Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Anti-OCD Game!

My family has a history of obsessive compulsive disorder. My brother was diagnosed with it in middle school, and endured a hellish battle with medication and therapy which eventually lead to him moving past the symptoms, learning to make them into a positive form of structure in his life. My mother likely had similar symptoms as a young woman, but coming from an era where psychoactive medication was less likely to be prescribed than electric shock and an educational framework where barbaric conditioning outweighed therapeutic concerns. She still shows a number of obsessive compulsive traits today.

I never really showed any symptoms, myself, nothing concrete. But when I’m placed in a structured, objective oriented environment I find myself compelled to complete the objectives as quickly and cleanly as possible. If I think things are going to be tough, or just untenably difficult, I’ll restart to an earlier time when I have more control over the circumstances surrounding me. I get pissed off when games don’t let me save wherever I please, or worse have an arbitrary set of checkpoints that just record whatever you have on your at the time.

The end result of this is that I hate improvising in games. Hate, hate, hate it. Or at least I used to.

A decade of multiplayer competition has liberated me somewhat from my puritanical concerns. The rush of killing three people with one clip, dropping your empty assault rifle for an SMG and mowing down another three before charging round a corner to take your last foe down with a knife in Call of Duty is a great incentive to make you want to improvise more often. And while circumstances such as the ones I just described far more often “almost happen” or “completely fail to happen,” they’re still so mystical, even in their half-formed states, that they’re so, so very worth it to pursue.

But they’re stressful to seek as well. Those sort of serendipitous collections of events don’t usually emerge from careful planning, they come as a result of chaotic, unexpected and frequently reset circumstances. Defeating that tough opponent might happen only once in a multiplayer game, and it’ll be a hurried, ugly affair without finality. The experience will still be cool, but it won’t have the sense of permanence and accomplishment that a similar experience in a single player game might provide.

And simulating such a chaotic environment in a single player game is incredibly difficult. Make the stakes too high, the game becomes stupidly frustrating. Too low, it’s a pointless jaunt. Make the system too unforgiving, the game is a pile of dross, too easy and it’s made for children. These are the challenges facing people who carefully craft experiences where you’re supposed to be lead to specific solutions for challenges. Providing an open ended experience, where unexpected things can happen and lead to solutions has to account for all these issues and the framework to generate new and unexpected problems is that much more difficult.

The games capable of rendering this serendipitous chaos are few and far between. Some of them are even kind of weak tea about it. Red Faction: Guerilla was great at it, creating some incredible scenes of destruction and giving players plenty of freedom while putting through rigid paces. And Far Cry 2’s buddy rescue system padded the game’s occasionally punishing system of challenges, turning death into an experience. But all of these games had fail states, and each time you encountered a fail state you would be forced to restart.

Enter Dead Rising 2.

Dead Rising 2 is one of the rare games intended to completely disarm the compulsive, completeist behavior that besets most gamers. Most games insist that you save early and often, and return to these saves. They start out slow and easy, then bit by bit unfold into challenging tapestries of experience as you develop a skillset you previously lacked. There are certain rules, rules about permanence, achievement and the elimination of fail-states.

Dead Rising 2 violates these seemingly sacrosanct rules. The game is more than happy to force you into failure. It delights in the near miss, in making you split your attention while travelling from place to place and lose track of time. Most games take great pains to keep you from encountering such scenarios. They’ll insist that you go certain places at certain times and, should you fail to do so, they’ll teleport you there. They’ll always give you ample time to complete a given task and, should you somehow fail, they’ll return you to a time before events where you can accomplish all time critical goals without issue.

Not so much Dead Rising 2.

I’ve never seen in recent memory a game quite so willing to let me die horribly or fail so abjectly at a simple objective as Dead Rising 2. I’m constantly running around, making appointments, tracking down medicine. If I get distracted for even a moment, if I fail to check my watch, I’ll miss a critical juncture and the game will go all ex-girlfriend on me, call me a dumbass and put me back to square one.

But, unlike ex-girlfriends, Dead Rising 2 really isn’t that big a bitch about the whole thing. It actually kind of encourages me to start anew, to try and learn from your mistakes and come back bigger, better and stronger. See, each time you restart the game in Dead Rising 2 (and you will restart the game, my pretties, time and time again) you retain all of your experience, your recipes and your money. You lose your items, sure, and your story progress, but in its place you have scads and scads of stat improvements, special powers and nifty items which can be made with a wide variety of materials readily available from the very beginning of the game. You also get lots of lovely inventory slots, all the better to carry said items in.

The end result is that each time you restart the game you come back better, faster stronger. Sometimes your story progress will be a strong argument against restarting the game, especially after you clear out a few psychopaths and get some neat items like motorcycles and light machine guns. But early on, as you rush around an unfamiliar set of casinos and mall structures, it’s actually very encouraging, and it makes you want to take risks. For example, I carried a critical character, a medic with medicine for my daughter that I’d have to bring back to the safe room in once piece if I wanted her to live, into a boss fight against T.K.. I had no idea what it would consist of, if I’d even be able to carry my followers through combat. Turns out I couldn’t, and Sven, my stalwart physician, with a sliver of health, just barely survived his time out-of-zone during my train battle.

Following the fight, he ran up to me and I nursed him back to health with orange juice and coffee. I gave him a fresh assault rifle and we started on our journey back to my precious daughter with his much-needed medicine. We arrived seconds before the deadline for her receiving medicine.

In a game where the stakes were higher I never would’ve felt inclined to take so many risks with so many objectives. I probably would’ve just reloaded to before the boss fight and tried to run back and forth with Sven, cut the clock as close as I could and hopefully survive the entire ordeal. But because of that magic reset button I didn’t really stand to lose a lot by attempting to carry Sven back home. In fact, I stood to gain quite a bit by accomplishing so many objectives at once.

The end result of these constant, pressing goals and noteworthy consequences for failure which don’t really set you back so much as put you back into the fight tougher and wiser is a game that walks a fine line that, to the best of my knowledge, none have ever attempted before. It introduces a game with a constant sense of urgency which encourages you to take risks by buffering against and, in some cases even encouraging, failure.

Dead Rising 2 isn’t the “perfect zombie game,” but it is perhaps the most cinematic I’ve ever played. And it forces me to do things I love to do in games, things like improvise and experiment. Occasionally I find myself falling back into my old patterns of saving frequently and reloading constantly when I want to beat an especially difficult boss fight and I feel that I’ve got the tools I need to do so at my disposal. But just as often I’ll walk away from threats and just try to survive events. I’ll take risks and gamble to try and defeat enemies that I’d usually run from just because I want to see if I can do it. I’ll put myself in bad situations and improvise solutions, learning loads about the game and getting a cool story out of it at the same time. I’ll let go of my anxiety, even as I watch the clock, and lose myself as I slam a bat with nails hammered into it into a zombie’s face, laughing gleefully all the while.