Crazy Trains

As that great pragmatic philosopher of the late 20th century once said in a tragic lament on the state of the individual in a postmodern society,

“I’M GOING OFF THE RAILS ON A CRAZY TRAIN!”

Read in an overly serious and only half sarcastic light, the rails here can be easily seen as a metaphor for the standardized, unchosen, one-size-fits-all, consumerist reality of the postmodern age, and the “crazy train” can be understood as a kind of impulse toward Nietzschean self-actualization.  This is, some would say, a fairly appropriate metaphor for life in the 21st century, and if this is the case it is certainly worth wondering why any person would willfully live “on the rails” and partake in what is, at best, a drab and mediocre existence that lacks both personal choice and surprise.

Of course, in life, there are simply some persons and some dispositions which are not actually well suited to non-conformity, persons who simply have passive or communal spirits who, who are best suited to what may be called a “rail” lifestyle, and that’s their choice, I certainly have no room to judge them.

However, why a 21st century video game would present itself as a “rail” experience is puzzling.  Unfortunately, I do not, in this article mean to address unfortunate issues of gameplay conformity, the seeming uniformity of male teenage target audiences in western games, or even issues of overly linear gameplay in modern gaming.

I’m talking about rail shooters.

No, don’t worry, I’m not hating on House of the Dead or Time Crisis or any of the games that we all loved to beg Mom for $3.00 to play at the arcade.  There’s a good deal to say, I think, toward the goodness of these games, which are specifically rail-shooters.  Hell, times spent in the arcade burning dollars rank among some of my favorite gaming experiences of my early years.

No, I mean the seemingly obligatory turret and/or rail shooter segments that seem to be a mandatory inclusion in otherwise excellent current shooters.

There’s the ever-present Call of Duty: The Next One which is beginning to parallel the Madden series in both its release schedule and its rate of average gameplay innovation per release.

There’s the paragon of how to really do an emotionally charged military shooter, Spec Ops: The Line.

There’s the fantastic meditation on the corrupting nature of violence and new standard of open world gaming, Far Cry 3.

There’s Metro: Last Light, which could have just as easily been titled Making an engaging protagonist: incarnate

There’s even The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct, an otherwise tense, tightly paced game which put an awkward turret segment at the end of the game,

I don’t know, I must be missing something, but does this trend annoy anyone else?

What gets to me most is that these turret or rail segments tend to come at moments of the game which the developer seems to most carefully want to emphasize.  In Spec Ops, a rail shooter accompanies both the singularly most morally ambiguous decision in the game and the emotionally charged, “let’s go get the fucker in a helicopter” that precedes the crescendo of the whole game.

In Killzone 3, an otherwise solid single player campaign, a rail shooter is literally the end of the game, and in Far Cry 3 a rail shooter is similarly placed in such a way that it seems like it’s supposed to be the cherry on top of the pie.

But it’s not.  It’s just not.  If you’re a developer and you’re reading this right now, let me please, please, PLEASE communicate to you that a rail shooter does not convey any real emotional response from me, and if it’s structured in such a way that it’s challenging it tends to feel less like you’re actually giving me a challenge and more like you’re checking my ability to simultaneously hold R1 and look at the whole screen, all the time.  In a contrary vein, if it’s too easy then, well, it’s too easy and I similarly don’t feel empowered because you haven’t presented me with a challenge, a problem that I think I’m going to start calling Saint’s Row 4.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s not even the real issue.  I’ll use Far Cry 3 and Metro as specific illustrative examples because I liked both of them and they’re pretty similar.

Both of these are games in which the vast majority of the time you spend in the game world is taken up by sneaking around and carefully manipulating complex scenarios with dozens of enemies to your maximized benefit and to the minimized damage to your health bar.  Because that’s the primary game mechanic, (successfully sneaking around, not getting caught and still managing to kill every bad guy within a quarter mile) and because all of the rewards in the game essentially come from managing or attempting that gameplay mechanic, doing that specific thing (the sneaking and whatnot) is what the game, by association of action and reward, completes a Pavlovian response dynamic and finally tells you is fun.

In other words, I hate stealth games and I tend to hate sneaking, but when I play Far Cry 3 and Metro, the game is the most fun when I sneak around because that’s more or less simply how the game is designed.  (Be stealthy=get stuff) is tantamount to (be stealthy=have fun) because in-game (get stuff=have fun).  This is an entertainment media version of what most of you should recognize as “if a=b and b=c, a=c.”

The big problem that I have, then, with rail-shooting segments or turret segments in these two games is that they totally, completely rip the player out of the experience that they’ve more or less been taught to want in the game.  If you’ve spent 12 hours telling me that sneaking=fun and I should carefully conserve my ammo, it’s jarring and, for lack of a better term, funky to suddenly be thrown into a position where the only real question seems to be how quickly I can remove as many bullets as possible from the barrel of my chain gun.

In Metro, they avoid the infinite ammo gimmick, but shooting at people on another train before they shoot you isn’t something the game has set up as fun.  It’s more excusable in games like Call of Duty I suppose, since there your whole objective all the time is to shoot everything that moves, but in Metro it creates an awkward experience where suddenly, all the skills that you’ve picked up and honed throughout the game are useless before a completely different and completely irrelevant challenge.

Similarly, in Far Cry 3 the climactic helicopter-minigun experience removes all of the mobility and kick-ass abilities and talents the player has accrued throughout the rest of the game and turns the major escape-everything-and-kill-all-the-baddies segment nothing more than a shooting gallery.

Consider in contrast how Dishonored made its final level difficult and engaging by (shocker here) carefully designing a level that was more difficult and engaging than the previous levels and making the player do everything they spent the whole game getting good at, even better than they did it throughout the whole game.

Is this really so hard to do?  If I wanted to play a rail shooter, I’d PLAY A RAIL SHOOTER, not a bad copy of a rail shooter unnaturally forced into a type of game that was completely something else.

While we’re here, there’s one final issue I’d like to address: infinite ammo.

Look, I know that these are games we’re talking about and that maybe by saying this I’m committing the apparently unforgivable sin of “taking things too seriously,” but there’s simply no such thing as infinite ammo.

I might actually be interested in playing a rail or turret segment with limited ammo, since it would force me to carefully hedge bets on my accuracy and current risk level with the possibility of future danger.  After all, that’s what real people who man stationary or vehicle-based turrets have to worry about.  The average American battle tank carries about 32 readied shells for its main gun into battle, and about 8,800 rounds for its mounted machine gun.  Why not add that in as a gameplay mechanic?  The “minigun”, a favorite to developers everywhere in designing a rail segment, fires an average of about 4,000 rounds a minute, which measures out to about 84 pounds of ammo, every minute.  Again, I don’t want to be a stickler or a party pooper, but I don’t recall ever seeing so much as a few ammo crates or expended ammo chains in minigun segments, and there’s an interesting dynamic there (high damage vs. genuinely impractical, unsustainable ammo consumption) being wasted on boring, unimmersive gameplay.