Super Nerd Sundays Presents: I Left My Spectacles at Home!

Michael Bay is an asshole. He’s a high grossing asshole who is deeply tapped into our collective intellect and who knows just how to play on our expectations. He knows how to play the notes we expect, to make a song we all know already and make us think it’s something new. He’s a very smart asshole, who isn’t really original, but his unoriginality is scaled and constructed in such a fashion that we’re never supposed to notice just how dull it is. It’s a kind of magic, a kind of magic that has been translated to games expertly.

It dawned on me just how well the medium leant itself to this sort of mindless, dazzling action when I was arguing with a friend of mine during a game of Left4Dead. We were both drunk. Extremely drunk, which is when the best thinking usually occurs, at least for me. He raised the point that Call of Duty: Black Ops was an excellent single player game. I raised the point that it did a terrible job of telling a story, failed at level design, scope and utilizing its few original themes. But he returned, time and time again, to the production values, the spectacle of the action. It was enough for him that the explosions were cool, the set pieces big and dynamic. Even when they didn’t really relate to the gameplay itself, he did have a point. The explosions were big and explodey. There were a lot of neat, big battles that were ambitious and, from an objective standpoint, original. And while the level design was terrible, the story was poorly written and Sam Worthington’s voice acting was deserving of a high school play at best, the shit that went down was always pretty cool.

And that’s enough for some. Excellent production values, neat explosions, and visual spectacle. Which is fair. Watching cool shit go down can be a lot of fun, and when it’s well executed all the better. But it’s also worrisome that this is enough to convince an intelligent, articulate gamer that a game is good. And it’s kind of a bummer that it seems to be enough to sell copies, en masse.

Original, well executed ideas that lack spectacle, games like Brutal Legend and Assassin’s Creed, might do okay, or even great, but they never seem to reach the blockbuster level that games like Call of Duty: Black Ops manage. And while I’m sure this is due to a variety of factors, well beyond the span of a thousand word essay, it’s certainly worth saying that Black Ops has very little going for it aside from punchy visuals. The game is a chore to play, a full on chore. The action is so jumpy, the set pieces so transparently tied together, the gimmicks so clumsily executed that without stunning visuals to tie them together there really is nothing to come back to.

And it’s saying a lot that I’m not playing the game again, but that I still recall fondly some of the stranger visual punches – running downhill into a pitcher gun fight with Cuban partisans, walking the streets of a Russian prison with a minigun, driving a boat upstream and unleashing hell while I did so. I think Black Ops is a total failure as a game, but it’s gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous, and it has terrific visual sense, perhaps an even better sense than Modern Warfare 2.

But spectacle isn’t enough to draw me back to a game, and I don’t think it’s enough to sustain a game, especially one like Black Ops, where you’re constantly immersed in the game play. If it wasn’t for the multi I’d feel terribly cheated by Black Ops, but because of the fantastic mulitplayer, which, by the way, maintains the awesome grasp of visual punch that made the game bearable, I would safely recommend the game to nearly anyone who wants a good multiplayer first person shooter experience. And the spectacle in all the game modes is a big part of that.

But I still don’t think spectacle is a good reason to buy a game. And I don’t think it’s what games do best. I think films are great for it. When control of a camera is what you focus on you can do some incredible shit with it, and games aren’t really about that. They’re about generating a world for that camera to exist in. The best games don’t rely on things like visual punch, they rely on a sense of immersion, a sense of being part of a world, even an abstracted one.

Even though I’m an eye in the sky when I’m playing Starcraft I still feel immersed in it. The manner in which my inputs are interpreted, the beautiful consistency of the game and the manner in which it plays, the fact that I can examine any given unit and its functions and find perfect realization of its purpose. When I play Assassin’s Creed the Animus and its intuitive controls and interface make me fall in love with the game, with its kinetic motion and beautiful, occasionally clumsy combat. When I drive around in Brutal Legend I feel pride in my car, joy in the impact of each blow as my axe rings against Tainted Coil flesh and focus as I rattle off a solo, tongue caught in my teeth.

Spectacle is good and well, but my dollars, my efforts, go in a different direction. They go towards games that change the way I think about play, games that make me feel like I’m in a different place. Sometimes these games are fucking gorgeous. Sometimes they’re games like Far Cry 2 or Assassin Creed, with their glorious rendering of place. Sometimes they’re games that are ugly as sin, games like Fallout 3 and New Vegas, where a sense of place is established using graphics that could charitably called harsh. Sometimes they’re beyond understated, like Flotilla, the best game no one ever played where all the ships are a set of colored geometric shapes. While people will keep making games that trade on and, all too woefully often, rely on visuals there will always be games that are satisfied being ugly. There will always be games with something different to offer, so the haters can keep their pretty explosions and expository dialogue. I’ll be over here playing Arcanum, spinning my pistol and taking in the world.