"You're Not Supposed To Be Here"

     Booker stands on a Parisian street, looking up at a theater's sign which advertises, in French, "Revenge of the Jedi.” At the end of the street looms the Eiffel Tower, glowing in the night sky. He doesn't know the year is 1983, and the reality he stands in is not his own. He's just watched a firetruck go screaming by, and then vanish into thin air at the end of the street. In spite of this collection of bizarre events, Booker has nothing to say.

     He's not supposed to be here, eighty or so years in his future, in a reality which he doesn't belong. He's just a character in a story. No words come from his mouth, because none were written for this situation. Poor Booker has somehow ignored his scripted fate, and stepped into a minute detail in the corner of a paragraph that was only supposed to be glanced at.

     He's supposed to be removed from these events, watching them from an observation room. Paris in the eighties isn't a place that Booker should be able to go. It's just a place he can see for a few brief seconds. The walls created by his author's pen should seal him safely away from the dangers of French cinema.

     But his sadistic puppet master has no desire to see the story the author has penned for him. The one in control has seen that story already, and now he wants to visit Paris. It's less of a desire to visit the city, and more of a desire to see the gears spinning between the pages, to catch a sentence removed from the final work, or maybe even peel the glue off of the imagery that holds the story together.

     There are risks to peeling that glue. Unbeknownst to them. Booker and his invisible master are about to see Paris disappear before their eyes, forcibly deported to the world where Booker belongs. Unfortunately, it's not the part of the world he belongs in. Without ground to stand on, Booker will simply fall to his death. Then Booker's torturous dictator will flip to another page in the story, and find a few more lines to read between. A crack to slip Booker into, to see more inner workings of the tale being woven.

     It's becoming harder and harder to find those cracks. Video games these days are sealed tight. While Booker's world was created with a toolset which has the built in ability for cheats and tools to change its own rules and peek behind closed doors, those abilities are removed before the game reaches the player's hands. Nowadays, the majority of the people who join Booker on his journey won't be able to go to Paris. Those who can will have to fight tooth and nail to do so, creative rogues stealing the shadows they slink into.

     Things weren't always this way. There was a time when game developers would hide things in the folds of their works, meant to be found. Inside the brain of Satan lies John Romero's wailing, severed head on a pike. Through the crack in the wall, next to the bank, behind a corner you can't see through the crack, is a message letting you know that you shouldn't be there. Years ago, there were little love letters painted on the scenery you should never see.

     Even when there weren't hidden things to find, it was fun to visit places you shouldn't be. Force spawn a character or drop a weapon in a skybox or other area rendered outside of the normal map, and suddenly there's a short gun on the TV news, or a giant woman in the sky. It did nothing to further the story, it was just pure exploratory fun, to go to the places one could only see, to maybe take a few potshots at an enemy (or friend) who you normally would not be able to.

     Beyond peeking through mirrors and sliding through locked doors, there were those re-writing the stories for themselves. New characters, locations, weapons, stories and anything that could be dreamed arrived on the tips of the fingertips of those adventurous enough to reach in and weave new threads of fate into the tapestry of other tales. The worlds that existed came with the means to mold them into other worlds and dreams entirely.

     These dreams ranged from banal, to grand, to outright ridiculous. We shot swords from guns, and wielded firearms in medieval times. Familiar places became strange landscapes, and strange landscapes paved the roads into familiar stories that were carved out of other games innards. Fifteen years ago, video games weren't just singular stories, they were gateways into an infinite sea of possibilities.

     And then, somewhere along the line, those dreams began to die. Slowly, as consoles dissolved the uniqueness of PC gaming, they took away the ability to paint our own pictures in their worlds. Then, they took away the abilities to see the pictures hidden in their worlds. No more peering through the cracks, no more rewriting the stories. Just showing us what they wanted us to have and nothing more.

     Even when those of us who were industrious enough to find the remnants of the cheats they wrote out of the game did so, they simply patched them away. Now there is no deviation tolerated, no creativity. I should mention again that many of these games nowadays are built on engines with cheats and toolsets that would encourage such creativity.

     The death of that creativity shows. Where we used to have mods that allowed us to shoot Cacodemons from rocket launchers, now, in the games that still allow modifications, we have a majority of nothing but realism mod, realism mod, increase difficulty, realism mod. Additions of boring, uninspiring weapons are placed onto games whose arsenal are made up of boring, uninspiring weapons.

     When did we start wanting to die faster and shoot the same boring guns in every game? When did we give up the dream of limb severing laser chain guns and grappling hooks? Because I never did. I still want guns that shoot living tigers at enemies, and lightsabers in every last video game. I want to turn on walk through walls and see all of the areas I'm not supposed to get to! I want to fight hordes of Tom Servos and Barney the dinosaurs for no discernible reason. I want to Rambo through scores of enemies with god mode and infinite ammo and not be chastised because “cheating ruins games.”

     I don't want to spend my time whining about how things used to be. I don't want to lament about how Booker can't go to Paris anymore, because someone decided to patch it out. Paris is an interesting place.

..even if it does disappear after a few seconds.

 

-Raymond Adkins