfights, you find yourself sprinting across the battlefield to the invisible spot on the game map that deactivates the spawning mechanism filling the overhead window with snipers.
In
Far Cry 2
none of the firefights is scripted. While you have missions, the gameworld is open, and you can travel—by boat, Jeep, car, bus, hang glider, or foot—virtually anywhere you want within its fifty-square-kilometer area, with carefully placed cliffs, rock formations, mountains, and rivers there to complicate things. Militias patrol, independent of where you are in the story. They are always out there, looking for you, and all of them want you dead. Checkpoints are numerous, and if you are as much as glimpsed by those manning them you will be attacked en masse. When a battle
in
Far Cry 2
begins you have no idea what will happen. Simply because you are fighting five guys does not mean that four more cannot show up and join in. And simply because you successfully make it through one grueling encounter does not mean another will not happen ten seconds later. When
Far Cry 2
is set on its highest difficulty level, it becomes as thrillingly challenging as any game I have played. You learn to love and fear the violence in equal measure. Then you listen to a man burning to death in the grass and the game lets you make of that what you will.
I described to Hocking my most memorable
Far Cry 2
experience. It was morning—the game has an evocative day–night cycle, with morning suns as bright as magma and night skies buckshot with stars—and I was driving along in a Jeep, on my way to steal a bag of the African narcotic
khat
for one of my fellow mercs. Around the bend ahead of me came another Jeep. Since almost everyone in the world of
Far Cry 2
wishes you ill, I began to think about my course of action. Suddenly a zebra—perhaps headed for the local watering hole for its morning refreshment—ran into the road. I swerved, unsuccessfully, to avoid it and smashed grille-to-grille into the other Jeep, the passenger of which had opened up on me with a .50-caliber mounted machine gun. The zebra, meanwhile, was pinned between us. I jumped out of my vehicle and spun and lobbed a grenade under the Jeeps and will not soon forget the surreal clarity with which the luckless zebra’s blast-launched corpse went sailing past me. It was as bizarre as anything I had ever seen in a video game—and no one had written or programmed one moment of it. I asked Hocking if, when he played
Far Cry 2
, he ever felt as if he were at the Frankensteinian mercy of some incomprehensible beast of his own creation.
“I have that feeling all the time,” he told me. “The sort of sublime violence and chaos—something rises up out of it that’s shocking. The
beautifulness
of its horror. It’s incredible how
volatile and intense this game can be.” With
Far Cry 2
, Hocking said, unrelentingness was “a big part of our goal. Playing the game, I’ve
learned
things about myself. Trying to hold your ground against fourteen or fifteen guys when you’re hidden behind a Jeep with an assault rifle? Your brain is telling you,
If you get up and try to run, you’re dead
. You’re trying to stay calm:
I don’t have enough ammo to miss, so I have to aim at these fucking guys and make sure they’re down
. In most games you just kind of charge forward. There’s no real tactics, no real discipline under fire. We wanted to make sure that the potential for that insane stuff was so high that you don’t need to script anything because there would
always
be insane stuff happening.”
He sat up in his chair, then, roused by the memory of the first time
Far Cry 2
was publicly shown at a game convention in Leipzig, Germany. “Alain Corre, the head of Ubisoft marketing in Europe, came to see the game; he hadn’t seen it yet. It’s a very hard game to demo, because nothing is scripted, so you’re always improvising. We were showing him the game and at one point the guy who was playing got into a bad spot. We’re like, ‘Ah, fuck. He’s gonna die in the demo. Great.’ So he’s just spraying machinegun fire and hits this propane tank that was in a weird fluky position. It went flying through the air and the jet caught the three guys who were shooting at him on fire—all in a row. They
burst
into flames. The propane tank goes sailing out of frame. Then another one caught fire and goes bouncing across the ground and up into a tree, and right when it hit the branches of the tree, the tank exploded. And the tree goes,
BOOOF!
I’ve never seen a tree come apart in the game like that since. Every branch smashed off the tree in this huge puff of leaves. Because that tank had bounced across the ground and up into the tree, there was this huge line of scorch marks where it had spun through the grass. It was so amazing, this crazy chain of events—and to this day I’ve never seen a
chain reaction that was so cool. Everything that happened was totally systemic. There was no way we could have scripted that. And then Alain turned to us and said, ‘Your game is great.’”
Hocking is obsessed with the formal reverberations of game design. “I
despise
cut scenes,” he told me. “We have a mandate, actually, not to use cut scenes. It’s not necessarily engraved in stone, but most of us believe we need to try to tell a story in an interactive way.” When I brought up Rockstar’s
Grand Theft Auto IV
, the cut scenes of which are generally superb, Hocking nodded and said, “As a player I don’t necessarily dislike them if they’re done very, very well. As a developer, on the other hand, the cost of them is so high. The constraints that they bring are significant. Once a cut scene is built and in the game, you can’t change it. You’re done. A lot of my work on the original
Splinter Cell
was building cut scenes, which is a massive waste of time. They were taking my time away from making the game more fun.”
Far Cry 2
’s maintained first-person point of view tries to supplant the need for cut scenes. Every in-game activity—talking to someone, studying your map, climbing into a car, opening a door, using pliers to remove a bullet from your leg, relocating a broken thumb, popping an antimalaria pill—holds the first-person and places no freeze on the surrounding action. (Hocking swiped this from DreamWorks Interactive’s
Jurassic Park: Trespasser
, an ambitious but largely unsuccessful game.)
Far Cry 2
’s devotion to its unbroken first-person point of view may not sound unusual or even noteworthy—until you find yourself running from seven militiamen and trying to consult your map while suffering a simultaneous attack of vision-blurring malarial fever.
The maintained first-person was intended to provide what Hocking calls a psychosomatic “shortcut” to the gamer’s brain.
“The reason is twofold. First, you create this bond between the player and the character. When he has to pull a twig out of his arm, he feels some kind of illusion of pain. Second, all of it was designed to build up to that moment when you’re holding your buddy in your arms. It’s this huge chain of connectedness that pays off in that moment.”
Hocking was referring to moments in
Far Cry 2
in which one of your merc buddies attempts to come to your rescue, only to be cut down on the battlefield. When you approach severely injured buddies, they beg you to help and curse you if you put your back to them. If you choose to help, you take your wounded buddy in your arms. You then have three choices: abandonment, healing, or mercy killing. If you pull out your sidearm but hesitate to fire, your buddy will sometimes grab the gun barrel, place it to his lips, and demand that you put him out of his misery. These moments are unnerving not because your buddies are deeply imagined characters. They are types, nothing more. What
Far Cry 2
seeks to provide with depth is the actual, in-game experience of terminating a life or being the agent of its restoration. This is not a tragic choice, and does not pretend to be. It is a way to lure you deeper into the gameworld’s brutal ethos.
That you can hurt your buddies at all runs counter to the way most shooters deal with friendly characters, who are either magically immune to your bullets or whose death by your hand results in instant mission failure. On this point Hocking grew animated: “I guarantee that the first time you went into one of those interactive scenes in
Half-Life
, where you had your gun in your hand and were able to point it at Alyx, the first thing you did was line her up and shoot her in the head. And it
didn’t do anything
. It fired, and you lost your ammo, but the bullet wasn’t there. And then for the rest of the game you never questioned it. All we did was say, ‘Okay,
what if you can shoot that person? What happens if this dude shows up to save your life and you turn around and pop him in the forehead? What does that mean?’”
With some sorrow I admitted to Hocking that I did not register my buddies’ passing quite as viscerally as he intended—and I shot a lot of them. Some final emotional tumbler refused to fall into place. Whether this was because the buddies are horrible people, or because
Far Cry 2
forgoes the clumsy (but possibly necessary) means of characterization found in other games, I was not sure. Hocking admitted the moment “didn’t work as well as we hoped,” and attributed it to, among other things, how “wooden” the buddies are during interaction. This would mean that my failure to be moved had more to do with the current capability of the video game than
Far Cry 2
’s failure to realize its vision. Possibly it was both.
Just as possibly, Hocking said, it was neither. “I always assume minor technical problem X prevented us from achieving perfection. I always think,
If we just solved X, we would have succeeded in everything beyond X
. But you don’t actually know what is behind X. The wall behind X might be impassable.” He went on to agree with the most common complaint lodged against
Far Cry 2:
Only rarely do you have the faintest fucking clue as to what, narratively, is going on. You have your buddies, but they are as fickle and unforthcoming as house cats, and your interaction with them is fleeting. On top of that, you are working for two different militia factions simultaneously, which neither appears to mind. (They also prepay you for your work, which resembles no merc protocol of which I am aware.) For long stretches of the game you do not know who is related to whom or how or why anyone happens to be doing what they are doing.
“That stuff,” Hocking said, “is being tracked, but it’s all just a bunch of invisible matrices that aren’t exposed to the player. It
would have been in our interest to make the game more about the aggregate relationships of all the people and expose who likes who and who dislikes who—making clear to the player that all of these people are interconnected.” A less formally adventurous game would have provided such information in typical video-game fashion: either artificially, such as a chart with the faces of the various characters beside mood-indicating glyphs, or with the marginal dynamism of allowing the gamer to find some miraculously thorough memo. Hocking could not bring himself to resort to such conventions.
I asked him, “So how
do
you reveal that information?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s the question. And the problem.”
Like approximately everyone else on Planet Earth, Hocking writes a blog. His most famous and impassioned post, “Ludonarrative Dissonance in
BioShock,”
appeared in late 2007. Although Hocking opens the post by assuring his readers that
BioShock
is an indisputably great game, he says that, as a game designer, he is unable to overlook its central failure.
BioShock
invites “us to ask important and compelling questions,” Hocking writes, but the answers it provides “are confused, frustrating, deceptive and unsatisfactory.”