Significant Zero

by Walt Williams

  For me, Handsome Jack is one of gaming’s great villains. Part of that is thanks to Dameon Clarke, the actor who gave Jack his voice. It’s also because Jack is probably the most unrepentant asshole in game history. He’s not an asshole because he’s uncaring or mean; this is a man capable of wringing pure bliss from something as simple as fucking up a stranger’s day.

  “The goal was always to make this guy someone you thought was kind of funny and you wanted to listen to, but then specifically have you move to ‘Oh, I fucking hate this guy and I want to take him down’—to have your hatred accelerate to the point where the only thing you care about isn’t the loot or fighting a big monster, it’s putting one bullet in this guy’s head. We want them gripping their controllers in anger and hatred. I want them to strike him down with all their vengeance and embrace the dark side. It’s fucking creepy,” says Burch, “but that’s what the gameplay is.”

  It paid off. Handsome Jack was such a great villain that, as Borderlands 2 neared completion, Gearbox, the developer, began questioning whether or not he should be left alive at the end of the game.

  “It’s amazingly flattering that someone would like the character enough to bring him back for a couple of games. I felt really good, but also like an asshole, because at the end of the game people were saying, ‘We should let Handsome Jack live because people really like him.’ And I shouted and stamped my feet. ‘No! He is a bad person! I don’t want him continuing! Stop this—he stays dead!’ And he did.

  “And then we brought him back two more times anyway.”

  That’s the problem of creating a great villain, especially in a game with an avatar for a protagonist. Like I said, people are drawn to a well-developed character. In the absence of a great hero, they will readily accept a great villain to be raised upon a pedestal. This is an important lesson for life and game design. We are attracted to charisma, regardless of who has it and what they use it for.

  “When people come away saying, ‘You know, Jack’s not such a bad guy. He’s an anti-hero in his heart,’ I kind of feel like that means I failed in some way. Because the goal was for him to feel like an asshole who is worse than you. You, as the player, are an asshole, but he’s a bigger asshole. Every single time we had an opportunity to have him do something awful, we took it. He met Helena Pierce, from the first game, then shot her in the head offscreen and laughed about how her head exploded. He imprisoned his daughter since childhood . . . he’s an abusive father . . . and we still had people going, ‘Nah, I mean, he was doing the right thing.’ I just don’t know what I could have done to make him more awful.”

  Anthony worries that he’s encouraging the audience to forgive a person’s asshole tendencies if they’re charming enough. Even if they’re an abusive monster like Jack.

  “I just don’t know what to do with that,” he says. “I wanted it to be fun because it’s a comedy game, but I didn’t want it to be so fun that you’re okay with abusive people.”

  I think what bothers Anthony about the reaction to Handsome Jack is proof of how well the character is written. In the eyes of some, he was a person, not a monster. The way Greg Kasavin views villains sheds some light on that.

  “I just don’t do villains,” says Greg. “Period.”

  “I make the distinction between villains and antagonists. Antagonists are all around us in life. Your antagonist can be your wife for a few days a week, or something like that, when you’re just trying to decide where to go to dinner. You want to eat Mexican food, but she ain’t having it. She’s the antagonist in your life in that moment. So, antagonism is constant throughout life, and it’s a real force. But villainy, I think, is very rare. Usually, it’s a lack of empathy that leads people to perceive one another as villains, because in our own minds we’re doing the thing we think is best. I really, truly believe that.”

  In Transistor, Supergiant’s second game, the futuristic city of Cloudbank comes under attack from the Process, a robotic presence slowly assimilating the city and everyone in it. The Process is controlled, and was possibly created, by a mysterious group of high-ranking officials known as the Camerata. Through its use, Cloudbank would be ever changing, shifting to fit the whims of its people. At least, that was the plan . . .

  That was the thing with Transistor. I wanted to set up the seemingly cool band of supervillains and then just sort of watch these characters unravel and discover they had these more tragic, potentially more noble intentions in mind that maybe fell apart.

  I also think it leads to better characters when characters have motivations you can relate to. Those are the most compelling antagonists, when you’re like, “I guess if I was in your position, I would do that, too.” I think that leads to interesting characters and interesting stories and interesting twists. I’m really interested in the gap between intentions and reality. I think people typically act with good intentions in mind, but their actions can be deeply misconstrued or have terrible consequences they didn’t really anticipate.

  We’ve all been there when we tried to do something good or nice and it just blew up in our face, or situations where we’ve been really angry with someone, and we realized we were angry on a false premise. Maybe if we had a little more information we wouldn’t have reacted the way that we did. I really like taking those kinds of stories and spinning them in a really fantastical context. That stuff is just deeply humane to me.

  Humane.

  That’s not a word we usually associate with AAA games. It’s strange, since we strive to create these deeply immersive experiences. Our graphical capabilities have been pushed to the brink as we try to claw our way up the far side of the uncanny valley. Released in 2015, Fallout 4 went so far as to build a realistic world in which every lootable item has purpose. There is no junk; everything is useable. Players can tear down buildings and use the parts to build their own settlements. Even electricity is made available by building a generator, scavenging circuity and copper wire, and then connecting all the necessary bits in the game’s workshop.

  Video games have now brought us full circle from where we started. We wanted to escape this world, so we built digital worlds where we could hide, and then we packed them full of everything we were trying to escape.

  The player is the only human element in a game as it is being played, and yet they bring no humanity to it. They are limited to the systems we build. And a system, no matter how deep, is a poor replacement for humanity. Gameplay is a cold, incorporeal skeleton kept in motion by the organs and muscles of the game’s systems. It will never create the immersive experience we’re all looking for. The humanity necessary to ignite our empathy can only come from story.

  When I think about story in games, my brain keeps coming back to a quote by Leo Tolstoy: “All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.” There is a lot of truth hidden in this statement; the first bit being that writers love to simplify complex issues into catchy quotes. But look closely at Leo’s choice of words. The quote is like a perspective puzzle; it changes shape depending on the angle from which it is viewed. Look at it straight on and it appears to be two different stories. To see the complete image, you have to turn it over in your hands and study it from every angle. A man goes on a journey. To those he meets, he is a stranger come to town. If he returns home, he will not be the man he once was; he will be a stranger. One story becomes many, all by changing your point of view.

  Our story is never going to change. We need the player as much as the player needs us. To grow, we need to change our point of view.

  Long live character.

  11

  * * *

  WALKING THE LINE

  When you think of the great military shooter franchises, Spec Ops does not come to mind. Created by Zombie Studios, the series was a budget franchise, the kind of game you’d find in the discount bin at Kmart. From 1998 to 2002, the franchise released nine installments. The first two games in the franchise, Spec Ops: Rangers Lead the
Way and Spec Ops: Ranger Team Bravo, were well received. The following seven, not so much. I can’t tell you why, because I’ve never played them. But if I had to guess, it had something to do with releasing seven games in just three years. Maybe the quick development schedule caused a drop in quality, or maybe players became burnt out on the franchise. Too much too fast is never a good thing. Whatever the reason, after 2002, Spec Ops games disappeared from the shelves. After that, the franchise somehow ended up at Rockstar—yes, the same Rockstar that makes Grand Theft Auto—where a new installment sat in development for two years before it was canceled for unknown reasons.

  Finally, in 2006, it came to us.

  “Do you play a lot of military shooters?” asked the Fox.

  “Not really.” I grimaced, hoping my honesty wasn’t about to kill my chances of working on the game. “I played some Counter-Strike back in the day, but aside from that, the genre just never appealed to me.” This was mostly true. My dislike for military shooters actually stemmed from my field training at Lackland Air Force Base back in 2002.

  One evening, all the trainees gathered in the auditorium to listen to an AC-130 gunner discuss his tours in the Middle East. To accompany his talk, he showed a video from one of his missions. Through the grainy lens of the targeting camera, we watched little white dots sprint for cover as they tried to avoid the death from above. In the background, we could hear the gunner cracking jokes as the dots fell, one by one, and went still.

  The gunner’s casual attitude didn’t bother me. I don’t know what it’s like to kill someone, but from all accounts it sticks with you. This guy killed people for a living. It made sense he would develop an emotional distance between himself and his work. What I found unnerving, though, was the reaction from my fellow trainees. They were laughing and cheering like we were at the movies. There were many reasons for everyone to feel okay about what we were watching. The footage bore no resemblance to reality. It was grainy, black and white, shot from high in the sky. The people dying on-screen were dots, blips. Even if you could muster empathy for them, they were still enemy combatants. Their deaths had been sanctioned for the greater good. So why couldn’t I shake the feeling we had just watched a snuff film?

  I’d always felt a little out of place in the military because I naturally bristle at legally mandated conformity and an institutionalized class system, but those were temporary constraints I accepted when I signed away four years of my life; I’d have to deal. But this was something different. This was the celebration of death. The loss of life is tragic—any life. War happens; I accept that. When it does, death is inevitable. But it is still tragic.

  That was the moment I realized the military wasn’t for me. Afterward, whenever I played military shooters like Call of Duty or Battlefield, they made me feel the same as I did in that auditorium.

  I didn’t say any of this to the Fox. There’s a belief in this industry that in order to make a great game you must love the genre or franchise you’re working on, as if only a foaming-at-the-mouth fanatic can understand what players want. If you’ve ever wondered why so many video games feel like microwaved leftovers, this is why. Fans are wonderful and should always be embraced, but their opinions can be deadly to the creative process. Fandom is an organized religion whose holy laws are handed down by people who get angry on the Internet. By defining what something should and should not be, fans secure ownership over that which they love. When their passion informs rather than inspires, it becomes a millstone around a creator’s neck.

  You don’t get into game development if you don’t love and play games. That shared passion blurs the line between creator and player. When we see ourselves as players, we design to our audience, believing we are designing for ourselves. By doing this, we forget that our job is not to give players what they want; our job is to show them things they never imagined.

  As a writer and designer, I would much rather work on a project for which I have no affinity. I don’t need to make something I like; those things already exist. The pleasure they provide me comes from experiencing them as part of the audience. The pleasure I get from writing and design comes from the challenge. For me, there is no greater challenge than taking something I couldn’t care less about and finding a way to approach it that sparks my interest.

  I told myself this was the reason I said yes when the Fox asked if I wanted to work on Spec Ops, despite my opinion on military shooters.

  As my mother has always said, “That’s a great excuse, but it’s not a very good reason.” The truth is, I wanted to make Spec Ops because I’m a hypocrite. As a military shooter, it would embody a lot of what turned me away from the military. It would also be a full-blown AAA game with a focus on narrative. This was an opportunity to help build a game from the ground up. If it did well, it would potentially open a lot of doors. Could I honestly ignore my beliefs for the sake of furthering my career?

  Yes—absolutely and without hesitation.

  * * *

  TO MAKE THIS GAME, we needed a development partner. We found one in Yager, an independent studio located in Berlin, Germany. They were new, having only released two games, both of which were combat flight simulators. They lacked AAA experience, but 2K did not. By working together, the Fox knew we could create something special.

  Our competition was fierce. We were up against fan-favorite franchises Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, Battlefield, and Call of Duty. Each of them had carved their own niche into the genre.

  Originally developed by Red Storm Entertainment, Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon franchises were both inspired by Tom Clancy novels. As tactical shooters, they aim for realistic combat, requiring players to focus on caution and tactics rather than fast reflexes. Often, a single bullet is enough to get the player killed. While the two franchises have a lot in common, their core gameplay is very different. Rainbow Six focuses on heavily planned infiltration tactics, whereas Ghost Recon is designed for on-the-fly battlefield tactics. If we were to pick two verbs to describe each game, Rainbow Six would be breach and clear; Ghost Recon would be outmaneuver and progress.

  The Battlefield franchise, developed by Visceral Games and EA DICE, built its name on large multiplayer battles, which can include up to sixty-four players at once. These matches take place on large maps designed to simulate the widespread chaos of real war. To further that design, players are not limited to the normal run-and-gun gameplay associated with FPS multiplayer; they can expand their combat arsenal by commandeering vehicles such as tanks and planes.

  Activision’s Call of Duty is a franchise so big it’s developed by three studios—Infinity Ward, Treyarch, and Sledgehammer Games. By excelling in both single-player and multiplayer design, Call of Duty has earned its place as the king of military shooters. Its narrative campaigns are nonstop, action-packed affairs, probably the closest video games have come to distilling summer-movie blockbusters into an interactive experience. Its multiplayer mode matches the stellar gameplay with a progression system that rewards player skill by unlocking gameplay options, both during a match and afterward. It’s a perfectly designed addiction loop built around the smoothest, most responsive gameplay in the genre. Play unlocks new features, which lead to more play, which increases your skill, which unlocks new features, and so on.

  These were all time-tested franchises, with formulas refined over multiple installments. We weren’t foolish enough to think Spec Ops could make a run at any of them. All we wanted was to carve out our own niche so we could stand beside the greats and hopefully enjoy a reasonable piece of the market share.

  * * *

  YAGER’S PITCH FOR SPEC OPS was exactly what you’d expect from a military shooter: Dubai is taken over by terrorists, and three Delta operators are sent in to rescue the city’s captive billionaires. The military shooter genre was already packed with games about duty-driven Caucasian soldiers fighting terrorists of unidentifiable nationality. If Spec Ops was going to succeed, we needed to offer players something different, so w
e threw out the guts and kept the skin.

  The location, time period, and setup remained the same—three soldiers fighting in present-day Dubai. That was the box we had to work within. As far as creative constraints go, these were spectacular. They were loose enough that we could essentially write any story we wanted. At the same time, they were defined just enough that we were able to bypass the initial brainstorming and not get lost in the weeds of preproduction.

  Trying to decide the who, where, and when can be an enjoyable part of the brainstorming process. It’s fun to sit around spitballing ideas, to feel that rush of adrenaline when a concept ignites the possibilities in your brain. But it can also be very treacherous to navigate. A new idea is like a new relationship. It’s exciting, electrifying. Everything about it seems perfect and unspoiled. Dwell on it for too long, however, and suddenly the new idea becomes an old idea. The initial excitement wears off, and its cracks begin to show. You wonder how you could have ever been so blind. This idea was never good. You can do better than this. So you begin to brainstorm again, and soon a new idea catches your eye, and that familiar chill runs down your spine as your scalp tingles with elation. This is it, you think. This is a brilliant idea. And the cycle begins anew. Everyone gets caught in this trap. Coming up with an idea is easy; the pleasure is almost instantaneous. It’s instant gratification that requires zero follow-through. Good stuff, but deadly to the creative process. A great idea can get you high, but the process of actually bringing it to life will lay you low. If you get addicted to that new-idea buzz, then every time you hit a creative wall, you’ll go back for another hit, and you’ll never move forward.

  Coming off the success of BioShock, the Fox wanted to double down on dark and gritty. “We need something with a story,” he said. “Something thought-provoking that makes people scream, ‘What the fuck did I just play?’ ”