Extra Lives by Tom Bissell Read Free Book Online Page B

detail but evocatively vague about the bigger questions. Tolkien is all but ruined for me whenever I make the mistake of perusing the Anglo-Saxon Talmudisms of his various appendices: “Among the Eldar the Alphabet of Daeron did not develop true cursive forms”—kill me, please, now—“since for writing the Elves adopted the Fëanorian letters.” As for horror films, the moment I learned Freddy Krueger was “the bastard son of a thousand maniacs” was also the final moment I could envision him without spontaneously laughing. The impulse to
explain
is the Achilles’ heel of all genre work, and the most sophisticated artists within every genre know better than to expose their worlds to the sharp knife of intellection.
    A good example of a game that does not make that mistake is Valve’s cooperative first-person shooter
Left 4 Dead
, which offers yet another vision of zombie apocalypse. Unlike the
Resident Evil
series, which goes to great narrative pains to explain what is happening and why (culminating in one of the most ridiculous moments in video-game history, when the hero of
Resident Evil 4
discovers an enemy document helpfully titled OUR PLAN),
Left 4 Dead
abandons every rational pretext and drops you and three other characters into the middle of undead anarchy. Almost nothing is explained; the little characterization there is comes in tantalizing dribs; and all that is expected is survival, which is possible only by constantly working together with your fellow gamers: covering them while they reload, helping them up when they are knocked down, and saving them when they are trapped in the eye of a zombie hurricane.
Left 4 Dead
is one of the most well-designedand explosively entertaining games ever made. While its purpose is incontinent terror, its point is that teamwork is, by definition, a matter of compulsion, not choice.
Left 4 Dead
’s designer, Michael Booth, had the maturity to grasp the power that narrative minimalism would provide his game. The speedy and acrobatic zombies of
Left 4 Dead
have no plan more refined than kicking you to death and sucking the marrow from your femur. As a scenario, it is as ridiculous as any forged by the Vulcans of video-game conceit, and yet, from start to finish,
Left 4 Dead
is as freefallingly unfamiliar and viscerally convincing as the worst dream you have ever had.
    Capturing what playing
Left 4 Dead
feels like is not easy. But set
Left 4 Dead
to its highest difficulty level, recruit three of its best players you can find, push your way through one of the game’s four scenarios, and make no mistake: What will go down will be so emotionally grueling, it will feel as though you have spent an hour playing something like full-contact psychic football. The end of the game, however it turns out, will feel epic to no one who did not take part in it, but those who did take part will feel as though they have marched, together, through a gauntlet of the damned.
    The game’s refusal to explore the who, what, why, or how of its zombie citizenry is emblematic of the unusually austere approach to narrative in many Valve games, which the company may not have invented but has certainly come close to perfecting. The four controllable characters in
Left 4 Dead
are all common video-game types: the girl, the black guy, the biker, the elderly Vietnam vet. They are not, however, blank canvases. (I play as—in order of preference—the girl, the black guy, and the biker. I absolutely refuse to play as the Vietnam vet. For some reason I absolutely hate the guy. Tactics that failed in the jungles and swamps of the Mekong Delta have no place against an army of the undead.) The object of the game is to fight your way through scenarios that arethemselves divided into five stages, all of which, but for the scenarios’ finales, conclude with the players’ slamming shut a safe house’s thick red metal door. The problem, of course, is that between these safe houses are devastated locales (a