It will cost you a piece of yourself. It will cost nothing compared to everything you will save.
Gen. Shepherd’s briefing before “No Russian,” the airport massacre level, in Modern Warfare 2

The day after I finished the Modern Warfare 2 campaign, I went to move my car and ended up driving around Baltimore, listening to the entirety of President Obama’s eulogy at the Fort Hood memorial service. The most moving part came towards the end, when he named each victim and read short biographical anecdotes about them—their interests, their goals, their commitments. There is no spectacle, within the collective tragedy, when we zoom into the scene—only the value, honor, and decency of the individual remains, which are values Quintin Smith feels the ­__Call of Duty__ series abandoned with the Modern Warfare iteration. He writes, “I’m just very aware right now that the first Call of Duty promised an emotional depth to this series, and if all sight of that wasn’t lost when they chose to set footage of men dying to an Eminem single, it currently seems very distant.”

The series has always walked the line between war porn and tribute; and the series has marginally stuck to the latter. By making death vicious and sudden, Infinity Ward made players aware of what it meant to be a soldier on the field. The early iterations used set pieces such as Stalingrad or The Battle for Hill 400 to show you the improbability of survival—one minute you’re sniping a Nazi rush to take the hill, next minute you’re on the ground, your vision fading. The entirety of the experience “had the very important side effect of popping the top of your head off and making you realize that, holy s***, men actually did this.”. Therein lay the soul of the game—in the game’s ability to create an immersion and connection between the player and history on a visceral scale.

But running through the entire series and, most prominently in the Modern Warfare iteration, is a tendency to trivialize the cost of war by reducing it to spectacle. And when you reduce reality in such a way, you make it unreal. And I believe that anything that makes human pain and suffering unreal is poisonous.

The fun of the first Modern Warfare came from it being, as Jeff Cannata said it, “a Badass simulator.” Where death is your agent in the earlier games, you are now the agent of death. Human and global suffering is your entertainment. The first-person perspective complicates that issue even more. Reducing historical and global conflicts and misery so that they’re always about the player means ignoring the wider implications of the presented scenarios. When you die after a nuclear blast in Modern Warfare 1, it’s all about your death, while the annihilation of an entire city remains in the background.

The “No Russian” mission calls up similar problems. The day of the eulogy also being the birthday of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the level reminded me of this particular passage in Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut visits his World War II buddy to do research for a book about the Dresden firebombing, and to reminisce about their POW experience when their German captors made them dispose the corpses of German civilians after the attack. While they talk, the friend’s wife accuses Vonnegut of trying to write a book that sensationalizes war:

Then she turned to me, let me see how angry she was, and that the anger was for me. She had been talking to herself, so what she said was a fragment of a much larger conversation. “You were just babies then!” she said.

“What?” I said.

“You were just babies in the war—like the ones upstairs!”

I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.

“But you’re not going to write it that way, are you.” This wasn’t a question. It was an accusation.

“I—I don’t know,” I said.

“Well, I know,” she said. “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.”

So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn’t want her babies or anybody else’s babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.

However, I don’t think either the first or second Modern Warfare are entirely about distorting the realities of war. In a game committed to spectacle, the “No Russian” mission is one of the most honest and raw displays of forced witness—it is the moment where I’m no longer the player to the game, but a person aware of the suffering of others. We are, as citizens of the world, culpable by ignoring suffering or by our ignorance of it. The game has shown me the bodies; and the game has taken me beyond the news footage of the airport’s exterior with casualty numbers scrolling at the bottom of the television. There are no numbers here—there are only people, as real as the reaction the game draws from every player.

The two iterations have consistently had such moments of honesty and emotional authenticity, including the first-person nuclear death in Modern Warfare 1. The scene acknowledges that people see in each other’s death only their own—we are selfish, and the only way we accept the impact and meaning of death is if it happens to us. And the game’s perspective allows this to happen. When I’m a gunner riding through the streets of an Afghan city during the beginning of an insurgent attack—the bullets ricocheting off the vehicles, the sound of bullets going past my ears, and the location of the shooters hidden by the urban sprawl—I blindly spray my mini-gun into the neighborhood, not in cold blood or complete negligence, but because I want to survive. No news story, no witness account can ever make me simultaneously empathize with a soldier’s experience and grieve for the innocent lives caught in the fight on such a personal, visceral, and interactive scale.

Both games, as much as they create and contribute to some players’ glib perceptions of war, are also reflections on how America’s perception of war has changed. If Modern Warfare 1 was the first post 9-11 we’ll-put-a-boot-up-your-ass huzzah then Modern Warfare 2, with its labyrinthine (and borderline incomprehensible) plot of military brass betrayal, is the first post post-9-11 game of our disillusionment and fatigue. Where can we go and what can we learn, as citizens of the world and as players, from the bodies piled up on the ground?

One story that stuck with me after the Fort Hood eulogy was the story of the woman who didn’t realize she was shot in the back, because she had been so committed to dragging the injured to safety. After hearing the story, and the eulogy, I was compelled to play “No Russian” again—the Fort Hood massacre changed the context of the level from that of a disturbing simulation to an inadvertent and urgent meditation on a real life tragedy. The elevator door opened, and Makarov’s men opened fire on the first group of civilians waiting at a security line. When I made it up the stairs I noticed for the first time, amidst the panic and gunfire, a man in a maroon sweater dragging an injured man to safety. Oblivious of the approaching shooters, I watched as one of the shooters gunned them down. I, immediately, turned to my right and saw another surprise in the bookstore—a man crouched by the registry tending to a dying victim, despite one of Makarov’s men walking up to gun them down. I felt completely powerless as I watched their murder. Yet, having seen those moments of courage, I realized the massacre itself no longer dictated the mission. Now, only those acts of courage dictated my perception and memory of both massacres.

Looking to acts of courage and goodness as a way to cope with our sorrow has become a tired platitude. But I have to admit it’s a platitude I find hope and comfort in. Sorrow is a selfish and narcissistic trick of relief that it wasn’t you who died. What we feel can never compare to the real impact of the individual loss, because that loss is removed from us through words and images. What gives me hope is that any one of us has the capacity to act as selflessly as these people, both real and unreal.

There is courage in the scripted code. That is what I choose to see.

Clint Hocking is an award-winning designer, whose work on Splinter Cell and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory has cemented him as one of the most unique and intellectually rigorous voices in the industry. His most recent game, Far Cry 2, was both a critical and financial success for Ubisoft. Hocking currently works as a Creative Director at Ubisoft-Montreal and you can find his full bio on his blog.

Clint Hocking started off his Click Nothing Tour 2009 on Day 2 of the GameX Industry Summit with his new lecture titled The Territory is not the Map: Hyper Realism and the New Immersion Paradigm. As described by Hocking, the talk is “about changing notions of what immersion means in the context of social and cultural shift in the face of technological change and generational change.”

The talk focused on the competing approaches to creating immersion between Generation X and Generation Y developers. While Generation X games create content-based immersion using traditional narrative tools (such as story, characters, etc.), Hocking says that the Generation Y model creates context-based immersion by focusing on the game’s framework. He believes that the generational shift, both in the development industry and the consumer population, means that Generation X developers will have to rethink their investment in the traditional model of content-based immersion.

Hocking was very generous with his time, and answered questions about his keynote address, Far Cry 2, and the ongoing ethical gaming debate.

KEYNOTE

You recently participated in an EDGE roundtable discussion about the relevance of authorship in games. Where do you think the traditional role of authorship you addressed in the EDGE roundtable is headed given the [Generation X to Generation Y] shift in the game industry?

I think that’s a big question, and I definitely don’t have the answer to that. I think that, again, a lot of what [my keynote] on what immersion in a game means has to do with things like story, and character, and universe creation and all of that stuff. I think that Generation X, in particular, and thus the industry in extension, has made those things very, very important because they are very important to [Generation X]—because that’s what [Generation X] was raised on.

The importance of those things is changing. I don’t want to say that it’s diminishing or that it’s going away. I think that it’s changing, and there’s this other level of authorship, if you want, which is the creation of the entire framework—[it’s] the creation of the context outside of the fiction. That’s becoming really important. And people who play games are becoming aware of it. They’re not aware of the cultural change that’s happening, [but] they are aware that those other things are important. I believe it’s going to de-emphasize the importance of having a really richly immersive story and scripted characters.

Games that allow you to escape and forget about the exterior world are always going to be popular, the same way films are always going to be popular or novels are always going to be popular. But, just because of the nature of what a games is, we’ve gotten to a point where we’re trying to almost deny the existence of the framework reality in which the game exists. And that’s not a sustainable model for the new audiences that are starting to appear.

During that roundtable you talked about Grand Theft Auto IV and the disconnect between how you felt as a player and how you were told to feel by the game. Were you addressing that as a failure of traditional authorship?

I don’t think that GTA IV ’s story and world and characters are a failure. Compared to your average TV show about the same thing, it’s on par, right? It’s as good as that stuff. The issue is that the stuff being embedded in the framework is so ludic and has so many things going on that there’s a conflict, at least for me anyways, between who I’m being told I am and the things I’m being told are important and the things that are, in fact, actually important to me as the player, right? If it’s important to me to find yet another pigeon or to do another stunt jump [then it’s], “Oh I didn’t see that stunt jump before, and I’m in the middle of this really important mission but I’m probably going to fail it anyway, so I might as well hit that jump while I’m here.” I mean, imagine if a character did that in a television show. Imagine if the bad guy was trying to chase down the guy who killed his cousin and was about to catch him and a truck pulled in the way and he went, “Fuck, that looks like a rad jump!” and just did a left and just jumped. [You’d] go “Dude you were just chasing someone! It was really important for the plot, this is the climax and you just went and did a rad jump—what the hell?” Yeah, actually, that would be a really great TV show (laughs).

You’ve talked in the past about how film, in its early stage, [borrowed heavily from] plays, and used that as an example of how each artistic medium has to find its own footing outside of the influence of other artistic mediums. This new Generation Y model almost sounds like your way of moving towards that goal. What to you is the purest state of what a game medium can be?

I think it’s fundamentally ludic. I think one of the main points I’m trying to make that I never said explicitly in the talk is that games fundamentally are something that you play WITH, not something that you play IN. I think we really have tried for too long to force them to be something that you play in, to try and get rid of the notion that the game itself is something that can be manipulated by the player.

But it can’t be gotten rid of. No matter how immersive a game is people WILL stop and play WITH it. They may switch back and forth between playing WITH it and playing IN it, but when that’s the case it’s always the case they are still playing WITH it. So I think we’re better off acknowledging that, and getting on with it. To me it almost feels like Generation X is ashamed of that. It’s like we need to make our games more immersive so people will start taking them more seriously and stop playing with them like they’re toys. And start playing IN them in these things that we have created. I think we should stop taking ourselves so seriously and let people play WITH [the games] the way they seem to want to.

How do you see social games or MMOG’s, where the play is purely contextual within a social setting, come into play [in regards to your keynote]?

Yeah, I think it’s critical. Again, I think it’s something that we’ve neglected too long. Even just looking at the console platforms [and] the comparative absence of cooperative play in any deep meaningful way compared to Facebook, what do you have, like a dozen [Xbox 360] games that can be really enjoyed in a cooperative way? And maybe two or three of those games are fundamentally about co-op, like Army of Two or Left 4 Dead? And even in those cases they are about co-op among very small groups. Compare that to Facebook where you have social play on the scale of hundreds and thousands of users – it’s much more distributed, it’s much lighter. The amount of person-to-person contact in a Facebook game is infinitesimal compared to the amount of person-to-person contact you have in Left 4 Dead. Shooting the tongue that’s wrapped around someone, and picking them up off the ground and healing them, you are not physically doing it to me but our avatars are doing it through direct high agency input, from me, that’s affecting you. That feels very very personal. You don’t have that level of connection in Facebook [games] but you have one ten thousandth of that [experience] with ten million people in Facebook. It’s a different model, and a different way of thinking about it. I think it’s very important for the future.

You seem optimistic about this generational shift. Do you have any concerns about this model?

(laughs) Just that I don’t understand it. I’m talking about it, and thinking about it, [because] I don’t get it. It’s a problem I’m thinking about all the time that I don’t know the answers to, that I don’t know the solutions, the why’s, and the what’s, and the how’s. I don’t know if anybody does. Probably some people do (laughs). [So], I think it’s really important that I wrestle with these problems and understand them, because this is the beginning of my obsolescence if I don’t kind of figure this stuff out. That’s what worries me.

FAR CRY 2

When you were setting Far Cry 2 in Africa, I, personally, felt extremely uncomfortable playing the game itself, because it’s something that’s happening now, it’s a [real world] problem, and I’m having a negative effect on that world. I haven’t felt that way about a game for a long time. Did you have any concerns placing the game in that kind of setting?

No, actually, we wanted to make people feel that way. One of the challenges of games is that those kinds of feelings are not part of our vocabulary. You can make a movie that’s scary, but you can’t make a car that is scary to drive. You’re just not allowed. It’s not permitted in the design vocabulary of what a car is allowed to be, that it would be terrifying to operate. There’s good reasons for that, because people can die and cars are dangerous and all that kinds of stuff.

Video games, [like films], are not dangerous except that they may give people ideas. But that’s a healthy kind of danger. So, we shouldn’t be making games, like cars, that shouldn’t be about certain things. I think games should be allowed to be about things that are disturbing, things that are uncomfortable, things that are frightening, things that make you question, you know, your own world view and perspective. If we’re not doing that then we’re not just neglecting a piece of our medium but we’re neglecting like 50% of it. Imagine if every movie had to be a musical comedy—that would suck. We like scary movies, and it’s okay that they’re scary, and that we feel weird and scared when we watch them. We like depressing political dramas about corruption and stuff like that to make us realize how fucking broke this real world is; and yet for some reason we only want games that are just sort of peppy, drively entertainment. I think we can do much better.

I understand that point, but what is the ultimate [value after] the initial effect of placing [the player] in that kind of situation? Not to make a moral or ethical dilemma out of the whole thing, but is there anything beyond than just that initial effect?

Well, it goes to the idea of dangerous ideas—it’s good to have dangerous ideas. I mean if people are playing a game like Far Cry [2] and they’re being disturbed about the political realities of the violence in Africa, [then] probably people need to be more disturbed about that than they currently are! There’s a billion fucking people who live there and they don’t have what we have here; and it is because guys with AK-47’s can pretty much do whatever the fuck they want a lot of the time. If I made someone uncomfortable… then good! (laughs)

The funny thing is that [the game and its play] are more immediate to me than what I see on the news.

Well yeah, for sure. It starts the conversation and it gets people thinking about it. We’re exhausted by all the horrible shit that goes on in the news all the time that we just don’t pay attention to it anymore. If this is a new way to talk about a problem that people have gotten very good at ignoring for a very long time, [then] that’s probably more than just a good thing—it’s probably a great thing. It puts [the problem] back into your mind in a different way.

This is something I’ve wanted to ask for a long time—what was the design decision behind limiting terrain exploration in Far Cry 2?

You mean like not allowing the player to go over different mountains?

A lot of those mountains seemed scalable to me, and given the [game’s focus on] dynamic play of the game I found that [restriction odd].

There were some technological constraints—obviously that was one part of it. But that wasn’t the reason. We actually didn’t want Far Cry 2 to be open like Oblivion or Fallout. We didn’t want the player to have complete free reign over the height map, because as a shooter we did want to channel the player through corridors, intermittently. So you would have large open areas to make decision about how to do it, corridors for chases, and sort of have little bit of planned encounters going on. So it would switch back and forth so it wouldn’t be just completely open all the time like Fallout is, for example. And even Fallout isn’t even completely open all the time. Sometimes when I get inside a building the doors are blocked in such a way that I have to go through [the building] like a linear level, but nobody complained about that. But for us, because it was the terrain or something… I don’t know. That bothers me. There is no question that we underestimated the strength of people’s expectations that they had toward being able to go anywhere in the terrain.

It’s probably better than the grocery carts blocking the doorway, and you go, “Oh, looks like I’m going another way now.”

It’s a good point. You see the grocery carts and you go, “ah, it’s a game.” They’re telling me I have to go that way, but when you see this very organic mountain that doesn’t look any different [than the] rocks and trees and bushes [at the bottom] and you shoot a rocket up into those trees and they still explode and catch fire and [then you think], “That’s part of the game—why can’t I go there?” You don’t understand the “why” the same way as you do when you see the pile of shopping carts in the stairwell. [You can’t go in there] because the game designer put carts in that stairwell, [as opposed to] I don’t know why I’m not allowed to go on top of that hill.

ETHICS IN GAMES

You recently engaged in an online debate with another developer, Manveer Heir, about ethical gaming. When you hear the words ethical game design, what are some of your larger concerns regarding that phrase?

What I’m concerned about is just the idea of “New Chocolate Covered Coco Puffs—with Ethics!” I’m concerned about an industry that’s going to make into bullet point features the idea of the ethical decision as though it’s something that adds game play value to your game and is also, somehow, socially responsible.

I just don’t think it is [that simple]. I’ve never encountered an ethical problem, which was cut and dry and had an interesting set of solutions [where] one of them was good, and one of them was evil, and one of them was neutral.

By their very definition, ethical decisions and moral life is unbelievably complicated. We’ve been talking about it for millennia and no one still has any answers. Or even for the simplest things. So turning those things into little game design challenges that make the game more clearly differentiate between black and white is sort of weird to me. And I’m not against doing it. I’m just against certain implementations of it, and against the sort of featurization of it as though it’s something that every game needs to have. […] It’s like the health food stamp on the box of cereal—in order to sell more copies you need this, but it actually doesn’t mean anything. In some ways it works against the things that it’s supposed to be proposing. Fundamentally morality and ethics is about having a life of self, and thinking about what your actions mean in consideration of all the complexities, right? But it’s not about being able to make choices to have more fun.