There's a certain kind of joy that comes from shit talk, a
kind of reverberant negative-positive energy, especially when it cycles back
and forth, up and down, as the game stokes the pedantic shit-talking fires that
lie in the adolescent hearts of every human being. Rendered in random conversation, these
aspects are socially unacceptable, with good reason. Whiny, pedantic shits tend to find themselves
friendless and in banking by the time they hit thirty for lack of basic human
conscience, but the same winging shiftiness that besets the least among us
takes root in us all, and to suppress that knowledge, that urge, that verve, is
to do a disservice to the animal within all of us.
That's part of why the Gauntlet
reboot is so remarkable.
In a world where co-op has become king, and co-op is a
"let's all win together" prospect, wherein teammates function to the
capacity of either the least or greatest among them equally, a kind of cruel,
Darwinian engine for resolving personal disputes with impressively raw passive
aggressive force is more than welcome. Gauntlet brings just that to the table,
featuring what Jerry Holkins aptly termed "competitive co-op" in its
best form.
See, Gauntlet
harkens back to the unforgiving arcade days of yore, where you were on your
own, at the mercy not just of the enemies you were fighting, but your teammates
as well. Games designed to eat coins
were looking to eat your coins, yours specifically, and in so devouring those
coins, they would emasculate you, make it readily apparent that you were less
man than your friends. Your friends
would make fun of you in turn, fueling your rage, your drive to push back into
the game. Your drive to improve.
That drive, once fulfilled, was rewarded with the flip side
of the same cycle that reinforced it into being in the first place: you'd be
the mocker, the winging little shit who'd shoot the food to spite your brain
dead elf who didn't have the brains to grab it before it was gone. You'd be the jack off grabbing the gold from
his still warm corpse, picking up the crown from the barbarian when he dropped
it after taking a hit for the team, darting in and out of combat, hoping for
the best, fearing the worst: that you might be exposed, even for a moment, as
something less than superlative at your game of choice.
For a generation of gamers, Goldeneye was the ultimate vector of this shit-talking framework,
but the Gauntlet reboot repackages it
quite aptly, in a way that, unlike Goldeneye,
makes it much more possible for players lagging behind to participate, and even
catch up. But, like Goldeneye, without shit talking there's really little to it: single
player Goldeneye was about as fun as
hammering a nail into one's dick, and Gauntlet
without other people is a special kind of hell.
But on Skype, with friends screaming at one another, Gauntlet is exactly what it needs to be:
a remembrance of a kind of game long since past, a throwback in all the right
ways that takes the best aspects of the original (abject competition among
teammates and unforgiving conditions) and throws away what it doesn't need
(friendly-fire damage and pedantically frustrating penalties for even passing
deaths). Mixed in with a wonderfully
original achievement structure, which thus far has mostly focused on the ways
I've fucked up while simultaneously giving me benefits for fucking up
continuously, Gauntlet makes me pine
for a simpler era of gaming, where games weren't so simple, where social
interactions were terse and passive aggressive.
There's some nostalgia there, too. Gauntlet
has a flavor to it that recalls the best of arcade gaming, where you'd sit
around with a handful of friends mashing away, occasionally shouting at one
another, mostly silently working together towards a single task. It makes me long for discontinued foodstuffs
from my youth, for Hoods single serving chocolate-vanilla ice cream cups served
in long sleeves and pretzel sticks from jars.
That's the power of Gauntlet's game type, the power of the specific kind
of social interaction it permits, even lubricates by making the framework
surrounding it more forgiving. And that
is the real core of Gauntlet: not its
asymmetric play, not its well crafted progression system, not its button-mashy
chaos.
It's a framework for people to be shitty to each other. A spectacular framework, at that.
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