Nicholson Baker: The Way the World Works

Altogether, it took me an astounding twenty-four hours to get through the single-player version of Modern Warfare 2 —three times longer than the average player takes. But I made a lot of notes, and that stretched the time out some. What fascinated me most were those moments in the midst of a fierce firefight when you were given a chance to find some “intel”—on the second floor of a house on the Russian border, say, where Makarov, the paleo-Soviet terrorist, was rumored to be hiding out. During these tranced lulls, I found, you could wander at your leisure from room to room while your squadron-mates stood around waiting for you to act. As they waited, they cracked their necks from side to side and scratched themselves, as idle men seem always to do under the guidance of artificial intelligence.

I found many interesting things while exploring this house, not wanting, particularly, to get back into the action and be killed again. Some Russians lay in pools of blood in the upstairs hall. In the master bedroom were books on a bookshelf, including The Jungle Book, a law treatise, and what appeared to be a biography of the Dutch painter Gerard van Honthorst. I’d seen these same books back in northern Virginia, during a break in the frantic action there, before the bloodbath at Burger Town. In the bathroom there were sections of illegible newspaper and a Teddy bear fixed to the wall with a knife through its nose. I went into a smaller bedroom.

In it were seven or eight sleeping bags, unrolled, empty, and a lot of rollaway suitcases. Also a pinup of a clothed woman wielding a machine gun. There was something touching about this tableau of sleeping bags, since I knew that the soldiers who had slept there were now dead. If I got down on my stomach, I could crawl right through the sleeping bags, which was an interesting experience — seeing the underside of the texture. I could even crawl through a dead body, and I did once — for everything in a video game is just a contortedly triangulated, infinitely thin quilt of surface. What, I wondered, was in the suitcases?

The only way I knew how to look inside a random object was to shoot it. So I shot at a suitcase. A dingy striped shirt flew out. I shot at another suitcase: another dingy shirt. These rang a bell: I’d seen them hanging from a clothesline in the Brazilian favela, the setting for an earlier battle. In the master bedroom, I shot at some cardboard boxes. Bags of potato chips and beef jerky popped out, and little cherry pies. Down in the kitchen, I noticed an old crate of potatoes — also bags of flour and basmati rice. These staples, too, I’d seen in the favela.

I began to think a lot about the hardworking set dressers for this game, who cleverly reused the same props in different ways in different countries. What moral were they offering — that people were basically the same everywhere? That most of life was getting up in the morning, putting on your clothes, and eating basmati rice? That war, even for the soldier, was the aberration? Or were they just being thrifty, or playful?

Modern Warfare 2, at that moment, felt truer, realer than almost all war movies — although it owes much to them, of course, especially Black Hawk Down. In fact, when I watched The Hurt Locker I sensed the rifle-scopic influence of the entire Call of Duty series — as in the long, still standoff in the desert with the tiny figure at the window. Cinematographers and movie directors think more like snipers now because of the Xbox. I went downstairs in the Russian house to resume the battle. When I was shot and died, I was offered a quotation from Confucius: “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.”

Next on my master list, appearing on November 17, was the ultra-stealthy, silver-hooded Assassin’s Creed II, set in Renaissance Florence and Venice. (This list, by the way, I’d made with my son’s help. He reads the video-game websites and listens every week to the charmingly garrulous “Giant Bombcast,” which is like “Car Talk” but with four vastly knowledgeable gamers.) In Assassin’s Creed II, you are Ezio, a man with many missions. You deliver letters and hurry around cities with a loping stride, climbing up the facades of palazzos and churches when the mood moves you. You leap from rooftop to rooftop, and sometimes you leap in the wrong direction and fall, and if you fall too far you die, whereupon the screen goes red and then white, crisscrossed with many schematic lines, and it says “desynchronized”—because in the game’s frame story you’re not really in Renaissance Italy; you’re really a twenty-first-century man (again voice-acted by Nolan North) reclining in a comfortable virtual-reality machine with an orange cushion.

Sometimes you have to assassinate someone — that’s your creed, after all — which you can do with hidden wrist knives or poison blades or swords or even an early gun, and sometimes you just have to beat someone up. One of your first tasks, in fact, is to find a lout who is cheating on your sister. You call him a lurid pig, and when you beat him up you make money. You can hire thieves, you can loot dead bodies, you can steal florins from pedestrians (although they will fuss if you do), and you can buy Renaissance paintings from a small art stand. You can even hire a group of murmurously flirty courtesans who wear low-cut pastel gowns and coo provocatively, and if you suddenly decide to parkour around on the roof once again they will wait for you down below.

The game, made by Ubisoft Montreal, has moments of loveliness, as when you reach a lookout high up over Venice and allow your gaze to sweep across the sfumatoed city. The colors are brown stone, weathered brick, the occasional red flapping banner, and pale Mediterranean blue. The wind sounds just the way wind should sound. Not much that’s noble or witty or soul-stirring happens in these lovingly re-created cities. If you hang in there for many hours, you get to fly Leonardo da Vinci’s bat-winged glider by night. But mostly it’s death, death, death — and fistfights, and the accumulation of wealth by acts of thuggery. You leap down on the Borgia Pope in the middle of Mass and punch him out. You’re forever pressing the pink square to stab. (Or, on the Xbox, the blue X.) “There’s a lot of face and neck stabbing, if you like to stab dudes in the face and neck,” Ryan Davis explained on the Giant Bombcast. “There’s one really good move where you will stab a dude five or six times super quickly, shank style, like, uh uh uh uh uh, just jabbing — and that’s oddly satisfying.” The most fun I had was jumping off a building into a pile of hay. My son showed me how to rock-climb to the top of the Tower of San Marco, keeping a lookout for the slightly darker brick where the handholds were. That was a pleasure.

To avoid competing with Modern Warfare 2, many game publishers took cover and postponed their launches, so after Assassin’s Creed II there wasn’t much going on till late in January. Out of curiosity, I played the demo for Bayonetta, a Japanese game in which a woman dressed in her own hair kickboxes her way through battles with fearsome creatures. She wears hip eyeglasses and looks like Tina Fey. When she goes wild with a kick combination, her hair suddenly swooshes out and forms itself into a swirling lethal force that helps her defeat her enemy. I also fought zombies with a fry pan and a crowbar in Left 4 Dead 2 . A zombie called the Spitter doused me with corrosive stomach acid that emerged in a flume from her enormous toothy mouth. That was the only game that gave me a bad dream: in it, I crouched in a jet engine with my family, hiding out from evil people on the runway, wishing I had a fry pan.

Meanwhile, my son and his friends were laboriously working their way up the multiplayer ladder of Modern Warfare 2 . The goal is to reach the top rank, level 70, in which you unlock an AK-47. At that point, you start again at level 1, but with a fancy star icon next to your name to signal that you’ve gone “Prestige.” My son quit playing the game at that point — many of his friends have continued.