I've never been big on first person shooters. However the recent glut of writing about Modern Warfare 2 and its effective (or not so effective) "No Russian" level has got me thinking about many discussions of first person narratives lately. Far Cry 2, Red Faction: Guerrilla, and both Call of Duty 4 and World at War are all games that have garnered much critical discussion yet I've let them slip by me because of their genre.
These have sat in the bottom of my GameFly queue for a while so I was quite surprised yesterday when World at War showed up in my mailbox. I popped it in this morning with an open mind and was immediately impressed by its graphical polish. The interspersing of real footage with a dramatic stylized history lesson of America's involvement in World War II was made for the post-MTV generation. The tension of the opening scene - my character's capture and the graphic execution of a fellow Marine seconds before my rescue - pulled me into the game instantly. Unfortunately that excitement died alongside my fallen comrade the moment I picked up a gun.
Not being a veteran of first person shooters I felt more like a frightened James Sunderland who had never held a gun before than a hardened Marine. What button do I push to shoot? Should I crouch to avoid enemy fire? Who are these people yelling at me - My CO or a random AI grunt? How do I tell the difference between friendlies and hostiles when everyone looks nearly the same? While I realize the panic that grips a soldier during a firefight is a major reality of war, generally you have many months of order and training to fall back on that helps create order out of the chaos of the battlefield.
I had none of that training. Call me spoiled but I like having a tutorial available when I play a new game. World at War has none. Perhaps developers believe anyone who plays and FPS are "hardcore" and wouldn't need such a thing. Yet the game that renewed my interest in the genre, Battlefield 1943, did so largely because of the tutorial that held my hand as it explained the basics combat. Being thrown into a chaotic and dangerous situation where I have no idea how to protect myself creates the perfect atmosphere for a survival-horror game, but not so much for a simulation of war where your training and trust in your squad mates are essential to success.
Assuming the opening experience for veterans of the Call of Duty franchise would be markedly different and knowing I would eventually get the hang of things, I perservered. A few suspension-of-disbelief shattering moments aside (I'm talking about the CO who yelled at me for 5 minutes to kill one glitch-hiding hostile while the rest of my squad stood around doing nothing.) I reach the end of the second mission and a member of my squad is killed before me in a scripted surprise attack. Cut to the set up for the third mission and the aforementioned glitzy graphics lamenting the loss of my fallen comrade. Who was he? I have no idea. But apparently he was important enough to me in those two brief intro missions that I should be choked up about his death.
Two missions into the game and I have no real attachment to characters, or even, to myself. While it's still early in the game I think much of my distance from the game's narrative is that I still feel confused by what's going on around me. This is a problem that could easily be solved by adding a tutorial for nubs like myself and using that time to introduce me to my squad.
Anyone who has seen Full Metal Jacket knows that if you really want to get into the psychology of a soldier you need to start with Basic Training. A game doesn't necessarily need to go that far. A a simple sweep and clean mission punctuated by down time where the player can overhear their squad mates talking - humanizing them - and scripted, hand-holding attack sequences would do wonders for giving a player both the narrative drive to care about their team and the tools to do something meaningful to protect them.
First person shooters do a great job of immersing the player in a world of limited vision and ever-present danger. They don't necessarily need a tutorial to do this if the player perseveres enough to learn the ropes. I imagine this is why many players stick with the genre. The learning curve is small and the gameplay immersion instantly gratifying. But a good narrative, particularly if a game aspires to create an emotional experience for the player, requires more than just placing a player with a pre-existing skill set into the heart battle. They need a reason to care at the micro-level, not just the patriotic thrill of a brief stylized history lesson. In the case of World at War they developers choose to give the player a name but it is really just that. No backstory, nothing to connect him to his squad. Maybe more of that is revealed over the course of the campaign, but they haven't given me a reason to stick with the game so far through either story or gameplay.
