Overthinking Terrible: Duke Nukem Forever('s Fans)

Duke Nukem Forever came out in Europe last week, and is set to drop in the NORTH AMERICA any moment now.  Two things have so far been found out:

1) Anyone objective playing this game pretty much hates it.  As someone who watched a let's play of it on youtube, I can tell you that these opinions are all correct.  Duke Nukem Forever is goddamned terrible.  I don't care about the graphics, but Duke Nukem 3d was an FPS that prided itself on exploration and well-executed item placement.  I'm still more of a giant Doom nerd, but Duke Nukem 3D was superior in the fact that discovering secrets was not just a matter of "hit spacebar in front of every wall and listen for opening doors."  So, now we have a game that is literally a bad joke of modern FPS shittery, with endless linear corridors, two-weapon limits, and best of all, REGENERATING HEALTH.  You could honestly get a far more legitimate Duke Nukem Experience by playing Painkiller (NOT Overdose, which now that I think about it is sort of the Duke Nukem Forever of Painkiller) again and yelling slurs at women whenever you reach a new arena.  But this post isn't about that.  It's about the fact that:

2) People are literally losing their minds over the fact that Duke Nukem Forever is a bad game.  Go on the reviews that are already up, go on youtube comments, go on any message board (save for the official DNF message board, you'll probably die of the stench) and read the furious, mind-altering screams of people that refuse to believe that the game might not be that fun.  People accusing the reviews of not being TRU FANS and only TRU FANS can understand what it means to always bet on the Duke, death squads downvoting and screeching against youtube comments who seem skeptical of the "capture the babe" multiplayer mode where you smack a woman on the behind to shut her up, and giant bro group therapy sessions of people telling each other how best to deal with duke haters.

Of course, this isn't by itself a big thing.  Every popular series has its fans that fan out like rabid dogs if an installment of the series gets less than a 9.0 on Gamespot.  But the thing is this:  Duke Nukem 3D was released on January 29, 1996.  The true horror may have dawned on you: there are people who are emotionally invested in the sequel to a fifteen-year-old game.  I have to ask: who are these people?  I believe there are probably two subtypes of these Duke fans, both representing alot of what's wrong with the gaming world.  One of these problems is natural and understandable, but the other represents a disturbing subfacet about life.

The first group are just kids that don't know any better.  I refer to recent gamers, aged roughly ten to sixteen, who fucking love video games.  They of course didn't play the DN3D when it first game out, though they might have downloaded it from GOG or downloaded a ROM of the N64 version.  It's just as possible they just watched a Let's Play of the original, or didn't even witness the game, just finding a masculine dude with shades who tells people to blow it out their ass to be omgroffle hilarious.  These are more likely the people telling the detractors to OMG SHUT UP .  As they likely never played the game, the only thing about Duke Nukem Forever that matters is how bawdy and boob-filled everything is.  As Gearbox took care to ensure that the only thing remaining from the original game was Duke's outdated-then humor, they are satisfied and don't understand people bewailing the FPS mechanics they've come to love.

I don't have a problem with this, really.  After all, I was as much a consumerist whore at 13 as any of these brats, getting into online arguments with people about how it was TOTALLY OKAY for Nintendo to fuck over people with fifteen versions of the gameboy and harsh censoring laws didn't matter glub glub glub.  I grew up pretty okay, and with any luck, a good number of these guys will soon outgrow their awful youtube meme videos and start actually thinking for themselves.  What's troublesome is that some in my generation clearly never figured things out.

Witness the second group.  The people that clearly played Duke Nukem 3D when it initially came out, and are STILL incapable of distinguishing what is good and what is shit.  Again, fifteen year difference means that even if you're being generous and assuming that alot of ten-year-olds were blasting pig cops, we now have twenty-five year old men going WELL I ENJOY THE GAME I GUESS I'M JUST A FREE MIND THAT LOVES WHAT HE LOVES ENJOY HATING EVERYTHING FOREVER HATER.  I'm a judgmental bastard, but I can tolerate most dumb things from people younger than me.  It's just that when people in my generation are trying to come up with complex sociological arguments why it's okay for them to really like what is for all intents the video game version of Nickleback that I just hate you all.  Yeah duders, even as someone who watched the game I acknowledge there's alot of wrong comments on the negative reviews, but at the end of the day you're still goddamned desperate not to admit that you've wasted years of your life anticipating what is surely a game that will be forgotten by everyone but yourselves and your gross comments.

I could keep going on, but I think this quote from the gearbox duke boards (topic: "People seem to be enjoying DNF a lot, despite being in the age of pompous critics.") pretty much encapsulates what I'm saying here:

So far ive spent 31 hours playing Duke since release here in the UK
My eyes are blurry , I feel lethargic , I have missed quite a few meals since its come out , Ive smoke LOADS and drunk I dont know how much coke all this and im 40 years old. 

I feel now at this very moment like I used to feel back playing D3D / Quake / Wolfenstein 3D all those years ago and I will say I AM LOVING EVERY SECOND OF THE GAME.

Is it D3D ? Nope no its not ... Is it a Duke Nukem game ?? Hell yeah it is and a great 1 at that.Ive finished the game on hard ( not yet tried insaine ) and im still having fun going back in game to replay levels and look for things ive missed ... not just ego items either , im having a load of fun just looking for little things I have not found yet like newpaper headlines and clipboards with bits and pieces written on them.

A closing anecdote/lesson: My father was once really into Wing Commander (even buying a mid-tier joystick for max killening), but his biggest love was the spin-off Privateer.  He and I played the shit out of that game, for all the problems there were it was just a perfect little sandbox spacesim.  So, three years later we were HYPE for Privateer 2: The Darkening.  Goddamned, my dad tried to like that game, playing through all of the exactly the same side missions and playing the impossible to actually play market.  Eventually, I just walked up to him and said, "Dad, this game is really terrible, isn't it?"

He looked at the screen (trying to pursue one of those GODDAMNED KIOWAN SKULLS), shugged, and nodded.

The Coolest Guy: Persona 3 FES

Escapism in video games is a curious thing.  I'm not just talking about the fact that video games place us in the lives of people whose decisions actually have a purpose, but additionally give the player himself the illusion that his actions are to be celebrated as tasks are accomplished.  Other forms of media are also rife with the first form of escapism, but save for the primative forms as seen in shit like American Idol, you never see much of the second outside video games.  The two types of escapism are closely intertwined and strengthened in video games, not only are you identifying with some hero, you feel as though you have some form of control over his actions although designer choices limit your actual involvement to about the same extent of deciding whether to keep turning the pages of a book.  Most games naturally try to hide this fact from the player, both through sneaky game mechanics or making the protagonist someone either blank-slatey or flawed enough that we don't feel ridiculous for having this guys life for 20-25 hours.

Persona 3 is pretty amazing how it utterly lays bare its contempt for the player and his attempts to gain escape from his/her own terrible life.  Your character is a wonder boy; no sport or subject is beyond his grasp, there's never a need to really try to make friends, people throw themselves at you and always call you, never a need to seek them out.  Even in the magical fantasy fighting world, you're clearly top dog, being the only one that can summon multiple beings of indiscriminate destruction (and the only one that doesn't decide that an elemental break spell is totally a worthy use of magic points).  No one ever seems that perturbed by your completely perfect perfecthood; one character gets jealous for like 2 weeks and subsequently feels bad and apologizes to you with no real effect on the game itself.

While this degree of flawlessness is bizarre, by itself I don't argue that escapism is affected.  I raved about Stocke is Radiant Historia, after all, and he was for all intents a slightly more gruff version of Persona 3's protagonist, doing shit like the "I just mastered what took you a decade to learn" and having every character fall over themselves in worshipping you.

The difference between Stocke and Persona 3's protagonist (we're just going to call him CHUGGO for the rest of the review, shall we) is twofold.  In Radiant Historia, while you controlled Stocke, he sort of felt as his own man, the player himself was just a sort of subconscious along for the ride who occasionally told him to take the obviously wrong choice because you wanted that time map totally filled out.  Chuggo, on the other hand, is you yourself and nothing else.  You tell him what to do for everything, and never says anything that you aren't selecting from a list that has no point.

There's also the setting.  Stocke is a pretty perfect dude, but he's also head of a kingdom's intelligence operations.  It's understandable and expected that he's totally qualified and kicks amounts of ass all the time.  Chuggo is a high school student.  If you're a person playing an Atlus game, there's a fair assumption that you did not exactly peak in high school.  It's fine for you to admit that, don't feel bad!!!!  But now you are faced with a game that is essentially going "hey look at this dude who is in the JAPANESE high school who does everything without trying, everything including fucking a girl that has been scientifically tested to appeal to your greasy interests (for the record, Elizabeth)."  You're not in an escapist fantasy anymore, you're strapped to a machine that is going to feed you all the DOUGHNUTS IN THE WORLD.  Some gamers are going to be Homer Simpson and be totally fine with this, but at least for me, fantasy was rubbing a little too hard against the fabric of my reality and giving me a boner that I could never tell my girlfriend about.

The biggest issue, as alluded to above, is that Chuggo has no real personality aside from "perfect."  He is a tofu god filled with gold, and the game essentially forces you to take over the controls, pretending that you can do everything easily and sexily.  This wouldn't be an issue if you could at least impose some of your personality on the character, or at even pretend to impose it when it had no effect on how the game went.  But Persona 3 isn't going to have that shit, no fucking sir.

The only time in the game you actually get to express yourself (aside from choosing to pick that cute little mitama as your point man against the sleeping table) is during social link conversations, when you have to say correct things so you can make your personas big and bad when you fuse them up.  You might think on your first social link, talking to the guy that wants to fuck his teacher, that the conversations are sort of a test of helping to guide various characters in correctly choosing a path through life via careful logic.  But this is absolutely incorrect.  Chuggo's role in people's lives in Persona 3 is very simple: enable.

I mean, sure, you could tell the sexually confused French exchange student that sewing a dress for his uncle back home is probably not the best way to stay in Japan, or counsel the young girl that running away from home isn't a good idea, and that choosing which parent she needs to stay with is a choice she has to make.  But, then you won't get invisible progress that makes your personas better, culminating in a special MYSTERY PERSONA that could be either utterly game breaking or terrible useless, depending on who you're talking to (indeed, the golden rule of Persona is that the less interesting a given social link is, the better the associated persona arcana is gameplay wise).  So if you want to get those shiny mythological figures as interpreted by a back issue of Heavy Metal, you are required to be bland as humanly possible, grunting in vague agreement when people tell you dumb things.

Leigh Alexander said that this phenomenon was "suggesting that all others ever really know of your “self” is the mask you choose to show them." That'd be a good theory if you knew what the fuck your actual self was in Persona 3.  As it stands, I think the actual truth is that Persona 3 does, for all intents and purposes, place one into the rule of someone your real-life self could never hope to be even today, then deny you of even experiencing the fruits of that role by forcing your personality out of the equation entirely.  In other words, Tartarus ain't just a pretty boring dungeon that comes out of your high school at midnight.  Going back to what I was talking about above, Persona 3 takes the two kinds of escapism in video games and forces you to experience how empty they are when the artifice is stripped out.  I still beat the game after one hundred twenty hours, mostly due to one of the best fucking soundtracks around, fun battles and art design, and a plot that more often than not fucked with my mind in a good way, but I have to wonder about those people cosplaying as Chuggo.