The Art and research of Dr. Merlyn Seller, Lecturer In Design and Screen Cultures, University of Edinburgh

|Game Studies Blog|

Applying theory to play - The Game Studies Musings of Merlin Seller MA Mst (PhD) Lecturer University of Edinburgh

Dear Player: DOOM Actually

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DOOM means ‘hope’ means ‘doom’. Id’s 2016 DOOM is a game of flouting expectations: it succeeds where critics anticipated a flop; it reinterprets nostalgia without being either typically modern or old-school; it is a game with the trappings of horror but in which the demons are scared of YOU. To me, DOOM signifies ‘hope’ for a decrepit genre, and I think it paints the player as a villain in order to show us what we’ve been missing all these years.When I was younger than I should have been, playing shooters on PC, I felt like I didn’t get them: ‘So, the reticle is like my mouse pointer? And I click on men and monsters to delete them? Isn’t this just a desktop sim?’ Looking back I laugh. My reading seems deeply strange - for many obvious reasons – but I’ve been thinking about my younger self’s analogy a lot lately. Perhaps there is something important in the mechanical transparency of shooters, their close fidelity to the most widespread interface on the planet, a machine-like task underlying them that has led to their success as games of labour as well as skill (to use Naomi Clark’s phrase)?

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DOOM started it all, and now it’s back to reap what it’s sewn. Lifting from a time when all FPS games used to be called Doom-clones, DOOM brings the 90s back from the dead to kill it again: health-packs, power-ups, platforms. Mobility and level design are the core areas where Dooms past brings a breath of fresh air, and in reflecting on this I am on one level simply adding to the critical praise being heaped on this miraculous recovery of canonical IP. However, in exploring this game’s relationship to the history of the FPS, I also want to see what it tells us about why we play these games and how they cast the player.

This is a shooter obsessed with jumping and punching. Unlike a predominantly static and staccato COD, DOOM is concerned with relentless flow. To play DOOM with a mouse and keyboard might even be to miss the point – unlike technical twitch shooters, DOOM is full-bodied fun. There is no waiting in DOOM, no hiding, no cover, no sniping and no inexplicable death. This game is accessible and transparent. Unlike Battlefield or CS:GO or any other conventional warfare sim, there is a rhythm to DOOM, a dance – variation, crescendo and diminuendo, piano and forte. A lot of forte.

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While closer to the style of Halo and Destiny, with its extended and very spatial ballet, its rhythm of combat is not the metronome of recharging shields. In DOOM you neither die instantly from an unseen assailant, nor cower to recover – DOOM is an entirely offensive shooter. Health comes from being up-close and personal – the bounty of melee kills. Want health, want ammo? Rip the head off something horrifying and bath in the confetti. Hiding is death, waiting is death, strategy is death and against a wide range of equally mobile opponents cover is just a distraction. Id has looked at its legacy, the CODs and the Haloes it started it all, and asked us why we’ve slowed down, seized up, ossified pure destruction into a technician’s sport?

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Its answer is to interrogate the shooter with its own language. In DOOM we are all that we see – our hands and our guns, we are not invited to consider any other body parts, we never see our reflection. We are what the First-person perspective is best at: a vector of force and direction. So too is our enemy, transparent in its behaviours, its strengths and weaknesses. As a loading screen reminds us: if it has a head, it has a weakspot. The enemies, as Halo’s single-player campaigns learned from the original doom, are puzzle pieces -  each with specific counters requiring adaptation on the fly. By stacking these pieces up, like the projectiles in a bullet-hell game, the player gets expansive and fluid encounters and obstacles with a deeply mechanically detailed arena. In a move remarkably similar to its contemporary, Overwatch, DOOM makes the shooter into a fluid and highly legible puzzle. Enemy silhouettes read as signs, denoting dangers and opportunities and in combination they spell out dynamic solutions. As the barrel of a gun, we shoot ourselves through the gaps, we pick apart our environment at the bleeding edge of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s intersection of difficulty and skill, but also with intense flow of speed and movement itself. We are a force of digital ‘nature’, the hybrid spawn of Hell and science as our world spares no detail in reminding us.

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We are not a rock facing off against paper and scissors, nor a tennis player fighting another tennis player – combat is neither simply an asymmetric balancing act, nor the weighing of the relative strength of shared skills. Combat in DOOM is somehow both. The player must synthesise all the variables and balance every equation: A Hell Knight needs a shotgun, the flaming skulls a machine gun, both at once might take a jump to place the Knight between us and the skulls killing both with one stone, or a chainsaw to the knight to give us the health to weather the coming bombardment. We are a Queen facing off against every other chess piece on an infinite board, we are everything we need to be, provided we are fast and dynamic. And while the odds seem stacked against us, the legions of Hell diverse and… legion, the odds are actually always in our favour.

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The player is the formula, the algorithm, capable of processing Hell. Every sequence of signifiers falls to our gaze. We are the blade to Satan’s Gordian knot. The experience is visceral, fleshy and embodied, and this piece very nearly went down the phenomenological road, but I think the interesting core of the player’s activity is it’s machine-like, abstract, almost computational aspect. For all the gore and viscera, targets glow in crystal outlines, and pickups float like road-signs – legible, but oddly more ‘otherwordly’ than the beating hearts of Hell in their abstract purity. One might call this an immersive puzzle game, but I think DOOM tells us that this is what shooters always were

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We are not a body, not a human - like Jesus we’ve apparently already harrowed hell, and now we’re back to hard-reset it. We can absorb anything, from argent energy to electricity, and our output is the negation of all input. As the director of the facility asks us in the end, “you would kill them all, wouldn’t you? …Well I can’t kill you” – instead he suspends us. In DOOM, we are a bot. Demon’s run in fear, because we are the antagonist. We are an undying difference engine, and there is work to be done. Throughout the narrative, we are manipulated by Samuel the cyborg director – we were found by him, awoken by him, and then tossed aside by him, and we are well aware that we are a tool, nothing more. In a world after Bioshock, we have internalised the fact that free will might be illusory, in DOOM we embrace it. We are a ‘lighthouse’ that kills stuff. ‘We’ are always the same, the reticle that reads the programme. There is even an official mod for centering the gun to make it appear as it did in the original Doom, turning the player into a ‘pointer’, and rejecting the immersive naturalism an oblique view of our gun emphasised. Hell is a desktop GUI.

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The Modern shooter has become procedural, tactical, halting precise and code-like – it is perhaps the neo-classical dead-end of the video game’s Form. DOOM, however, is hopeful. There are no illusions, only programmatic flow: we are the bot, the machine, the enemy and the will to destruction and we glory in it. DOOM makes no promises, we are no hero, but we feel empowered by giving in to the pure desire to negate everything. Rich in syrupy nihilism, we are a dada-esque machine for punching.

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DOOM deconstructs the genre and then revels in the debris. It shows us that the ashes were what we loved in the first place.

Merlin Seller