This book is dedicated to the study of computer games in terms of the stories they tell and the manner of their telling. It applies practices of reading texts from literary and cultural studies to consider the computer game as an emerging mode of contemporary storytelling. The book contains detailed discussion of narrative and realism in four of the most significant games of the last decade: ‘Tomb Raider’, ‘Half-Life’, ‘Close Combat’, and ‘Sim City’. It recognises the excitement and pleasure that has made the computer game such a massive global phenomenon.
3 Gritty realism: reading Half-Life Half-Life [inc. Half-Life (1998), Half-Life: Opposing Force (1999), Half-Life: Blue Shift (2001)]. First-person shooter. The player controls the actions of an in-game protagonist from a firstperson perspective. What the player sees is what the protagonist would see. Progression through the game largely involves forward movement through a series of areas within a government research complex. There is a limited need to interact with objects and the landscape. All versions of the game offer variations on a basic escape and
, of conflict. Of all the game-fictions selected as primary examples in this study, Close Combat is the least likely to be an instantly recognisable brand name even to those who spend their leisure time staring at a computer monitor. Its relative popularity as a games franchise might be indicated by the longevity of a series that had seen five episodes released by the year 2000, but it has hardly become a household name in the same way that Half-Life, Tomb Raider, or SimCity have. Its profile even among other real-time strategy games, itself an extremely popular sub
game-fictions driven forwards by their move from moment to moment of extreme violence might chap5.p65 111 13/02/03, 14:23 112 More than a game also come as something of a surprise. Forms of conflict and confrontation have always played a major part in the structuring of both games and popular fictions, after all. We know where we are, in story terms, where there is a loaded gun available and a slavering alien or shambling zombie in front of us. How we ‘should’, or how we ‘can’, read such a plot fragment is obvious. Where Tomb Raider and Half-Life had obvious
of Better Than Life, like the players of Half-Life, ‘know’ that this is not the real, for all that the fulfilment of their inner desires persuades them to lie to themselves and remain ‘immersed’. Red Dwarf is not merely science fiction, but science fiction parody, and much entertainment is provided by the audience knowledge and protagonist ignorance that this allows. The eventual realisation of the fictionality of the experience of Better Than Life (and that it is killing the players in the real world as they neglect all those inconvenient bodily matters not dealt
might become, rather than address the mundanity of the object we actually have access to. This is not that potentially oxymoronic thing, an ‘untheorised reading’. Rather, it is a reading that draws on narratological and structuralist thinking and criticism for the most part, and tries to leave its more speculative digressions until the closing chapter. Those who wish to read chap1.p65 10 13/02/03, 14:00 The computer game as fictional form 11 about Tomb Raider, Half-Life, Close Combat, or SimCity are advised to skip ahead to the beginning of Chapter 2 and read on
, Indigenous, or “Savage” position exists liminally as half-death and half-life between the Slave (Black) and the Human (White, or non-Black)’ ( Red, White & Black , p. 23). While a fuller discussion of this position lies beyond the scope of the present chapter, suffice it to say I do not believe that this schema holds up in the context of nineteenth-century British Guiana or modern-day Guyana. For a critique of Wilderson’s understanding of indigeneity, see Iyko Day, ‘Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique’, Critical Ethnic Studies
aspects of this topos in Half a Life . Willie Chandran’s journey from India to London to an unnamed African colony (recognisably Mozambique) is also a progressive movement to dependence and defeat. His anxieties centre on emasculation and inauthenticity. His ‘half’ life is one characterised by hiding. For example, as a child he revises European stories movingly, yet obliquely, to accuse his parents
way or the other. Then she will know what to do next. It’s this suspension, hanging in a void, this half-life she can’t bear. She can’t bear not knowing. She doesn’t want to know’ (52). Rennie’s ambivalence about the nature of this particular boundary arises from the fact that the boundary of her own body has been violated by the cancer that afflicts her. The insecurity of a physical self on which she
From the outset, adjunct therapies such as the administration of a monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI) were tried to improve the effects of L-DOPA, especially to counteract the ‘wearing off’ period resulting from the short half-life of two hours of the dopamine precursor. While scepticism persisted about the efficacy of L-DOPA, in the late 1960s George Costzias demonstrated the emphatic anti-Parkinsonian impact of increasing dosage over a prolonged period of time. In 1969, Costzias began mixing L-DOPA with a peripheral dopa decarboxylase inhibitor (MK485) which