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 Jet?e," 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 Jet?e": 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.


But as long as I'm plugged into its other space, removed from my own surroundings, I want to be able to retreat into the game's depths, too. I want to relish being in my new body, to listen to its grunts and footsteps, to creep and jump through the digital dirt of the new world. I want to pause and admire the way a street corner suddenly reminds me of a place I might have been, or how the inside of an apartment building resembles one I've seen with my own eyes. These details are only incidental to the game proper, but they're instrumental in letting me live in the world.

Zoey can't live without a camera on her.

The seamless AI in Left 4 Dead pushes me out of it. Zoey, Louis and Bill, who follow me everywhere like lemmings, armed with one-liners that make us laugh at just the right times during our plight, prove that this is more act than experience, more setup than story, that my friends are fake, my gun is fake, the zombie holocaust is fake, and my escape is only virtual. They are so good at their jobs that I'm left cold in their company; they're the best actors in the business and I'm just posing. Single-minded, relentless and perfect in their purpose, they also make me realize that a game world is so full of fragile life, full of sights and sounds -- all of which can be silenced and gone in the blink of an eye, mere figments of my imagination.


If stories in most games were more earnest, and were intended to be truly valuable to the gamer, then maybe I wouldn't so easily feel like I was just play-acting. Maybe the astonishing vividness of the game environment wouldn't so often feel at odds with its programmed underbelly. In a game like BioShock, whose every pixel feels meaningful, I feel no existential crisis; I love being with the Splicers in their dank hell-hole, even though they all want to kill me. It's because I actually believe that the city of Rapture existed before I arrived, and that it'll always be there for me.

Drowning was never so fulfilling as it was in BioShock.

Games like Left 4 Dead and Portal, which tell comparatively thin stories while also telling us about what makes them into stories, are charming and smart. Like Portal, where you literally open up and step into new worlds, the cinematic Left 4 Dead is clearly meant to show that when you interact with a videogame, you create a story for yourself that's never quite the same twice. But aren't the designers jumping the gun a bit? Now that designers have the technological means to build games that envelop us like a film, why shouldn't the stories more often do the same? As disquieting as it feels for me to come back home after ending a game, I think it's much braver for a game to deeply want to bring the player into a new place, rather than to ruminate about how it's still just a game.


If only the Director had instead been called the Artist; then Left 4 Dead might have tried to inspire real, abject terror that lasted beyond the confines of the game rather than provide a commentary on gaming backed with a list of B-movie citations. Instead, after a few chapters of survival theatrics, the new eyes I'm staring out of start to feel as lifeless and tired as the zombies, and I'd rather have my old ones back.