Games Aren't Numbers

I used to wonder why I like S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl so much. I didn’t used to like it, in fact I was absolutely miserable whenever I tried playing it. I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to be doing or why I was supposed to care. I couldn’t understand why I would die so much and why my gun was so awful and why ammo was so scarce and why everything in general was just so unforgiving. Then one day I stopped hating it and started liking it a lot, and I had no idea why.

Consider any other FPS I like, for example Left 4 Dead, and I know exactly what I like about it: It looks great, it is well balanced, it runs smoothly, it teaches its skills well, it provides lots of opportunities to use its skills, it gives lots of positive feedback, and the list goes on. I don’t really like Left 4 Dead just because of all the bloody zombie killing, I like it because it makes me feel good. Stalker has nothing on that list. Stalker doesn’t make me feel anything, at least not anything positive.

It took something completely unrelated to videogames to explain Stalker to me. A while ago I stumbled across Vowels by Christian Bök. It’s not long or complicated, just a short poem written with lines no longer than two or three words and every word only containing a vowel E or O. I thought for a bit about why this very simple piece works so well. Then it dawned on me—the reason, or at least a reason, why a work like Vowels is impressive to read and write: words are arbitrary. There’s no brilliant insight achieved by organizing words by their vowels because there’s no real reason for which words have which vowels. English is a mess of a language, and this is exactly why a poem like Vowels is so great. It takes our chaotic language and creates something not only very orderly, but very meaningful. Even before I could understand the poem I could immediately recognize the skill and art that produced it.

Stalker is a mess of a game. It’s ugly, buggy, unbalanced, and broken. But all of its quirks and rough edges give this game a soul that can’t be artificially constructed. When you’re alone in The Zone you really are alone. The other stalkers don’t pretend to care about you and the monsters don’t go easy on you. Every bullet that streams past your head for a half-moment it was suddenly a real bullet that could have really hurt you very badly. It’s scary, really.

This is why so many games try to specifically be as unreal as possible. The reality of reality is that it’s not always very fun. It doesn’t immediately “wow” us. The 30 second clips we see during commercial breaks are supposed to “wow” us. Watching a Gears of War soldier devastate an impossibly powerful enemy is supposed to “wow” us. Any cognitive process lasting longer than a second isn’t required to enjoy these things. Stalker is real though, or at least it is a kind of reality. Its mechanics don’t immediately conform to our expectations so we have to take the time to learn them ourselves. Our duty becomes to discover their nuances and be surprised by their unpredictable outcomes. When I play Stalker and something unbelievable happens then it really is unbelievable.

World of Goo rides on this principle. The premise of the game is nonsensical—goo balls are arguably the worst material you could use to build anything. No matter how carefully you plan and build your tower you’ll always be faced with the fact that the goo is just going to jiggle around and fall over sooner or later anyway. It’s a real miracle then when you do finally reach the pipe at the end of the level. By all rights that shouldn’t be possible.

Another example: The difference between Sid Meyer’s version of history and my version of history is that he has everything designed. There’s nothing amazing about unlocking nuclear power in Civilization V because you’re supposed to do that. Ever since the dawn of time you’ve been able to look at the tech tree and see what you’re going to do and how you’re going to get there. When I look at our own history I’m in awe of the fact that we as a society were and are capable of accomplishing the things that we do. The crooked timber of humanity shouldn’t be able to work together this well, but by some miracle we do anyway. This is how I feel when I play Stalker.

This is dangerously close advocating something absurd—that being broken is a good thing. All of the legitimate bugs in a game like Stalker are indeed legitimate and aren’t responsible at all for my enjoyment of the game. I would like to be able to say something like “Stalker is good because it’s buggy” or “Stalker is good because it’s non-linear” or in some other way heuristically heap the credit onto a simple explanation. The reality is, as reality tends to be, not simple. It’s Stalker’s complexity that makes it engaging. The game balances scripted and emergent situations on top of a system of a thousand arbitrary variables. That is why I like it.