DOOMguy Knows How You Feel

March 17, 2017 7:46 AM

The DOOM Emotion Machine pushes you to move beyond mere expression of rage, not just inchoate, unfathomable rage, not just rage at any old thing or the nearest narratively acceptable target, but to feel free to rage at the people who brought you here, rage at their apologists, rage at the idiocy of HR, rage at the plodding stupidity of looking for one more source of “dead labor” — human, demon, or other carbon-based lifeforms — “that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” Rage at Hell but rage at who brought you to Hell and why any of this is necessary at all.

posted by Sokka shot first (32 comments total)

> Rage at Hell but rage at who brought you to Hell and why any of this is necessary at all.

But enough about the committee meeting I had last week.
posted by The Card Cheat at 7:58 AM on March 17, 2017 [2 favorites]

with no “intellectual property” deemed too insignificant to be recreated ad nauseum.

Hey, my rage is suddenly rising, too!
posted by Celsius1414 at 8:06 AM on March 17, 2017 [3 favorites]

That actually sounded quite refreshing. Maybe I should cut back on my caffeine intake...
posted by bert2368 at 8:07 AM on March 17, 2017

This reminds me that the new video card I bought came with a free copy of the new DOOM. A game I wasn't initially interested in, as I'm not particularly into ultraviolence or circle-strafing at 100 mph, but the fistbump gif is pretty compelling TBH.
posted by tobascodagama at 8:19 AM on March 17, 2017 [2 favorites]

Doomguy would punch a Nazi and not even pretend to feel conflicted about it.
posted by tobascodagama at 8:41 AM on March 17, 2017 [7 favorites]

Incidentally, "Dime-Store Satanism" is the name of my new band. We play death-metal covers on cheap toy instruments.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:42 AM on March 17, 2017 [9 favorites]

Doomguy would punch a Nazi and not even pretend to feel conflicted about it.

Pepe's become kind of a symb… ACH, MEIN LEBEN!
posted by zamboni at 9:25 AM on March 17, 2017 [19 favorites]

aw man, I'm buying the game now. I think this article was the final straw that's broken the camel that was holding back the torrent of rage hedonism.

Doomguy also mangles metaphors.
posted by LegallyBread at 9:27 AM on March 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

Doomguy would punch a Nazi and not even pretend to feel conflicted about it.

Doomguy is actually descended from one of the greatest Nazi punchers/shooters/flamethrowerers of all time.

iD has confirmed his real name is Stan Blazkowicz, implying he's canonically related to the protagonist of the Wolfenstein games (William B.J. Blazkowicz).

Also, Commander Keen is named William "Billy Blaze" Blazkowicz II, so he probably fits into that lineage somewhere.
posted by prosopagnosia at 9:30 AM on March 17, 2017 [11 favorites]

Keen is canonically BJ's grandson
posted by griphus at 9:34 AM on March 17, 2017 [3 favorites]

prosopagnosia: Also, Commander Keen is named William "Billy Blaze" Blazkowicz II, so he probably fits into that lineage somewhere.

Yup. It's established canon that Commander Keen is the grandson of B.J. Blazkowicz, hero of Wolfenstein 3D.

Hm. So Doomguy is the Great^n Grandson of B.J. Blazkowicz, and Great^(n-2) Grandson of Commander Keen. This makes the ending of the second secret level in Doom II kinda... concerning, no?
posted by SansPoint at 9:36 AM on March 17, 2017 [2 favorites]

BJ actually talked, though, at least in the newer Wolf games, so I have a hard time believing that he's actually related to Doomguy, canon or not.
posted by tobascodagama at 9:39 AM on March 17, 2017

Hm. So Doomguy is the Great^n Grandson of B.J. Blazkowicz, and Great^(n-2) Grandson of Commander Keen. This makes the ending of the second secret level in Doom II kinda... concerning, no?

Unless...that level actually represented him releasing the many incarnations of his ancestor from hell? Sounds like a Greek tragedy.

Man, this conversation is nerdy even by my standards.

BJ actually talked, though, at least in the newer Wolf games, so I have a hard time believing that he's actually related to Doomguy, canon or not.

Unless society became post-verbal sometime between WWII and colonizing Mars. Not altogether improbable, since I feel like we're in a timeline leading up to a point where only the children of the rich learn how to properly read/write, and everybody else just communicates by showing each other emojis and animated gifs.
posted by prosopagnosia at 9:51 AM on March 17, 2017 [4 favorites]

This was a pretty fun read. I think that, apart from the political commentary about feeling / suppressing / channeling rage, it's a really good point about games as systems of choices versus games as experiences that create feeling. In that light, DOOM (2016) has a lot more in common with indie games like Dys4ia or Gone Home rather than modern shooters, like CS:Go or Modern Warfare X-infinity.
posted by codacorolla at 10:04 AM on March 17, 2017 [5 favorites]

That's an excellent insight, codacorolla. Writing DOOM 2016 off as 'Death Metal, Kick some demons! See some skullz!!!! YEAH!!' -- is actually a terrible mistake. It's not Proust, no. But it does have a weird, unsettling tone all it's own.
posted by mrdaneri at 10:07 AM on March 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

Nice piece. It reminded me a bit of some of the insights in the Errant Signal critical piece on the new Doom as well.
posted by Drastic at 10:11 AM on March 17, 2017

Incidentally, "Dime-Store Satanism" is the name of my new band. We play death-metal covers on cheap toy instruments.

/throws money at screen
posted by Celsius1414 at 10:15 AM on March 17, 2017 [2 favorites]

I remember some of the rage directed at Roger Ebert saying "games can't be art" when he showed his ignorance of games. He was talking about Pong and Pac-Man and how they don't tell stories.

Which is weird, because tennis, in itself, doesn't necessarily tell a story. (Neither does Rothko, for that matter). Ebert was, too naturally, thinking of film when he thought of "art," and thus focused on narrative.

Anyway, this is all to say that when people hold up certain games as prestige examples of the art form, too often they're finding the closest approximation of a cinematic narrative, and not something that exemplifies the flow of good gameplay.
posted by pykrete jungle at 10:40 AM on March 17, 2017 [3 favorites]

Incidentally, "Dime-Store Satanism" is the name of my new band. We play death-metal covers on cheap toy instruments.

There's no drummer, just one of those creepy Cymbal Playing Monkey toys.
posted by Quindar Beep at 11:05 AM on March 17, 2017 [4 favorites]

/throws money at screen

I imagined you saying that in a guttural roar.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:07 AM on March 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

Yes, pykrete jungle, absolutely. Games don't need to be sprawling, cutscene-laden Hideo Kojima epics to be art. (And that's not a knock on Kojima, mind you.)

One thing I find interesting is the way that many games now try to reject the cinematic narrative with "non-linear" gameplay and "player choice" systems. Player agency is what separates games from movies, in that theory.

But many of the most memorable games have made themselves memorable precisely by removing agency in the sense of choose-your-adventure. I'm thinking of scenes like the nuke level in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare or the White Phosphorous level in Spec Ops: The Line. You're restricted to a linear path that can only have one outcome, and you're made to sit with that outcome because the game forces you to bear witness before it lets you move on.

In a way, that's much like what the article is talking about with Doomguy. Doomguy doesn't make decisions. He made one decision, before the player ever embodied him: he wants to kill every fucking demon he sees. So the gameplay is not so much about choosing where to go and what to do as it is about bearing witness to Doomguy's rage. And, in the process, you align yourself to that just as you align yourself to Captain Walker's guilt over committing a war crime and anger at civilians being in the line of fire in war zone.
posted by tobascodagama at 11:16 AM on March 17, 2017 [4 favorites]

I remember some of the rage directed at Roger Ebert saying "games can't be art" when he showed his ignorance of games. He was talking about Pong and Pac-Man and how they don't tell stories.

Of course games can be art. But some games can be better than art, because they can help the player to tell a story to himself. They can be a system that enables art.
posted by JHarris at 11:28 AM on March 17, 2017 [2 favorites]

> with no “intellectual property” deemed too insignificant to be recreated ad nauseum.

Speaking of intellectual property, the linked piece is by Ajay Singh Chaudhary, and I'm sure he'd like people to know that. Mention the authors of writing you post on the blue, folks.
posted by languagehat at 11:51 AM on March 17, 2017 [5 favorites]

BJ actually talked, though, at least in the newer Wolf games, so I have a hard time believing that he's actually related to Doomguy, canon or not.

Well, last I checked UAC wasn't run by Nazis, so we can probably assume that Wolfenstein: The New Order isn't the same timeline, although they did invest in some questionable architecture...

Anyway, this is all to say that when people hold up certain games as prestige examples of the art form, too often they're finding the closest approximation of a cinematic narrative, and not something that exemplifies the flow of good gameplay.

QFT. This is why (in my view) games with tricky narratives like Spec Ops, or games where the narrative can be altered by the player like Mass Effect, seem to get more media attention than games with actual well-designed gameplay like Doom4.

the White Phosphorous level in Spec Ops: The Line

(gets distant look in eyes, quietly shudders)
posted by neckro23 at 12:03 PM on March 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

They can be a system that enables art.

Trivially most procedurally generated games: rogue and -likes; diablo, Sunless Sea, Dark Souls etc.. but they tend to be more technical stories than actual. Doom is somewhere on this end of the choice axis.

But the next level are sandboxes with a wide enough array of player options to enable real stories: Minecraft. Dwarf Fortress. The new Zelda.
posted by bonehead at 12:28 PM on March 17, 2017

>Trivially most procedurally generated games: rogue and -likes; diablo, Sunless Sea, Dark Souls etc.. but they tend to be more technical stories than actual.

At the risk of starting a nerd fight, I have to take exception to this... I'd consider Diablo to be procedurally-generated, but for Sunless Sea that's only really true for the initial placement of map tiles in each new game, and I'm not sure that there's anything about Dark Souls that isn't planned down to the pixel. And while you could argue about how much of Blizzard's backstory for Diablo actually makes a difference in the game, there's certainly a story there, and both Sunless Sea and Dark Souls are heavily story-centric. In fact story is so central to Sunless Sea that there'd hardly be a game there without it, and Dark Souls and the sequels have a rich and complex mythology that gives shape and meaning to the whole enterprise.

That said, I would agree with your point re Minecraft and DF at least; sandboxes with enough range and complexity to let you discover your own stories as you go can be more compelling than even the best-written game narratives because they're *your* stories.
posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape at 2:27 PM on March 17, 2017 [2 favorites]

Trivially most procedurally generated games: rogue and -likes; diablo, Sunless Sea, Dark Souls etc.. but they tend to be more technical stories than actual.

Some are much better at this than others. A lot of roguelikes and other procedural games, while technically different every time, don't present interesting decisions that change with every play. What does it matter, from the player's stand point, if you encounter 5 rats and 7 goblins on level 1 or 8 rats and 4 goblins? The game is still largely the same.

What has the power to break that sameness is if the player gets a notable advantage or disadvantage early on, like finding an artifact early in NetHack, or encountering an out-of-depth monster. Or finding an interesting combination of magic items, or encountering a rarely-generated dungeon branch, or weird random events like a water demon wish.
posted by JHarris at 2:31 PM on March 17, 2017

But what of the unneccesary sound effects?
posted by lagomorphius at 3:01 PM on March 17, 2017

All of the rogue-likes (including Sunless Sea) allow a player to create their own story of their character within the game's framework. It's even formalized in nethack as conduct challenges (vegetarian, pacifist, etc...). Even in the smaller details though players do make a significant choice constantly on a tactical level, this potion or that one, do I risk a sink, etc... You're typically never more than a few choices from death in any rogue-like. Choices, what I'd call plot choices, are baked into the experience.

Dark Souls perhaps has less formal freedom, but is rather unique in the level of freedom it gives you tactically, allowing for different modes of combat and paths through the game.

Dark Souls and the sequels have a rich and complex mythology that gives shape and meaning to the whole enterprise.

That's what the formal story is about, I'm talking about what the emergent game is about.

I mean, technically Minecraft has a "plot" and an "end" too, but absolutely no one cares about it. It's important because of how you can play the game, not what the authors intended.
posted by bonehead at 3:37 PM on March 17, 2017

Of course games can be art. But some games can be better than art, because they can help the player to tell a story to himself. They can be a system that enables art.

Games are art like telephones are conversations.

To misquote Brian Eno.
posted by Sebmojo at 5:59 PM on March 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

Dark Souls and the sequels have a rich and complex mythology that gives shape and meaning to the whole enterprise.

That's what the formal story is about, I'm talking about what the emergent game is about.

Dark Souls diegetic story is both intentional and fundamental - all those hollows you kill over and over again? They're the ones who, at some point, stopped pushing forward.
posted by Sebmojo at 6:00 PM on March 17, 2017 [3 favorites]

Metafilter: It's not Proust, no. But it does have a weird, unsettling tone all it's own.
posted by Chrysostom at 11:53 AM on March 18, 2017 [1 favorite]