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contents

Going Stealth 4 Hitman: Blood Money and Gender Passing. When life becomes a game of stealth. #4: Storytellers Lost 10 What’s it like to be truly lost in a game, trapped in a dungeon with your own internal compass broken? #7: Power Under the Radar 19 Metal Gear Solid is about seeing and being seen, until Solid Snake stands against Vulcan Raven. #10: Heart Wanderer in a Sea of Stars 26 Space exploration games like Out There are a unique way to experience the sublime. #9: Time Keep the Scandal for the End 35 One man, one copy of Commandos, fourteen years later. Can he finish the mission? #8: Space

© 2015 Five out of Ten. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without explicit permission is prohibited. Products named in these pages are trade names, or trademarks, of their respective companies. She’s reading me

Going Stealth Hitman: Blood Money and Gender Passing. When life becomes a game of stealth. #4: Storytellers Going Stealth Hitman: Blood Money and Gender Passing Samantha Allen

he mirror seems to scream my artifice. I can I know how she feels. When I enter a restroom, I Tsee every telling detail: the small outcropping immediately take stock of the situation. Is there a of flesh-coloured lace beneath the hairline of my queue? I don’t like to stand around; it gives people wig, the tiny spot on my chin that I didn’t shave more time to examine me. Are there parents with perfectly, the peculiar prominence of my brow line. kids in here? Mothers are often the most insistent police. The whole affair feels sadly, uncannily like I look down at the sink and try to focus on the a stealth game. frothy lather that’s building in my hands, but I can feel her staring at me. She’s washing her hands, The affinities between stealth games and too, but she’s stopped all of a sudden. I steal a transgender experience run deep. In the transgen- sideways glance through the mirror and notice der community, we even use the phrase ‘going her eyes moving up and down with a character- stealth’ to describe living full-time without most istic rapidity and intensity. She’s reading me. She people being aware of our transgender status or knows I’m transgender. our identities prior to transition. We also talk about ‘passing’, a term we use to describe successfully “You shouldn’t be in here,” she insists forcefully interacting with others without being ‘read’ as and, when I protest, she threatens to call security. transgender. Or maybe she starts to hit me with her purse. Or maybe her overzealous boyfriend is in the men’s For trans* folks though, the consequences of room. I’ve had nightmares about this scenario; it failure are more dire than a Game Over screen. plays in my head every time I walk through a door If the wrong people catch us we can be humili- that says ‘Women’. It will happen to me someday, ated, detained, beaten, or murdered. A stream but up to this point, I’ve been lucky. of heart-breaking headlines threatens to erode our already fragile foundations. For us, visibility In her game dys4ia, Anna Anthropy wrote, “I feel all too often means violence. Not everyone can like a spy whenever I use the women’s bathroom.” pass successfully; not everyone wants to. Yet when I enter the women’s restroom, Agent 47 is never far from my mind. He has a specific objective, usually murder; my goal is the much more peaceful one of urination. He dons various disguises to move through restricted areas; while do not mean to suggest that passing is as incon- I wait for my hair to grow, I use a long blond wig I sequential as playing a videogame for entertain- to send an unmistakable signal of femininity to ment; rather, passing and stealth games occupy my peers. His disguise must pass muster with a shared mechanical territory and they operate various security personnel; my appearance has on similar principles. It is because of this curious to satisfy gender-policing women in the restroom affinity between stealth games and transgender who stare at me too long. experience that I find myself identifying with some unlikely heroes. Hitman: Blood Money is a game about a guy who kills boatloads of people – sometimes liter- Agent 47 of the Hitman franchise might seem to ally - and I’m painfully aware of the fact that the be a counter-intuitive role model for a transgen- marketing for the Hitman franchise is irredeem- der woman like myself. He has no hair; I’m trying ably sexist. Approaching videogames as a primar- to grow mine out. He’s built like a Mack truck; ily representational medium makes it easy for us oestrogen is fast depleting what little muscle to dismiss games like Hitman as culturally irrel- mass I had pre-transition. In recent trailers, he’s evant experiences: in this mindset, games like been known to perpetrate horrific acts of violence Anna Anthropy’s dys4ia, Mattie Brice’s Mainichi against women; I’m the kind of feminist killjoy who and Merritt Kopas’ Lim seem far better suited to bristles at such advertising. represent a marginalized transgender experience. ithout dismissing the worth of these queer Wgames, on a mechanical level Hitman: Blood Money is a profoundly queer game about the struggle of moving through policed spaces and the risky politics of recognition that occur within them. We can have our queer cake and eat it too: we can play and make queer games, but we can also ‘queer up’ games that might seem, at first blush, to have nothing to say about life in the margins.

Agent 47 is by no means a perfect chameleon. In fact, his character design is so nondescript that it loops back around into conspicuousness. When I play the “Flatline” mission disguised as a doctor, I am bewildered by the doctors’ failure to realize that a perfectly bald man with a comically square build has replaced their fellow MD. “There’s even a barcode on his neck!” I yell at them, through my monitor.

But ‘Dr. 47’ never seems to betray his nervousness about being noticed, if he feels any at all. He walks confidently through security choke- points and into restricted areas. He shrugs off his conspicuousness, ignores the barcode and embraces the disguise. What if acting like he belongs is precisely what gives him the edge he needs to slip through space unrecognized?

Gender attribution, the form of interpersonal recognition that matters most to me, is a fast and imprecise process. It is, as Kate Bornstein describes it, the moment in which “we look at somebody and say ‘that’s a man,’ or ‘that’s a woman.’” Gender attribution is, for me, a loom- ing storm cloud that hangs over all of my interac- tions. I feel conspicuous everywhere because I’m 5’10” and I struggle to produce a believable

female voice. 25 15 21 1 18 5 2 20 9 6 21 12

These are my barcodes. ost observers don’t think too hard Mabout gender attribution and, like Agent 47, I’m fortunate enough to benefit from their inat- tention. As Bornstein observes, people make gender attributions “all the time without think- As I approach a new public environment, I imagine ing about it.” Passing in public, as Bornstein and a tiny suspicion meter in the corner of my vision. others note, is about lining up enough of the right I move slowly, not just because women tend to kinds of physical and behavioural ‘cues’. In my take smaller strides, but because faster movement case, as a transgender woman who attempts to would cause more people to notice me. I’m acutely approximate a more-or-less-normative feminine aware of my noise level: unless I’m at a gay bar or appearance, those cues are breasts, long hair, a a Women’s Studies conference, I follow a strict “no close gait and a shaky attempt at a female voice. talking in bathrooms” rule. Like Agent 47, I identify potential troublemakers in advance and try to skirt Most people take note of these cues in less than around them. I use casual stereotypes based on a second and don’t spend any more time acting dress and age to guess how socially conservative like sex detectives. They catch a glimpse of boobs my fellow bathroom-goers might be and, if I’m not and hair: case closed. Even though I feel like I comfortable with the crowd, I’ll wait for them to have a barcode on my neck, I often try to follow exit before I emerge from the stall. in Agent 47’s footsteps by putting my faith in a few simple cues and hoping my confidence can When my personal suspicion meter reaches yellow, paper over my tells. I have to remind myself that panicking is often the worst thing I can do when I get nervous. Whenever I’ll admit that this confidence would come more someone turns their head as I walk by, whenever easily if I could see my own suspicion meter. In they make eye contact with me, I resist the urge Hitman, a suspicion meter tracks the enemy AI’s to run in the opposite direction. level of suspicion from green (everything is normal) to yellow (something is afoot) to red (47’s identity After I started presenting female full-time, I had to has been compromised). 47 can raise the suspi- acclimatise myself to the notion that people look cion meter in several ways. If he runs, makes too at women because they want to look at woman much noise, or gets too close to the wrong people, and not because they’re actively trying to ferret security personnel will start to take notice of his out transgender folks. The art critic John Berger presence. When this happens, the player-qua-47 famously claimed, “men act and women appear. might be tempted to panic and pull out a weapon Men look at women.” The feminist film scholar but, in fact, the best way to lower the suspicion Laura Mulvey similarly argues that, in a patriarchal meter is to remain calm, act naturally and move economy of looking, femininity is more or less steadily away from danger. synonymous with “to-be-looked-at-ness.” had read Berger and Mulvey prior to my transi- When Agent 47 gets in a bind near the end of a Ition but I hadn’t experienced the truth of their mission, he can rely on lethal firepower to punch theories first-hand. After I came out, cisgender his way through to an exit. When I get in a bind, a female friends reassured me that I was pass- serious bind, all I have is paper: a passport with ing and that being looked at was, much to their an F on it and a letter from my psychologist that chagrin, an inevitable part of being a woman in says I “should have full access to facilities marked public. I mistakenly thought that my suspicion for women.” These documents provide me with meter was always on the border between yellow some mild reassurance, but when someone really and red; they reassured me that it was green. wants to hurt me, paper can’t protect me - my passport can’t block punches. One of the most important lessons that close female friends have taught me is that my fear For that reason and many others, I’d much rather of the suspicion meter itself can sometimes be live in a world where videogames didn’t partici- enough to bump it up to yellow. If I continue to pate so enthusiastically in the very culture of act naturally in the bathroom, the woman washing violence that makes my life precarious. Turning her hands next to is far more likely to think twice Agent 47 into a transgender icon might seem like than she is to publicly confront me. But if I start to cold comfort in a cultural climate where the old squirm under her gaze, my nervousness will only guard of gaming enthusiastically defends the invite further scrutiny. Similarly, if Agent 47 were to misogynistic marketing that surrounds him. But pull out a firearm every time a guard looked at him, while I wait for change, I rely on these small inter- he would never complete his mission. While there pretive acts of subversion if only to metabolize are extreme situations in which running becomes the mainstream. imperative, the best course of action is usually to remain calm, collect myself and trust that the suspicion meter will subside on its own. Further Reading

Using the restroom isn’t a game to me, but it Kate Bornstein - Gender Outlaw. Routledge. behaves like one. What was once a simple fulfil- ment of a need is now a complex negotiation of John Berger - Ways of Seeing. Penguin Classic. space that requires a certain degree of stealthy acumen. I take no delight in playing this bathroom Laura Mulvey - Visual Pleasure and Narrative game: I’d much rather live in a world that does not Cinema, Screen require transgender folks to pass in order to avoid violence. But in the world as presently constituted, Hitman: Blood Money is an unexpected reflec- tion of my fears as a transgender woman and an unintended lesson in the kinds of tactics I can use to overcome them. Lost What’s it like to be truly lost in a game, trapped in a dungeon with your own internal compass broken? #7: Power

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Metal Gear Solid is about seeing and being seen, until Solid Snake stands against Vulcan Raven. #10:The Heart Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz called war “an area of uncertainty.” It is a space or a condition that taps into a fact of the human condition: everything outside of us is totally opaque. We can speak about what we can see, hear, taste, or experience, but everything beyond that space of experience is fair game for the unthinkable. Horror games live and die on this principle. If you know what is around the corner (or inside the fog), you can prepare for it and maybe defeat it. To know of something is to be able to confront it. The unknown works differently.

Across no man’s land there are trenches and there are mines.

Across that ridge there are cannons.

In that forest there are monsters. Under the Radar Cameron Kunzelman

hen Solid Snake emerges from the Wcold Alaskan water to begin his strange quest, we’re dropped into a world where the fog of war has been rethought. We experience a world where what we can see is deliv- ered to us in three different ways, all unique, all necessary. The first is the standard camera, floating in a nearly-isometric fashion far above Snake. From this vantage point we can survey the battlefield in all of its 4:3 aspect ratio glory. Developed in a pre-16:9 world and deployed for the original Playstation, Metal Gear Solid lacks subtle camera work at this height. Sometimes standing against a wall will shift it into a “cinematic” angle, showing us a beautiful angle around a corner and the coat-clad genome soldier who patrols there. Mostly though, we have the eye of god, and we seem to miss very little.

The second camera is a first-person view, a way of viewing the world that seems to be less a product of design and more a clunky solution to the problem of “how would a top-down camera show Snake inside of an air duct?” The short answer was “don’t bother,” and so every time Snake crawls into an air duct or scuttles under a crate we are brought into his body, peering out from behind his super soldier eyes. Compared to the top-down view, first-person is incredibly limited. Snake seems to be aware of very little at one time, and using his eyes alerts the player to the fact that the only thing that keeps Snake from being murdered or constantly captured is the player herself. Or, rather, it is how much the player knows about the world. She can see the paths. She can predict where the enemy will be, see where the life-restoring rations are, and so the player – a possessor of the god’s eye view – is a literal benevolent godproxy for the Snake, the terrible child.

The top-down and the first-person views are symptoms of Clausewitz’ uncertain battlefield. We can only know what we have access to, and the world of access in these games is mostly deter- mined by what we can see. However, there is also a third way of seeing the world: the radar.

The Soliton Radar System is a thing of beauty. Perched in the corner of the screen, it displays a green outline of everything in the immediate area. It is a universal map that hides nothing. The top-down view is limited by what our television shows, and Solid Snake’s vision is limited by the cone of his vision, but the map shows us things outside of those limited spaces. In renders the entire area in simple detail. It turns what could be opaque and unknowable into colourful shapes that we can then develop knowledge of. The fog of war is subverted when you can cut through it. PTT

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Modern military strategy has never quite recovered from Clausewitz’s claims. Attaining perfect knowledge of the conditions of battle has driven the development of sonar, radar, cameras, unmanned aerial vehicles, land-based drones, biometric scanning and tracking, and anthropological research. Perfect knowledge, supposedly, can translate to perfect action. A specific blade in a specific rib in a specific moment in time will solve every problem: this is the eternal failing logic of the drone strike.

What kind of information can Metal Gear’s radar give us? It shows the contours of the world within and outside our vision, but it also delivers insight about the people who Solid Snake must fight or avoid. Each enemy has a short cone projecting out from the tiny red dot that represents them on the radar. It is thin, the range impossibly small, and it enables a kind of strange play where the player is able to dance in and out of an enemy’s awareness, toying with them. If a soldier yawns, the cone disappears while his eyes are closed. If he falls asleep, the cone drops from view, which enables Snake to waltz up to the soldier and put him in a devastating headlock. At one point,Snake fights Vulcan Raven, a gigantic man who fires an airplane-mounted machine gun, in an intense game of cat and mouse set in a huge refrigerated warehouse split into a grid. Raven monologues about his prowess at the Eskimo-Indian Olympic sport of Ear Pull, an event “where two oppo- nents pull each other’s ears while enduring the harsh cold.” Snake reacts with pseudo- action hero humour: “You want to pull each other’s ears?” Vulcan responds: “The form is different, the spirit is the same.”

The spirit of the Ear Pull is one of limits. Two players take a large circle of string and loop it around their ears. They draw it tight, and on “pull!” they attempt to vie for control of the string. It cuts into their faces, and it pulls their ears into tight cauli- flower shapes. Their faces curl up, curdle, in pain. Each body tries to tear the other body apart by putting pressure on one of their weakest spots. Inevitably, someone caves to the pain.

The Vulcan Raven fight is special In contrast to this, Vulcan Raven can see because it is one of the few moments everything. His cone of vision is wide where the mini map is both useful and long, and if you are down a hall- and robbed of its usefulness. Usually way, he will see you and immediately you can use the map to develop near- begin shooting. Knowing where he can perfect knowledge of the level you see becomes almost useless, because are walking around in, and most of if you’re close enough to do anything, this benefit is gathered from the fact you’re close enough to be murdered. that enemies can barely see anything directly in front of them. You begin to play the absence. You flank him. You listen for him to run by you, breathing heavy from all of his equipment, and you whip around the corner to follow. You shoot him with missiles. You use drone weapons. You place mines. You use all of the methods available to the combatant who is embroiled in the uncertainty of the battlefield because now, in this battle, your nearly-perfect knowledge has been reduced to equivalent knowledge. For the first and last time in Metal Gear Solid, you are fighting an enemy who is matched perfectly with Solid Snake.

Vulcan Raven killed my teenage self dozens of times. Unable to adapt and change, I would try to wait in a corner with a sniper rifle, not quite able to grasp that if I could see him then he could see me. Eventually I developed an intuition, a cognitively layered meshwork map that had me focusing on playing the map, the screen, and my own body all at once. Turn up the volume to listen for footsteps and breathing. Look at the mini map to see the edges of his all-seeing-eye. Manage corners to dip in and out of sight, luring him or pushing him away. Clausewitz’s fantasy was perfect knowledge of the capabilities of a combatant; the Ear Pull is the perfect realization of this fantasy.

The Metal Gear Solid games rival Shakespeare for deathbed speeches. Characterization can only happen at the end of the end, it seems, and it no different for Vulcan Raven. “Snake!” he screams. “I will be watching you... understand?” A little later: “I will be watching from above.” A conspiracy of ravens descends on him, gobbling him up, reducing him to nothing other than those ravens. Defeated, he chooses to leave the earth, defaulting to sky instead.

Immaterial, Vulcan Raven floats forever, watching the earth. Snake continues on his journey, killing his way through game after game, losing and gaining new cinematic modes of seeing, losing a radar, and eventually gaining a suit that hides him from sight completely. His only real competition defeated, Snake walks over his pathway paved in corpses, enabled by his unseen-yet-seeing, godlike benefactor. Wanderer in a

Sea ofSpace Stars exploration games like Out There are a unique way to experience the sublime. #9: Time

It’s strange to think that something so vast can fit onto such a tiny screen. Wanderer in a Sea of Stars

Joe Köller

’m playing Out There on my phone, a game at once, like the black hole in my path. Space Iabout being stranded in space. Fortunately, is a new frontier for confronting the feelings of you can jump between star systems, so the insignificance, but humanity’s contemplation of vastness is yours to explore. The star in the last its place in the grand scheme of things came system I jumped to turned out to be a black hole, long before. and now I’m low on fuel with no planets nearby to gather more. There’s another star in range, The sublime entered philosophical discourse about an inch from this one on the map, but I in the 18th century when a number of British can’t get there without depleting my reserves. thinkers wrote about their trips across the Alps, This next jump will be my last. describing the peculiar mix of feelings: “[A]n agreeable kind of horror”, in the words of Joseph At the beginning of the game, Out There Addison. It is a complex concept, with roots in pinpoints the source of a mysterious signal, the ancient philosophy. Throughout the romantic only beacon of hope for your lost little space period, many artists were interested in further farer. It then whizzes you back to your start- exploring nature’s capacity to be both beauti- ing location as dozens and dozens of stars ful and dangerous at the same time. Immanuel swoosh past. When coming to terms with my Kant gives his interpretation of the sublime in own helplessness, moving through Out There’s his Critique of Judgement, where he differenti- galaxies, I am experiencing the sublime: a joyful ates between the dynamically and mathematical apprehension created by facing something far sublime. The former, according to Kant, is inspired greater than myself, beautiful and terrifying all by fearful sights observed from a safe distance: “Bold, overhanging, and as it were threatening, rocks; clouds piled up in the sky, moving with lightning flashes and thunder peals; volcanoes in all their violence of destruction; hurricanes with their track of devastation; the boundless ocean in a state of tumult; the lofty waterfall of a mighty river, and such like; these exhibit our faculty of resistance as insignificantly small in comparison with their might. But the sight of them is the more attractive, the more fearful it is, provided only that we are in security; and we readily call these objects sublime [...]” security; and we readily call these objects sublime [...]” For Kant, the dynamic sublime was a compounding of fear and beauty, but only when observed from a safe vantage point. The mathematically sublime is a far more abstract, philosophical concept. It’s not inspired by fear of physical harm, so much as the existential terror of facing something that exceeds humanity’s capacity for reason and comprehension: “Nature is therefore sublime in those of its phenomena, whose intuition brings with it the Idea of its infinity. This last can only come by the inadequacy of the greatest effort of our Imagination to estimate the magnitude of an object.”

For Kant, this was the true form of the sublime. It was the overwhelming magnitude and magnificence of an object that could not be overcome by human’s efforts. For Kant’s contemporaries, mountains served as a good place to test the imagination because of their sheer size and the view of the surrounding land they afforded. As a mainstay of sublime art, like Caspar David Friedrich’s famous 1818 painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, mountains became strongly associated with the subject — one of the reasons the peaks and valleys of Skyrim are cited as an example of the sublime in videogames.

However, this reading of mountains as sublime neglects the shifting scale of our imagination since the romantic period and our attitude towards these giants of nature along with it. The mountains themselves may not have changed in size, but the mapping of these summits and their surroundings does make them feel smaller, as does the spread of roads, tunnels, and cable cars to help us scale them. Though they remain dangerous to even experienced mountaineers, the fact that pastimes such as skiing exist speaks to the fact that humanity’s relationship toward mountains has changed. The same pace of technological change that has helped create videogames have also drastically changed how different cultures views nature. Scientific discovery has robbed it of much of its mystery, if not its wonder, while the spread of infrastructure and urbanisation have eroded many of its dangers. All humans seek, to some extent, to gain control of their environment — sheltering from the rain, improving access to resources. But nature will always threaten us and extreme catastrophes will always disrupt and distort everyday life. Earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes are the stuff of disaster films, not pleasant landscape paintings.

This attitude also influences the entertainment we consume. Despite the harsh appearance of Skyrim and the dangerous creatures that populate it, it’s more a playground than a deadly wilderness. Players who want to climb its mountains in search of the vistas of Friedrich’s Wanderer may marvel at its greatness, but it’s equally possible to focus on pursuing your own greatness instead. You play a legendary hero foretold by ancient prophecies, tasked with saving Skyrim from grave danger. It is a game in which you hunt dragons, not one in which dragons hunt you.

Contrasting with such power fantasies, the sublime is about confronting your own insignificance in the face of creation. It is the humbling experience of basking in the majesty of something far bigger than yourself, while trembling at the thought of the forces required in making it — forces that are entirely indifferent to your existence, but could crush you in an instant. Kant calls this the feeling of respect for our destination. Friedrich Schiller, who considered the danger of physical harm more important to the experience than Kant, describes it in his essay On The Sublime as resisting the forces of nature that threaten you by making peace with them: “This is possible in two kinds of ways. Either actually, when man opposes violence with violence, when he as nature rules over nature; or ideally, when he steps out of nature and so, in regard to himself, annihilates the concept of violence. [...] To annihilate violence as a concept, however, is called nothing other, than to voluntarily subject oneself to the same. The culture, which makes him apt thereto, is called the moral. [...] The sublime, therefore, procures for us an exit from the sensuous world, wherein the beautiful would gladly always keep us imprisoned.”

If this sounds spiritual to you, you’re on the right track: the German word for sublime, erhaben, also means exalted. Giving players too much power risks eroding the realisation of one’s smallness, taking away what is often important: why would I fear a snowstorm in Skyrim, when I am immune to the cold and can breathe fire? On the flipside, too little power risks making meekness a foregone conclusion. Experiencing the sublime means facing something that challenges us but is too great for us to hope to contend with. This is where most games fall short of capturing the sublime: even those dedicated to nature tend to present it as an aesthetic commodity rather than a force put upon players. The impressionistic islands of Proteus may be beautiful, but it is only a tame beauty they offer.

Despite contemporary attitudes towards nature, the wild unknown is still more than capable of putting the fear of god(s) in us. You have to be creative to find some untamed wilderness left on this planet, as well as a justification for why somebody might end up in such a forsaken area. The recent movie The Grey dropped Liam Neeson into the remote Alaskan woods, transforming wolves into a believable threat; incidentally, the same setting was chosen for the upcoming survival game The Long Dark. The key words here are ‘on this planet’. Earth itself is starting to feel like a less dangerous place due to the spread of civilisation’s comforts, and a smaller place due to advances in global travel and communica- tion, but there is no shortage of unknown and spectacular vistas right above us. Solar storms replace roiling seas — an endless sea of nebulae instead of a sea of fog. Moving to the final frontier restores the sense of contains every kind of planet, or any planet at mystery that local terrain lost in the age of discov- all, so an unlucky break could easily end your ery. Space offers uncharted, untamed wilderness, journey — like my encounter with the black hole. and while signs of life remain elusive, we can speculate about chest-bursting Xenomorphs and Your endeavours in Out There are no grand, other, less-threatening, alien flora and fauna. It heroic feat; you’re merely traversing an envi- resonates with Kant’s idea of boundlessness in ronment that has no interest in sustaining you, the mathematically sublime. As Douglas Adams a suitable analogy to the hardship Friedrich’s aptly commented in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Wanderer must have faced. The tedium of main- Galaxy: “Space is big. You just won’t believe how taining your ship does not inspire much contem- vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, plation or awe, but it makes explicit how little you may think it’s a long way down the road to power you have over your surroundings. Like the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.” the tiring ascent that precedes the view from There is nothing better suited to facing your own the top of the mountain, it puts you in the right insignificance than this seemingly endless void. mind set for beginning to appreciate them.

Many games realise that space is perfectly suited for exploration. But they portray it as a serene and peaceful journey, like in MirrorMoon EP or Space Engine, or they fill it with space pirates, like FTL, rather than presenting space itself as a beautiful but uncaring environment. This is where Out There shines: each step on your journey drains your fuel and oxygen reserves, which you can refill by visiting gas giants and habitable planets. Breaking through their atmos- phere weakens your hull, and repairing it involves taking a trip to a rocky planet, which uses up more fuel and oxygen. Not every star system Your lonely astronaut writes diaries that chronicle his struggles with the endless emptiness around him. Little rituals, self-built musical instruments, and conscious efforts to remind himself of his own voice: these are attempts to introduce familiar structures and concepts into something that far exceeds their scope. The fact that he numbers his entries by days shows the need to make sense of his environment through a smaller frame of reference. While many games can only allude to this absolute greatness by being comparatively big, the procedural generation Out There’s galaxies allow it to live up to its promise through the infinite possibilities of space. In this way, it is similar to Proteus, with the difference being that Out There’s combinations appear to exist independently of you, rather than for your sake.

The inspiration Out There draws from roguelikes — games where players battle through randomised environments over and over again, hoping to progress a little further each time using their skills and wits-- might be the perfect design philosophy for capturing the experience of the sublime. An image of something terrifyingly insurmountable may inspire contemplation — or it may not. Forcing players to struggle with something larger than themselves starts them on the path towards the spiritual realisations that lie at its core.

Images from Super Mario Galaxy, Mass Effect, Elder Scrolls: Skyrim courtesy of Dead End Thrills. http://www.deadendthrills.com/

Further Reading:

Rick Lane — The Men Who Stare At Mountains, Escapist Magazine http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/features/9391-The-Men-Who-Stare-At-Mountains/

Jos De Mul -The Technological Sublime, Next Nature http://www.nextnature.net/2011/07/the-technological-sublime/

Ian Bogost — Puzzling The Sublime, Gamasutra http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4225/persuasive_games_puzzling_the_.php/

Kaitlin Tremblay & Alan Williamson — Escape to Na Pali. Oxford: Five out of Ten http://fiveoutoftenmagazine.com/books/escape-to-na-pali/ KEEP THE SCANDAL

Keep the Scan- dal for the End

One man, one copy of Commandos, fourteen years later. Can he finish the mission? #8: Space

FOR THE END KEEP THE SCANDAL FOR THE END: COMMANDOS, 14 YEARS LATER Grant Howitt

A LONG STORY MADE MERCIFULLY SHORT

I’ll cut to the chase. I received a demo disk when I was thirteen, and on that disk (amongst other games) was a single mission from Commandos: Beyond the Call of Duty. I fell for that game. I played it for days, weeks. I could never finish it, because Commandos is hard as nails.

I never purchased the full game. I spent years convinced that Commandos was a great game, but that I could never really hope to play it – because if I couldn’t get past that mission, what chance did I have of getting anywhere with the real thing? And so it, and I, drifted apart. A PRIMER

Commandos: Beyond the Call of Duty is a standalone expansion pack for Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, both published by Eidos and developed by Pyro Studios, a Spanish development house who would go on to develop three more Commandos titles and a couple of RTS games in a more traditional vein (Praetorians and Imperial Glory) before shifting to mobile games and fading into obscurity in late 2012.

Commandos is a real-time tactics game, a challenge for the mind and not necessarily the reactions – it’s a game of building convoluted plans and then rapidly rearranging those plans when they prove to be almost entirely useless. The player takes control of a small unit – generally numbering around four men, each with unique skills – and is tasked with infiltrating a series of German bases during WWII. It is astonishingly difficult: unforgiving, unintuitive, and requiring you to utilise techniques that border on the absurd to avoid detection.

It’s kind of like chess, although to truly simulate the experience using chess your opponent would need to move during your turn and a big man in a greatcoat would kick the board off the table if you came within three moves of checkmate. I CAN DO THIS, OBVIOUSLY

But now it is 2014, I am twenty-seven, and I believe that I am old enough to play Commandos because, honestly, how hard could it really be? I could barely tie my shoes at thirteen, let along co-ordinate a real-time invasion of a Nazi encampment with a crack squad of hard-bitten soldiers. I am a married man now, a young professional. I can do this.

I downloaded a copy of the game through Steam, booted it up, and felt nostalgia wash over me as the familiar lo-fi whistling and drumroll of the menu music began to play. This was going to be great. FUCK COMMANDOS

You know what? Fuck Commandos.

It is hard to buy Commandos. It is hard to buy a working copy of Commandos, because although you can type “Commandos” into Steam and download the entire series for under a tenner, none of the games you have purchased will work. They are riddled with problems. Sometimes they do not function at all; other times, even the video cut scenes cause the game to crash.

Sometimes the game runs at a bizarrely high speed, like Benny Hill but with Nazis, and sometimes it refuses to run at an acceptable resolution and looks like it’s been crudely upscaled in Photoshop. In some cases – and, crucially, in my case - the game does not save. Not even a little.

I thought that was a feature; the save game option was perma- nently greyed out, and I ran headlong into missions over and over trying to brute-force my way through – an experience akin to playing an incredibly long, boring game of Hotline Miami – waiting for the save game function to unlock. There’s even a password system to play later levels, further reinforcing the idea that the save game function had some other purpose. I didn’t know what that was, though.

It turns out that was just a flaw in the Steam release of the game, and Valve has no intention of addressing it. There is a fix, an executable cobbled together from old source code by a fan, which fixes the problems and lets it run on Windows XP, at least - but it was hosted on Megaupload and, as such, is now lost to the wastes of the internet graveyard.

Good Old Games sell a functional copy, you’ll be pleased to hear, which I eventually purchased after an afternoon of trying to hammer my Steam edition into playability. It costs more, of course, but seeing as it actually works in the way it’s supposed to it’s infinitely superior to Valve’s cheaper offering (who could have, in retrospect, just written “COMMANDOS” in felt tip on a napkin and sent it to me in the post for the same effect).

With the compatibility issues fixed, I began to play Commandos properly for the first time in fourteen years. MAYBE I DIDN’T MAKE MYSELF CLEAR EARLIER

Seriously, though. Fuck Commandos.

Some characters can stab people with knives, or otherwise stick ‘em with something sharp that puts them down in a permanent sort of way. (It’s about two-thirds of the crew in total, with only the English characters unable to engage in melee like the thin-moustached tea drinkers that we are.)

Stabbing people in a game that focuses on operating silently behind enemy lines is unsurprisingly common! In fact, the interaction you will have with most guards is to step up behind them and shank them in the ribs. To stab someone, you select the knife from the knapsack (or hit X on your keyboard) and then click your target. Of course, because you’re operating behind enemy lines, you’ll want to stab them post-haste – so if you double-click on them, you’ll dash up and gut them quick as you like.

But: many of the guards are moving, walking around on scripted patrol routes. Have you ever tried to double-click on a moving target that’s seven pixels wide? You generally click once on the guard to begin the stabbing process and then once on a pixel slightly behind the guard. Single-clicks on the landscape initiate a slow walk to the selected location; meaning that you go from dashing out of cover and silently eviscerating a guard to walking slowly out of cover and then showing an armed man your knife.

There is an art to it, of course, and that art involves a healthy appreciation for the quick load function. THE GREEN BERET:

Foul mouthed poster-boy, good with a knife. The Green Beret will frequently complete large parts of missions himself, treating the other characters as optional extras. Talks in an impa- tient, absurd Irish accent; his favour- ite thing is to say “Dat’s eezy” before meandering directly into an enemy patrol and getting gunned down by understand- ably upset Stormtroopers.

THE SPY:

Can disguise himself as enemy units, gets a close-combat attack, and can carry bodies like the Green Beret despite the fact he’s a weedy French- man who smokes sixty a day judging by the sound of his raspy voice. If someone could teach the Spy to drive there would be almost no need to have any other characters in the game; his very existence underlines how arbitrary it feels that only two of these hardcore military men are strong enough to carry dead bodies. Christ, I could at least drag a body, and I get out of breath taking off my trousers before bed. IF YOU’RE NOT PART OF THE SOLUTION, YOU’RE NOT RIDICULOUS ENOUGH

I decided, out of a sense of fair play, to play the game through from the start again. This was a terrible idea.

I knocked through all four levels en route to the mission that had defeated me all those years ago, and I loathed all of them. The game manual says that there is an “elegant solution to every problem,” but what it does not say is that the elegant solution to every problem is to kill every non-elite guard on the map and hide their bodies in increasingly large piles behind sheds, wood piles, on rooftops, etc. There are spots on every map where no guard will look, and these are the places you must stack your empties; places no more than ten pixels across, tucked in behind corners and under low walls. Gener- ally, pretty much everyone has to be dead before you can move safely, and killing them is both awkward and time-consuming.

Occasionally, an hour into a mission, you realise that what you thought was an excellent hiding spot for your dead Germans is, in fact, slap-bang in the middle of where you need a guard to look for a few seconds to knife him in the ribs, and you send back the Green Beret to shuffle them into ever-tighter, ever-more-ridiculous arrangements. It’s a farce, almost; it reminds me of the bad episodes of Frasier, most of which seemed to hinge on the man himself dashing back and forth between two equally awkward situations until various elements met and the whole thing fell apart in his curiously hairy hands.

These are “elegant solutions” in as much as they’d look incredible if you pulled them off the first time you tried them, but you will not. Commandos is a tumbler-lock of a thing, a puzzle where most of the pieces are occluded for most of the game.

Eventually, I reached mission five - Guess Who’s Coming Tonight. Fourteen years ago, I played this bastard over and over and over to no avail. As the opening cinematic played and the viewpoint scanned over the heavily guarded camp and to the traitorous Colonel von Below (who I was to “kidnap” from under the noses of the Nazi soldiers and extract in an armoured car) I felt, well, not nostalgia, but honed reflexes and rehearsed responses click into place. I felt, finally, like I knew what I was doing.

I’d programmed myself to play this level. LIKE THE BOURNE IDENTITY, BUT WITH A 1998 PC GAME

Where before I had stumbled and tripped – where my distractions had fallen short, where my commandos couldn’t run fast enough, where I single-clicked more than I double-clicked – I was operating smoothly. I dispatched the first four guards without reload- ing a save.

I could scarcely believe what was happening. What I needed to be good at Commandos was to have already played it. I wasn’t failing; I was just preparing myself for the future. The mission was its own tutorial.

Things that shouldn’t have worked started to work – a guard saw me, I slipped around a corner, and when he poked his head round to see where I’d gone I knifed him in the face. Gambits worked. Gambits never work. Is this what the game was supposed to be like? Everything was clear to me; the three guards at the start who fall to the Green Beret’s knife, the machine-gunner with a stupidly narrow cone of vision you can just sidle up to and kill once you dash past his eye line, the three elite guards patrolling a doubtlessly tactically vital empty field on the edges of the base that you crawl, and then dash, past, the other empty field that’s surrounded by fences that the majority of your unit sits in while the Green Beret completes fully half of the level. This was second nature, now.

And, crucially, it was fun.

Up until this point, playing the game was not fun; sure, there’s some enjoyment to be had at the end of a mission, say, or discov- ering that you can hide the Green Beret inside the corpse of an elephant in order to shank some witless Nazi trooper, or – well, honestly, those are the only times. But this worked. I could intuit what I was supposed to do, where I was supposed to go. THE SNIPER:

Posh; his accent suggests that he’s public-school but then, when he gets shot, he reverts to a panicked Scouse. I like to imagine that, rather than this being a problem with the barks, he’s a housing estate scally that the army have brainwashed into a cold-hearted upper- class killing machine, kind of a cross between My Fair Lady and The Manchurian Candidate, and his programming slips when he gets wounded.

THE DRIVER:

Spends the majority of the mission sitting quietly at the start point waiting to join in. Carries a sub-machine gun and rifle, both of which raise the alarm if heard and are therefore largely useless, which gives me the impression he brought them from home in a failed attempt to impress the others. The Driv- er is not actually very good at driving and frequently gets stuck when trying to manoeuvre through wide gates. UP TO A POINT

Of course, my programming could only get me so far. After getting to the point in the mission where you free the Spy from a jail on the North end of the map and approach the Colonel’s position, I started to run into uncharted territory. I’d never come this far before. Time and time again, I’d hit this point in the mission and give up.

This now strikes me as strange because it is a turning-point in the mission; the part where things don’t exactly become easy, but having the Spy (and his ability to wear enemy uniforms) at my command shifts the balance of power in my favour a little.

So why didn’t I carry on from here? What was stopping me? And why could the spy now take clothes from captured enemy soldiers, and not just from washing lines like before?

Because that feature wasn’t in the demo. YOU BASTARDS

I realised that so many things were different, now. The Spy had chloroform, and I swear he didn’t before. Every one of my men could command captured soldiers to distract others at gunpoint, a feature the demo didn’t even hint at. My squad had the wrong voices, because the demo used the barks from the first game, still, rather than the (slightly less ridiculous) ones from the final version.

Had Pyro released an unsolvable puzzle?

To be honest, I can’t say for sure. The demo disc, if it in fact still exists, is about nine thousand miles away in my parents’ spare room at the bottom of a pile of CDs. I can’t get hold of it to check – but I wouldn’t put it past Eidos. And it would explain why, when I got to the part of the mission where it became vital for the spy to knock a soldier unconscious and steal their uniform, I suddenly stopped being able to play the game because that wasn’t a thing that I could do. I wasn’t bad at Commandos. I wasn’t a stupid thirteen-year-old. Commandos was still hard, of course, mind-numbingly hard, but not impossibly hard. It had not outwitted me. I carried on, eager to see what it could feel like to finally end all of... this.

There is a central mansion in the level, the crux of the second half of the action, and I killed every single guard standing on or near it in a series of precision murders using lethal injec- tions, knives and silenced sniper rifles. I distracted the offic- ers using my Spy and crawled the rest of my men behind them, mere feet away. After about two days of play, I managed to knock Colonel von Below unconscious, bundle him into an armoured car, and drive it out of the base whilst only crashing once or twice.

As the mission ended, there was no joy; relief, perhaps, that this was all over. It wasn’t so hard, after all. It wasn’t the work of devious masterminds that I couldn’t defeat, but a mistake made by humans that I had no means to detect.

The next mission loaded up: an airfield to infiltrate, six planes to destroy, and a pilot to capture so he could fly us out of there. I’ve never been happier to escape to Windows. t continue?

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