Super Nerd Sundays: Brothers in Arms!

At first Gaz doesn't really take to me – maybe he's threatened. But he warms up to me, him and Price. We have a rollicking good time together – we break into a freighter, we kill a bunch of people, steal a bunch of shit and travel the world for a few jam-packed days of fun, sun and murder. We get to be buddies, me and my SAS bros, touring the world through our gun-cams. By the time we reach the end of our journey things have changed a lot: we've got a black friend who I watched pass through the same friendship inauguration process that I did, there were some nukes we did some thing about (I think we...stopped them?) and we killed some douchebag's son in a Ukrainian apartment complex.

But as the final frames dawn upon us we find ourselves on the ground – Zakhaev closing in on us. Our black friend dies. Gaz is thrown from us, distant: we watch him fall helplessly. Price gives me the tool I need to resolve the situation – my weapon, my perspective on the world. Just as he did during training, when so much less was at stake, he presents me with this perspective, this framing device existing simultaneously with his own, and through it I save something: the world, my life, the remnants of our friendship.

It's not always the case, but a fair number of First Person Shooters focus heavily on elements within their stories like brotherhood. Some games are obsessed with it to the exclusion of most other themes – Brothers in Arms has it right in the title, and the Hells Highway expansion (or sequel, depending on how you look at it) examines the concept of brotherhood set against the backdrop of Market Garden, tearing the concept apart and building it back up under the light of one of the bloodiest and most disheartening American losses in World War II. Half-Life 2 constantly throws bands of saucy rebels your way to make you feel connected to them and imbue your actions with not just a sense of anarchic glee but true revolution as well. Far Cry 2 even goes so far as to imbue the game with a literal “buddy system,” which blossoms into a crucial mechanic.

All of these potent narratives about brotherhood all move towards more or less the same goal – a story about community, conflict and resolution told from behind the barrel of the gun, a story where your identity is more or less that of a gun. And why shouldn't it be? We've been romanticizing that conceit of identity for decades now, ever since Marines chanted “This is my rifle. There are many like it but this is mine.” on screen. To be a part of something bigger is to lose a part of yourself, to place it in another object – to find a constant in a world where you are not fully in control. The gaming shorthand to this end is the weapon: the rifle, the spinfusor, the crowbar.

It establishes our identity and our ability to act upon the world. In Modern Warfare we aren't placed behind a real, controllable character until we're given the opportunity to choose our guns, to shoot our guns and act upon the world. Even then we're eased into our guns, our guns are given context and friendly faces to help us feel comfortable using them – we're taught that our guns are how we can interact with the world, and the better we do with our guns the better off our brothers are. Far Cry 2 goes one better, crippling you and making the gun your means of empowerment. Considering how weak and finicky guns are in Far Cry 2, and how sickly your character is, constantly on the verge of collapse, it does a great deal more than establish brotherhood. But it does so at that - it establishes not only your worldview but your working relationship with every other character. Each time you interact with a friendly character in Far Cry 2 you are given a gun. Each act of aid, cooperation and coordination comes with a firearm – even if you already have one, your buddy will give one to you.

Perhaps the best example stems from Half-Life 2, where Barney officiates your re-integration into the revolution by giving your a crowbar. He turns you from a man on the run to a force of nature, and the first action you take with that crowbar is to defy the Combine – to disarm and destroy them while defending your Resistance brothers and sisters. Half-Life 2 is a bit of an odd example, especially considering how much of that game is spent running through various kinds of corridors alone. But the role the Resistance plays in the game is undeniable, and without Barney giving you the tools for your work, without you being the chief Guy With a Gun for the Resistance, and without your gun-camera adventures from the first game there simply wouldn't be a Resistance. Half-Life is fundamentally about a revolution built around a camera that swings around a gun.

And don't even get me started on Hells Highway – a game centered around a gun and its nigh mystical implications for a band of soldiers. Hell's Highway has a highly refined system of directing AI teammates and a third person cover-cam that gives you a view of you and your brothers in arms sitting shoulder to shoulder behind cover, your little gun-pricks poking out overhead. It's a game where characters, their roles and their personalities are defined by the weapons they wield, and characters who cannot wield a weapon are literally crippled. The gun isn't just a tool for building camraderie and community in Hell's Highway – it's a necessity if you want to survive in the world.

So guns are more than just a way to kill things – they're a way to bond over killing things. But what about games where guns don't kill people, where “guns” aren't really guns at all?

Portal is obsessed with ideas about community, cooperation and the role of the player as collaborator rather than opponent for developers. It's also a game with a very feminine gun model in it that fires vaginas at walls. As such Portal's commentary on community isn't so much about brotherhood, the way that Call of Duty or Hell's Highway are, as relationships in general. There are some brilliant close readings of Portal which take apart the player's relationship (and Chell's relationship by extension) with GlaDOS out there, and I'm loathe to try to recreate it here. But what I do find interesting is the complexity within Portal's relationships seems to stem somewhat from its new take on guns.

Portal never really saddles you with enemies. Even the turrets are collaborators of a sort, characters who assist you in creating a story, make witty quips and make you feel better about the world around you with their adorable little voices. As such it concerns itself less with making you look at the world from the gun's perspective, replacing the usual gun-centered orientation with a spatial orientation that introduces you to your character. As the game unfolds your relationship with GlaDOS, the Portal Gun and the Weighted Companion Cube all unfold through similar constraints – the space is what undoes characters and brings them closer together, and the spatial passage the crucial element in the game. Without destruction, Portal centers on movement, cooperation and collaboration – it centers on personality and coordination where other games might use violence as a shorthand for moving the plot forward.

This gets really interesting in Portal 2, wherein you and a friend can play adorable robots together to solve puzzles and generally make a mess of the world. It's a different situation than the aforementioned single player experiences, to be sure, but it's still worth discussing the way that you're introduced to your ally and the way you're encouraged to look at the world. Portal 2 never asks you to look at the world through a pair of iron sights. Rather every piece of visual information, from your initial orientation to the final steps in solving a puzzle, is centered around the bodies of your little robo-avatars and their place in the environment. In a game with a first person perspective there's a staggering amount of spatial data to absorb, and Portal 2 gives you plenty of subtle cues about where you are, who you are and how you fit into its uniquely cooperative play before it lets you loose on puzzles.

It's facile to say that this is solely a result of the lack of violence within the game, but it is worth considering (perhaps in another, longer essay) that the relationships built in Portal are not built around violence. Instead your portal gun, or vagina gun as I've been calling it of late, makes you take not only a new perspective on the world around you but also a new perspective on the relationships you encounter. The ease afforded storytellers by violence and violent action is replaced by a more complicated kind of relationship building: our brothers and sisters in arms become a more general sort of brother and sister and, in turn, become more complex individuals with richer pallets developing them.