The Man on the Other Side of the Scope
I’ve been playing FarCry 2 for an inexplicable reason: I’ve mostly caught up on the games I’ve felt needed playing so far in 2010, so I’ve been using the time before the typical holiday avalanche to catch up a few that fell through the cracks. I decided to play Clint Hocking’s largely ignored FarCry 2.
That’s actually a lie; there is a specific reason. If you’ve never listened, the now nearly dead Idle Thumbs podcast was a fantastic games conversation, especially since several of the rotating members were from the development community and the discussions often went much deeper than the surface level examination of videogames, something I’ve become profoundly more interested in the last few years. Idle Thumbs was obsessed with—so far as I understood from the podcasts I listened to—because it’s far more entertaining when viewed as a series of complex systems than a traditional game.
I’ve been actively playing FarCry 2 differently than other games, purposely exploiting the various systems—FarCry 2’s virtual domino pieces—and understanding how those systems can create fun.
I had a revelation while getting shot at by some asshole from seemingly a mile away, one of the more frustrating aspects of actually playing FarCry 2. Enemies have an uncanny ability to track the hell out of you, scoring insanely accurate pot shots from great distances while the game provides little feedback on where the shots themselves are coming from. And then it hit me: my frustrations were the ones usually reserved for the helpless enemies. Imagine what it must be like as a nameless enemy combatant in a videogame. Everything is stacked against you; the design rooted in empowering the player and their ability to utterly destroy you however they choose—in games, variety is beloved. When the player takes a pot shot at a flailing enemy, they curse under their breath because their ammo count has gone down a notch. That enemy, in this case a series of AI routines, is attempting to reconcile whatever feedback it can about the player’s character that’s been instilled in its little brain by the game’s AI programmer, the goal of both parties being to convince the player its actions are somewhat “real.”
I’m not necessarily saying lack of feedback is good, but in this specific instance, it was interesting.
But if you attempt to imagine that AI character is a person, even if it’s a programmed thing, it’s kind of depressing. We yell at the game because we’re trained that games are supposed to feed us with knowledge about what’s attacking us, whether it’s a throbbing heart visualized in the direction of the bullet or the sudden appearance of an arrow on our mini-map. While I’ve cursed a handful of times for approaching death because some random enemy is playing with my head besides a bush in a mostly-green forest, I had to admire the turning of the tables. I was no longer in charge, I’d become the hunted and it was an undeniably thrilling feeling. “Where the fuck is that guy?” I’d say aloud over and over.
When I finally found the enemy, a nameless ghost who’d pelted me with a dozen rounds, I acutely recalled a scene from the end of Jaws, a movie about men against an enemy with every advantage.
“Smile, you son of a bitch.”
Boom.
