Preemptive Retaliation

Last year I poured about 33 hours into XCOM and its expansions. My time with it was almost unhealthy. I stayed up too late working on my next turn, figuring out the best tactic to take on the missions. The soldiers were named after my friends and family, and if I had a particularly good mission I would message them to tell them so. I upgraded my crew and specialised them. None of them died, because each time a soldier bit the dust I would reload the level and start it all over again. I was cheesing the game. sure, but that wasn’t the point of it for me. I saw each mission as a puzzle to solve. Like a game of chess I had to figure out the right moves to complete the mission with zero casualties and total success. I spent a lot of time honing down my technique, having fun perfecting it and tackling the harder missions.

I managed to get 2 hours into XCOM2 before uninstalling it.

I could go into a short, lackluster rant on a lot of the reasons why I didn’t like it (terrible performance on my machine, cutscenes running a second behind audio, weird random pauses in gameplay for no reason, confusing menu system, unfair to the point of frustration, just a strange lack of polish), but those weren’t deal breakers for me. I’ve played tons of videogames that haven’t worked all too amazingly yet I’ve still received enjoyment out of them. And that was the problem with XCOM2. I didn’t enjoy it.

I was in the middle of a mission when I turned it off. There was an attack on a town, and I had to go in to kill the evil aliens, save innocent civilians and save the day. Every turn had the aliens gunning down helpless people on the other side of the map, far from my help. I understood why this was the case; the point of the game is that you can’t save everyone, you just have to do your best. So I start playing the mission and I’m inching my way across the map, and more civilians are getting killed with their little names popping up on the screen to remind me that they’re real people. I get a communication from the commander saying something along the lines of Oh no you’d better do something quick! But first I have to take out the soldiers waiting for us at the beginning, and due to a RNG roll I’ve missed the first two shots and they’ve knocked one of my team unconscious, so now I have to lug their body round to make sure we all escape. More civilians die, but I can’t reach them because if I run over to them another of my squad would die and I’d have no one to clear the rest of the area in time, and the commander is coming over the comm again saying My God it’s a massacre out there! And of course it fucking is, I’m trying to manage my best here.

And that’s when I realised that I was gritting my teeth so hard I was getting a headache. My shoulders were tense and I had to blink a fuzz out of my eyes. This game wasn’t only not being fun, it was actively stressing me out. This was some time at night, after a not very stressful day at work. Mike had come on line asking if I wanted to play multiplayer in a fun VR game, but I refused because I was looking forward to playing XCOM2. But then I was sitting there, becoming unwell from playing a videogame. I am 28 years old, with a full time job, a wife, a bundle of friends (am I bragging now?) and a terrible writing career to maintain, and I do not have the time nor inclination to play a game that stresses me out.

So I went the complete opposite direction and started playing Abzu. This is a game with no failure state, no quest objectives, no time limits, just an open world to explore. I played this for an hour before going to bed, then completed it the next morning when I woke up. I think it took me about twenty minutes to realise the aim of the game was to relax. That was its point. Slow down. Take a breath. Look at the scenery. The point of the game is to swim through these gorgeous looking underwater worlds, frolic with the fish and maybe parse together a cryptic story. There is no stress here. Nothing at all. Hell, there’s even a meditate mechanic, where the whole point is to sit back and take a moment to watch fish glide around in their schools or swirl away from a predator. In comparison to XCOM2, it was like going from 60 to 0 in a heartbeat.

I’m listening to the soundtrack of the game as I write this, and it’s so very, very soothing. There was one section of the game that could be described as tense, but even then it leads into this grand finale that’s beautiful and cathartic. And it was stunning to look at. I had to turn off my screen warmer to appreciate it all. The colours were bright and vivid, with a luscious feel to it that just made me want to drink it all in. I thought the meditation mechanic was a little gimmicky to begin with, but I kept taking advantage of it to view all the fish and how they behaved. I cannot express how gorgeous this game is.

But did I enjoy it?… I think I did?

Even though Abzu was a beautiful looking relax-fest, I didn’t really enjoy playing it. The game consisted of holding one button to move forward, and another button to find something and interact with it. There were no puzzles or challenges. No danger. The one object that seems to cause pain and strife is woefully ineffective against the player, and I even swam into it a few times, thinking it was some sort of power-up. There was nothing more to it. The game was meant to relax me, to provide an experience of this underwater world, but it bored me. 

So here I am, swinging wildly between two games, moaning about how one is too hot and the other is too cold, and of course there has to be one somewhere that’s juuuust right. I know that, but the two polar experiences had back-to-back has made me stop and think; what do I like about videogames? Why do I play them so much? The quick answer is that it’s a hobby of mine, and I enjoy it. The darker answer is probably addiction to some extent. A morose answer would be that I’ve always played them. But it’s hard to think of why I like the games that I like.

Games are usually seen as some sort of power trip. Here I am, an overweight underachiever using magic powers to save the universe and seduce aliens. I did something embarrassing today, but I managed to singlehandedly end a demonic invasion from hell. I clumsily lost my temper at someone, but cooly assassinated a monarch without being seen. I can make up for my own misfortunes and shortcomings by living out a fantasy life virtually, if only for a little while. But that hasn’t always gelled with me. If I wanted a power fantasy, why do I ignore games that are too easy? Why do I crank the difficulty up to Hard on first playthroughs? Maybe I like the challenge of it all. The strife involved in getting from A to B. But then why do I balk at games that are too difficult? The Dark Soul’s, The Kerbal Space Program’s, the countless well-regarded rouge-likes, the XCOM2’s (though, I maintain that XCOM2 is unfairly hard) – these are games that are well known and well reviewed, yet create no pleasure for me.

The only conclusion I can come to is that I like difficulty, but not too much difficulty. I like mastering the controls and getting better at something, with the difficulty increasing to test that skill. In the Witcher 3 You are constantly levelling up and improving. So is the world. As you go through it, the enemies get harder and more numerous, making you use your skills to progress through. I was never too powerful, I could never take out an enemy with complete ease, but I was never too overwhelmed. Sure, I died, but I got better and came back to rise to the top. It was never like slicing through butter, but cutting through a hunk of meat with a knife I had to periodically sharpen. It was satisfying and rewarding. However, if I find myself with a chunk of meat that is too difficult to cut through, I abandon it entirely.

Wait, that was a terrible analogy.

And now we’re onto a third game is this entirely derailed review. DOOM (2016) was a game I enjoyed. It starts off with the player clumsily working through a few levels, gradually upping the difficulty of enemies, introducing new weapons and scenarios to keep track on and deal with, eventually leading to the player leaping through the map in an endless path of destruction. I had a blast with this game, with an effortless grin on my face the entire time I shotgunned and exploded a group of demons as I ricocheted past them in a roller coaster of death. The difficulty worked up perfectly, and I felt real satisfaction after clearing a room.

This lasted until the final level, when it just got too hard for me. Death was common in my playthrough I made mistakes, I misjudged jumps, sometimes I just wanted to see the death animations, but I died. This was tolerable, but on the final level it just kept getting worse and worse. I would get so far only to die and respawn at checkpoint, die and respawn, etc. I became frustrated. I became stressed. I was not enjoying the game. So I turned the difficulty down.

The game became instantly easier, and with skills honed on the harder difficulty I blasted through the final sections and the final boss with ease. I completed the game, but I didn’t feel very good about it. Like I had cheated.

I wasn’t as good at the game as I thought I was.

The first videogame I played was Mario on the NES. I’ve been gaming my entire life, and I’ve always considered myself to be a good gamer. I can pick up a game and learn to play it with ease, I follow trends and styles, I have a good collection of titles and have completed a large chunk of them. Difficult games come up against that perspective of myself. I am a good gamer. I play games with ease. Is this game difficult? Oh, well, it’s not the game for me. I don’t like that. Because I am a good gamer and that is who I am.

God, I sound like I’m stuck in an internal echo chamber. I cannot fathom that I am bad at something, so I do not engage with what I am bad at.

Isn’t that a terrible way to go through life? To only take risks in a safe environment without massive failures. Don’t do anything too difficult because you might not enjoy it even though the results could be very rewarding. Don’t live your life. Yeah, that’s a shity way of thinking.

But isn’t it even worse that I’m leaving it up to videogames to handle this sort of risk experience? Isn’t it just fucking awful that I’ve spent a few days writing this, thinking on this, only to realise that it’s acting as a metaphor for how I live my life? Risk free, moderate gains?

Ahhhh fuck it Joe, I told you to stop getting all introspective with blogs.