I sit, high above this city, eating a magnificent burrito and contemplating the year gone by. 2012, once an impossible, science fiction dream, is now collapsing into the past - it's glittering, futuristic name destined for out of date calendars and budget CD compilations; the subject of melancholy regret for the time we were younger, and had hair. It's off, like every other year, into collective memory and the spines of unfinished diaries. Before it slips into history, though, let me take a little time to pay my respects.
2012 has been a year of great change, for your handsome though occasionally inebriated narrator. By far the most striking change, and the one that is most fun to tell people, is the shift in my working conditions that means I now get to spend most of my time playing video games and telling others about how awesome it is. Yes, it turns out that pretty-much-watching-TV-for-a-living was still too difficult for my lazy and decadent soul and I was forced to push deeper into the abyss, to a place where I might spend an evening attacking a horde of zombies with a chainsaw wielding cheerleader and justifiably call it 'research'. When I tell people I'm teaching games design they find it hard to comprehend. "That's not a thing,' they say, incorrectly. Of course it's a thing. Everything is a thing you idiot. It's just that my thing annoys you, because it sounds fun, while you've probably chosen to do something worthy and dull with your life like be a doctor or manage a company.
"But I work really hard!" they protest. "I do a significant, difficult job that comes with incredible stress and little reward! All you do is toss around on computer games!"
"Your job sounds awful!" I shout, laughing and spilling wine everywhere. "Mine is awesome." And I am correct.
Video games are like everything else - 90% of them aren't very good, some of them are quite a lot of fun and once in a while you find one that makes you love it like you've never really even loved a human being. One, in particular, made me very happy this year, and so it become the first of my great pleasures of 2012.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
You know the story of the emperor who dreamed he was a butterfly, and then woke up wondering if he was, in fact, a butterfly dreaming about being an emperor? Well, that's how this game made me feel. So beautiful is the world of Deus Ex, in it colours, its music, its texture and shape, so beautiful is this world that I longed to be in it whenever I was away. Real life offered poor substitutes for its Blade Runner skyscapes and smooth, low lit interiors. On mundane Saturdays I would stand in the shops, gazing at the air vents, wondering if I could shimmy through it to assassinate whoever was upstairs. When I entered a room I wanted to roll and dive behind the nearest cover, all the better to sneak about knocking its occupants unconscious.
Deus Ex offers a gorgeous, intricate, believable world full of plentiful opportunities for espionage and mayhem. As my cybernetic alter ego stalked its futuristic streets, searching for clues to the various conspiracies that drive the story, I found myself enthralled by the freedom given me to play the game however I liked. It was quite possible, for example, to charge ahead firing guns wildly into the faces of delightfully terrified passers by, and this did allow for a certain visceral thrill. Some of them cowered and wept, allowing me to indulge in not-unhealthy-at-all cathartic roleplay in the comfort of my living room. "Look into the gun barrel, Mrs Robinshaw from Middle School! Look into the barrel, and tell me again that my cheese scones are dry and tasteless! DO IT!" Blam! Blam! Blam! Death to Mrs Robinshaw. Or, at least, the computer controlled civilian who was unwittingly standing in for her.
It was, however, far more satisfying to creep around in the shadows, observing the patrol patterns of guards and plotting a series of Michael Myers-like abductions, swooping in, knocking the guards out and dragging their bodies behind a crate before their mates came back. This bit did amuse me quite a bit. After a while you'd have a solitary guard, pacing up and down, evidently unconcerned that six of his squad mates had knocked off early without telling him. I'd create a little narrative for him in my head, where his deep seated insecurities were tipped over the edge by the certainty that all his so-called friends had gone to Nandos without inviting him. I imagined him getting home that night and taking his frustrations out on the wife and kids. He would sit alone, nursing a whisky, going through the conversation he'd have next time he saw his treacherous workmates, telling them just what he thought of them, and their cliquey bloody behaviour, all the while unaware that his friends were, in fact, laying unconscious in an artful heap, victim to my desire to smack people round the back of the head.
It is the reality of Deus Ex's world, in fact, that really drove my fascination with the game. You could overhear characters chatting about what they were going to do later, explore their apartments and read their emails. In one instance the little details of the game actually changed how I played. I was creeping around a police station looking for clues, scuttling through air vents and avoiding security cameras, and I came across this one guy working at his desk, his back to me. Desperate to peek at the no-doubt secret and revealing files on his computer, I crept up behind him to knock the guy out. But, because I am crap, he heard me, spun round, started to shout out. Without thinking I shot the guy in the forehead. Didn't even have time to pretend he was John Dyson who bullied me when I was ten. Just shot him.
I scampered over to look on his computer, scanning hungrily through the files for clues and secrets. All I could find, though, was an email from his wife, delighted that their son could come home for Christmas, telling him how exciting it was going to be for them all to be together for the holidays, telling him how much she loved him. His name was Andy.
Bollocks. I looked from the email to the cop, slumped at my feet, computer generated blood pooling around his head. This, I concluded, was going to ruin Christmas. I flicked back to the game menu screen, hit load and restarted from an earlier point in the game. Now way was I going to have that kind of guilt going on in my head. Andy could live, and have his Christmas.
The fact that a video game could elicit feelings of remorse and guilt is rarely reported - buried beneath the hyperbolic shoutings of those inclined towards moral panic. Yes, it's also fun to surprise a group of soldiers by hurling a fridge at them from a balcony (I did this a lot), but it's also quite the experience to kill a man and feel for the consequences of your actions. There's a lot more going on in Deus Ex - the nature of humanity, the artifice of broadcast media, the nature of social control - but I will remember the game for the day I killed a man who did not exist, and felt so sad about it I changed my ways.
See you next time, for more of the winners and losers of 2012. Have you made the list? Find out soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment