I Survived, Now It's Time 4 Bed
12/5/2008 7:39 PM | 3 Comments | Page 1 of 2
Instead of playing
Left 4 Dead, I played Francis in "Blood Harvest" in
Left 4 Dead.
Saturday night I was sitting alone in my studio, shooting zombies. With me were three friends of a like mind, Zoey, Louis and Bill. Together, the four of us made our way from an abandoned highway, the lights so harsh and the trees so still that the air around my head seemed to freeze; through a ghost town and onto a boat that rescued us finally, hearts pounding, from the infested woods. Only Louis went down, guns blazing; the camera pulled upwards and away from the boat, giving us a bird's-eye view of the rabid mob piling upon his corpse. Fade out as the waters parted before us. Roll credits.
As I took off my headphones, story complete, I felt a familiar pang of sadness, wondering just what it was I'd done all by my lonesome.
Left 4 Dead tried to tell me: "You've just made your own movie, brave gamer! Now do it again. And do it better, if you can." This was all I got for what I'd been through?
When I play with
people, naturally, that feeling goes out the window entirely. I'm having fun with people. I'm still human. Online in
Left 4 Dead, even as I'm chastised by high schoolers with headsets for getting myself separated from the group, I'm at least comforted that I unwittingly abandoned a team that had the capacity to feel let down by my actions, to break that fourth wall and express a desire to strike me from its ranks.
Alyx knows that you can't talk to her in
Half-Life 2, but she keeps you company anyway.
But having few gamer friends, I almost always play on my own, so it's not surprising that my favorite moments in single-player games are collaborative: commanding and conversing with hired wingmen in
Privateer; running through
Quake with my faithful companion, the "Cujo" mod; playing backup in tight hallways for resistance squads in
Half-Life 2; blasting my way out of a labyrinth with my robot friend Curly in
Cave Story.
And yet, surviving
Left 4 Dead's horrors with only virtual friends left me more than a little empty. I felt like the time-traveling protagonist of the film "La Jetée," who suddenly realizes that no matter what change he tries to make in the past, his future's fixed. His journey through time was supposed to liberate him, but he was really just sliding in an endless loop around his destiny. He never went anywhere, and I was only ever sitting by myself in my room. Next time I come back to
Left 4 Dead, Louis will have the same tie on, Bill will still need a shave, Zoey will still have no interest in me whatsoever. They're sharp artificial intelligences, but doomed to an eternity of trying not to have their brains eaten.
Chris Marker's film "La Jetée": Was the prisoner ever free? Gaming can be like time-traveling.
Faced with any art form -- novels, plays, films -- you suspend disbelief, lose your temporary grip on reality. I love and hate games because they draw me so quickly into their other world, one where I'm re-rendered as a Survivor, hotshot pilot, robot soldier, psychic boy. Games make it
easier than ever. They simply hand you a blue pill to swallow, and you're immediately swept away into a computer-generated un-reality. Yet as the worlds look and sound increasingly vivid, the characters feel increasingly lifelike, and the designers become increasingly self-aware about being not unlike the robotic overlords in "The Matrix," I find myself increasingly aware that when I play a game, I'm acting alone on an elaborate stage set with nobody watching.
