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• Video games are evil!

  November 27, 2011 @ 10:43 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  Nothing cheers the soul more than baldy geezers fulminating about the threat posed to society by video games. When such scares come along one can’t help but think back to the horror-comic panic of the 1950s or the great Hula Hoop riots of the 1930s. (I think I made the last one up.) Every decade or so some nut suggests that the latest craze is going to turn all young people into illiterate vampires. Time moves on. The undead refuse to rise. And the time comes along for another fresh scare.

  There was some kerfuffle about games in the late 1970s. But the cabinet-enclosed varieties featured fairly tame violence and, being based in arcades, they weren’t likely you keep you up too late. The real media hysteria started when the home console arrived beneath the Phillips Portoview 3000. Now, young people could murder Nazis and detonate planets without leaving the privacy of their rooms. Another generation grew up. Folk who’d spent their adolescence hunting for magic keys in giant toadstools still managed to become lawyers, doctors, plumbers, estate agents and actuaries. Sure, a few also became mass murderers. But the criminally insane were still in a fairly small minority.

  

  I now want to throw some bloke off a bridge.

  I thought about this last year when listening to Saturday Review on BBC Radio 4. Every now and then they include a video game on such shows and the results are always ghastly. Supposed intellectuals will huff and puff about the silliness of it all. Poets in print dresses will boast about never having heard of Space Invaders. “Shut up, shut up, shut up! There’s nothing clever about not knowing stuff! Well unless it’s bloody rugby obviously!” I don’t really say. Anyway, one of the contributors on this occasion was historian Dominic Sandbrook (whose books on the 1960s and 1970s I  heartily and unexpectedly recommend). I screwed myself up as he began discussing the latest episode in the ace Call of Duty franchise.  Ah, how time marches on. Of course, being born in 1974, Dr Sandbrook was easily young enough to have had a console in his rooms when an undergraduate at Baliol. If a contemporary Sebastian Flyte had vomitted through his window, he might have ruined a perfectly good game of FIFA ’93 (as I don’t think it was then called). Dom knew his first-person from his third-person shooter. He was perfectly able to worry about the occasionally jarring jumps between difficulty levels.

  What brought all this on? Oh, yeah. The perennially irritating Keith Vaz, Westminster MP for some unfortunate part of Leicester, has been droning on about how, yes, video games are corrupting the poor wee citizens of Great Britain. Once again, Call of Duty is at the centre of the story. He has actually tabled a motion in the House of Commons stating: “This House is deeply concerned about the recently released video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, in which players engage in gratuitous acts of violence against members of the public.” The statement goes on to repeat the usual unsustainable guff about “increasing evidence of a link between perpetrators of violent crime and violent video games users”.

  To be fair, the debate was kicked up by a potentially insensitive scene in the game. About halfway through, your hero gets to discharge firearms in Westminster Tube Station following a terrorist attack. It is certainly fair to say that anybody who lost friends or family in the 7/7 incidents should stay well away. It is also understandable that such people may not want the game sold. But no sane person playing the game — and we can’t legislate for maniacs — is going to be rendered any less sympathetic towards the victims.

  When debating freedom of expression, an annoying artistic hierarchy sets in. MPs might get a bit grumpy if a film was released involving such an attack, but they probably wouldn’t — to quote further from Vaz’s motion — “[call] on the British Board of Film Classification to take further precautions when allowing” the film to be shown. If a book was published featuring this material then nobody would bat an eyelid.

  Arguments about “identification” and “empathy” are so much hogwash. People who have never played video games too often regard those who have as being gap-toothed morons with talons for hands. The whole story reeks of intellectual snobbery.

  Hooray for Tom Watson. Now over 60, he is still playing great golf and he nearly won the Open Championship a few years back.

  Oh hang on, that’s not right. Hooray for Tom Watson MP. Chief instigator of the campaign against phone hacking, Mr Watson, a casual gamer, took the relatively unusual step of tabling a motion that sought to lesson its stridency. He said: “I just amended it to make the point that the game has an 18 classification and that the BBFC said in a statement that it bore no resemblance to the July 7 bombings in London – which is what he refers to in his motion.” Quite right too. Apparently, Mr Watson is currently enjoying the puzzling fun that is Portal 2. A bit late, old man, but never mind.

  For the record I am greatly enjoying Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. There is a reassuring sameness to the mayhem. I like the way that you can totally ignore the stupid story — something about Roman Abramovich taking over the world — and, even when drunk, blaze away in happy, narrative-free bliss. That said, I do prefer those Call of Duty episodes that are set in the past. Yes, as far as I am concerned, all art aspires to the condition of Where Eagles Dare. Watch out, RPG! Boom, boom, boom. And so on.

• Why am I playing LA Noire (sic) when I could be watching a film?

  June 27, 2011 @ 10:05 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  First things first. This post is not some huffy, tweedy rant about the superiority of films to video games. Such generalised comparisons are largely pointless. Given how differently the entertainments operate, this would be rather like making an unfavourable comparison between bananas and trolly-cars.  (Okay that’s an exaggeration. Films and video games do, as we’ll see, share significant territory. But you get the drift.)

  I am making a specific point about those video games that attempt to tell a complex story — often involving large amounts of dialogue — over a long space of time in carefully realised, quasi-realistic environments. LA Noire is a key, current example. As you may be aware, the game offers a lavish take on the noir universe inhabited by the likes of James Ellroy, James M Cain and Raymond Chandler. You “play” a detective, recently returned from the war, who — while investigating a series of crimes that resemble the Black Dahlia murders — gradually climbs the greasy, sleazy pole that was the Los Angeles Police Department.

  We have no complaints about the version of late-1940s LA. Driving around in bulky cars, the game-player gets to gawp at lovingly constructed facsimiles of iconic landmarks. There’s Union Station. Here’s RKO’s Intolerance set. And so forth. The “acting” is above standard. The music is nicely propulsive.

  Here’s the thing. In what sense is this a game? After a few hours, you realise that the entertainment consists of driving long distances to crime scenes or witness’s houses, ascending the stairs and then pressing the x-button while a series of increasingly boring plot points are droned out by virtual characters. It took me a while, but I eventually recalled what ancient entertainment entity was waving from the depths of my sodden memory. Does anybody else remember Dragon’s Lair? Created in 1983, the arcade game offered the player a series of options, each of which would trigger the playing of a traditionally animated sequence from Disney Studios.  It was nice to look at. But it wasn’t really a game. It was a vast series of short films that the player could, while fooling himself he was in control, programme in vaguely cohesive manner.

  LA Noire is Dragon’s Lair on a vast scale. Rather than devising your own route through the non-game, you find yourself wearyingly trying to accommodate an invisible director by selecting the next scene in his proposed storyboard. Imagine watching a compromised copy of Chinatown that constantly broke down and, unless you kicked the right corner of the DVD player, failed to progress to the next sequence. Actually, scratch that. Imagine a broken copy of China Wars IV — a cheap Chinatown knock-off — that suffers from the same eccentric flaws. It’s not even as if you’re creating a particularly good Film Noir. (Or “Film Noire”. What is it with the use  of the feminine adjective?)

  At least in Red Dead Redemption (excellent western recreation) and Grand Theft Auto (excellent exploitation recreation) you could find alternative entertainments if the set missions were getting you down. The Red Dead fan could potter off for a game of horseshoes. The Grand Theft enthusiast could play pool or… Well, let’s not get into that controversial business with the sex workers.

  This really is the weirdest excuse for a video game. Why the hell would I play this when I could be watching a film?

  I think Stan has something to say on the issue…

  

• Grand Theft Auto IV and double time-wastage.

  December 30, 2009 @ 1:58 am | by Donald Clarke

  I’ll tell you what I hate about Grand Theft Auto IV. Bloody nothing, that’s what. Who knew recreational murder, casual arson and amateur car theft could be such darn good fun? In all the chatter about the best of the decade, the arrival of that gloriously amoral video game — resurrected from its top-down rudiments as Grand Theft Auto III in 2001 — has been scandalously overlooked. You didn’t get to blow up an oil refinery when reading Atonement. That bleeding Arcade Fire album offered no opportunities to slit the throats of strolling nuns. Does anybody get hacked to pieces in the average Martin McDonagh play? Erm. Okay. That’s a bad example. But, you get the point.

  

  Die, die, die! Oh God, I feel awful about myself. Die you motherf**ker!

  If, rather than listing best plays or best films or best operas, we stopped to list best stuff of  the decade then the Grand Theft Auto series would stroll into every sensible maniac’s top five. But, here’s the issue. There is something that annoys me about GTA and it’s annoying me right now. The so-called Sandbox genre — games in which you have the freedom to wander about an imagined world randomly — has introduced a entirely new class of guilt-within-guilt to the human condition. Here’s what I mean. If you have work to accomplish — as I do this week — then, when you displace yourself into GTA and begin murdering passersby, you, quite inevitably and quite properly, feel bad about yourself. Oh, no. I’m crashing cars into buses when I should be designing cathedrals or unplugging drains (or whatever it is you do).

  Meanwhile, within the game, rather than accomplishing the allotted missions, you find yourself idly firing at police helicopters or trying on new clothes in the boutique or attempting to jump motorbikes across urban ravines. “Oh Lordy,” you mumble to yourself as your wanted level creeps towards a fourth star. “I really should be delivering that package of cocaine to the  prostitute on the subway. Hang it. I’ll just slit a few more throats, try on a few more leather jackets, play a game of pool in the bar and then I’ll get round to it. I promise.”

  The work doesn’t get done. The missions don’t get accomplished. But the awful mayhem continues. Two levels of guilt eat away at you ruthlessly. Even J G Ballard didn’t imagine that happening