Boiled eggs and optional violence: A series of Far Cry 3 letters

Dear Quintin:

We need to talk.

I don't know what's become of you. This thing you've been doing, it's gotten out of control. I don't even know you anymore.

I was with you in the beginning: You were a callow youth who quailed at the sight of blood, rich tropical vistas blurring to the rhythm of your panicked breath. Your security blanket — the militaristic elder brother who was going to make everything OK — died with a sanguine gurgle under your hands. You ran with the terror of a hunted animal through jewel-green foliage, the whip-sting of gunfire chasing your heels, and I sat on the edge of my seat. When you stumbled, I cried out. The merciless branches, the horrific, alien tropical landscape buffeted you carelessly, and I felt your pain. When you fell, my stomach turned.

And now, not even 10 minutes later:

You accepted a generic tribal tattoo — oh, sorry, tatau — without complaint. You have a radio, a fully-functioning tablet and generous access to vehicles, so you could try to contact your family; you could try to get a ride to the mainland, get to an embassy, call for help and let your family know your brother has died, that everyone you love is being held hostage by pirates. You could spare a tear, even.

Instead you are agreeably slaughtering tapirs for backpacks. You have draped yourself in weaponry, suddenly cogent and interested in leading an assault on some pirate base — wait, though, you'll assault the base after you have collected all the flowers at its outskirts. OK. This island is making a monster out of you, Quintin. A monster who wants to build wallets and collect cocaine baggies. What the hell's become of you?!

Sorry. Unbridled emotions misfiring everywhere, because video games. I'm talking about Far Cry 3.

Let me back up: The scene is my living room. You are putting on Far Cry 3, a game I hadn't planned on becoming interested in, and yet I begin a cheer (my single semester of high-school inadvisably spent as a basketball cheerleader is among my dark secrets): Clap, clap, clap-clap-clap, clap-clap-clap-CLAP! And you finish, after a pause, uncertain: "Far Cry?"

The cheer starts out enthused, ends up confused. Oh man. How appropriate for this game.

Are we going to have to start listening to Skrillex now?

Save me,

– L

Hey Quinns,

Yeah. I remember you talking about Call of Duty as we winced through the rain on Thames Street — sorry you picked such a crap time of year to visit New York City, and sorry we pronounce "Thames" wrong here.

I often feel slightly guilty making CoD the single whipping post of this nebulous thing I'm so uncomfortable with. It's just become the icon for something, maybe many things, that so many of us have had enough of.

I mean, if there weren't some urge rising beneath the cash-lacquered veneer of our FPS-dominated commercial industry, then we wouldn't have heard so much this year about how Spec Ops: The Line is great because it tries to be intelligent about the experience of war, or so I read (full disclosure: Haven't played it).

Whatever else Spec Ops is said to do imperfectly, it's apparently tried to present the idea that gunning down hundreds of people is an act that actually can have moral implications, psychological impact. People find that worthy of admiration. And in The Atlantic, Far Cry 3 is billed as the potential "video game that critiques video games."

But I can count tons of games that have been interpreted, at least in part, as "critiques" of games: Portal and BioShock are about subverting the player's expectation of the systems that give them instructions; before them, Shadow of the Colossus did that, too. When I get drunk you know I'm wont to go on about how even Metal Gear Solid 4 is an industry critique. It's not that examining the nature of games is new this year — it's that people actually care about it now, particularly as concerns gun violence.

And oh, look, what's one of the most divisive issues in America right now, right?

Back to "you," Jason Brody, suddenly neck-deep in a mad world, hacking up flowers and stuffing your pockets with dingo meat. You can't really remember what you're supposed to be doing because every crucial plot point is unveiled by someone blowing magical mushroom spores into your face, or whatever.

Nah. I can't. Apocalypse Now this isn't. I've not had this much fun all year drunk-tweeting about anything besides the Spike VGAs, that Tinseltown celebration of, according to Samuel L., getting to "shoot people in the face."

Far Cry 3 is supposed to be a story about a man who loses himself as this island, its rituals and its blood hunger quite literally get under his ever-more-inked skin. Will he remember the people that are important to him, or will he become a remorseless killing machine?

I mean. I think that's what it's supposed to be. Just, none of it feels important. The people don't feel real, and if they were real, I'd want to cap 'em, not rescue them.

As a "statement," Far Cry 3 feels like a well-intentioned term paper on class issues by a white 12-year-old from suburbia. Or like a song about foreign gangsters by a woman who actually doesn't seem to understand foreign politics and likes truffle fries (that'd be M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes," which fittingly opens this game).

Bang-bang-bang-bang. Kaching!

– Leigh

PS: Those shirts don't smell like bread; they smell like thrift store. And you look great in women's t-shirts. I mean, this is Brooklyn, and you should try to fit in.

Quinns,

Wow, bro.

I want to say "thank you for sharing that with me," because you've not actually told me this story before, and I'm moved. But "thanks for sharing" has been culturally adapted as a trite-ism for an ironic age, where we're afraid to be sincere, so we adopt Twitter-ready idioms that make light of our anxiety about connecting with others. If we look cool, no one will know we have feelings.

Far Cry 3 does look cool — high cliffs, radiant grasslands, vivid seas. It's a place I'd desperately want to go; it makes me want to be naive enough to presume that land would welcome me. It occasionally looks smart, understated. We loved the detail in that old doctor's house — a neglected shell of a place where a children's room remains, undisturbed and unexplained, the man cripplingly high, rattling about among the ghosts and memories.

It's also occasionally gross, all that stabbing and mauling. And it's often dumb — the logic gaps, the caricature of a "tribal belief system," the predictable B-movie dialogue. I can't tell the one tight-tee Buffy doll from the other, can't muster anything but annoyance at these obnoxious stoner clichés. These spoiled brats are in over their heads and I don't love them. Whether or not their being unsympathetic is intentional, ultimately there's no stake in whether Jason gives himself over to the island or not.

But you didn't ask how Far Cry 3 looks. You asked how you looked, playing it. Honestly, Quinns? You looked like you were just playing another bro-shooter. You shot things, you occasionally died, you listened to dubstep.

You muttered, bored. You frequently paused it to smoke cigarettes and look at Gmail.

I don't think you're unsettled because Far Cry 3 was effective. I think you're unsettled — I think we both are — by this yawning gap between what a game says it wants to do and what it then goes and does. It's as troubling as the cheerful gawping tourists you met in that war zone. The game mines superficial rituals of meaning and then it puts a gun in your hand.

Thanks for sharing, Far Cry 3.

Pirate skulls and bones, sticks and stones and weed and bombs,

Leigh

PS: How was the food in Vietnam? I assume you did not need to hunt it yourself.

Quinns,

A game about just having a holiday. About domesticity. I wonder if a really good game about war begins when you, exiting the tunnels, choose not to pick up that gun.

I hear the cry of a million bros: That doesn't sound like a lot of fun. No. But why do game developers build mansions and buy Ferraris off the back of efforts to neuter grotesque modern horrors, to make them fun? Kirk Hamilton's articulation of Medal of Honor's promo campaign as "mortifying" really resonated with me. I've heard my own gin-laced hiss — "war profiteers" — threading into the dark of some promo party, as regards certain kinds of industry people.

Maybe it's not entirely profiteering, but modern irony. People don't want to have feelings about the world, so they're playing with it instead, as a means of coping or desensitization.

On one hand, that's healthy. "It's only a game" makes us feel in control of experiences we can't possibly understand. Maybe those bros on your trip went for the guns to get a sense of power back after feeling shaken by what they saw.

On the other hand, I live in a country where, when I was a child in the 1980s, it was still normal to run around whooping and playing "Indians," being shot by "cowboys." Our history is so revisionist that I don't think it fully dawned on me that I had been gleefully playing ETHNIC CLEANSING until I was, like, 20 years old.

I didn't learn to play "cowboys and Indians" from people who were cautiously processing our history, afraid to be sincere. I didn't learn it from people who were seeking absolution from our nation's history. I learned it from people who were ignorant and didn't know better.

I don't like the idea that games with guns need to be conscienceless and absurd, divorced from any reality, to "work." Yet the violent games that work for me — early GTA, Hotline Miami — would seem to bear this out. My favorite part of Far Cry 3 was taking a flamethrower to those pot fields and running like hell, and Jason's silly commentary.

You see this game offering the fantasy of a vacation from conscience. I could maybe buy that its dissonance intends to make the player aware of how absurd, how reprehensible it is for a game mechanically rooted in violence to act as the player's "vacation."

That might be giving it a lot of credit, though. Most games are stuck in a weird adolescent valley where they're taking themselves too seriously to be fun, but not seriously enough to be smart. If you ask me, all we've got in Far Cry 3 is another one of those.

Cheers,

– L