Or, I'm not like you despite the perfection of my camoflage
I've started to dream in the imagery of Quake 4, one of the very best and most demanding First-Person-Shooter games I've ever owned - one of the best, indeed, that's ever been created. It's even better than Doom 3 (which, until the advent of Quake 4 had, without doubt and without competition, been the very best FPS game ever developed). In homage to the brilliance of the designers of Doom 3 Quake 4 uses the same game engine to drive its graphics and its AI.
Before someone like Brad appears to tell me that game engines can't drive both graphics and AI let me admit now and before all JU that the mysteries of game development and production are, to me, just that - mysteries. So if I screw up my discussion of the game because of my technical incompetence and ignorance you're just going to have to forgive me - or go read something else.
Doom 3 is truly wonderful. It's nightmarishly bloody, it's ferociously violent. It has an engrossing plotline and is structured in such a way that the main interest lies not in what happens next but in what environment one will encounter, how its aesthetic values will contribute to the horror (because it's avowedly and unashamedly a game that's intended to leave brown stains on one's underwear) of the overall situation in which one finds oneself immersed.
So great is the hold this game exerts on me, so succesful is its design, that even now after playing it through multiple times, there are certain sections of the game that make me physically afraid to play them. This is the hallmark and signature of the success of ID software, the game's developers.
To be physically afraid when playing a video game may sound ludicrous - but it shows the degree to which the developers are successful in making you forget that that's what you are doing - playing a game. Even now, it comes as a shock to me to have my suspension of disbelief broken by the POV character (point of view) 'dying', so that the game has to be restarted from the last save point.
Until I encountered Quake 4 I believed that Doom 3 was the most technically impressive and immersive game that I was ever likely to encounter. I couldn't have been more wrong. Doom 3 is to Quake 4 what canasta is to bridge, or tic-tac-toe is to chess. It's infinitely more demanding in terms of the strategies the player needs to employ in order to defeat the AI bad guys, and at the same time the occasional 'Boss' (not every level has one, thank the gods of gaming, because that's too predictably tedious) is carefully weighted so that while each presents a challenge none (so far) have been so overly-potent that the player has to cheat in order to progress to the next level. Or become discouraged and lose interest through having to watch the same cut-scene and repeat the same few moments of battle over and over while vainly struggling to destroy his enemy.
Not only is this so, but Quake 4 includes within it episodes that are examples of different types of FPS games. One of my favorite sub-genres is the MechWarrior series, in which the POV character occupies giant warmachines that stride like colossi through the virtual worlds they inhabit, wielding screaming electric death against their enemies. In every previous version of Quake (I have them all) the POV character has been on foot; in version 4 he occupies Walkers (very similar to the MechWarrior machines) and otherwise mobile platforms that leave him free to concentrate on what such games are all about - reducing the AI enemy to bloody chunks - without (except in the case of the Walker scenario) having to be concerned with navigation.
Added to which is the fact that these scenarios take place within spectacularly rendered and very different types of virtual geography, each of which is open to be exploited by the AI and the POV character to the best of their respective abilities. Enemies range from ground-based troops to arial components, to things which fulfil dual roles with attributes of both. In short, gameplay in Quake 4 is an absolute dream (as it is in Doom 3 though for different reasons).
The essence of the different storylines is this. In Doom 3 the planet Mars has been over-run by extra-dimensional Aliens who ultimately hail (we eventually learn) from Hell. They are in fact Demons. It's the mission of the POV character to close the means of access presently enjoyed by these Demons that leads from Mars to Earth. As the game progresses the POV character travels from Mars to Hell and back again, acquiring along the way a semi-supernatural weapon that eventually allows him to confront the ultimate Boss of the game. This is a continuation, and a far more sophisticated expression of, the storyline that underpins the entire series of Doom games.
In Quake 4 the POV character takes up the storyline immediately after the ending of Quake 2 (blithely stepping over the aberration which is Quake 3; an entirely unnecessary attempt to give the single-player something approximating the experience of an online deathmatch - an attempt that failed miserably because dedicated single-players such as myself have no interest in online play, being concerned with aesthetics and with storyline rather than with 'killing' faceless and unknown opponents over the net), emerging into the next stage of humanity's war against the Strogg.
The Strogg are far more interesting characters than are the Demons of Doom 3 (who, despite the undoubted technical excellence of their realisation, are purely one dimensional). They have ambition. They are the subjects of tragedy. They have a civilisational ethic that slowly manifests itself across the two games in which they appear, Quakes 2 and 4. It's necessary to play both in the order they were created to grasp this ethic, because it's entirely understated, never explained and, I think, more an accident of the game design than a product of the intention of the designers. Nonetheless, it is there, and in Quake 4 is an integral (though never annunciated) part of the game play.
One of the things that most excited me about the advent of Quake 4 was a snippet of gossip I heard, that the POV character (who begins his life in the game as a human Marine) was to be captured by the enemy and 'modified' in order to be able to use enemy technology. This snippet lead me to believe, falsely, that the story-tree would contain a division in which it would be possible to choose whether to fight as a human or as a Strogg. Unfortunately that's not the case. The POV character remains relentlessly human in its loyalties throughout the game. This is the only deficiency I've so far found - in every other way the game has exceeded my expectations and desires a hundredfold.
This, for me, is the great difference between Doom 3 and Quake 4: the bad guys in Quake 4 so far engage my attention and sympathy that I want to be able to fight for them. Whereas in Doom 3 there is no element that can engage my sympathy for the 'bad guys'.
The Strogg are creatures whose technology is biologically based. It becomes apparent, during the course of Quake 2 and 4 that humans understanding of Strogg ambitions, their motivation, and the reason for the first Strogg assualt on human civilization, was resource based. In a sense this is true. The Strogg do indeed want the resources of Planet Earth. But their concept of a 'resource' is radically dfferent from the concept endemic to humanity: oil, gas, coal, steel, water etc. What the Strogg want is flesh - human flesh. Flesh, that can be modified, adapted, transformed, engineered, converted and manipulated. They don't fight to conquer; they fight to convert and transform.
Does anyone else see the resonance this has in a culture beleaguered by forces which wish to make it over in their own image? The tactics of Radical Islam are not directed toward conquest; they are directed toward transformation. The means it uses are the knowing exploitation of what we consider to be our virtues in the pursuit of our radical transformation into what we are not. They use our values, they use our sense of justice, they use our desire to be both moral and to be seen to be moral, against us. They incite us to be other than what we are by using what we are against us.
I doubt very much much that the designers of Quake 4 realised that the Strogg desire for human meat can be taken, can be understood as, a metaphor for this philosophical and political parasitism, but nontheless, to the thinking person it is readily present in the game.
But if that were all then the Strogg would serve as no more than a representation of an insidiously seductive attempt to fight a war by other means than the classical meeting together of armies in the field. The Strogg are both weaker than and stronger than their enemy. They have a technology (represented in the game by images of great sensuality and explicit sexuality - explicit to me, at least) which is both superior and inferior to that of their human opponents. Because it relies on flesh it also relies, at the highest levels, on complicity in an explicit project - which is domination of all opposition and its incorporation within Strogg culture as both means and end.
The West is the child of the 17th. century European Enlightenment. In paricular it is the child of the work of Immanuel Kant, the greatest philosopher of that philosophical movement (as others have pointed out, there was more than one Enlightenment - but, in my opinion, Kant was the greatest and most coherent exponent of what it means to be Enlightened).
For Kant, human beings are Ends in themselves. This means that, from the most ill-educated, ignorant peasant dwelling on the steppes of Asia to the most serene, sophisticated, informed exponent of the high culture of the West at its finest, all human beings are equal as human beings and must be respected as avatars of Reason and Truth. On a personal note, I love the extraordinary rigor, the ferocious and undeniable intellectual honesty of Kant's philosophy - I also think the conclusions he drew from it are the most egregious nonsense I've ever encountered. But that's beside the point.
Where the creators of Quake 4 (whom I have no doubt never remotely considered the ramifications of their game in relation to Kantian philosophy) differ from Kant is in their exaltation of flesh as the basic component of a society - flesh devoid of any other meaning than its reality in service to a greater vision - and, in the Strogg and their world, the apotheosis of that vision as technique and as practice (to be technically correct one should say praxis not pratice).
The only place flesh has in Kantian philosophy is as an impediment to Spirit and Reason - but in the world of the game flesh gives birth to reason, flesh is the tutor of reason, and reason is the servitor of flesh in its triumphant expansion into the universe.
Quake 4, whatever else it is, is a commodity to be sold, a product of Capitalism (it's selling like hot cakes, I'm glad to say). And as such, like every other commodity, every other product, it's an indicator, a sign, a signifier of the spirit of the age. If I was the philosopher I like to think I am I'd be highlighting that phrase in order to indicate its indebtedness to Hegel - but then, I always thought Hegel was a pretentious and rather over-blown interpreter of what it is to be enlightened, and while his debt to Kant is manifest it's something that tends to be honored in the refusal to mention it rather than in its explicit exploration - and in order to piss off those who are aware of such things I tend to follow my instinct and let it pass rather than making it obvious.
I am indeed a philosopher - but not one that either Kant or Hegel would recognise as such.
The point to take on board (other than that I have a fondness for gnomic asides) is that the game says something about the world we live in (if it didn't it wouldn't be selling in the way that it is). And what it says is this: that in the world of the game, and the world which both non-game-players and game-players occupy, the idea of flesh is approaching the pre-eminence that the idea of spirit and reason once enjoyed.
Why is that? It's partly because action is now more honored than thought (which, after both Kant and Hegel, occupies the place that spirit once did). But not simply action per se: action dedicated to purpose, to achievement, to the realisation of the self in this world, the world of history, the world of concrete purpose which touches the lives of everyone, the world of reputation and of fame. Fame is to our world what holiness was to the world of the medieval scholars and monks. It gives depth. It gives meaning. it gives a taste of eternity while being divorced from the moral and ethical substratum that informed the ethos of the Medievals.
But what is profoundly different from that former ethos, expressed in brilliantly explicit imagery in Doom 3 and to an an even greater degree in Quake 4, is an aesthetic of horror, terror, and cruelty. In the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch and his contemporaries, the horrors of Hell were meant to direct our attention to Salvation and to Heaven. In the aesthetic of the games, the horrors to which flesh is subject directs our attention only to the flesh itself and its ability to sustain suffering and to triumph over it, to force flesh to become aware of its ability to sustain the most egregious suffering in the name of a purpose which is contained entirely within this world, suffering and torture which has no connection, no connection whatsoever, to the redemptive purposes of that perfect Icon of unmerited suffering, Jesus Christ.
In the world of Quake 4 suffering (and trust me, in this game suffering is depicted with such sensual, sexual detail, that it can have no purpose except to attract and to sell) is not an indication of some other-worldly and holy motivation but, rather, a device meant to inflame, arouse, stimulate and tempt, tempt not to sin but to the acceptance that flesh is all there is, all that is worthy, all that merits attention. All that is worthy of consideration.
Our world, which is the world of the games, is a world in which flesh and its control is all that matters. And that is why the Strogg are tragic characters because, as the present state of our world illustrates, this pursuit of sensory exaltation, this pursuit of the body perfect (which is, after all, what motivates the Strogg in their endless manipulation, their endless sculpting of flesh to the purposes of war and domination), proves to be self-defeating.
If you finish the game the Strogg lose and are destroyed. That's the point of playing such games: to defeat the Alien, the terrifying, and the other-worldly, and so restore a moral order that is the direct decendant of Plato, Aristotle and Kant. When you defeat the Ultimate Boss in Quake 4 and Doom 3 you are remaking the world in the image of an order that derives directly from the thought of men who died almost 5000 years ago.
And again, I'm certain that the game designers had no idea that that was what they were doing.
And that's why, if I could, I'd fight for the Strogg. Because their victory would be the triumph of an order that, while it's slowly becoming explicit in the world of our present, is utterly antithetical to the values which have underpinned Western society since the time of Plato. The Strogg, to me, are the heroes of anti-rationalism (while being exponents of extreme technological ability), anti-spiritualism, anti-theologicalism.
I sympathise with them, these fictional monsters of cruelty and terror, because they express the deepest desires of (for want of any better word) my heart. The world you live in (which is meant in a purely generalised sense referring to no particular person) is one in which reason and spirit dominate - or appear to do so. I have no love for such a world, considering both 'reason' and 'spirit' to be types of fraud.
The 'human spirit' is no more likely to endure than a glacier subjected to global warming. Human 'individuality', which is equally the child of Kant's thought, is also fated to wither and vanish - no matter how much fools such as political 'liberals' protest that individuality is the basis of society. But what exists, perpetuates itself, and triumphs, is the Flesh. What the designers of Quake 4 have done, as the designers of Doom 3 with their 'Demons' (who are no more than an a portrayal of the will to continue and to dominate), have done, is mark out the cultural transition from reason and spirit to flesh.
Flesh is. Flesh triumphs over time and history. Flesh rules. But not merely 'flesh' in its simple insistence upon procreation and continuance. Flesh that understands itself as all that is. This is the true scandal of Quake 4, and the point at which it far exceeds Doom 3. In Doom 3 the enemy of our current world is a fictionalised Other - which is how the forces that oppose the West have always been portrayed. In Quake 4 the Enemy is what constitutes us as us - it is Flesh itself. This is why I love the Strogg.
Even when they're defeated - they know they're going to win. Because what the creators of the game have unknowingly realised and made explicit is that the time of 'reason' (so beloved of both Kant and Hegel) is coming to an end. And that what is left is what there always was from the very beginning - the nakedness of what makes us, in the last analysis, human - the thing that will always carry our humanity into the future - flesh.
Flesh is. Flesh endures. Flesh rules.