Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Darksiders, Deadspace and the Discussion of Derivation!

Recently Dead Space 2 emerged from the smoldering maw of the game industry to massive critical and commercial aplomb. Despite a tone-deaf marketing campaign aimed not at gaming’s core market but its fringe (by the way, game designers, wise up: gamers aren’t angry middle-scholars, they’re mostly the coveted 18-25 year olds who actually don’t have as much disposable income as you think) Dead Space 2 has been doing great. It has been widely recognized as an excellent piece of work and, perhaps thanks to a masterfully executed launch from EA’s very talented publishing (not marketing) group, has been doing well across all platforms. But let’s all remember that Dead Space, as a franchise, sort of never needed to exist. In fact the original game, and even the prequel, were some of the most derivative games imaginable. Given their relative success at launch and the continued success of their incredibly derivative youngest brother this raises the question: does it matter when games are derivative?

I have no real rage at self-aware derivative games. All art, great or terrible, is rooted in some sort of derivation and homage to the artists who inspired it. Dead Space’s derivation did not upset me as much as its pretentions towards originality did. Adherents to the series will remember that Dead Space’s status as fresh intellectual property was a huge part of its original marketing campaign, and that it launched with such original failures at Mirror’s Edge. There’s nothing wrong with making a derivative game, stealing and borrowing from creative influences is just how we create. Dead Space’s dishonesty and apparent lack of awareness was really what irked me.

The game itself never winked at us, never let us knew that it totally understood its status between System Shock 2 and Resident Evil, with a little Doom 3 thrown in for the art design, but it was readily apparent to anyone who had played its predecessors. The upgrade system was ripped straight from SS2’s cybernetic upgrade system, the inventory and user-interface so Resident Evilly that they really could not have existed without those venerable games (mostly the most recent one, the criticism of which is like criticism of a band whose artistic direction you disagree with despite its total pitch perfect execution) were actually bullet points for selling copies of Dead Space, which was just not cool. This is to say nothing of the plot of the game, its art design, and the nature of your enemy. Those monolith critters are like The Many light, and by the end of the game they’re basically about as scary your average shambling basic Many servant from System Shock 2. We never get the sense of ramping horror that System Shock offered up so easily.

I enjoyed Dead Space, but this love of other games without explicit statement ground me down over the course of the game, right up to its cliché ending. Paired with the fact that its one original element, the zero-gravity mode of play which involved using every part of a room in order to solve combat puzzles, was actually pretty poorly executed, the game had a slipshod feel to me. And I’m still not sure why you’d want to play through the game as a super-powered Isaac Clark. The tension of acquiring my armor and weapons was actually my favorite part of the game, and a lot of the fun vanished when I could basically sit back and relax moving ahead.

All of this derivation would be quaint enough in a vacuum, but recently I’ve started playing Darksiders, which was not incredibly well received, unfortunately, and let me tell you: Darksiders is fucking amazing. It’s also very, very derivative. But unlike Dead Space, which seemed a little coy about being derivative, Darksiders owns it whole hog. And rightly so, the game’s artistic style draws heavily from existing games. War, your horseman protagonist, looks like Link and one of the ladies of Brutal Legend bore a very angry child who did a lot of body-building work, and the world and its various creations and objects owe much to God of War, especially the melee attacks and occasional “hot key events” that you’re forced to play through. You even find life and items in big stone chests you break or slide open and trade “souls” taken from enemies for weapon upgrades and new skills.

The overall structure of the game itself is also ripped straight out of Zelda, too. You move through a series of “dungeon” structures, acquiring items and procedurally unlocking new areas through puzzles of varying complexity, occasionally finding hidden spots that contain helpful optional goodies along the way. You eventually have to fight a boss at the end of the level, which involves using the item you found along the way in some creative or obvious way, depending on how much time the designer had to spend on a given level. You even collect new health and energy bars by collecting four pieces of an object. It’s not fooling anyone that the item isn’t a heart.

Darksiders owes its existence entirely to these other titles, and it owns its position between the two with a candor rare among video games. There’s never an explicit acknowledgement of the borrowing, but the clarity of it, the manner in which its homages are played out even in the game’s art design is just so direct, it’s hard to feel the way I did while playing Dead Space that the game was aspiring to be its own creation. Darksiders is a game about God of War and Zelda coming together, about combining brawler game play with adventure-puzzle design and mentality. It adds combat puzzles into the mix and addresses questions about just how these genres work, how they’re similar and how they’re dissimilar. The end result is a game that essentially generates a discourse about the manner in which various titles interact.

For example, Darksiders’ open world environments would be anathema to a brawler like God of War normally. With a limited selection of “goodies” to be found and a piss-poor camera and navigation system, walking around in God of War is the worst part of the game. But the game is so centered around murdering dozens of poor sods at a time that you’d never notice until someone pointed it out to you. Darksiders asks these questions unconsciously, through its very design. It shows us how clumsy Zelda’s combat system is as well, how frustratingly gated its upgrade system is as well. And it does all of this by presenting us with a similar design that has learned from other game types and adopted the strengths of those various designs.

I’m a bit shocked that anyone wouldn’t see value in Darksiders and its various unoriginal overtures. As a commercial venture it combines two already excellent games into one fantastic experience, albeit one which is narrative light and laughable in theme (something the designer did not seem to notice judging by the inexplicable comic book they presented to me with the game). And as a creature of game design it’s a lesson in taking lessons, an expression of how great something can be when we admit that we borrow elements of other works to ourselves and our audience and embrace that transaction instead of running from it. There are plenty of imperfect things about the game, to be sure, like a weak storyline and a complete disconnect from any of the characters. War is particularly bad as a protagonist, and I’ve found it useful to just imagine him as an older version of Link who lost Zelda somewhere along the way and decided to go a little crazy. And the supporting cast are all either faceless or irritating. But brawlers have never been particularly fertile ground for establishing relationships with characters, and we’re never asked to identify with War or his regrettable cadre at any point in the game. The artifice of Darksiders, its status as a creation aware of its own lineage willing to admit its status as an object emerging from a tradition where others have tread previously, is really what matters here. There isn’t a single person I wouldn’t recommend Darksiders to, especially given its paltry price-tag this long after release.

The discussion it prompted within me, parallel to the release of Dead Space 2, made it worth the price of admission by itself. Because if you think about the way games are built, why and how they exist, it’s hard not to compare the Dead Space series and Darksiders and consider the manner in which they treat their homages. Darksiders seems rife with affection, its dark brooding protagonist an artistic amalgam of his origins. Dead Space seems to want to escape its referentialism, attempting to design edgy and original creatures and separating itself from its obvious creative influences such as Aliens, Doom and, not to beat this horse all the way to death, System Shock 2. It should also win an award for “worst space marine armor design in video game history,” a hotly contested award.

There’s no question anymore that games are an art form, simply a discussion of the manner in which they function as an art. And as we move deeper and deeper into that discussion games like Dead Space and Darksiders, for the brazen nature of their derivation, are some of the most useful titles to inspect and dissect. They’ve both got problems as games and are both pretty fun regardless of all of them. They’re easy to engage, understand and they open up a broad range of other related titles that might be harder to jump into with a general idea of what you’d be experiencing in them. And they illustrate the intertextuality of games, the manner in which it’s important and how its lack can be devastating to elements of a game through their various choices. Their component parts were, in many ways, superior products, but the conversations that Darksiders and Dead Space present are just as interesting and, from a design perspective, more important.