Start Press: Details, Details

Like millions of gamers around the world, I spent a decent chunk of this past week clutching an M4 Carbine assault rifle and elbow-crawling around in the muck trying not to get waxed. I watched from space as a nuclear missile detonated over the United States’ eastern seaboard. I scrambled through the charred husk of the Oval Office while the entire city of Washington D.C. smouldered to ash around me like a bad acid trip at a 4th of July barbecue in Hell. On a deep-cover assignment as a CIA operative, I followed a group of Russian terrorists as they marched patiently through a crowded airport terminal and massacred civilians all around me in an orgy of unflinching homicidal malice (read journalist Tom Bissell’s incisive dismantling of the controversial episode). I got my first taste of sub-urban warfare, laying down suppressive fire from the roof of a strip-mall fast-food restaurant in Northeast Virginia. Modern Warfare 2 is a game critic’s Disneyland—so many provocative moments to chew on. And yet my mind keeps returning to a silly set of bookcases.

Let me explain: In the “Whiskey Hotel” mission toward the end of the single-player campaign, as my beleaguered company of soldiers fought to regain control of a demolished White House from the invading Russian forces, we passed through a number of rooms containing fully stocked bookcases. Maybe it’s because I’m obsessed with books—reading them, shopping for them, turning them over in my hands, feeling the matte finish of their dust jackets. Maybe it’s the fact that my wife and I recently bought a much-needed IKEA bookcase for our new apartment and I was overjoyed to finally have a home for my books that had been languishing in piles on our bedroom floor. Maybe it’s because one of my favorite things about visiting a new friend’s home for the first time is having an opportunity to nose through his bookcase and see where our literary tastes overlap. But I was supposed to be focused on shooting bad guys and saving the world (sing with me now: ‘A-mer-ica...f%@k yeah!’), and yet I found myself compulsively stopping to peruse each and every bookcase I stumbled across.

I don’t know what I was expecting to find in those bookcases. A hard-to-track-down early edition of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern? A hardcover, first-run copy of Frederick Buechner’s A Long Day’s Dying? (‘One of the developers at Infinity Ward loves Buechner too!’ I’d stammer excitedly to no one in particular.) A dog-eared copy of Barney Hoskyn’s new Tom Waits biography? Nope, nope, and nope. What I found was a batch of 30-some-odd identical copies of a generic compendium called Grimm’s Fairy Tales lining the shelves in front of me. Sure, there were a couple other titles copied-and-pasted to various spines—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and, if I remember correctly, a generic volume called Philosophy & Poetry—but nothing in quite the same abundance as that collection of Grimm’s fairy tales. (My only hypothesis is that, given the sheer number of copies on display, President Obama enjoyed the Grimm Brothers’ delightfully gory bedtime stories as a young boy and has a tradition of giving a copy to each and every foreign dignitary that pays a visit to the White House.)

Infinity Ward’s talented staff of designers obviously had more pressing concerns during Modern Warfare 2’s production schedule than set-dressing bookcases—the view of Rio’s iconic Christ the Redeemer statue from below in a pulsing, breathing favela will leave your mouth agape—but the emotional impact of a videogame for me often lives and dies on its attention to precisely these sorts of ultra-granular details. While people always talk about videogame studios trying to create a Hollywood blockbuster experience for players, the game developer’s creative challenge strikes me as far more punishing than their creative counterparts in the film industry. If you’re Steven Spielberg and you want to capture 19th-century London during the Industrial Revolution, you’re free to use visual sleight of hand like recreating city streets where the buildings are merely grime-painted facades with nothing behind them. In videogames, the environment’s smallest details have to be fleshed out because players inevitably want to kick the tires of the world you’ve created. Many contemporary games will allow you to linger and explore, whereas a movie forces you to soak up whatever environmental details you can in the time it takes the shot in question to finish its pan.

If there’s a well in a videogame, it’s only a matter of time before the player tries to jump down it to see if there’s a surprise waiting at the bottom. If there’s a window, players will try to shatter it with a melee swipe of their machine gun butt. If there’s a coffee mug sitting on a cubicle desk, you can bet players will hoist their rifle and try to send it flying in a bit of impromptu target practice. As much as I loved the open-world shooter Crackdown and relished its hilarious satire of ethnic cliches—Mexicans and Russians and Chinese, oh my!—in depictions of organized crime, my suspension of disbelief suffered a touch of whiplash every time I walked down a hallway in a building to find it just randomly dead-ended. Um, whoops.

I took a break halfway through Modern Warfare 2’s campaign and dove into an even more enjoyable sequel: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. Forget about bookcases. In terms of painstaking attention to detail, the designers at Naughty Dog deserve a couple packed trophy cases for their work on the second installment of the studio’s delightful Indiana Jones paean. I’m confident I would’ve shaved at least a full hour off my time playing through the game if I hadn’t spent ages loitering around examining etchings on cave walls from a host of different camera angles and ogling every last dusty artifact in the Instanbul Palace Museum store room.

Appropriately enough for a game about an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue model who hunts down priceless mythical artifacts in his spare time, Uncharted 2’s environment is absolutely freighted to bursting with incidental visual treasures for players to inspect and admire. One of my only regrets was that I couldn’t switch into first-person perspective to get an even closer peek at some of the giant Buddha statues in the Tibetan monastery section. On that picturesque, snow-covered Himalayan mountainside, I spent a few good minutes gazing over protagonist Nathan Drake’s shoulder at the mammoth waterfalls spilling over sheer cliffs nearby. What does a man have to do to get a Hasselblad CF-39 digital camera up in this game? And how about making sure Uncharted 3 lets us upload the dazzling in-game photos we snap to a Facebook photo album? You can’t set players loose in a game world this awe-inspiring without expecting us to want a visual souvenir to take home with us.

At one point in my gaming life, I was perfectly content with being given a few bad guys to bury. But, more and more, I find myself judging games by the quality of the treasures exhumed when I start digging. I get frustrated occasionally when my sightseeing is cut short due to an enemy’s grenade plunking to the ground near my ankles. The game clearly wants to remind me the world needs saving. I’m too busy examining book spines off in the corner, determining whether this particular world happens to be worth saving in the first place.

Jason Killingsworth is Paste’s games editor. He is based in Dublin, Ireland, and writes about music, film, tech and games for a variety of outlets. You can reach him online at jason [at] pastemagazine.com.