The sound of silence

If games are their gameplay, then the essence of the first person shooter genre is noise and violence. It's things happening, multiple threats coming from opposite directions, a player who is required to think and adapt to a rapidly evolving situation in real time.

Half-Life 2 is really rather unique in this respect, even as an entry in its own franchise. Not many first person shooters are confident enough to let players take a step back and drink in the silence every now and then. To allow them to stand alone on a clifftop and just do nothing, taking in the stark vista of the abandoned surroundings until they are ready to press on. This stands in contrast to a number of more modern shooter games where the noise, action and violence is omnipresent to the point of being numbing.

The examples that spring to mind for me occur primarily in the vehicular chapters “Water Hazard” and “Highway 17”, but I don’t think it’s especially specific to the road trip-style vignette gameplay that these sections engender. Think of the section where you battle it out with that carpet-bombing attack chopper in the lagoon just before Black Mesa East. After ten minutes of intense combat, adrenaline, concentration, there’s a thrilling rush of exhilaration as you watch the bloody thing spiral out of the sky in flames to land in pieces at your feet, the stinger music providing a sudden spike of dramatic tension and relief.

Then comes a brief instant of confusion. For those past ten minutes you had a single-minded purpose in the game: you knew without question what you had to do: escape from and/or preferably destroy the most immediate threat i.e. the chopper. But now, for just a split second, you’re unsure of what to do next.

And in that moment, that’s when the game’s peculiar silence takes on a life its own. You realise where you are, the sight of the setting sun over the lake dawns on you (no pun intended), and it compels you to stop and marvel at this strange oasis of picturesque beauty hidden just on the outskirts of technocratic dystopia. Barrels bobbing in the water look like lifebuoys, and stone monoliths create long shadows on the surface. There's a chirp of evening crickets coming from some unidentifiable source (crickets, presumably, or perhaps someone making cricket noises) In this light, Half-Life 2’s crumbling post apocalyptic earthscape takes on a weird sense of peace.

 

The fact that it’s placed immediately after a balls-to-the-wall action sequence is not accidental either. The player has a chance to catch their breath, remember why they are here and proceed at their own pace (although sometime today would be nice, I’m sure)

Highway 17 uses silence a tad more liberally and not in any so memorable set-pieces; it’s more in the creaking of an old boat-shack door, a tyre swinging from a tree, the chilly wind blowing over the cliffs, the vastness of the seascape that remind you just how alone you are. Even the Combine patrols encountered at regular intervals seem like quaint anomalies rather than the symbols of all-powerful authority over this Hebridean landscape.

The absence of any soundtrack is crucial to these moments. It creates an immersiveness that is impossible to fake, one which is further authenticated by the lack of characterisation of the player character (G. Freeman esq, this guy). The seemingly natural progression of time, the sky darkening as day turns to night and vice-versa, is similarly a key component here.

What moments of silence such as these achieve, in a functional sense, is to remind us that the essence of this game is more than the noise and violence of its core gameplay elements. We are more than just players; at another level, we are participants in a fully-realised fictional drama, and beyond that, we inhabit a fully realised fictional world where we have the freedom to do as we will, to sod the hero's journey and go dune-buggy joyriding squashing antlions till judgement day if we so choose.

Half-Life 2 is, in its own way, a uniquely lonely game. (Yes, I get that may possibly be related to a significant chunk of its target market being perceived as possessing minimal to borderline functional social skills) But a starkly beautiful one, too. I’ve yet to see any subsequent entries in the genre, even those which are self-touted as “post-apocalyptic” that have quite managed to replicate the same effect.

No doubt there are plenty of recent shooters out there with technically more impressive visuals which ooze atmosphere (dammit, I thought I'd get through this spiel without making a single use of that word) in every singular facet of their art design. But Half-Life 2's silence is all its own. It's in the uncanny strangeness of the emptiness of this world, which hits you all at once when you least expect it. It's of a type that players will seek out voluntarily rather than having it bludgeoned into them at the end of a Combine stun-stick.

Ok, I’m done licking Valve’s boots now, but you get the point. It’s still a bloody well-made game in terms of art direction, even when the Source engine is going on seven candles on its birthday cake (which is not a lie).

Oh, and it was Halloween last night. Probably should make some mention of that. When I snap my fingers you will awaken and re-read this article all over again, except this time it will be scary. Blah.

Let’s go back, back….

Does anyone remember Quake? I’m talking about the original, bunny-hop-around-medieval castles obliterating Lovecraftian horrors-with-a-nailgun-that-should-really-only-function-when-pressed-flush-to-a-flat-surface-due-to-manufacturer-safety-regulations-seminal ID Software first person shooter. It’s been somewhat obscured in collective gaming memory by its more conventional hulking space marines vs. ugly mutant bodybuilder aliens succession of sequels, but you can still grab it off Steam for 10 bucks. Play it, and as you do so, marvel to yourself: this is what shooters used to be.

All the seemingly intrinsic mechanics we take for granted as part of the genre today are unknown to this beast. Cover-based combat, regenerating health, evil PMC’s featuring as the excuse to throw wave after wave of human cannon fodder into successive linear corridors of conveniently placed debris, barbed wire, broken down tanks or crashed jam donut vans, none of them has any business being at this shindig. It’s a fascinating meld of 3D puzzle platforming, dodging traps a la Indiana Jones (I refuse to use the words “tomb” or “raider”), fast paced combat against otherworldly monsters and rudimentary survival horror. Visually it’s oozing with atmosphere, with advanced (for the time) lighting sources that are actually quite effective in complementing the recurring dark and demonic imagery throughout.

Yet it offers a very different kind of fear to that we encounter in many games today. Not that horror is its strongest suit; in comparison to psychological mindfuckery such as that transpiring in Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Quake’s scares seem somewhat tame. And there’s no plot beyond a very basic, “you have four runes to collect and there are lots of nasty things standing in your way,” blurb.

But what Quake evokes quite well is the sudden, visceral feeling of fighting for your life. This is a true relic from the old days of gaming, where players weren’t babied around. Completion is certainly achievable, but Nightmare difficulty means exactly that. Frustration and endless reloads will comprise a major part of your playtime. On the topic of which, quicksave is conspicuously absent leaving only a hastily scrawled explanatory note on the kitchen benchtop, tearfully apologising by way of the fact that it hasn’t been invented yet, which I suppose is a somewhat more reasonable excuse than saying you had to go home to feed the cat. All saves and reloads must be done through the pause menu, the comparatively lengthy process of which naturally discourages the use of the save function altogether. As a result, when you do manage to come out of a particularly trying battle by only the skin of your teeth, there’s a genuine sense of satisfaction. Your character is surprisingly agile for a pre-noughties shooter, so learning to move and shoot while maintaining environmental awareness are the skills that will allow you to survive. This lends itself to fast-paced gameplay that hurls you unsuspectingly from one threat to another in quick succession, barely giving the player time to breathe in between. 

And coming face to face with a mighty Dimensional Shambler or a pack of Fiends lurking in the shadows out of sight can be genuinely unnerving, as can running down a corridor toward a tantalizingly placed Quad Damage powerup only to have the floor open beneath your feet and drop you into a murky dungeon full of things with claws and teeth and filthy hygiene habits. Whenever this happened to me I’m sure that somewhere, an old ID level design veteran was chuckling evilly.

It all adds up to a game environment where between the oppressive atmosphere, truly tough enemies and old-fashioned adventure-serial crypt-pinching trickery, you rarely if ever feel completely at ease. And this was 2011 me playing. I can’t imagine what a splash (damage, natch) it must have made back in 1996, with its full 3D environments and immersive lighting. I first remember playing this game when I was 8 years old at a department store, hogging the demonstration computers they had set up and thinking what a thrill it was to be playing an MA-15 rated game chock full of zombies that exploded into clouds of gory gibs and warped mutant spider camels with human heads and serious dental problems. Come to think of it, that might explain a great deal about why I turned out the way I did today. Um, yes. Moving on.

Perhaps the greatest compliment I can bestow upon Quake is that it harks back to a time when first person games still held promise as a genre with real creative potential for the medium. All these modern checkboxes of “realistic” real-life-conflict-based “tactical” shooters filled with painstakingly rendered human opponents and plots lifted straight from Hollywood blockbusters by people with scriptwriting degrees, of which the genre has been progressively channelled into ticking off on a mandatory list of creativity-killing selling points, only serve to infantilize and dumb down first person-action and indeed gaming as a whole. This is a proverbial shipping container we need to think outside of if we’re ever to fully realize the tremendous immersive and story-telling potential of first person games more generally. With that goal firmly in mind, it’s fun to look back at old shooters like Quake and remember that developers, too, were once able to just let their imagination (and their rockets) fly.

I would have written "Myst-ified" here, but then I would have been summarily condemned to the ninth circle of portmanteau hell

On the subject of major game franchises that we haven’t heard so much as a blip on the sonar system from recently, the Myst franchise is a notably now-deceased example that managed to spawn four bratty offspring, a spin-off and a corresponding cult MMO before it flopped. Alright, point of clarification: the sequels weren’t bad. Actually, they were quite good, in fact, some going so far as to surpass the quality and timeless charm of the original. I’ve been trying to map out a point of analysis for the recurring formula of this game series for a short while now, and I think I’ve finally arrived at one.

What Myst, all its sequels and spin-offs (i.e. referring to Uru, Uru Live) have in common is that they rely on a primarily visual reward system. In return for exploring, completing puzzles and learning more about the story and characters, the player is allowed to advance further and thus behold the latest pretty techno-surrealistic vista the art department has managed to conjure out of its collective sleeve.

It’s by no means unique in this respect. Early 3D platform games such as Super Mario 64 or Banjo Kazooie spring to mind as other examples that have operated using a similar mechanic. The latter even directly parodies this fact by showing the player incomplete paintings of worlds that must be filled in using “jigsaw pieces”, the game’s chief currency in trade, to unlock the entryway to that world.

Travelling back even further down the poetic oak-tree lined boulevard of memory lane we encounter the classic retro side-scroller 2D platformers blocking our paths like a police cordon around a crime scene. Because of the limitations of the technology and 2D perspective you could only display a percentage of the game world limited to the size of your monitor at a time, and the camera moved as your character did, so moving your character forward was directly linked to revealing more of the game environment. Spatial progress and visual gratification were, in this genre, completely synonymous. Therefore, many in-game obstacles were geared toward actually literally impeding the player’s physical progress, as opposed to more abstract and complex challenges observable in later 3D platformer titles (i.e. collecting parts of a dismantled space ship in preparation for the end-game confrontation in Jet Force Gemini).

This is why games with essentially (sometimes necessarily) repetitive or bland aesthetic environments usually focus on an alternative reward system for exploration and advancement. Consider some examples of non-visual player reward systems:

• Early FPS’s with low graphical capabilities: Wolfenstein, Doom etc: reward is the novelty of the introduction of new gameplay mechanics (i.e. use of new weapons, enemies etc) 
• Action RPG’s: Diablo, World of Warcraft: the game is player character-centric; therefore “levelling up” of one’s character is the reward as it records effort and time spent through a numerical syntax. I.e. the player character itself becomes a work in progress and a motivating factor for continuing play.
• First-person horror thrillers: F.E.A.R, Cryostasis, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Doom 3: reward is emotional stimuli i.e. the momentary cinematic shock and awe of the paranormal encounter.

Myst and its progeny are notable, however, for taking the visual reward system to its logical extreme. More specifically, here it has become a self-consciously parodied trope that is an integral part of the game world and backstory. This occurs through the plot device of “linking books” that are the only means for players to travel to and from in-game levels (Ages). In the Myst lore, Ages must be “written” by authors (read: surrogate level designers). Learning to write Ages is a closely guarded art which takes years to master. Each Age has a distinct atmosphere bearing the mark of its creator, comprised by any number of things: from a uniform colour palette, use of recurring geometric shapes, methodological consistency of puzzles, polarisation toward technocracy or the pastoral, and more often than not corresponding textural identities in the soundtrack vis-à-vis unusual or unique instrumentation.

Myst is unique in that it represents the characterisation of environment. This is a game where levels are given veritable personalities in their own right. When players achieve the objective of unlocking an Age by locating or activating the Linking Book, they are motivated by the promise of a unique aesthetic reality at least as much as that of discovering new plot details or the simple sense of achievement generated by the completion of an intellectually challenging task.

Here the game posits entire worlds as singular acts of authorial self-indulgence. Myst’s “Ages” are self-contained works of art within a single product. The basis for this probably lies in the series’ origins; Myst was at the cutting edge of 3D rendering technology when the original game was released back in 1993, and so the pressure of expectation has weighed like a poorly designed diving helmet on each subsequent entry in the pantheon to push the envelope in terms of graphical sophistication. And even though the developers have concurrently fleshed out the Myst universe and given it a sense of identity beyond that of a glorified tech demo, there continues to be this lingering association that hangs around the series as being a river barge for a comfortable tourist ride up the Amazon of fantastically surreal extraterrestrial worlds. But in this regard, it’s an interesting example of a game franchise that taps an often marginalised or underplayed function of games in general – transporting us to simulations of places we could never actually visit IRL, rendered with astonishing depth and attention to detail.