Abandonment Issues

It happened again this week. I was running around the ruins of a mining operation, in a cave, now made accessible by the departure of a floating city, which acted like a cork upon this bottle of badly-aged acid, when I looked up and I got the urge. This isn’t the kind of urge that involves running to the toilet after last night’s curry, this is the urge to will time to stop, so you can just stand there and take in what you’re seeing. When I get this feeling, I can’t help but get this itch in my mind, which isn’t satisfied until I’ve explored all the things. I want to climb that scaffolding, and see how far the tracks go. I want to know whose house-of-tyres I just ran through. Where are they? Are they still alive? Does anyone remember that this place still exists? My mind races, and for a moment, I want to be my character, with all the opportunities that this effectively timeless world offers. Only for a moment, however, as the bubbling lakes of acid, the swarm of varkids and the pack of thumping crystalisks detract from this notion of abandonment. Damned nature. The problem is that I can’t rightly put this feeling into words, so you’ll just have to bear with me, whilst I try to mangle words into emotions.

In case you hadn’t guessed, I was talking about Borderlands 2 and the Caustic Caverns underneath Sanctuary – an old city constructed as a base of operations for the aforementioned mining operations. When you get off the elevator at the ‘ground’ level of the mines, nothing seems out of place – it’s your regular, grey architecture that you’ve seen in earlier missions. It’s when you turn the wheel to open the ten metre high and one metre thick doors, that you suddenly feel dwarfed by the structure. There’s no comically quotable enemy force down here to liven up your day – you’re in a place that even your hardened enemies haven’t ventured into. Your sole sources of entertainment are the bugs and crystalline monsters that seem to thrive in this corrosive atmosphere, and they’re not big talkers.

Borderlands 2 isn’t the only game that elicits this response from the hyperactive cat-trying-to-find-a-sunny-spot part of my brain. Let me take you back to Portal 2 – a source of enough quotes to fill /vg/ or /r/gaming for years to come. There’s this switch in the tone of the game, about one third of the way in, and you’ve gone from “ERMAHGERD RESCEW!” to “ERMAHGERD FALLIN TO MAH DEF :(“. Considering your immunity to fall damage (a shared characteristic with Borderlands 2) you don’t go splat, but you find yourself thrown back in time, to the beginnings of Aperture Laboratories (the original name of Aperture Science), with a speaking potato. Portal 2 isn’t exactly the most varied, when it comes to life forms you can interact with – with the majority of speaking done by recordings of long-gone industrialists, or the A.I. (Artificial Ineptness) that controls the facility. Or your potato. That being said, I don’t feel lonely or abandoned in the first part, as there are cameras and viewing windows all over the place, but once I’ve dropped into the ruins and pipes of the long-forgotten testing facilities and offices, I get that urge again. What’s behind that door? What’s living in the water at the bottom of the caves? How does this work, and where does that collapsed walkway lead to?

It’s not just first-person games that let my mind wander either – Beneath a Steel Sky (BaSS) is a rather old Virgin Interactive game (so old that you needed to use an emulator to play it when it was new (a slight exaggeration)), set in a large industrialised city and the whole game has a dark 1984-esque authoritarian feeling (think Machinarium mixed in with Bladerunner) and I want to know what the history is behind the boarded up shops, or where all the pipes go!

I think this whole situation stems from the idea of being unnoticed by other people. In large cities, sandbox games and MMOs, you don’t normally warrant attention, and the world continues past you – the same as if you were fighting your way through the sewers underneath London to reach an ancient crypt, or watching commuters walk by the news stand whilst you’re 2 miles away, ogling at them through the scope of your rifle. I think my mind goes crazy when it thinks no-one is watching me. In most games, the sit-there-and-wait mentality normally makes a token appearance in a scripted event – there’s rarely ever a bonus to just watching the world go by in the normal playthrough of the game. Some games do reward pacifist gameplay i.e. the Deus Ex series, and once in a blue moon, the game’s better (IMHO) when you’re the most cautious thing since sliced bread (I told you all, ages ago, that I’m not good at metaphors) a la DayZ.

The odd thing is that this is a trait that I hold in both gaming and real life. True, there are times that I want to hit (slow moving) people with a frying pan, or eat a hotdog to heal all my wounds (let’s not talk about my mushroom usage), but, generally, my play style isn’t my lifestyle and I hope it stays that way, or I’m heading to prison really soon. So, I guess this boils down into what would make a truly great – if not iconic – game, in my opinion. So, a good graphics engine, with an immense amount of detail and backstory, and a massive city I can get lost in, with secret passageways, sewers and an abandoned underground city. Oh, gameplay? In the wise words of the immortal Sweet Brown, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!”