Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Cold Worlds of Games!

The worlds in which most games exist are cold, inhospitable places, wastelands with only the most cursory trappings of humanity. Even when they’re teeming with virtual life games always have trouble grasping at just what makes a town a town, what makes a house more than four walls, a roof and a foundation. They are, by nature and by design, demonstrations of the fundamental elements of what something is, rather than representations of places, fictional or real.

There are exceptions. The most ironic, and indeed one of the best I’ve ever encountered, was Fallout 3, a world which felt vibrant, living and empty in a way which echoed the socially nihilistic world I live in as a nerd. Fallout 3 had people, many of them nominally friendly, only a handful of whom would actually accompany you through the Wasteland. It was a game about growing up, moving from place to place, and it grasped that to make a place real you must populate it with people who will deal with the main character without concern or knowledge of who or what that main character is.

Brutal Legend walked a similar line with its alien world of metal, in this case trading off immersion and interaction for fullness, richness and wondrous consistency. Brutal Legend should have felt odd and off-putting, but the manner in which a cycle of constant war shaped both the game and the game’s world made it come to life in a way that most single player experience cannot hope for. Sure, the multiplayer was dense and difficult to access, rooted on a set of systems where people are largely uninterested in playing new and original kinds of games on the internet, but the Brutal Land was without peer in how it delivered on its promise of a war-torn Metal landscape.

But compare this to a place like Liberty City. Liberty City is based off of New York’s layout, populace and landscape. It has no business being boring. To make New York boring is an impressive feat in its own right, but it sets Grand Theft Auto in the midst of a lifeless, sterile city consisting entirely of goodies to grab and occasional interstitials which register with the audible clunk of my disc shifting RPMs to draw new data from unused sectors. Occasionally the world comes to life within these interstitials, in rooftop chases and kidnappings, a few assassinations and one very notable heist, but none of this takes place within the much touted open world of Grand Theft Auto 4.

To the credit of Rockstar’s designers, they’ve spent most of their careers trying to mask the fact that their games are traditional video games shoehorned into open world environments, and they’ve been making improvements. But in the end their worlds are little better than those of a Final Fantasy game – filled with potential targets and threats, the occasional reward and little or no personality outside of bits of art and tidily scripted cutscenes which will, at best, unlock new areas of the game, but will most likely change absolutely nothing. They’ve popularized a form of world building without recognizing its potential for immersing players, and it’s a shame, because all it does is illustrate the problems that traditional game designs have had with making their worlds feel lifelike.

The issue mostly stems from the fact that games are intended to tell a story: singular. Games aren’t trying to present you with an interpretive narrative, again with few exceptions: they’re trying to lay out a series of events “as they occur” and let you engage them. Some games camouflage this fact better than others, games like Half-Life 2 and the first F.E.A.R. that constantly present you with interesting situations and asides and give you worlds that actually beg to be interpreted, worlds with muted and unclear laws and histories which demand that their players immerse themselves in order to comprehend events. Most games are more like Final Fantasy or Grand Theft Auto, forcing you to jump through hoops until you reach the end of the story they want to tell you, feeding you snippets of narrative until you reach the last snippet of narrative intended to close off all the other snippets with some measure of satisfaction.

In between the world consists of scripted challenges, usually challenges which consist mostly of harming other creatures or solving puzzles, and the story itself occurs outside of these challenges. Sometimes you’ll be given friends to accompany you through these challenges, and the game logic will insure that these friends arrive (or do not arrive) at your destination in one form or another. The two worlds are more or less closed off. Little has actually changed since Doom, with its occasional dying marine and text box informing you why you’re shooting weird brown men in the face through a series of gray hallways and stacks of boxes. All we’ve improved for the most part is the graphical quality of the boxes and the quality of the writing.

Few games illustrate this better than Torchlight, the utilitarian indie title which has been working its way through the Steam play lists of many of my friends. Torchlight is a neat little Diablo clone that takes the classic formula of Diablo – generate a dynamic map and populate it with random baddies then let players run through it - and adds a cutesie art style that recognizes the exceedingly low stakes that the genre brings with it and makes the game accessible to players from a variety of backgrounds. Even people who don’t like Diablo’s style of play have had their interested piqued a little by Torchlight’s endearing, cartoonish and incredibly generic art.

Torchlight is completely fine as a game, and if you play games as the sort of person who engages them so that they can essentially solve math problems with graphical representations and limited finesse, Torchlight is perfect. Its spreadsheets are engaging, its characters memorable and its world stripped down with just the right amount of self-aware humor and self-serious guidance to keep things moving painlessly. But Torchlight suffers from one serious defect in my mind: its maps lack a sense of place.

No one expects them to have a strong sense of place, and fair enough. They’re randomly generated dungeons that spit out items of various colors, and most of what you really care about while you’re inside those dungeons is stripping them of their brightly colored items so that you can progress to the next set of challenges and leave. There’s no sense that people live in these dungeons or that the creatures there have any existence outside of being destroyed by you. It’s like the polar opposite of the ambitious Badman games – the world you live in is completely artificial and totally unconscious of its own haphazardly constructed nature. The art is beautiful, but the places the art combines to build for game play are lifeless and dull. Only their procedural nature deflects any criticism.

There are many games which do their all to counter this. Massive effort goes into the Half-Life series in order to make its sets feel lived in, and a great deal of Left4Dead’s appeal comes in the fact that wherever you go you always feel as if you’re not the first to be there, and not just because of the hordes of zombies. Left4Dead’s world feels lived in. And while the logic doesn’t always hold up (Why does that jukebox still have power? Why are there so many infected who don’t seem to have any major physical trauma? Why don’t we occasionally see fallen survivors by the road?) the effort is there and the pieces are there so that we can see that we’re not alone in the cosmology of Left4Dead, an important message the game keeps repeating.

Even stealth games like the original Thief did their best to make you feel like you were part of a bigger world while pushing you to the outskirts of it. Guards have lives and conversations, crime bosses had business which needed taking care of, peasants had families and even the rat men had names. These touches define what turns a good game into a great game, what allows us to make our own stories and insert them into the larger narrative of our favorite pieces of electronic media. They separate games like the Call of Cthulhu shooter from Thief in the way they approach the world they build and the way they allow players to experience that world and generate stories from it.

Because even within these cold, inhospitable worlds there remains life. Like our own world it isn’t always life we get to know, and it isn’t always life we’d want to know, but the feel of it there makes these worlds seem real, complete and whole in ways that games with empty or soulless worlds do not. There are plenty of different ways to accomplish this goal and certainly, as Torchlight proves, it’s not always necessary for developers to do so. But if developers want to create serious games that tell serious stories they can’t set them in closed off worlds where nothing unexpected can happen and no consequence can emerge without the explicit dictum of the developer. As in fiction the world can be an impassive and cruel place and still feel right, so long as we can look at it and see some facsimile of ourselves reflected in our surroundings.