by DeWitt Henry
To dwell in, and on, is more than merely to visit, seek temporary shelter or escape; it is to be immersed, nourished, and hooked.
I’ve played and replayed Doom 2, the classic first-person shooter game, for some thirty years so far with pleasure, frustration, triumph and satisfaction; although also with some guilt. However gripping, it is a largely vapid pastime, requiring skill more than talent, and leaves behind no artifact or wisdom. Or so I’ve thought. If poetry, according to Sir Philip Sydney, is that which “keeps old men from the chimney corner and children from their play,” my hours of playing the Doom series have kept me away from literature, family, work and friends.
Doom 3D was released in 1993 and Doom 2 a year later by ID Games, while both its creators, Johns Romero and Carmack, were still twenty-somethings. According to David Gusher’s Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture (Random, 2003), both had come from broken families, and had graduated from arcade gaming to school computer labs before becoming hackers. They first collaborated on Wolfenstein 3D, which helped to popularize first-person shooter games, but Doom 3D set a new standard for video gaming in general. It combines concepts and graphics from such sci-fi films as Alien, soundtracks of heavy-metal rock, and situations and player choices similar to those of the role-playing board game, Dungeons and Dragons; but as Carmack puts it, “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie; it’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.”
If you’ve never played Doom and its sequels, here is a brief description (if you have, please skip). On a PC, with your mouse and keyboard keys for control, you take the perspective of a single Space Marine on screen as he aims a pistol ahead and fires when you hit the shoot command. Your mission is to evade or defeat a demonic horde from Hell (and/or another universe) by sabotaging their extra-terrestrial bases and strongholds. You don’t know your way initially and as you advance to explore caves, tunnels, castles, corridors, factories and craggy landscapes, you battle a hierarchy of clever, but non-human monsters, ranging from ape-like imps that throw fireballs, to fanged attack dogs, to bee-like lost souls, to flying tomato-like creatures that spit explosives, to oversized barons with blasters, to spider-brains, to giant and all-but-indestructible bosses firing missiles. You can turn, crouch, jump, walk, run; shoot and destroy—as long as your health and ammo last. If wounded you can find health boosts, but if health declines to zero, you have to start the game over. As you progress, you also pick up more powerful weapons, ammo, armor, and other supplies. The carnage is realistic and graphic. Demons remain splattered as roadkill, sometimes in heaps. There are howls, cries, growls, and groans, along with explosions and driving music. You are immersed in 3D action and space, evoked by 2D means. The fight/flight thrill is sustained as you work your way through the map and traps, locate three keys, and then the final switch that allows you to exit to the next of, yes, 32 levels. Other features include a save command (allowing you a do-over with foreknowledge at any point) and cheat codes that allow you to be invincible, pass through walls, and wield a plasma blaster with unlimited ammo, the ultimate weapon.
No previous computer game had been this brutal, fast, and visceral, created 3D views, Mannerist habitats, fun-house surprises, and complex tests of persistence and wit; and despite advances in hardware since (including innovations in AI, AR, and VR), none has surpassed it. Custom fails to stale its variety; and its spell remains potent.
But still I wonder whether addictive play is innocent or dangerous. If escapist, is it as destructive as drugs, gambling, or sex (Doom has been called a “cyberopioid” and “heroinware”)? Or is it beneficial in any way, like running?
/
Even before the release of Doom 3D, moral guardians blamed graphic violence in film, video, and video games for corrupting youth, but almost at once Senator Joseph Lieberman and other lawmakers singled out Doom as a contributing factor in the school shooting at Columbine in 1996 (and in the others that followed). Both the adolescent killers at Columbine had been devotees of Doom and one had boasted to his journal that the massacre would be “like playing Doom,” and that his shotgun “was right out of Doom.” (Although it has never been found, he may also have modified a level of Doom to resemble his school’s layout, and its demons to resemble classmates and teachers.) Watch-dog attempts to ban video games eventually failed, yet did persuade industry leaders to self-regulate by posting adults-only ratings. In 2010, critic David Grossman cited Doom in particular as “a mass murder simulator,” and reported that the U.S. Army even used it (and other FPS games) for combat training.
/
And what of Hamlet, or even worse, Titus Andronicus—no matter how ironic the morals, monstrous the figures, or cartoonish the gore? And aren’t Doom’s targets demons, after all; and the heroic shooter’s mission, to save humanity? Games don’t kill people, people do, insist game designers and Doom fans. Meanwhile, so-called ludologists have attempted to link FPS games to the higher arts.
One game designer and scholar argues that “The same impulse towards play that drives our behavior in playing a first person shooter is present where we read a line from Homer or look at cave paintings” (Bryan Upton, The Aesthetics of Play, 2015). He proposes a “heuristics of play as a critical tool for understanding how art in general goes about structuring experience,” and offers such key terms as “active constraints” (rules, with give and take between player and system), opportunities for meaningful action, “states” (an evolving record of how a player moves within the system), flow, threat zones, phase space, horizon of intent, strategy, consequence, and satisfaction. “Day to day life,” he writes, “presents an unfolding sequence of choices, but these choices aren’t shaped by a coherent systems of rules,” whereas a video game presents us “with an evolving state that implies the underlying nature of the rules, but the rules themselves remain hidden.” Games supposedly “help us to understand understanding” and “generate the experience of self.”
Playing Doom, he implies, is like reading a poem or novel. “The path we take to get [meaning] is convoluted and indirect…because navigating a well-constructed system of constraints is interesting and fun.”
Ralph Koster, in A Theory of Fun for Game Design (2005), exhorts us, “Go play! In poetry and prose, play in wit, play in form, play in association, illogic, metaphor, allusions.” For him, play exercises the brain. Fun translates into “mentally mastering problems…and problems can be aesthetic, physical, or social.” He particularly praises flow, or “learning in a context where there is no pressure.”
Such efforts sound defensive and pretentious. And yet. Video games may have replaced narrative film as the “art” medium of our wired age. Koster argues that “entertainment becomes art when the communicative element is either novel or exceptionally well done.”
Another brilliant feature of Doom 2 was the free availability of its code, so that amateur hackers could modify it. This resulted in thousands of MODS becoming downloadable online as long as players owned a licensed copy of the ID original. The maps for each level could be changed creatively, as could the weapons, background graphics, hero and monsters. Otherwise, the rules and play remained the same. Many of the MODS became experiences special enough to keep replaying. Some were camp parodies, where the Marine became Batman or .007 or the Cyber Boss became Barney the Dinosaur. Some are more elaborate than the ID original. Their novelty seems limitless.
Over time, I’ve experienced “gamer nostalgia.” Returning to a familiar map is like returning to my hometown and knowing the streets, topography, routes, and turns. I’d been here before. I half-remember this secret or that, this short-cut, this strategy or that. Earlier lessons I had learned.
/
For better or worse, gaming has become a staple for post-millennial generations. In a recent interview Carmack, forty-nine and the CTO of Oculus, the VR headset company (he has since stepped down to concentrate on AI), described “E-sports and competitive gaming” as a world-wide phenomenon, complete with professional players. The dawn of this was with Doom. “When I did the Quake Tournament, I gave my first Ferrari as first prize (won by Thresh [a gaming superstar]). Only a year later, there was another tournament with a $100M prize.” His interviewer adds: “And today you’ve got the amazing celebrity of the top pro players. They’re now legitimate sports stars… Top earners like Tiger Woods are out-earned by three times, three million. The Super Bowl in South Korea for gaming dwarfs that for the football in the U.S. Millions are tuning in.”
However, attempts to make feature films out of Doom have flopped, lacking any viewer interaction; while attempts to turn popular films into role-playing FPS games, where the player is James Bond, say, have enjoyed some passing success.
Notes Jay David Bolter in Wired: “New audiences…seek their cultural centers elsewhere—in video games and social media. One of the principal pleasures offered by both video games and social media is the experience of flow.” We’re swept along. Point by point choices and actions blur in motion, like flip cards, or cells of movie film, or fragments into meaning. We discover grace, like a pro full-back evading tacklers with twists, plunges, dodgings, straight-arms, and speed, until crossing the goal line, ecstatic and triumphing; from inertia into glory.
/
Jane McGonigal, a “game evangelist,” believes that “intense concentration in a game can be harnessed for social change by turning real-world problems into collective online games.” A dubious prospect, I think. But so is the familiar claim that poetry (or narrative itself) improves mutual understanding and our capacity to feel, despite the equally familiar objection that high culture and Wagner didn’t keep the Nazis from being Nazis. I simply can’t imagine a version of Doom where the demons learn through “play” to be humane. Or where “humans” learn not only to out-think, evade, and outgun challenging demons, but manage to transform them and to be transformed.
Perhaps Doom engrosses precisely because I am exasperated with “real-world problems,” which seem unsolvable. It’s a relief to take action as the righteous, persistent and resourceful Marine. And if I’ve only played at the medium level, or if I’ve used save and replay for second chances, if sometimes I’ve been stymied and had to resort to cheat codes, still better players than I exist and have won fairly—look at the Youtube recordings of best games.
I love the programmers’ joke hidden in the impossible level 32 of Doom 2. If you use God-mode and clipping (which allows you to pass through walls), you can penetrate the hole in the forehead of a sphinx-sized supreme demon, from which flying cubes steadily issue—cubes that land and turn into endless ranks of demons—and there you find a living and tormented human head on a stake—recognizable as John Romano’s. Bombard that and you win.
/
I think of Shakespeare’s Prospero as the ultimate designer, who puts his enemies through a dream of shipwreck and survival on the strange island where they marooned him years before with his young daughter. Now under his spell they are tormented and act out their viciousness on each other, until Prospero’s hench-spirit, Ariel (portrayed as a robot in one sci-fi film adaptation), reminds him to see them as fellow humans.
“The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance,” Prospero decides, then breaks his spell and forgives the repentants as he wishes to be forgiven, though the problem of Caliban, the island’s native and the offspring of a witch, remains. Indeed, most recently, post-colonial, feminist, Marxist, and anti-racist readers have sympathized with Caliban and condemned the Eurocentric, patriarchal Prospero, who may abjure magic at last, but is still more at fault than he admits. And there’s the rub: what can we do, this side of Utopia, to transcend division, violence and crime?
In life, it seems we only have imperfect attempts, ranging from the well-intentioned to the self-hating and sadistic. We don’t have innocent solutions. How do we prevent recurrences? How do we rehabilitate the Nazis after World War II? How do we reason with fanatics? Saint Genet? Jihady John? Klansmen and supremacists? And what about psychopaths? Where imagination fails, our games at least keep teasing our philosophy.
To dwell in, and on, is more than merely to visit, seek temporary shelter or escape; it is to be immersed, nourished, and hooked. So it has been for me with Doom, the classic first-person shooter game, first released in 1993. I keep returning to play, fixated and intrigued. I speculate whether this is for good or ill—for me, or for our culture—as violent computer games are being considered both “mass murder simulators” and high art.
—
DeWitt Henry’s most recent prose collection is Sweet Marjoram: Notes and Essays (MadHat, 2018). A new collection, Endings and Beginnings: Family Essays, is scheduled for 2021 from MadHat (excerpts featured in Juked and in Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices). Henry was the founding editor of Ploughshares and is Prof. Emeritus at Emerson College. Details at www.dewitthenry.com.