Play, along with work, learning, communication and creativity, is one of the basic forms of human behavior. In addition to the entertainment function, a person plays to express himself and his skills in a hypothetical situation, to gain new experience and knowledge about the world around him. When playing yard football, children are captivated by the idea of competition, the opportunity to physically surpass their peers, and improve their ball handling skills. Or a racket, or a stick – whatever, because sports games are extremely abstract, the process itself is important in them. The first video games are essentially the same abstraction. Pacman is a game about how a yellow circle runs around a black screen and eats smaller circles – a masterpiece of abstract art in which there is no narrative background. Just like there is no final goal – the game is endless. There is another example – a triangle flies in the middle of nowhere and shoots at vector graphics figures. And here there is a little more context, the imagination assigns the triangle to be an airplane or a spacecraft, and the figures can be asteroids or some kind of space debris. However, there are still a great many interpretations of this disposition, since the game is abstract and accommodates any context without any contradictions. Because there’s nothing to contradict. At worst, a triangle is just a triangle, just like a puck is a puck.
However, the more video games developed, the less abstract they became – they began to have context. If in Pac-Man nothing mattered except the number of points, then in the conventional Super Mario the gameplay suddenly had a beginning and an end, and even a goal – to defeat the dragon and save the princess. However, the game still remains the pinnacle of conventions – some evil men who need to jump on their heads, turtles that flock with their shells against obstacles, carnivorous flowers from pipes and blocks broken by the head. What kind of place this is is absolutely impossible to understand. And the figure of Mario himself is arbitrary – replace the Italian plumber with, for example, an Israeli banker and the game will not lose anything. And therefore, since Super Mario exists outside of any comprehensible coordinates, then it is pointless to demand any reliability from it.
Transferring what has been said to the category of first-person shooters, the same can be said about Doom. Can anyone say with any certainty what’s going on in the game, other than the text boxes between levels?? Some soldiers, brown monsters, pink horned bulls and God knows what else, and all this at levels that are pretty crazy from a logical point of view. By the way, during the development of Doom, there was a man named Tom Hall on the ID team, who sought to recreate levels based on real-life buildings, that is, to bring them to authenticity. Only no one liked his work, but Romero liked that same absurdist design much more. Doom is another abstraction where, in principle, it doesn’t matter who you are, where you run or who you shoot at. What was important, first of all, was the unadulterated pleasure in the process. Well, just like how Mario knocked down brick blocks with his head and grew up on protein mushrooms, the character from Doom picks up all the possible crap generously scattered in the corners, and is always busy looking for three keys, because we all always have three keys in our pocket – red, blue and yellow, which is absolutely logical. Actually, Carmack’s famous phrase about the fact that the plot in games is necessary, but not important, is true precisely for those times when the introduction of any contexts into video games was practically not carried out due to technical limitations, and the fact that the young industry simply had not yet matured to such ideas.
Thanks to the development of technology, in the next game ID, Quake, it is already possible to clearly distinguish such an important attribute as the setting and, accordingly, the narrative from the environment. If the fact that the action in Doom takes place on Mars, where demons broke into, could only be guessed from the notes, then the game design of Quake already screams about the infernal nature of what is happening – heavy black skies, lava rivers, rare alien monsters and undead, roaming around ancient castle buildings, set with traps, as well as blood, a lot of blood everywhere. And here it’s time to assume that you really find yourself in Hell or some similar terrible place, and creatures are swarming around you, which, according to Lovecraft’s precepts, have no name or description. But even having emerged from abstractionism into the space of images and tangible quantities, having acquired some moral and ethical coordinates, Quake, like its predecessors, is still deprived of the main feature of any work of art – authenticity. The game is more like a bad dream than reality – the images, no matter how creepy they may be, can be connected with the player only at the level of associations, but not contextually. In Quake, there is no character as an individually defined subject whose role the player would try on and through whom he would come into contact with the environment. Like Super Mario, in Quake it can still be anyone, which does not entail any change in the narrative or perception of the work of art.
By the way, the player does not https://casinoactiononline.co.uk/ have to directly play such a character. The main thing is that he is placed in an existing context, so that through him and his reaction the player can assess the situation in which the protégé has found himself. When we read historical chronicles that from 13 to 16 million people died on the fields of the civil war in Russia, these numbers mean little to us – these are statistics, historical fact and soulless numbers. But if we read the memoirs of direct participants in the events and look through their eyes at that time, at the cruelty that accompanied people and at how and under what circumstances they died, then this will be a completely different side of perception, much more personal. That is why the figure of the narrator or protagonist is so important for any work of art, including video games.
In 2001, the same ID released Return to Castle Wolfenstein, which has one striking difference with the studio’s previous games – it is a work in realistic scenery, which, with some reservations, can be called reliable. The main character, B.J. Blaskowitz, still doesn’t have much of a character, but now he really is a character – an individually defined person who cannot simply be taken out of the context of what is happening and replaced with someone else. After all, it is BJ who is entrusted with a secret mission to penetrate Castle Wolfenstein, it is BJ who escapes from Nazi captivity, meets with informants in Wulfburg and performs a number of other tasks. But what is much more interesting is not the figure of BJ, but his enemies – German soldiers and some officers.
In the third episode of the game, Blaskowicz finds himself in an ancient crypt in which the Nazis were excavating. There he can observe the horror and desperate resistance of German soldiers who are attacked by supernatural creatures. They shoot, flee, die a terrible death – it is through the prism of these soldiers that we, even as the omnipotent protagonist, understand that this place is exclusively for them, and scares them just as much. The crypt does not look alien compared to the rest of RtCW, which for the most part is a fairly mundane game – largely due to the fact that our usual opponents, ordinary German soldiers, in whom we can recognize people from the world we know, are placed in non-standard conditions with us. After all, the supernatural is such only in contrast to the scientific, comprehensible, and a person, his state of mind and behavior acts as such a fulcrum.
And while RtCW manages to come close to a reliable representation of reality, with plausible opponents in the context of real historical events, then for the first time we pay attention to that same ludonarrative dissonance – the difference between the game and that very reality. In Doom, such a concept is not applicable in principle, simply because there is no narrative, there is only the gameplay itself. That’s why shooting without reloading and color keys do not cause any rejection – we don’t even for a moment correlate them with reality, this world is not real and cannot be, it’s just a game, just like Pacman. With Quake it was already more difficult, but it is not enough to fill the digital space with blood for it to begin to mean something. And here it is Wolfenstein, a game about the Second World War, in which there is a hero, there is a goal and a reason, there is a context. But most importantly, in RtCW there is a human presence – we perceive visible images not only associatively, but also by projecting what we see onto ourselves. Thanks to the same German fighters and, in part, to the main character. As much as this world is real for them, it is just as real for us.
This would be the case if it were not for ludonarrative dissonance, when the player himself begins to see things in the game that destroy his faith in what is happening. BJ has a health bar that is reduced by hitting the hero with guns, a convention that’s the first thing anyone who’s ever played a classic first-person shooter will encounter. Over time, it was replaced by another, and now action heroes need a few seconds to catch their breath and forget that their body has just been filled with bullets incompatible with life. Which of these game mechanics is easier to accept, let everyone decide for themselves. Not having lived to see such amazing regeneration capabilities, Blaskowitz restores health the old fashioned way – with abstract first aid kits. What do they put in these first aid kits that allows you to continue on your way where otherwise you would have died long ago?? Based on Max Payne’s experience, morphine or other strong painkillers. In addition to first aid kits, BJ regains his strength by eating German cuisines – as you know, when you are dying, you can eat for a whole company. Another convention known to everyone who has played more than two games in their life, which is as familiar as it is strange if you try to think about it.
And, in general, already on the paved path from the conventional Pac-Man to the conventional RtCW, one can trace a pattern in which the more complex and complex a video game becomes and the closer it gets to the realistic context of events, the more distrust such a product causes in the consumer due to the increasing conflict between the narrative and gameplay. An effect similar to the “uncanny valley” arises when something that is close in appearance to a person, but still imperfectly imitates him, causes subconscious rejection and horror in us. Gaming conventions, of course, do not cause horror, but situations increasingly arise when one small gameplay detail is enough to destroy the pleasant and deep illusion created by the excessive means of screenwriters, visionaries and game designers. The so-called "5 match problem" from The Evil Within. Sebastian Castellanos carries a huge amount of weapons and ammo – another convention from the early days of video games – but in his pockets, you see, there is no room for a box of matches, and Castellanos can only carry 5. In terms of gameplay, this is explained by balance, the need to put the player in a difficult situation, teach him to be careful and save – everything is clear. But narratively, 5 matches. Throw away your second pistol or that stupid crossbow inspired by the shadowy Japanese genius, and get yourself a bag of these matches, they are many times more useful. But no. The Evil Within is a game where ludonarrative dissonance reigns supreme, and even the fact that the whole plot is a "dog’s dream" doesn’t make things any better.
By the way, does the main character really carry so many weapons with him?? And how many enemies does he actually kill?? The protagonist of Doom 3 had a large arsenal of various weapons, but in cutscenes he was present with only a shotgun. Does this mean that, according to the plot, the hero does not have any other weapons at this point in the game?? He found it but threw it away? And at what point? Dissonance. When the same Lara Croft’s pistol is knocked out of her hands in a cutscene, the girl finds herself defenseless – she does not reach into her invisible arsenal for a machine gun or the same shotgun. And although this simultaneously contradicts the entire experience of playing for Lara and Doomguy, it seems the most logical version of events.
What does this mean then?? The fact that video games in the context of shooters and adventure games are ambivalent and in some way are stratified into two versions of events – the gameplay version, in which the player kills hundreds of enemies, receiving thousands of bullets in his body, while remaining alive, carrying dozens of weapons with him, picking up first aid kits from the floor, etc., and the story version, in which there is none of this, the main character is armed with whatever he needs, he also has to bandage his wounds elsewhere less often, and the opponents themselves are no longer hundreds, but, say, a couple of dozen. This explains how Isaac Clarke survived all this time on the USG Ishimura and in subsequent crises – not because he, a middle-aged engineer, dismembers necromorphs better than any professional military man, but only because, according to the narrative, his clashes with monsters were much less frequent than what happened directly in the gameplay context. The same Max Payne, who, under the control of the player, like an angel of death, wiped out the population of an entire Brazilian quarter and remained unharmed – in one of the cutscenes, Max received a bullet in the arm from a sniper rifle, the plot takes this into account and therefore it can be argued that this particular injury to the hero occurred absolutely accurately. The same cannot be said about those bullets that the player will certainly catch as he continues on the path of vengeance. This approach to interpretation, on the one hand, simultaneously destroys the video game as an integral work, unified in all aspects, but on the other hand, it allows plot works not to stumble over the protruding reinforcement of the game mechanics.
No matter how hard the developers try to bring their projects to a level indistinguishable from reality, it is unlikely that they will ever succeed. And I don’t think it’s really worth it. A game as a form of human behavior is always something generalized, illusory, and as believable as the experience derived from it requires. Games are an imitation of reality, and no matter how significant the plot, narrative, characters, morality, etc. are, they only serve the purpose of accompanying the game with the necessary context, the necessary meaning. So that the player, whether a child or an adult, can learn some lesson from the process. However, the most important thing, nevertheless, is the process itself, regardless of the ideas and images layered on it. That is why Doom, Super Mario, and even Pac-Man can still be played today, despite the age of these examples and their far from the standards of the modern industry – because these are, first of all, games, each of which is good in its own way.