‘Videogame’ Is One Word

The following is another letter I recently sent to The Hatchet Job Show, wherein this time I take exception to one of the show’s regular participants criticising Fallout 3’s game mechanics, whilst citing Mass Effect (of all things) as somehow being markedly superior.

For the record – and you’ll likely guess this from the following paragraphs – I think Mass Effect is one of the more over-rated and over-attributed games of this generation; a thoroughly bland game with no more than beguiling production values and some above-average (by typical videogame standards) writing to its credit.

The following revolves around my recent over-extrapolation of Rockstar’s “zombie outbreak” announcement for GTA IV . Even though I was mistaken in my assumptions, the idea is something I thought would make for a fantastic game mode and so wanted to put down my thoughts using a basic narrative.

It is 5:23am on a hazy, cloudless morning.  The sun is beginning to come up and we watch the streets below us glow a predawn gold.  ‘We’ are 4 people: myself and 3 friends – Tina, Mark and Sean.  We’re camped out on a roof in downtown Broker, watching the world go by — or rather, what’s left of the world go by.

The streets below us are all but deserted as we gaze out across all four corners of the tenement block.  “Seen anything yet,” I ask Sean over the radio.  “Nah, nothing,” he replies.  I raise my rifle and glass the street below.  And I spot one; a lone, ambulatory corpse, slowly shambling it’s way down the middle of the 4-lane thoroughfare that runs in front of our building.  “Hey, I’ve got one-” The crack of Sean’s rifle makes me jump in the early morning quiet.  “Yep,” Sean says, as the echoes from his single shot fracture into the distance. I re-centre on the shuffling cadaver in time to see it finish slumping over awkwardly, its head now missing.

“Nice one,” I say into my radio; “…cheers,” replies Sean, sounding somewhat distracted for a moment.  ”I’ve only a few rounds left for this,” he says, referring to his rifle.  Tina, having been watching the western side of the building opposite me, reluctantly agrees. “We should probably go now,” she says.  Mark, keeping a vigil on the northern-most edge of the building sidles over and we make for the stairwell entrance in the middle of the roof.

On the ground, we split up.  Mark and Tina head north as Mark’s convinced the more lucrative supplies will be in the upper part of the island today.  Tina procures an abandoned station wagon from across the street and she and Mark head off, Mark hanging out the window brandishing his M16.  As they race off up the sidewalk and then onto the road again, I’m reminded of eager big game hunters out on safari.  Wonder if I can find Mark a pith helmet today, I think to myself.

It’s 5:44am when Sean and I split up and head off to find our own supplies. Sean’s convinced the best loot is going to be in the south, around the fairground and the docks.  I’m happier not to stray as far as the others, picking up the smaller, more frequent caches nearer the tenement.  By the time I reach the first cache, the others have moved already moved out of radio distance and I’m alone in the slums.

At 6:01am I’m picking over the contents of a stash behind a discount clothing store.  Unusually, there are a few choice items here and there in this part of town today.  Across the street, an abandoned park is scattered with rotting bodies. Mouldering corpses strewn amongst the weeds and long-dried piles of fresh tarmac that never got re-laid.  And it must be one of these corpses that rises and blunders towards me, as I busily root through the garbage for treasure.  Before I realise this, the creature’s low pitched moan sounds virtually at my ear and I wheel around, suddenly petrified, involuntarily loosing a hail of machine gun fire into the back wall of the clothes store.

As I bring my gun to bear, the corpse is already within arm’s length.  I jerk backwards and up against the wall of the store, ineffectually spraying bullets into the thing’s legs and lower torso.  It staggers a moment, then regains it footing as I frantically reload whilst trying to skirt the building at my back.  In doing so, I notice several other corpses across the street have risen and are making their way across the pavement towards me.  I pause, steady my aim, and quickly kill the first monster as it continues to follow me.  It drops to the floor, face first, with a dull wet thud.

The other undead are across the street and within half a dozen yards of me now.  I turn and run, calling into the radio as I do so.  No reply.  I spot an abandoned car ahead of me, but decide it’s probably safer just to continue back to the tenement on foot; better than risking being caught whilst trying to jump-start the motor.  The undead continue to follow me, but they’re starting to drop back.  However, they do not stop following – not yet anyway.

I reach the entrance to the tenement at 6:12am.  There’s no-one else here – they must all still be looking for supplies.  I try the radio again: still nothing.  The few undead that were chasing me seem to have either lost my trail or given up, and I can’t see any other corpses nearby.  I decide to wait here, on the sidewalk outside the building.  I can always make sport of those that were following me, should they find their way here.

Sean returns a few minutes later at 6:19am, but he’s brought his own fan club.  And it’s considerably bigger than mine was, slightly to my annoyance.  A group of about 10 undead are following him as he casually jogs down the street towards me.  ”Brought some friends,” he quips over the radio.  ”Yeah, yeah,” I mutter, but I’m grinning all the same.  We meet up in the middle of the street, face the pack and open fire.  They fall fairly quickly, but one or two get alarmingly close – with Sean actually walking out to meet them on occasion.

It’s 6:26am and the gaggle of stiffs Sean baited are lying dead in the road before us.  We still haven’t heard from either Tina or Mark.  The sun is now climbing above the taller buildings, the mist burning away and the glare coming off the skyscrapers is almost blinding.  It’s then we hear Tina over the radio, her voice faint and crackling with static at first.  Something about a party..?  Then we see them, Tina and Mark, as their scrambler slides around the building at the top of the street, its engine at full chat.  Tina’s driving, again, while Mark rides pillion.  A slight snap of static and Tina’s voice comes over the radio loud and clear this time: “I said: Mark decided we needed to have a party.”

As Tina guns the bike down the street, a sea of bodies pushes around the corner behind them and lumbers towards us.  There must be at least 40 of them, clothing ripped, long dried wounds black and sore against their blotchy, striated skin.  ”Oh… nice,” I say over the radio and Sean laughs.  Mark’s laughing too, loosing shots over his shoulder as Tina steers the bike around a burnt out car and across the last few feet of pavement in front of us.  Tina and Mark dump the bike and we reassemble in front of the building.  ”This is going to be a fruity one,” laughs Mark and he and Sean start picking off a few stragglers at the fringes of the mob with their prized rifles.

The timpani of shell casings and steady ratcheting reload of the rifles is slowly overwhelmed by the low murmur of the oncoming horde, and we realise we’ve loitered for too long.  There are still at least 30 of them as we duck inside the tenement entrance and back slowly towards the first flight of stairs at the end of the corridor.  The first couple round the door and Tina opens fire.  One drops instantly, but the other staggers for a moment and then rushes forward.  Mark kills it with a pistol shot.  But as this one falls, the rest of horde files in through the tenement door and comes rushing towards us.

By the third flight of stairs, Mark and Sean have used all their better ammo and have resorted to pistols.  Tina and I still have our machine guns, firing short bursts into the crowd over Sean and Mark’s heads.  We reach the fourth storey landing and Mark falters for a moment.  He’s immediately set upon by the leading three undead and killed just as we bring the first one down.  The horde seethes around the banister and across the landing towards Sean, Tina and myself.  Mark’s body vanishes in the throng.  Suddenly, to Sean’s left, a corpse lurches forward out of a side corridor and grabs Sean.  He manages to kill it quickly, but the main group is upon him now and boils around him.  Tina and I manage to kill several of them as they log-jam around Sean’s body.

Tina and I are running now, flat out up the stairs to the roof.  We can hear the corpses moaning and thudding across the floor below us, eager to kill the last two survivors.  We reach the roof and spread out to cover the doorway, being careful not to create a crossfire.  The door on the roof is narrower and funnels the undead almost one at a time as they race out to meet us.  I can’t hear anything above the pitched clatter of our machine guns, until we both suddenly have to reload in the same instance.  ”Shit!”  We wheel and run for the far side of the roof as the remaining dozen or so undead pour out of the stairwell.

I’ve no machine gun ammo left, Tina has just a few rounds in hers.  I open fire with my pistol, bringing down one of the corpses as the mass charges towards us.  Another staggers and Tina abandons her machine gun for her pistol also.  Two more fall and then they’re right on top of us.  We skirt sideways along the short wall edging the tenement roof, but we’re just delaying the inevitable now it seems.  Nine corpses bear down on us, Tina drops another as she side-steps past me and then I’m overrun. Raking clawed hands and biting feral teeth on all sides.  Blood red, then darkness.

I can hear Tina’s last futile attempts to fight off the remaining few with her knife, but it’s no good.  We’ve lost this time. “You’re an arse,” says Sean into the black, obviously referring to Mark. “Yeah, and..?” replies Mark. But you can hear him grinning when he speaks.  I just shake my head, smiling.

The following is a letter I originally sent to The Hatchet Job Show, a videogame podcast hosted and produced by a friend of mine (who goes by the online moniker 1Dgaf).  In it I refer to Peter Molyneux’s recent press conference, just prior to the release of Fable 2, wherein he asked the industry at large not to concentrate of seperating the mistaken concepts of “casual” and “hardcore” for the good of the industry as a whole.

In episode 17 you discussed Peter Molyneux’s talk with journalists about the perceived divide between “hardcore” and “casual” gamers. During your conversation, SomeGuy mentioned “markets” and I think this is something which may be the root of the problem.  And then later in the discussion, 1Dgaf made mention of not putting up with “shittily produced” casual games.

In the last 2-3 years there has been a conscience effort, by publishers – and indeed the appearance of bespoke “casual only” developers – to target this perceived “casual” sector of gaming with specifically tailored products.  It’s my feeling that this is a somewhat misguided effort; why the recent positive discrimination? There have always been parlour-style videogames, like Windows’ Solitaire and Minesweeper — tiny games that have been bundled with Windows since the 80s.  On the other end of the spectrum, there have equally been titles with the complexity and depth of Elite available to play.

I think what Molyneux was really doing is making a plea to developers and publishers, that pigeon-holing your game is unnecessary.  I would go much further and argue that some developers use positive discrimination, regarding intended audience, because they have knowingly built a game that is tailoring to the needs of a specific niche, with as little effort to engage anyone other than experienced players.  Quite often, this is because they rely on cheaply cloning gameplay and control mechanics from a successful title, and so are only interested in courting players of that successful title.

To me, this is a defining aspect of the perceived “hardcore market” as defined by publishers and advertisers.  But for me, this also falls under the 1Dgaf’s category of “shittily produced” and something I hate about contemporary videogames.  Even though AAA titles do cost (potentially) millions and millions of pounds/dollars to make, we still drown in great swathes of copycat titles which add little – and more often detract – from gaming as a whole, whilst almost always making no effort to engage anyone outside of their very targeted market.

And it’s this, I think, that Molyneux was talking about; he’s making a plea that people stop wasting money, time and effort producing throwaway content at horrendous expense that does nothing to broaden the market or further the medium.