A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness.

There is certainly joy in encountering anything perfectly crafted. Whether we’re talking about films or books or songs or games, there are examples that are exactly what they set out to be and you can’t see a single thing you’d change. Such craftsmanship is exceedingly rare, but to see it is always amazing.

And yet: sometimes it’s the imperfection of something that makes it especially memorable.

Perfection doesn’t necessarily mean that you will connect with something, and imperfection can be tremendously relatable. Above all, it is sometimes the more interesting thing, and I find that this is especially the case with video games.

There will be some that say that a video game has to be well crafted above all other things, and anything that gets in the way of the player’s immediate fun is simply bad design. But I have a weakness for games that aren’t frictionless, that are somewhat awkward. (There is a beautiful German word, “sperrig”, that doesn’t translate neatly into English. It means that something doesn’t quite fit, or only just about, like a sofa that needs to be tilted this way and that before you get it through a door.) This lends itself especially to games that are fast and twitchy, because when a game lacks this friction, you can sometimes feel the barrier between yourself and the game dissolving. Take something like the best of the Super Mario games – and, in fact, a lot of Nintendo games: you pick them up, and five minutes later you know exactly how to play them. What you’re learning is timings and coordination, it’s like a dance, and you can get to a point where you could do that particular dance in your sleep.

But then there are games – and oddly, I find that a not insignificant number of these were developed in Eastern Europe – that remain clunky in key ways: the inventory management is cumbersome to an extent where you think twice about picking up everything you come across that isn’t nailed down; or drawing your pistol and aiming at the gunslinger on the horse across from you (but not yet shooting!) just takes one or two button presses more than you’d wish, and sometimes, just sometimes, this results in you accidentally putting a bullet in the poor guy… and you justify it to yourself because, certainly, he would have put a bullet in you if you hadn’t (accidentally) got the drop on him.

There is Far Cry 2, a game that many players will remember for the many ways it annoyed them until they gave up. You’d think that a sequel to a first-person shooter would build on what the first game did well, but Far Cry 2 had an avantgarde heart beating in a generic exterior. The mercenary you’re playing suffers from malaria, and that’s one enemy you can’t shoot till he’s dead: anytime, anywhere, you might find your vision blurring. And this can happen right in the middle of an ambush or a firefight. Fun? Not terribly – but I certainly remember how this game, in a genre that thrives on power fantasies, made you powerless, sometimes at the worst possible moment, and all you could do is stockpile anti-malarial drugs and scurry away into the undergrowth to take the pills if you felt a fever attack coming on. Some of the fans of Far Cry 2 defended this as the game being realistic, but that’s not really accurate: the game is still a shooter, there are many, many aspects that real-life mercenaries in real-life war-torn African countries have to deal with (insects! heat! diarrhea!) that the game omits. But it’s friction that subverts the power fantasy and that changes the vibe of the experience. Far Cry 2 offered other such elements (or, as some might call them, annoyances), and it was not the most stable game to boot, but those who remember it fondly certainly also do so because of the ways in which this isn’t a smooth experience geared towards frictionless fun.

And then there’s the granddaddy of shooters that is a similar diamond in the rough: STALKER – or, let’s be embarrassingly complete, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (there were two follow-ups, Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat, but the first game is the one I remember best). Here, again, we have a first-person shooter – but it’s one that’s inspired in equal parts by the sci-fi novella Roadside Picnic and its loose film adaptation, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (which did not have a cringy pseudo-acronymic title, because Tarkovsky knew what he was doing).

Hang on: a shooter that’s at the very least inspired by a film by Tarkovsky? What next? Legend of Zelda: Link’s Childhood, in which you play an orphaned elf trying to navigate the battlefield during WW2? Super Nostalghia, in which you have to carry a lit candle back and forth across an obstacle course that may also be a drained pool? In S.T.A.L.K.E.R., do you shoot at an existential sense of despair while collecting shreds of faith?

In terms of the gameplay, Stalker is very much what it is: a first-person shooter set in a relatively open world. The world in question is the “Zone” of Tarkovsky’s film and of the book by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. It’s a place where strange things have happened and continue to happen: anomalies and mutants threaten your life, as does radiation, because the game’s Zone is more concretely defined, as its subtitle already suggests: you’re traversing the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and what went catastrophically wrong in this Zone isn’t either the novel’s visitation by extraterrestrial beings nor the film’s more cryptic unnamed threat but a reactor meltdown. But the video game take on Stalker isn’t just interested in non-stop action where you’re a one-man army shooting up soldiers, mercenaries and ungainly mutants. This is an unfriendly place, and it remains unfriendly – yet it has a strange beauty as well, which is very much in keeping with Tarkovsky.

And boy, is Stalker a game that thrives on friction! You’re very vulnerable to begin with, and if you find a reasonably advanced weapon, it may well jam on you. Even if it doesn’t, you may run out of bullets. It doesn’t take much for you to be encumbered by what you’re carrying, so no infinite arsenal for you. Enemies are much more dangerous to you than you are to them. Your missions, which are cryptic and raise more questions than they answer, are perilous. There’s none of that oo-rah! militarism that marks purportedly realistic shooters, nor any of the ’80s action movie machismo that you find in most of the more fantastical or sci-fi-minded shooters. You’re put in a world that is likely to eat you alive in many, many ways – but you’re also reliant on that world… and, finally, it is your home. You’re more familiar with it than you are with the pockets of civilisation and community that are strewn across the landscape.

Stalker was in development for a long time, and it was released in a buggy state where it was difficult at times to distinguish between what was friction by design and what was simply the game breaking up on you. Many gamers read the reviews, laughed, and then moved on to new titles that were designed to be fun and engaging and empowering. But those who decided to brave the Zone found something unusual, interesting: a diamond in the rough. Many of them remember the Zone, with the derelict nuclear power plant in the distance, much better than they remember the Calls of Duty and the Battlefields and the Halos. Such games are spiky, unwieldy, they leave real scratches. When sitting down for an hour of gaming, this isn’t always what you want, sometimes not even when you are playing these exact games. You may well curse at the piece of software that’s frustrating the hell out of you. But you may also be having an experience that will stay with you when all the more expertly designed, smoother, more fun games are gathering dust on your shelf.