To Thine Own Self Be True

The Idea

What I want to talk about today is the con­cept of “scope” and dis­cuss two major areas where scope can become a prob­lem in video games.

On Scope

Like any good philoso­pher, the first thing I need to do is define my terms.  By, “scope,” I mean, gen­er­ally, the sorts of things the game is try­ing to do, and what kind of game it is try­ing to be.  Is it try­ing to be a gigan­tic epic telling a mas­sive story of love and loss and war?  Is it try­ing to be a small, character-driven piece show­ing you what it is like to be a par­tic­u­lar kind of per­son?  Is it a game with lit­tle to no plot or char­ac­ter, but one in which the graph­ics and flow of the game con­sti­tute its art?

These ques­tions remind me most of a sec­tion of the phi­los­o­phy of Alfred North Whitehead, where, in a dis­cus­sion of aes­thet­ics, he puts for­ward two char­ac­ter­is­tics of aes­thetic activ­ity (which is really all activ­ity in Whitehead, but that’s another con­ver­sa­tion): Massiveness and Intensity Proper.  In Whitehead’s schema, aes­thetic value is derived from tak­ing dis­parate ele­ments (con­cepts, peo­ple, musi­cal tones) and work­ing them into har­mony with one another.  A given work of art has more value (i.e. is “bet­ter”) the more har­mony it pro­duces.

A work’s Massiveness is the sheer num­ber of dif­fer­ent pieces it tries to rec­on­cile, while its Intensity Proper refers to the strength of its indi­vid­ual har­monies.  In more com­mon terms, Massiveness might be referred to as Breadth, and Intensity Proper, Depth.  Whitehead’s con­cep­tion of har­mony may or may not be ter­ri­bly help­ful in our dis­cus­sions here, but the ideas of breadth and depth are quite rel­e­vant to dis­cus­sions of scope in art.

A video game’s breadth is found in how many dif­fer­ent types of things it tries to do, and its depth in how much detail it puts into its pieces.  There is no rea­son a game (or any other work of art) can’t be both very broad and very deep, it just requires a lot of work– most things tend to pick one or the other and focus on it.

It is impor­tant to note that there is noth­ing nec­es­sar­ily wrong with being broad, nar­row, deep or shal­low, as long as one struc­tures one’s work accord­ingly, and chooses ideas and game­play mechan­ics which fit the game’s breadth and depth.  Some very good games have been very nar­row and oth­ers, very shal­low.  Problems only arise when a game’s writ­ers or pro­gram­mers seem to be unaware of what the rest of the game is up to.  In my expe­ri­ence, the most com­mon mis­take is try­ing to tell a story that requires a cer­tain amount of depth with­out spend­ing the nec­es­sary time or detail to tell it well.  It is, how­ever, true that too much breadth with­out any depth starts to make a game feel thinly spread and flimsy, and too much depth with­out enough breadth makes a game feel pon­der­ous and cramped.

It is impor­tant to note that these are not binary char­ac­ter­is­tics, but con­tin­u­ums.  Dragon Age: Origins is far from a shal­low game, and does, in fact, tend to delve into its char­ac­ters, set­ting, ideas and mechan­ics with a great deal of speci­ficity and detail, but it is sub­stan­tially shal­lower than Planescape: Torment, which trades DA:O’s breadth for a much nar­rower focus.

What I really want to talk about today is how many video games (and other works of art, for that mat­ter) seem to be some­what schiz­o­phrenic about their approaches to scope.  The speci­fic game I want to talk about today is Call of Duty: Black Ops, because I think it might be the per­fect exam­ple of a game which is not true to itself. 

The Numbers, Mason

I will state very quickly that I am here only talk­ing about Black Ops’single-player cam­paign, as its mul­ti­player is wholly irrel­e­vant to this dis­cus­sion.  I also want to quickly dis­claim that Black Ops is not a bad game, exactly, just a schiz­o­phrenic one. At times, at least, I quite enjoyed it, so when I spend the rest of this column harp­ing on it, don’t get the wrong impres­sion.

Black Ops clearly wants to be taken seri­ously.  Rather than sim­ply hir­ing what­ever voice actors hap­pened to be around, the cast is full of seri­ous actors like Gary Oldman and Ed Harris, and pop­u­lar per­son­al­i­ties like Sam Worthington and Ice Cube.  I imag­ine that many video games could pay their entire cast with Sam Worthington’s cut alone.  The game is full of gor­geous envi­ron­ments, smooth ani­ma­tions, and lots and lots of lit­tle details that are eas­ily missed in the first run-through.  This game would undoubt­edly have sold mil­lions upon mil­lions of copies what­ever Treyarch did, so the fact that they did not just quickly slap together some sort of vaguely-suitable mess shows that they cared at least some­what about the qual­ity of the pro­duct.

I have noth­ing bad to say about the graph­ics, the mechan­ics (it’s often very con­fus­ing and frus­trat­ing and easy to die, but, well, I imag­ine that’s what real war is like, too, so that’s prob­a­bly not a bad thing), or, in most cases, the voice act­ing.

What I object to is the han­dling of the plot, par­tic­u­larly when it is done at the fatal expense of devel­op­ing our main char­ac­ter, Alex Mason.  I won’t waste a lot of time going into detail, but Black Ops tries to be your stan­dard Cold War drama full of lots of shady deal­ings and double-crosses.  At one point, there are a quick series of big reveals about Mason that go sort of like this: He’s been brain­washed!  His Russian friend is a Tyler Durden-style hal­lu­ci­na­tion!  The mys­te­ri­ous peo­ple inter­ro­gat­ing him are his CIA bud­dies!  They want to save the world from some kind of pre­pos­ter­ous chem­i­cal weapon!  While brain­washed, he got many of his friends killed chas­ing silly revenge quests!  He was the sec­ond gun­man on the grassy knoll!  We never learn any­thing else about Mason unless we engage in a wholly-optional and easily-missed minigame with a com­puter that can only be reached via press­ing a cer­tain com­bi­na­tion of but­tons while star­ing at the game’s main menu.  (It is not, at least, at the bot­tom of a locked fil­ing cab­i­net stuck in a dis­used lava­tory with a sign on the door say­ing Beware of the Leopard.)

This is all, with the pos­si­ble excep­tion of the Nova 6 chem­i­cal, which I’ll ignore until later, poten­tially fine: there’s no rea­son why this couldn’t have made for a pretty good game, one which asks ques­tions about who to trust, and which reveals, in a shock­ing moment, that the untrust­wor­thy per­son is not cold CIA han­dler Jason Hudson, or the mys­te­ri­ous peo­ple inter­ro­gat­ing Mason, or even the vil­lain­ous Russians, but rather the point-of-view char­ac­ter him­self.  It is per­haps not entirely orig­i­nal (KotOR did a sim­i­lar twist very, very well), but there’s no rea­son it couldn’t have been good.

The prob­lem stems from the fact that the game refuses to actu­ally spend any time with the char­ac­ters and themes it has set up.  With the excep­tion of one pretty well-handled “mind­screw” scene when Mason finally real­izes he has been brain­washed, the game never slows down long enough for us to learn any­thing about the char­ac­ters we’re sup­posed to care about or even be entirely sure of the game’s time­line.

Here’s the thing: I know why this hap­pened.  There is at least a per­cep­tion that the aver­age Call of Duty fan is some species of “bro” and there­fore com­pletely inca­pable of spend­ing more than five or six sec­onds pay­ing atten­tion to any­thing which does not actively involve shoot­ing, screw­ing, or yelling at some­thing.  I can’t speak to the truth of this assump­tion, but I can under­stand why a game designer might not want to spend a lot of time build­ing a well-crafted nar­ra­tive if his or her audi­ence is mostly just going to get bored and com­plain if more than four sec­onds of violence-free dia­logue go by.  This is fair.

But what I don’t under­stand is going some­where halfway.  Had the Treyarch team given in to the demands of their per­ceived audi­ence and cre­ated a game with­out much over­ar­ch­ing plot and with­out the mas­sive con­spir­acy, and which just involved mur­der­ing var­i­ous com­mu­nists in var­i­ous exotic locales, I could respect that.  It might even have time to be a pretty decent expe­ri­ence– it’s prob­a­bly true that the aver­age sol­dier does not really know much of what’s going on behind the mis­sions on which he is sent, and so one could imag­ine a game which not only sells a bajil­lion units by appeal­ing to the dude­bro crowd, but also man­ages to be some kind of com­men­tary on war.  Such a game might well have been a nar­row but deep expe­ri­ence.

Instead, the game tries to tell a pretty decent story, but by never actu­ally slow­ing down and tak­ing some time with the char­ac­ters, we’re left with a game with just enough story to annoy the dude­bros, but not enough to make us intel­lec­tual types (read: pre­ten­tious lit­er­ary jerks) happy.  It’s impor­tant to note that, unlike Gears of War 2, which usu­ally does spend a fair amount of time on its plot, but fails mas­sively due to writer incom­pe­tence, Black Ops actu­ally has decent writ­ing when there is dia­logue, but fails to deploy enough of that writ­ing.  I sup­pose this is a bet­ter prob­lem to have, but it is still a prob­lem.

In Conclusion: To Thine Own Self Be True

What this all boils down to is that the whole pro­duc­tion team of a video game needs to be on the same page about what kind of game they are mak­ing.  If one per­son thinks the team is mak­ing a mas­sive war epic and every­one else thinks they are mak­ing a goofy lit­tle shooter, the results will be odd at best and dis­as­trous at worst.  Black Ops’ prob­lem is not found in any of its com­po­nent parts, but in the way the game’s design phi­los­o­phy doesn’t jive with the story it tries to tell.

If you want to make a game which is pretty much only about shoot­ing things, remove the excess plot and char­ac­ter work and take the time you would have spent com­ing up with com­pli­cated plots and use it to craft a bet­ter shoot­ing expe­ri­ence.  I’m not con­vinced that all video games even nec­es­sar­ily need plots at all.  In fact, I think both Mirror’s Edge and Gears of War 2 would have been dras­ti­cally improved by com­plete plot-ectomies, and Left 4 Dead 2 func­tions as some of the best art I’ve seen in a shooter by remov­ing any plot more com­pli­cated than “get from point A to point B” and focus­ing instead on mas­sive amounts of detail and atmos­phere.

So, Treyarch: be hon­est with your­self about the scope of your game, and con­struct it accord­ingly: don’t use unnec­es­sar­ily broad ideas if you’re pro­duc­ing a game which won’t take the time to develop them!  Also, tell Sam Worthington he needs to learn how to do a con­vinc­ing American accent already.  Seriously.

Post-Script: Some Informal Jabs at Call of Duty: Black Ops

1. Sam Worthington can­not main­tain a con­vinc­ing American accent (he’s Australian) when­ever he needs to show more emo­tion than an apa­thetic grunt.  This was true in Avatar and Terminator, but was espe­cially notable here.

2. I don’t know why the @#$% we thought it was nec­es­sary to make up a new chem­i­cal WMD for the Soviets to use in their thwarted-at-the-last-second attack on the US.  Half the point of the Cold War was the nuclear arms race, so I don’t know why we couldn’t have just had some kind of sur­prise nuclear strike, rather than mak­ing up a ridicu­lous, James Bond-style chem­i­cal weapon to muck up the oth­er­wise rel­a­tively real­is­tic tone of the game.  It feels sort of like some designer for­got what kind of game he was mak­ing, like if one of the badguys in Dead Space was not a hor­ri­ble, flail­ing undead mon­stros­ity, but an angry polar bear from one of those Cabela’s games.

3. The whole sequence with Daniel Clarke receiv­ing a glass jaw (ba-dum PSH!) has var­i­ous prob­lems, but I’ll name two: first, as has been men­tioned by oth­ers before, Clarke seems remark­ably happy to fight alongside the peo­ple that have been bru­tally tor­tur­ing him for the last few min­utes.  I am impressed by his capac­ity to for­give.  Second, I don’t know about you, but if you put a bunch of glass in my mouth and punch me a few times, I’m going to speak with a speech imped­i­ment for a while.

4. If you rap­pel like that in real life, Alex Mason, you will cut off your hands.

5. So, the com­puter ter­mi­nal thing is pretty cool, guys, but it obvi­ously took a lot of work, and I don’t know why you would spend that much time cod­ing and writ­ing some­thing which maybe 5% of the play­ers will find unaided, and only 1% of those play­ers will actu­ally read through.  I appre­ci­ate the abil­ity to play Zork, but as I played the game on my friend's Xbox 360, that was actu­ally more like dan­gling a choco­late cake in front of me, hop­ing I’ll for­get that the time you spent putting Zork in your shooter could have been spent mak­ing the actual shooter.  Only I have to eat the choco­late cake through a straw, because the Xbox 360 con­troller is not a key­board.

6. There are var­i­ous good ways to deliver a major plot twist.  “Oh by the way you shot Kennedy sorry for­got to men­tion that hope it’s okay game is over now here lis­ten to a bad eminem song bye” is not one of them.

7. Sam Worthington does a really ter­ri­ble American accent.

However, because you cast Ed Harris in a video game, all is for­given.