Authors: Tom Bissell
Playing video games is not quite like this. The surrender is always partial. You get control and are controlled. Games are patently aware of you and have a physical dimension unlike any other form of popular entertainment. On top of that, many require a marathon runner’s stamina: Certain console games can take as many as forty hours to complete, and, unlike books, you cannot bring them along for enjoyment during mass-transit dead time. (Rarely has wide-ranging familiarity with a medium so transparently privileged the un-and underemployed.) Even though you may be granted lunar influence over a game’s narrative tides, the fact that there is any narrative at all reminds you that a presiding intelligence exists within the game along with you, and it is this sensation that invites the otherwise unworkable comparisons between games and other forms of narrative art.
Yes, as difficult as it sometimes is to believe, games have authors, however diminutive an aura he or she (or, frequently, they) might exude. What often strikes me whenever I am playing a game is how glad I am of that hovering authorial presence. Although I enjoy the freedom of games, I also appreciate the
remindful crack of the narrative whip—to seek entertainment is to seek that whip—and the mixture of the two is what makes games such a seductive, appealingly dyadic form of entertainment. A video game whose outcomeless narrative is wholly determined by my actions—as in, say,
World of Warcraft
, which is less a video game than a digital board game, and which game I very much dislike—would elevate me into a position of accidental authorship I do not covet and render the game itself a chilly collation of behavior trees and algorithms. I
want
to be told a story—albeit one I happen to be part of and can affect, even if in small ways. If I wanted to
tell
a story, I would not be playing video games.
A noisy group of video-game critics and theoreticians laments the rise of story in games. Games, in one version of this view, are best exemplified as total play, wherein the player is an immaterial demiurge and the only “narrative” is what is anecdotally generated during play.
(Tetris
would be the best example of this sort of game.) My suspicion is that this lament comes less from frustration with story qua story than it does from the narrative butterfingers on outstanding display in the vast majority of contemporary video games. I share that frustration. I also love being the agent of chaos in the video-game world. What I want from games—a control as certain and seamless as the means by which I am being controlled—may be impossible, and I am back to where I began. Reload.
The purpose story serves in video games is complicated, then. Less complicated is how many gamers view story. For many gamers (and, by all evidence, game designers), story is largely a matter of accumulation. The more
explanation
there is, the thought appears to go, the more
story
has been generated. This would be a profound misunderstanding of story for any form of narrative art, but it has hobbled the otherwise high creative
achievement of any number of games. Frequently in work with any degree of genre loyalty—this would include the vast majority of video games—the more explicit the story becomes, the more silly it will suddenly seem. (Let us call this the Midi-chlorian Error.) The best science fiction is usually densely realistic in quotidian detail but evocatively vague about the bigger questions. Tolkien is all but ruined for me whenever I make the mistake of perusing the Anglo-Saxon Talmudisms of his various appendices: “Among the Eldar the Alphabet of Daeron did not develop true cursive forms”—kill me, please, now—“since for writing the Elves adopted the Fëanorian letters.” As for horror films, the moment I learned Freddy Krueger was “the bastard son of a thousand maniacs” was also the final moment I could envision him without spontaneously laughing. The impulse to
explain
is the Achilles’ heel of all genre work, and the most sophisticated artists within every genre know better than to expose their worlds to the sharp knife of intellection.
A good example of a game that does not make that mistake is Valve’s cooperative first-person shooter
Left 4 Dead
, which offers yet another vision of zombie apocalypse. Unlike the
Resident Evil
series, which goes to great narrative pains to explain what is happening and why (culminating in one of the most ridiculous moments in video-game history, when the hero of
Resident Evil 4
discovers an enemy document helpfully titled
OUR PLAN),
Left 4 Dead
abandons every rational pretext and drops you and three other characters into the middle of undead anarchy. Almost nothing is explained; the little characterization there is comes in tantalizing dribs; and all that is expected is survival, which is possible only by constantly working together with your fellow gamers: covering them while they reload, helping them up when they are knocked down, and saving them when they are trapped in the eye of a zombie hurricane.
Left 4 Dead
is one of the most well-designed
and explosively entertaining games ever made. While its purpose is incontinent terror, its point is that teamwork is, by definition, a matter of compulsion, not choice.
Left 4 Dead
’s designer, Michael Booth, had the maturity to grasp the power that narrative minimalism would provide his game. The speedy and acrobatic zombies of
Left 4 Dead
have no plan more refined than kicking you to death and sucking the marrow from your femur. As a scenario, it is as ridiculous as any forged by the Vulcans of video-game conceit, and yet, from start to finish,
Left 4 Dead
is as freefallingly unfamiliar and viscerally convincing as the worst dream you have ever had.
Capturing what playing
Left 4 Dead
feels like is not easy. But set
Left 4 Dead
to its highest difficulty level, recruit three of its best players you can find, push your way through one of the game’s four scenarios, and make no mistake: What will go down will be so emotionally grueling, it will feel as though you have spent an hour playing something like full-contact psychic football. The end of the game, however it turns out, will feel epic to no one who did not take part in it, but those who did take part will feel as though they have marched, together, through a gauntlet of the damned.
The game’s refusal to explore the who, what, why, or how of its zombie citizenry is emblematic of the unusually austere approach to narrative in many Valve games, which the company may not have invented but has certainly come close to perfecting. The four controllable characters in
Left 4 Dead
are all common video-game types: the girl, the black guy, the biker, the elderly Vietnam vet. They are not, however, blank canvases. (I play as—in order of preference—the girl, the black guy, and the biker. I absolutely refuse to play as the Vietnam vet. For some reason I absolutely hate the guy. Tactics that failed in the jungles and swamps of the Mekong Delta have no place against an army of the undead.) The object of the game is to fight your way through scenarios that are
themselves divided into five stages, all of which, but for the scenarios’ finales, conclude with the players’ slamming shut a safe house’s thick red metal door. The problem, of course, is that between these safe houses are devastated locales (a high-rise hospital, a train yard, an airport, a traffic tunnel, among others) filled with literally thousands of zombies looking to attack you—and even, sometimes, one another. (You want a weird video-game experience? Creep around a corner in the sewers adjacent to the hospital, say, and you might find, to your fascinated horror, a couple of unawares zombies casually
beating each other up.)
These zombies attack singly or in groups or in what the game calls “the horde.” Standing in the middle of a darkened city street while a horde of zombies pours up out of a subway station and clamors over and around parked cars to get to you is about as unnerving as video games get. And these are just the rank-and-file zombies. The far more perilous “special infected” is where
Left 4 Dead
begins to glitter.
These special infected come in five nightmare flavors: the Hunter (a hoodied zombie who pounces upon and then tears into his prey, rendering the pouncee helpless until a friend comes along to shoot or push the Hunter off); the Smoker (a coughing, shambolic, elastically tongued zombie who operates much like a sniper, extending his tongue to pluck survivors from the pack); the Boomer (an obese and suppurating slob zombie who is as fragile and explosive as a Pinto but whose vomit and bile attract the dreaded horde, and whose vomit, on top of that, is
blinding
, so that during a well-coordinated attack you cannot see the Hunter tearing to pieces your screaming friend right in front of you); the Tank (as advertised, a steroidally distended zombie as tough as an armored car, but who mercifully appears only a few times a game); and, finally, the Witch (a crying lost-soul zombie who seems the very picture of helplessness, until she is startled by a flashlight or
loud noise, upon which she uses her razored manicure to instantly kill the survivor who startled her, and whom you must try to sneak past, and who is as upsetting and inspired a video-game nemesis as any). What is so brilliant about these special infected is the way they tap into distinct types of emotional unease. For the Hunter it is shock and for the Smoker helplessness. For the Boomer it is panic and for the Tank flight. For the Witch it is a strange combination of alarm and paranoia and blame. These emotions, aroused as they are alongside other, living gamers, are part of what makes a game with no traditional narrative to speak of such a dynamically fertile experience to look back on.
Left 4 Dead
creates, within a structure that is formally storyless but highly controlled, a game that feels to those playing it as harrowingly and expertly designed as a first-rate horror film.
Credit here is due to the so-called AI Director that Valve designed specifically for
Left 4 Dead
. It is, most basically, a piece of in-game computation that monitors the gamers, judges their performance, and complicates things as it deems advisable. If things are going really swimmingly for the survivors, why not inflict upon them a Tank? If the survivors are hurting, why not drop in an extra health pack? The AI Director, which could not work in a game with an inflexible narrative structure, also ensures that the survivors are never attacked in the same place by the same number of enemies. The revelatory quality of this innovation cannot be overstated. Gamers often learn how to master a game by memorization, but
Left 4 Dead
is impossible to master in this way. All one can do is hone strategies, which, especially on the highest difficulty level, have a toothpick-house fragility.
You do not get a delivered narrative in
Left 4 Dead
. What you get is a series of found narratives. How do these found narratives in
Left 4 Dead
work, and what gives them their resonance? Well, as it happens, I have a
Left 4 Dead
story and it occurred while playing
the game’s versus mode, in which two human teams (one survivor, one zombie) have at each other. Playing against human-controlled special infected takes the robotically inflicted havoc of the AI Director and turns it into something far more wonderfully and personally vicious. In versus mode, the object is to reach the safe house with as many living survivors as possible. The more survivors that make it, the more points your team receives. One night, at the end of the first stage of the “Dead Air” campaign, I and three fellow survivors (two of whom were friends, one of whom had just jumped in) had come to realize that we were up against a vilely gifted and absolutely devastating team of
Left 4 Dead
tacticians—the Hannibal, Napoleon, Crazy Horse, and Patton of zombies. They attacked with insurgent coordination and to maximum damage, and it was only our own skill that had managed to hold them off as long as we had. By the time the first-stage safe house came into view, we—four extraordinarily good
Left 4 Dead
veterans—were limping, hobbled, and completely freaked out. Then, another coordinated attack, led by the Boomer puking on us, blinding us, and summoning the horde. While we staggered around, the Smoker took hold of one friend while a Hunter pounced on another. The other remaining survivor and I decided to break for the safe house door. Before getting there my remaining friend was pounced on by yet another Hunter. Although I freed him, I was still mostly blind, and my friend, despite having been released, was under assault by at least a dozen rapacious normal zombies. Deciding that one of us making it was better than none of us making it, I stepped inside the safe house and closed the door. Outside, the friend I had left behind managed to fight his way out of the horde and kill the Smoker and Hunter ripping apart the other survivors, who were now incapacitated, incapable of getting up without help, and quickly bleeding out, which is to say, dying. Unfortunately, the heroic friend was himself incapacitated
while doing this. While my three downed friends could shoot their sidearms, they could not rise. They needed me for that. In a minute or so, they would be dead, and from the shelter of the safe house I watched their health bars steadily drain away. Meanwhile, the opposing team had begun to respawn. A lone survivor against even two special infected opponents would stand no chance, as all it would take to end the round would be a Hunter or Smoker incapacitating me. So I stayed put. Better one of us than none of us.
My downed friends failed to see it this way. Over my headphones, they vigorously questioned my courage, my manhood, the ability of my lone female survivor to repopulate the human world on her own, and my understanding of deontological ethics. On the other side of the safe house door, I could hear the Boomer belching, farting, and waiting for me to come out. “You dick!” one of my friends called out. He had just finished bleeding out, a skull appearing beside his onscreen name. My remaining friends were now seconds away from the same fate. I looked within, did not like what I saw, steeled myself, and fired several shotgun rounds through the door, safely killing the Boomer (who it must be said behaved with uncharacteristic carelessness). When I opened the door I saw a Hunter a few feet away, in the corner, waiting to pounce, but I killed him before moving out of the safe room and into the street. The second Hunter was better prepared, but with miraculous good luck I managed to blast him out of the air in mid-pounce. I quickly helped up the first survivor and together we made it out to the final remaining survivor, who was down to his last droplets of virtual existence. While I helped up the final survivor, my friend, covering me, eliminated the lurking Smoker, and with glad cries the three of us made it back into the safe house. At great personal risk, and out of real shame, I had rescued two of my three friends and in the process outfaced against all
odds one of the best
Left 4 Dead
teams I had and have ever played against. I realized, then, vividly, that
Left 4 Dead
offered a rare example in which a game’s theme (cooperation) was also what was encouraged within the actual flow of gameplay.