Nicholson Baker: The Way the World Works

Then came BioWare’s gigantic opus, Mass Effect 2, released on January 26, 2010. Commander Shepard (no relation to Modern Warfare ’s General Shepherd) is in control of a gracefully elongated spaceship, the Normandy, which has bunk beds, fish tanks, and a wisecracking mess officer who also cleans the bathrooms. “This ain’t no luxury liner,” he says. “I catch what falls through the cracks, heh-heh.” Young ensigns flirt outrageously with Shepard as they give him messages, and Miranda, a brunette with “extensive genetic modification” (i.e., breast implants), accompanies you sometimes on your travels. You visit a strip club where a blue alien dances for you and a bartender tries to poison you. You avert a plague by using some big fans to spread an antidote around.

Mass Effect 2 is the most novelistic of the games I played. It’s an elaborately cataloged scatterment of worlds in which you slingshot yourself around using mass-effect generators that make you go at light speed. You meet many colorful humanoids, with whom you converse by choosing bits of dialogue with your control stick. It sounds awkward, but it works. After one battle, Shepard encounters a young Krogan standing in a corner. The Krogan, a hulking monster with a huge reptilian neck, was born in a tank the week before. “You are different,” the Krogan says. “You don’t smell like this world. Seven night cycles and I have felt only the need to kill. But you — something makes me speak.”

“How can you speak if you’re only a week old?” Commander Shepard asks, providing you prompt this query with your control stick.

“There was a scratching sound in my head, and it became the voice,” the Krogan replies. “It taught things I would need — walking, talking, hitting, shooting.” Walking, talking, hitting, shooting — that just about sums it up. Video games aim to find and nurture the tank-born Krogan in all of us.

I played for a while, visiting planets and shooting incendiary bullets at waves of venomous antagonists. Then I stopped. It’s two DVD disks. It’s really enormous. In order to do all the missions and side missions of Mass Effect 2, you can easily spend fifty hours or more, especially if you like trying all the dialogue options, as I do. I craved more sunshine pouring in through the helmet visors, more leaf shadow, more wind, more air — maybe some little Krogans riding on bicycles. Finally, I gave up. I was dying too much, and when you die the music goes bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom, while terrible red and black retinal veins grow in from the edges of the screen.

By then it was the end of February, and time to play the most self-consciously artistic game on the list: Heavy Rain, by Quantic Dream, a studio in Paris that got development funding from Sony. Sony kindly sent me an early copy, in a faux-battered shoebox. When I lifted the lid, an audio clip of a woman’s voice asked, “Are you prepared to suffer to save your son?” David Cage, Quantic Dream’s founder, calls the game an interactive drama. In one interview, in the Independent, Cage said that he feels close to Orson Welles, advancing an art form. And in fact he’s right.

For the first half hour, the game is a stunner. “It’s flipping genius, Dad!” my son called out as he began playing. The faces have complicated eyes and eyelids, and you, a sad-faced father with a strong resemblance to David Duchovny, do pleasant things with your kids and your wife. Then comes grief: one of your sons dies in front of your eyes. Whereupon you enter the gloomy Heavy Rain universe, switching among several characters, one of whom may possibly be a serial murderer who likes paper folding. You are a woman with amazingly good posture and an impassive face who high-steps around her apartment in her underwear. You are a private detective with a big stomach and a big heart. You are an FBI agent with virtual-reality sunglasses. It’s always raining, and the music is lush, and everyone’s face is sad and empty, until you can’t stand the pop of droplets anymore and you’re slogging around in the runoff at the side of the street, wondering whether the clouds will ever part. No, they never will.

Is it a good game? It has realistic eyeblinks and moments of ecstatic mundanity, as when you use the controller to put a frozen pizza in a microwave for your TV-watching son (who is soon to be kidnapped) and then dump it onto a plate. It’s forward-looking, too, in the way it uses the control buttons: at moments of high tension, you have to hold down several at once, like Lon Chaney playing a Bach arpeggio, till you’ve accomplished a difficult action — fought off an attacker, say, or chopped off one of your own fingers. But the plot and the conversational tropes will be familiar — too familiar — to crime-drama watchers. It’s an homage to NYPD Blue episodes and the movie Seven: cops who squabble in Brooklyn accents, some serial killing, some split personality, some amnesia, more lush music — nothing that has any reality in any conceivable life lived anywhere on planet Earth. The endings vary based on what you do — the script is more than two thousand pages long — but my son and I both arrived independently at similar endings, in which the character that we liked the most turned out to be the Origami Killer. Which made us unhappy and made no sense dramatically. In my version of the story, my second son died, too. I suffered, to be sure, but I didn’t manage to save him.

Heavy Rain feels like a clinical depression served up in a shoebox. Possibly that’s what David Cage intended it to be — and more than a million copies have sold, so it’s a successful depression.

The next game on my list was another eagerly sought-after PlayStation 3 showpiece: God of War III, a single-player game set on and under Mt. Olympus. I got about eight hours into it, during which time I cut off the Chimera’s tail, ripped off Helios’s head, and stabbed somebody in the eye with his own horn. I hooked into the flesh of middle-aged naked birdwomen who flew around as Harpies. I injured a horse and saw its intestines pour out. I cut off Hades’s chest muscle and watched it jump around on the floor like a toad; I had to destroy the muscle before the huge Hell god could grab it and slap it back into place. I took hold of the Cyclops’s eye like a beach ball and pulled on it till the optic nerve dangled.

Why did I do this? Because I was the muscleman Kratos, a Spartan-born hero who wears a lot of eye makeup and wanders the mythosphere with a spoiled scowl on his face. Kratos is on a rampage, bent on revenge, because one of the gods tricked him into killing his family. He has a flaming bow and arrow, some claws he won from Hades, a long blue sword, and two big blades, and every time he whirls around — and he whirls a lot, because that’s how he fights — he’s slashing at something. If he slashes well, the words “Brutal Kill!” come on-screen. Once, he runs into a toga-wearing civilian on a window ledge of Olympus. “Curse the gods and their war,” the civilian says, quite sensibly, weeping. “My home — everything I own — destroyed!” Kratos knocks the civilian’s head against the wall and tosses him down the mountain.

This game isn’t satire. It’s a slasher movie over which you have control. It uses the Greek stories to trick you, or your parents (few families abide by the rating system), into tolerating a level of participatory gore that would be otherwise impossible in a mass-market entertainment. You think it must be okay to make your hero, Kratos, slowly tear off someone’s head by whanging away on the O button because the someone is a Greek god and everyone knows that Greek myths are dark, brutal, and Oedipal. It’s all in the name of classical culture, isn’t it? No — it’s a trick.