Sons of Loki

It’s my last day alone in the house and I’m basically just clearing up my mess before the guys get here and thinking about my interview/assessment tomorrow. Removed a big hairy Tegenaria domestica from the sink all by myself. Got Ken Bruce on, at least until he’s replaced by the sneery Jeremy Vine in five minutes. (“Is there actually anything to object to here?” he asks of the latest controversial non-story, but I’m sure callers will provide.) Coffee in the pot. Funny how it’s sort of nice to be alone in the mornings, but it’s terrifying at night.

I didn’t have time to play Red Faction Guerrilla last year, so I’ve been wasting my September days here on it. It’s certainly full of fun – the building-destruco-tech is a remarkable if flawed gimmick. Can there be anything better than planting explosive charges on a chimneystack, Fred Dibnah-stylee, and watching it tumble to the ground, crushing flimsy shacks as the pipe rolls down a hill? Well, yes. It would be better if the buildings weren’t often just held up by a single bit of wood after all the other walls were taken out, but it’s still satisfying when you take out the last bit and the whole thing tumbles down.

There was something really bothering me, though, but I didn’t realise what it was until Yahtzee pointed it out. You can’t play as a guerrilla. There’s no stealth whatsoever. The second you turn up anywhere, you get gunned down mercilessly. No sneaking around enemy bases, planting charges before retiring to a nearby hill and watching the fireworks – you have to go in guns blazing, throwing explosives aimlessly, which kind of takes the fun out of carefully demolishing buildings.
The game encourages you to ambush convoys, which would be really cool – planting mines on the road and hiding behind a rock – if not for the fact that the second the convoy gets within a hundred metres of you, they drive off the road and try to run you over while your carefully placed mines lie fallow. And you can only carry about six bullets and you die really quickly. And the AI guerrillas who spontaneously rise up to aid you in your one-man revolution die very, very quickly. I felt like shouting at them, Life of Brian style, that I wasn’t the messiah, that they should stop following me around because they’re just going to die horribly. (Although nothing’s more amusing than when you get involved in a minor road accident and knock over a wall, and a crowd of wannabe Ches turn up in a truck assuming the great uprising against your oppressors has begun.)

It also got me thinking about something that bothers me in just about every work of fiction where killing people is presented as entertainment. It’s the way heroes can do no wrong when they’re gunning down legions of faceless enemies. The villain is demonised for massacring thousands of peasants, but the hero slices through thousands of rank-and-file soldiers whose only crime was accepting the king’s shilling, and no one stops to complain. I mean, obviously the end goal is good, but it would be a better story if you introduced some depth to it. I mean, Red Faction is basically a big Iraq War allegory, with an insurgency fighting an occupying force there to grab all the natural resources, but the guerrillas/terrorists (depending on your view, of course) are presented as noble freedom fighters fighting an evil totalitarian empire. It would be a lot more interesting if your side was doing some morally questionable stuff, because that’s how war works.

The old James Bond killed plenty of people and was still a hero. The new guy, and the one in the books, is basically a cold-blooded murderer, and it’s a lot more interesting that way. There’s the bit in Metal Gear Solid 2 (I think) where the Colonel calls you out if you kill a certain number of enemies, saying “You seem to get a real thrill out of slaughtering the enemy. Are you frustrated about something?”, and in the sequel one of the bosses taunts you by making you face the ghosts of every single person you’ve killed in the game so far. And then there’s that Ultima game (?) where in an act of genius, it turns out that the faceless monsters you’ve been killing in all the other games in the series were actually intelligent and harmless all along. (Something along those lines.)

And there was this bit in Modern Warfare 2 that made me think. Now, I hesitate to attribute artistic merit to such a by-the-numbers blockbuster as MW2, but Call of Duty 4 did have that clever AC-130 level which quite subtly (subtly for video gaming, anyway) compares modern warfare to a video game, all point-and-click and detached from the actual slaughter.
It comes after the first half of the infamous “No Russian” level when you’re shooting Russian FSB troops as an undercover CIA operative. You have to shoot them to finish the level, whereas in the first half, the game wisely doesn’t force you to shoot any civilians in the controversy-inducing terrorist attack. And I thought why is it killing civilians is presented as wrong, but killing FSB police is just treated as part of the mission? Aren’t they just civilians behind their riot shields? And that’s when I realised I’d been killing plenty of Russian soldiers in the previous mission without batting an eyelid. I had an epiphany. If killing civilians was wrong, then killing police was wrong, then killing soldiers – even if they were the enemy – was wrong, surely.

But, then, this is Call of Duty we’re talking about, so I doubt it was the intended message. I’m probably thinking about this too much, and I doubt we want a world where every hero is tortured by the horrible things he has done to protect his family and way of life and stuff, but it would be more interesting, is all I’m sayin’.