All Quiet on the FPS Front
Thursday, July 14, 2011
I’m currently tearing my way through David Weber’s Honor Harrington books. For anyone who hasn’t read them – and they seem peculiarly under-appreciated in the UK given that they’re about a female Horatio Hornblower in space – they’re about a female Horatio Hornblower in space. Honestly, I can’t put them down, and now that I’ve finished all of Patrick O’Brian’s output, discovering them has significantly reduced my weltschmertz. (What? It’s a word!)
I like military fiction a lot. A group of friends and I periodically get together to watch old Sharpe episodes and wait impatiently until either Sean Bean takes his shirt off or we can ogle some heaving, barely contained bosoms, depending on sexual preference. I also like the new Battlestar Galactica more than Star Trek, not because it’s a better show, but because the Colonial Fleet seem like a real army and the Federation are a bunch of pussies.
I have no delusions that I’d be a good soldier in real life. The military discipline would drive me bananas and, perhaps more importantly, so would the screaming, pant-soiling fear of death. Also, ordering people under my command to their violent deaths would probably be a non-starter. As a real soldier, I’d be less Honor Harrington and more Gomer Pyle in Full Metal Jacket. And I’m convinced my brains look better inside my head than they would splashed across the wall of a dingy training-camp toilet.
So you’d think the FPS or squad-based shooter genres would be right up my street. Playing a space marine or a member of US special forces would allow me to fulfil my militaristic fantasies while slightly reducing the chances of a bullet penetrating my vital organs. I am, as I’ve said before, unspeakably awful at twitch games, but I’m sure I could learn. And yet I don’t. The only FPS I’ve ever completed is BioShock, and that had more to do with the brilliant art-deco design, the twisty story and the fact that the plasmid-collection aspect let me think of it as a kind of stealth RPG.
I enjoy fantasy novels, so I play RPGs like Dragon Age: Origins, which does a pretty good job of being an interactive version of a fantasy epic. Yes, it’s very episodic, but have you read the Belgariad recently? David Eddings basically drew a map and then pointed his characters at different bits of it so they could have a series of mildly-offensive-ethnic-stereotype-themed adventures. I also like clubbing, and Rez makes me feel like it's four in the morning and it's all gone a bit Pete Tong, in a non-rhyming-slang way. But playing military games just doesn’t give me the same pleasure I get from reading military fiction. Why the hell not?
I suppose it depends what I’m playing a game for. A friend recently told me she enjoys games for the illusion of competence they give her. I’m clearly highly incompetent at shooters, but then I’m not very good at RPGs either. If you saw how low down I have the difficulty slider in Oblivion you would lose your last vestiges of respect for me, yet it doesn’t stop me loving the game.
You might suggest I don't like shooters because military novels have a degree of depth and political sophistication absent from current games, and it's true that there's slightly less witty, Jane-Austen-inspired social drama in 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand than there is in Master and Commander. But, much as I adore Weber’s work, the Honor Harrington books aren’t exactly subtle. And though it’s invidious to guess an author’s opinions from those of his characters, I can’t help suspecting my politics are somewhat to the left of Mr Weber's. Unlike his heroes, I tend to think of a robust welfare state as necessary for a healthy society, not the first sign of the apocalypse. But Mr Weber gets gender equality effortlessly right in a way some other genre authors could stand to learn from, and it's not like you need to vote the same way as someone to enjoy their books. So it's not the politics of the games which bothers me either.
I think it's the people. Though Stephen Maturin’s a cold fish and Jack Aubrey's puns are actively painful, they'd be fun to hang out with. If it weren't for my abject cowardice, I'd love to be part of Captain Harrington's crew. But would I really enjoy a night on the town with Master Chief, Marcus Fenix and Mr Cent? Imagine the Wildean repartee! No, of course you can't. I don't think you can even imagine a conversation. It's hard to picture these three, or the scores of others like them, talking about anything other than killing the next Locust or Covenant mook or how great that diamond-encrusted skull is going to look in the display cabinet next to their Princess Diana 50th Birthday Commemorative Plate.
Personality is for girls and RPGs. Real men swear a lot, make manly digs about each other's sexual orientation and don't have any interests outside of their sniper rifles or – if necessary for plot purposes – their kidnapped wife and kids. But I am a girl, however much I enjoy gung-ho military escapism, and I want to like the people I'm spending time with even when they're imaginary. Is that really too much to ask?