Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Goood Old Clive!

When one considers the names of creative luminaries who have shaped video games a few fling to mind. Satoru Iwata, Kenicho Ueda, David Jaffe, Sid Meyer, Peter Molyneux. I think of Ken Levine, Tim Schaffer, Warren Spector, Satoru Miyamoto. Visionaries who craft systems of iterative narrative that play out through the course of play, men largely unconcerned with conceits of traditional narrative, far more comfortable creating a framework and letting people mess with it than painstakingly crafting a series of sets and forcing players to move through them one by one. But when it comes to discussing games, these men are largely silent. Iwata and Miyamoto love to discuss concepts of branding and the business side of games, and Schaffer and Levine have no trouble citing their creative influences outside of games, but when it comes to sitting down and defending the medium in public they leave it to representatives like N’Gai Kroal and Geoff Keighly.

The only creative mind involved with games who is also vocal in its definition and protection as an art form that I can think of offhand isn’t someone I’d consider a luminary. It isn’t someone I’d consider that good at making games. It’s actually Clive Barker.

Barker made his entry into the fields of electronic narrative with the early release, Undying. Undying was a gory, fun FPS , almost universally well received by critics and uniformly ignored by consumers. Undying was an ambitious attempt at pushing the relatively strict technological limits of the time and introducing gameplay mechanics that would one day be taken up by games as well received and iconic as Bioshock. That spells in one hand, gun in the other thing? Undying did that first.

Unfortunately I cannot vouch for any of Undying’s storytelling quirks or the quality of its play, except by secondhand opinion, but a casual observation of the response the game received, and its noteworthy position as Gamespot’s “Number One Game No One Played,” illustrates that regardless of its narrative hooks it demonstrated Barker’s keen eye for unsettling his audience and a knack for design. For all I know the story was shit on a biscuit covered in flies, but the fact that he’d produced an experience that was so well considered during such a halcyon era of game design was telling.

But I can tell you that the knack for creating games that he demonstrated in games like Undying did not carry over to Jericho. Jericho is Barker’s attempt at a contemporary game, and it plays like a brawler without a brain. You trudge down identical paths and fight scripted enemies until your resources magically appear. Occasionally you fight a boss and have to listen to your teammates shout at you until you do as they say and finish the fucker off. Sometimes there’s a tough fight and you have to weather it alone or something. Sometimes players go away. But you’re always heading down a hallway towards a set destination, fighting enemies with infinitely regenerating resources. It engages as much as a rail shooter, occasionally busting out of its skin with an intensely frustrating quicktime sequence which demands complete dedication or certain death.

Despite all these flaws a few good ideas are present in Jericho. Specifically the idea of a suicide mission that isn’t, the idea of a pocket plane and the futility of man’s existence. Jericho has some of the deep existential roots that Barker has shown in weird, sometimes campy, sometimes bad books and movies like Hellraiser. It shows the brain he brings to pop, the Lovecraftian sensibility about our fragility as people and the concept that terrible things occur not because of the supernatural invading our world but because of our own ignorance, misunderstanding and poorly construed attempts to tap these larger forces. Where we once had the theory of relativity we now have the power of the atom – we are children playing in Barker’s world, just as a child menaces the entire world because of God’s frivolity in Jericho.

Of course, none of this saves the game from being a piece of shit. But that’s neither here nor there. My point is that Barker is experienced in games. He’s experience in writing books and films and all other kinds of media. He’s a creative who engages a lot of fields and does some interesting stuff in each of them, even if it is sometimes incredibly flawed. He’s not perfect, nor does he claim to be, and even if he sometimes takes himself a little bit too seriously he does so with the occasional wink, recognizing that he knows that he isn’t going to win a Pulitzer and doesn’t care.

He should by all rights be one of our most valuable contributors, one of the only developers I can think of who has written books and films at all, let alone the veritable library Barker has created in his short life. He’s articulate, intelligent, and extremely open minded. Hell, he’s even gay, and gay game developers are a shamefully underrepresented group both professionally and thematically. He should be right out there in front, talking us up for the world to see. Listening to him speak about it, he makes horror seem elegant and poised. He’s great at countering arguments and making otherwise respectable people seem like loons. Hell, look at his open letters to Ebert from a few years past.

In what is, to the best of my knowledge, the only example of the gaming community using Barker as anything resembling the mouthpiece he could be for us Barker made an impassioned and intelligent refutation of Ebert’s condescending, ignorant conceit that sacrificing narrative control made games something other than art. Barker appeared in a series of interviews discussing games as they relate to other narratives, games as they constitute art. And in this he was invaluable. He was a mouthpiece for the creative members of the community, the ones who make fiction, poetry, painting and film influenced by games.

And that’s what Barker offers us as a community: a respectable, unpretentious voice that knows both games and other narrative mediums. And while our strange communal aversion to most non-filmic mediums does to some extent explain the fact that we’re not utilizing Barker as much as we could, his presence is still reassuring to me. So while there are many creative visionaries who come to my mind before Barker, I still hold him dear in the pantheon of those who dedicate their lives to creating electronic media for our entertainment. And while I’m not sure he’ll ever make another game after the flop that was Jericho, I’m interested to see what it will be like if he does.