Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Sunrise, Gunfight, Sunset.

I’m driving towards my friend from Oklahoma to help him with his train job. I don’t particularly like him, but I have to take help where I can get it. That’s just how it is in this little corner of Africa; I’ve got to do some things I’m not proud of and spend time with people I’m not fond of if I want to survive. But as I’m speeding over sand dunes, keeping an eye on the railroad tracks as they race by to my left, the glare of the fading sun catches my eye and I suddenly look at, really look at, the sunset in front of me.

I brake hard and turn off my truck’s engine before getting out. The silence of the desert settles around me, the sounds of the racing wind and the chirp of crickets offering meager interruption as I sit down and watch the sun set, smiling. It is beautiful and, for a moment, I am at peace in this war torn place. After a few minutes I draw my dart rifle, glance at the sunset through its scope, then get back in my truck and gun the engine, racing towards Warren and his latest scheme to get a rep.

This is the moment that changed Far Cry 2 from a good game into a great one for me.

Not all games aspire to immersion. Indeed, many of them move as far as possible away from it. Think of any real-time strategy came, spare arguably the MechCommander series, and you’ll have shining examples of great games which hate immersion with a passion.

But Far Cry 2 wants us to be immersed in its world. It wants us to imagine that we are Frank or Warren or Marty or whoever. It wants us to pretend that we’re a very bad man doing very bad things to very bad people.

This end is a little bit unusual for the positive associations we usually find ourselves making in video games. Even GTA IV, the latest stepchild in the series which is supposed to showcase moral ambiguity, features a main character who is constantly portrayed as sympathetic.

And Far Cry 2 has moments in its play where you can be a sympathetic person. You occasionally help people, by necessity or choice. You can help your friends and spend time in a bar with them. But at the end of the day you kill people for money. That’s just who you are. The whole reason you came to this country is to murder a man, after all.

But this amorality, as we said, isn’t new. In fact the games industry is lousy with characters who are supposed to be inherently “evil.” But this isn’t a game about being evil. Or about being good. Far Cry’s strength is in its amorality. A lesser game would try to make the character feel one way or another, but Far Cry 2 simply is content to be.

It never forces us to do anything terrible. In fact, it only occasionally forces us to do anything at all. Its about being in a place more than being in a story, and that’s where it shines.

Most games, and indeed most works of fiction, have trouble making their locations real. Think about the way A Handmaid’s Tale made you feel before Atwood revealed the changes that made her horrific world possible and the way you felt afterwards. Certainly, some people find those resolutions sufficient, but for me it ruined her construction. The ideas she had couldn’t fit in the world she’d tried to engineer. The same could be argued of many great narratives, both within and without the video game world. Bioshock and the original Half-Life, for example, both create fictions which don’t hold up to close inspections very well.

But think about Half-Life 2, and its sequels, or, for those of a more literary inclination, Gibson’s sprawl. These were worlds, stripped down and reduced to their most human elements, that worked on a fundamental level. That they had excellent stories told within them helped, certainly, but Half-Life 2’s ravaged earth and Gibson’s dystopic America both felt like places true to the nature of humanity. They both felt like places you could be unfortunate enough to end up if the world went a certain way.

Far Cry 2 manages this, and it does so in a wholly original way. Most games try to draw you in with elements of story and characters, to make their worlds feel real through the people who inhabit them. And indeed, Far Cry 2’s characters do feel real, like real people who have made terrible choices, but they do almost nothing to draw the character in.

With exception to Michelle and Nasreen, distinguished solely by their vaginas, none of the characters in Far Cry 2 stand out very well. Honestly, I didn’t catch on that the mercenaries who accompanied faction leaders during briefings were actual characters and not just random guards until around six or seven missions in. Sure, they all feel like real people, and that helps, but they might as well be furniture in the context of the game: they’re there, sometimes they’re used, but even when they’re not they’re still there, waiting and ready.

Far Cry 2’s story is similarly weak. While it has a few nice hooks, such as having a main character who is perennially on the brink of death, it is a flimsy premise at best. You’re drawn into a war-torn country and you stick around to kill the man who keeps helping you. Its beyond weak, its insipid. It wants us to follow its directives blindly, in order to get more bling. It’s lean and functional, and it fits the world, but it has almost nothing to do with what makes Far Cry 2 great.

No, what makes it great is the setting.

So much effort has gone into placing every stone and shack in Far Cry’s little war torn stretch of Africa, and so much effort has gone into making it flow together. There are occasional hiccoughs, but for the most part every bit of Far Cry 2 feels like belongs there.

And what’s more, its gorgeous and horrible. For every serene tree there is a burned out humvee on the side of the road, for every sunset a bullet riddled corpse. For every man you kill there is a water buffalo running free, blissfully unaware that someone like you exists. And in this dichotomy, Far Cry 2 shines.

It builds up a place, a reality unto itself. And the fact is that it is both deeply unsettling (watching your character snap his arm back into place should make anyone wince) and deeply uplifting (its rare I find myself staring at sunsets under any circumstances, and doing so in a videogame was an almost religious experience).

Far Cry 2’s Africa isn’t Africa, but it is a real place in its own way. Its less a game I play to be entertained and more a place I go to unwind. And, like any beautiful place, it is possessed of a profound ugliness. But just as in any real location it is ours to make of what we will.

And sometimes the best you can make of a place is a few minutes of peace, watching a moment of spontaneous beauty both internal and external that you couldn’t re-create if you tried. Maybe that’s the definition of art, regardless of its medium. Who knows. That’s a whole other discussion.