{"id":309,"date":"2008-10-28T13:21:37","date_gmt":"2008-10-28T20:21:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rickyopaterny.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/28\/gears-of-war-2-the-new-yorker-and-nathan-englander-is-a-gamer\/"},"modified":"2008-11-04T16:57:36","modified_gmt":"2008-11-04T23:57:36","slug":"gears-of-war-2-the-new-yorker-and-nathan-englander-is-a-gamer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/28\/gears-of-war-2-the-new-yorker-and-nathan-englander-is-a-gamer\/","title":{"rendered":"Gears of War 2, the New Yorker, and Nathan Englander is a gamer"},"content":{"rendered":"

In what must be the smartest profile I’ve ever read about the video game business, Tom Bissell profiles Epic Games designer Cliff Blesinski in this week’s\u00a0The New Yorker<\/a>. Blesinski designed the uber-successful game Gears of War, which I received once as a gift. Although I’ve never been a fan of shooters, there was definitely something different about this game. Bissell’s essay puts the game on the level of art and calls in Nathan Englander to help him make his case:\u00a0<\/p>\n

The novelist Nathan Englander, a fan of the game, cites its third-person viewpoint, in which the player looks over the shoulder of the character being controlled, as a key to its success. \u201cIn literary terms,\u201d Englander told me, \u201cit\u2019s a close-second-person shooter. It\u2019s Jay McInerney and Lorrie Moore territory. You\u2019re both totally involved and totally watching.\u201d As for the collapsed architecture and blown-open spaces of the Gears world, Englander said, \u201cThere\u2019s the hospital from \u2018Blindness\u2019 and the house from \u2018The Ghost Writer,\u2019 and I know that beautiful, ruined world of Gears as well as either of those.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What really got me about the piece isn’t just the convergence of video games and literature, but rather Bissell’s location in the game of something\u2014some emotion\u2014that is very mournful and mature and sad that he traces through its advertising campaign: \u00a0<\/p>\n

The advertising campaign for the first Gears was centered on a strangely affecting sixty-second spot in which Fenix twice flees from enemies, only to be cornered by a Corpser, a monstrous arachnoid creature, on which he opens fire. But it was the soundtrack\u2014Gary Jules\u2019s spare, mournful cover of the 1982 Tears for Fears song \u201cMad World\u201d\u2014that gave the spot its harsh-tender dissonance. This helped signal that Fenix was something that few video-game characters had yet managed to be: disappointedly adult.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bissell continues later in the piece:\u00a0<\/p>\n

Gears also contains what Bleszinski calls a \u201cgoing home\u201d narrative: \u201cThere\u2019s a sublevel to Gears that so many people missed out on because it\u2019s such a big testosterone-filled chainsaw-fest. Marcus Fenix goes back to his childhood home in the game. I dream about my house in Boston, basically every other night. It was up on a hill.\u201d In Gears of War, the fatherless Fenix\u2019s manse is on a hill, too, and getting to its front door involves some of the most harried and ridiculously frantic fighting in the game. When I told Bleszinski that Fenix\u2019s homecoming was one of my favorite levels in Gears, he asked if I knew where its title, \u201cImaginary Place,\u201d had come from. I thought for a moment. Earlier, he had made a nicely observed reference to the novelist Cormac McCarthy, and I was attuned to the possibility of an altogether unexpected window into his imagination. Was it from Auden? No. It was a reference to a line from Zach Braff\u2019s film \u201cGarden State,\u201d in which \u201cfamily\u201d is defined as \u201ca group of people who miss the same imaginary place.\u201d When you start to peel back the layers of the Gears world, Bleszinski told me, \u201cthere\u2019s a lot of sadness there.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bissell’s accomplishments in this piece are many, but the two most obvious are<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. He takes the level of discourse around video games to a whole new elevation.<\/li>\n
  2. He makes me want to play Gears of War.\u00a0<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    That second point, I think, is the the height of non-fiction writing about any subject\u2014whether it’s art or sports or technology or business: the writing drives the reader towards its subject.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    In what must be the smartest profile I’ve ever read about the video game business, Tom Bissell profiles Epic Games designer Cliff Blesinski in this week’s\u00a0The New Yorker. Blesinski designed the uber-successful game Gears of War, which I received once as a gift. Although I’ve never been a fan of shooters, there was definitely something […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,1,4],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":322,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309\/revisions\/322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}