In their Epic issue, the Escapist pays me cash money to vent a little about the somewhat odd double-standard people have about adolescent games, specifically Gears of War.
Along with my peers, I chuckled at the “So Macho” remake of Gears of War as 2006 drew to a close. And this was only natural. Gears of War’s washed-out, hyper-macho vision of a world on the cusp of complete annihilation was more than a little silly. That’s fine. That’s videogames. But my first clue that this satire was solidifying into something else came with Eurogamer’s year-end awards.
Lots more, including usavoury metaphors, digs at Walker and euologising of hypermachismo in the full thing. In short: If wanting that gun Blaine has is in the Predator is wrong, who’d want to be right?
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I haven’t played GoW — is it any more nakedly homoerotic than Far Cry? I really wanted to mod the cut-scene audio files in FC so that it was about a closeted man in denial, desperate to escape a gay resort (”Jack, you’ve got to make your way to the gaydar station!” “But it’s so hard!…“). I wouldn’t have had to change the models or enemy taunts at all, the amount of apopletic, gleaming bodybuilders with crewcuts screaming that they were going to tear ‘the guy with the shirt’ a ‘new one’ more than did the trick. Of course, the ‘Trigens’ would’ve spoiled it, but we’re all used to that.
I don’t think I fit your mould Mr Gillen. I hate DMC for it’s juvenile nature as much, if not more than, GoW. Of course I enjoy both as well, for their silly good fun, but it’s hard to get over how gut-wrenchingly stupid they are sometimes.
meh looks like they didn’t even bother with a demo. Fuck em.
@ Tom Camfield, Xbox Live can sometimes be absolutely disgusting. Last night, there were probably 3 occasions where I ended up shouting abuse at someone because he kept spouting his racist hatred down the mic.
Othertimes it’s people who spam the mic, but for me anyway, I find that hilarious, some people who do it are absolute comedians.
And then again, you can go a whole evening without having any trouble at all, have a good laugh and a chat, and play a good game
But do you like “shoot it in the face a lot” because of its homoerotic overtones?
i’d like to think my electronic drive to violate everything in the face is a pansexual expression of the rawest will to power.
a while back i’d written a jokey piece for TGQ about effeminaphobia and homoeroticism in far cry – all those masculine manly men shooing each other with bullets from their phallic guns, with those being pierced first dying/submitting to superior masculine power – but far too many people took it seriously. this is both a critique of my poor writing skills and bits of cultural studies wank that have surfaced in the mainstream.
For every satire you do need something that isn’t as self conscious and just commits.
I always felt that satire stems from a kind of fear. Of liking something stupid? Maybe.
We went out for a mates birthday the other day and we sung him a very manly happy birthday.
At first we did it with a wink but after a few words it turned into something else; we started belting it out and it ended up as a very mugs a swinging glorious Viking Russian national anthem birthday song.
It was great.
The birds thought we were being funny but the boys knew… we knew.
We went to a lot of kareoke after that but my point being sometimes it’s ok to like stupid man stuff.
But if there was a failing in Gears it wasn’t so much the testosterone overload or the burns victim enemies turning the game into a particularly odd episode of ER or the desaturated bloom excess; it was the lack adrenaline rush.
COD4 did that rush really well but it was strangely absent in GOW.
A result of the repeating game dynamics? Maybe but deffo something they need to up in GOW2.
Oh and Gillen it’s Fenix isn’t it?
I’ve been playing Gears of War on PC recently (having played through much of it on 360 when it came out) and, honestly, I hadn’t thought about the over-the-top macho big-guns nature of it all. This is how shooting games are, isn’t it? Men with guns (with, at most, a single token woman) stomping around ruined places shooting aliens with big guns. This is how it’s been since 1993. Personally, I find the sub-LOTR mumbo-jumbo epic fantasy of RPGs more objectionable.
There’s always a thin line between knowingly stupid over-the-topness and genuine emotion: as Radiant says, singing loud drinking songs with inebriated friends is both a bit of dumb fun and genuine male bonding. Likewise, something can be exciting and spectacular without being empty and meaningless. A good case is Apocalypse Now’s famed Ride of the Valkyries scene: I don’t know about you, but I watch it with a mixture of childish excitement at the explosions and machine-gunning and gung-ho blood-thirstiness of the soldiers, and uncomfortable shock at the callousness of the killing and the sheer scale of destruction. If it had been a pure action scene, or a scene designed purely for pathos, it wouldn’t have been nearly as effective. By combining the two, you get an uneasy mix that heightens the effectiveness of both. I remember reading an interview with a US soldier around the time of the invasion of Iraq, who mentioned that his company watched Apocalypse Now before the invasion. They weren’t watching it as a comment on the nature of war, they were watching it for the action and excitement of a war film.
I guess this is pretty irrelevant to Gears of War, which has no intelligent subtext, as far as I can tell. The whole thing is a framework for being able to shoot and/or chainsaw nasty monsters. I’m happy with that.
Typo in paragraph 4 of the article. (Don’t know if that’s you or Escapists fault.)
GoW was great fun playing co-op, but the idiocy of the characters lessened it. (Seriously, I wanted to shoot most of the human “allies”…if these were what was left of humanity, then would losing it really been all that bad?)I’m not sure what the difference is, but the machidiocy (SWIDT?)of, say, Predator is great “laugh along w/ your buddies whilst you drink beer”, wheras Gears’ just made me cringe…
I still don’t like Gears of War, sorry. Theoretically it should be a masterpiece of homoeroticism. The locust are after all a matriarchy, the Berserkers are who are terribly feared are explicitly referred to as female, and Fenix even says something about getting cooties occasionally after chainsawing someone in two ferchrissakes. But there’s just something about it that rubs me the wrong way. And it’s not the juvenilia per se. I *love* God of War, which is equally ridiculous. Warhammer 40K? Glorious.
It think the key is not having endless monochrome ugliness.
Mr Gillen, having read your work of various kinds over the years, I’ve noticed that you have a peculiar interest in the convoluted, subtle and above all self-conscious elements of how people interpret and consume popular
culture. There’s clearly a fascination with people being drawn towards a particular niche because it fits their sense of self, and the thought processes they go through in order to reject or embrace a particular band/film/game. Phonogram seemed to focus on this a great deal, and I suppose such commentary is appropriate when looking at music, given the extent to which pledging allegiance to a particular genre or band is used as an expression of self, but it’s rarer for it to be as useful when discussing video game tribalism. I often find this analysis to be somewhat tiresome, like my brain is gradually forming a corkscrew shape attempting to keep up with the ‘irony wrapped in an ulterior motive inside a niche’ pattern of the discussion, which is always highly speculative given the psychological nature of the debate, but this article was really terrific.
The line from the Korean gamer asking “Why am I controlling the bad guy?” is so priceless, the most succinct summation of one of the shooter genre’s problems I’ve heard since “Edward Pistolhands” was used to describe the average FPS avatar’s inability to interact with the world with anything other than violence. It hits on what I imagine is the reason for many of the complaints regarding the Gears universe and others like it; people aren’t necessarily making a reactionary and highly personal objection to Gears due to a belief that engaging in its juvenalia is a violation of the sense of self that sees them as an intelligent mature being, it is perhaps a more measured assessment that rejects the game based on a revulsion of values it expresses that the commentator
feels should be universally despised. Ie, the former is a more selfish concern, a desire to maintain a particular sense of identity, whereas the latter is rather more communal, more altruistic, stemming from a belief that such crud is not good for anyone.
I say this because when playing GoW, I had no shame in enjoying it. Not enjoying it for ‘what it is’, not enjoying it ‘in spite of itself’ not enjoying it ‘in an ironic way’. I’ve always found that a bizarre way to engage with anything, the notion that you must have a fixed set of values through which you parse something, and if it doesn’t match them precisely you must find an alternate means of enjoying it that enables you to preserve your idealised sense of self. Perhaps that stance implies a self-consciousness of its own and…oh, we’re back to the corkscrew and Russian doll bit again.
I enjoyed it for its gameplay, which was brilliantly constructed and innovative (yeh, that’s right). My objections to it stemmed from the thorough unlikeability of the games protagonists and the ugliness of the values being implicitly espoused throughout the game. Games, and FPSs in particular, generally are appalling at doing anti-heroes, hence the bafflement of the quoted gamer at the avatar he was controlling. I think it results from the fact that the US produces most FPSs, and the fact that the unpleasant values of such a hugely conservative nation are inevitably expressed through their popular culture, and secondly, the violent nature of shooters themselves, where the easy option for expressing the anti- element of anti-hero is through sadism.
Witness the scene in the third act where your squad comes across a man trapped in the bowels of a factory, which has had the vast majority of its occupants recently slaughtered by the Locusts. Rather than escort him to safety or simply protect him, they sneer with relish at forcing him to help them fulfil their next objective.
He berates them for their attitude and suggests such coercion is typical of the military. Within minutes the unfortunate survivor is killed due to falling into a pit of wretches, which is met by unconcerned silence from Fenix and Santiago.
This is typical of how the Gears behave throughout the game and the mores the game expresses. The military is
to be respected and all those who oppose it are weaklings and cowards who deserve their inevitable grizzly fate. Being a sadistic, insensitive lout is cool and will make you a winner. To me, a well crafted anti-hero is a loveable rogue, whereas the Gears just seem like arseholes, as I suspect they do to anyone who finds American conservative morality completely alien. Hence any criticism I aim at the game isn’t the result of self-conscious desire to convince myself that I’m above consuming juvenalia in an unabashed unironic way, it’s borne out of an entirely sincere and unmanufactured disgust at what’s being inherently advocated by the game’s creators.
What’s funny is that this kind of American Macho, let’s call it, has been around in games for a long time it’s just there’s been a bit of a lull as far as big name titles goes. That’s probably since a) Duke Nukem has thus far failed to reappear and b) John Romero gave the whole “Make you my Bitch” “Suck it Down” Pro Wrestling & …uh prison sex ‘tude a bad name.
Otherwise there might have been a more even continuity of macho wank and Gears wouldn’t stand out quite so much, methinks.
I quite like the notion touched on in the article, that these games are the contemporary version of weekend teen adventures involving an arm load of wrestling and Cannon films/Chuck Norris videos. Complaining about Gears’ macho is a bit like wrestling though; there’s a tendency among intellectual middle class types to want to yell ‘it’s fake’ and undermine it all the time. Why? ‘Cause there’s just enough people who seem to take it very seriously.
Scandalon it’s not so much idiot characters as much as they are just ‘lunks’.
If you want to see idiocy of character go play Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter [either one] I guarantee you that the bullshit that comes out of both your team mates and YOUR mouth [as Mitchel] will drive you absolutely flag burningly insane.
GRAW… now there is a game devoid of any subtlety, humor or satire that needs a good postmortem kicking [although again it's aces in co-op].
Genre wise GRAW and GOW are pretty much the same [cover then fight] it’s just tonally GRAW gets it so very wrong and comparatively that makes GOW’s bear force one overload seem strangely on point.
btw Bear Force One: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twQlpFrm5iM
Gears of War brilliantly captures the mood and style of the old Schwarzenegger movies, and anyone who doesn’t like them clearly has no taste so we can safely ignore them.
Also, great point about the double standard regarding Japanese juvenilia. Personally I like everything that’s beautifully silly, whether it’s a misspelled Marcus Phoenix or Dante with too much hairspray. Everything’s better than a game that takes its own fictional military bullshit seriously, like those terribly boring Tom Clancy titles.
But… dude. You wrote “Panzer tank”. That means “Tank tank”. That’s just wrong. Unless of course it’s part of the intentional silliness in which case I suppose it’s okay.
AndrewC: Yeah, there’s a bit of rhetoric there – but when you’re arguing against people who are throwing strawmen around that much, you do feel the need to make a few of your own. But the point you pick up on is absolutely the main one, and I think the one which is most difficult to argue against.
Theory: Mechanistically, I’ll go with you on Miyamoto. But a comparison of the sort of aesthetics Miyamoto games tend to have to Pixar is enormously, ludicrously complimentary to Miyamoto. They’re embarassingly badly written, badly designed, fairy-boy bollocks. The first two hours with any mainstream Nintendo game is me getting over my retch-reflex.
(What I didn’t deal with in the article is that I actually like teenage juvenalia more than I do pre-teen ones… but that’s neither here nor there. In the same way I wouldn’t dismiss Mario because it’s kiddy, people shouldn’t dismiss Gears because it’s teenage. Hell, there’s lots of other reasons to dismiss it, if you wanted to.)
CplTurboTurd: ” I’ve noticed that you have a peculiar interest in the convoluted, subtle and above all self-conscious elements of how people interpret and consume popular culture. ”
Guilty as charged. One note though – I don’t really mean liking it in an ironic way. In some ways, it’s beyond that irony – as a gent in the thread said, getting drunk and singing with your mates in the pub. That’s the bit of the mind Gears tickles.
Conversely, your critique is of Gears is a lot stronger than the IT’S GAY! stuff I was railing against. I don’t necessarily disagree.
KG
Alex with this was spot on:
Doom was brilliant, care-free, wallowing in it’s own filth and adolescent bravado. It was also the product of six mulleted men in a garage, not a multi-billion-dollar corporation. Gears of War is a paunchy middle-aged estate agent doing Megadeth karaoke. It’s not just the games-as-art set who should find it distasteful.
Yeah that sums up my distaste quite well. GOW is an in-direct descendent (in direction and tone) of Doom, but with an extra layer of unnecessary crap. In Doom you are the protagonist, but in Gears of War you are kinda cosplaying as these characters … and while some people might be enjoying some kind of wish fullfillment thing I just found the extra layer of man-cosplay really lame. It took a lot away from the fighting and shooting through dark places that was the draw for me.
For me the game would have been better without Marcus Fenix or Delta Squad. It doesn’t have to be a movie … just me and a friend against the bugs would have been fine – we can make our own stories because your story telling really isn’t that good.
Excellent article, thank you Kieron.
I dont mind silly machismo of GoW or the ridiculously overdone stlye of wh40k – cause they are done with class and look great from design pov.
gears of war is such a goddamn good game, if you didn’t like gears, it simply means you don’t have any friends to play it with. what’s wrong with having an overtly macho game, it’s badass is what it is, it’s just a game, there’s no need to look in-depth at the political satire or culture commentary that might be the underlying subext. it’s a game.