Gears of War 2 || ThinkThank #6

An Improvement in Every Metric

        It's been years enough now that even close friends may not instinctively know why its surprising, almost to the point of offensive in it's about-facedness, that I have chosen to discuss Gears of War in my series that discusses the things I appreciate in games through the ages. Doubly so when considering that I will go on to praise it as strongly as I will. So for anyone who has met me in my more reasonable, less incendiary years, or who simply has never asked me about my video game opinions, just know this: I was once a very obnoxiously anti-Gears gamer. I will not be using this write-up as an opportunity to provide justifications in-retrospect for my inflammatory rhetoric around the series. It also will not act as penance for my statements-- I still stand by some of them, even if I don't stand by the literal construction of the sentences I used to do my whining. Rather, I will be telling the side of the story I felt honor-bound not to admit back then, coupled with the developed additional appreciation for the series that grew out of a more careful and honest appraisal of games. Thus, I will get this much out of the way:

Although I have not been known as the biggest fan of the Gears series as far back as the original's 2006 release; Despite my recorded commentary on the character and location designs running the gamut between 'Not my taste' to 'Horrendously, irresponsibly ugly in every detail; Leaving aside my critique of the Gears narrative as a series of emotional justifications for bellicose chest-thumping in the face of then-contemporary guilt surrounding the public's complicity in atrocity; Ignoring my belief that every single character in the franchise looks like they were lab-grown in an experiment to recreate Smash Mouth using nothing but lead singers; With all of that aside...

I would like to suggest that Gears of War generally, and its second-entry specifically, is one of the most significant contributions to video game design in 30 years and its bombastic, enthusiastic, and unapologetically melodramatic presentation is a blood-thick ambrosia for which modern audiences have been desperately parched.

If I could go back and speak with the agitated early teen who felt that bitterness constituted depth of opinion, I would tell him that its okay to like things. Its also okay to like things for stupid reasons. In fact, you don't have to justify your tastes. You can-- I mean, you are welcome to-- but no one fucking cares. Its okay. And from a certain angle, its really hard to follow the logic of a kid who would openly praise and defend the Halo series but shit on Gears, as if the the two muscle-hunk space marine games with pseudo-Biblical pretentions were so radically different.

My one indulgence in complaint will be here in the introduction....

Ah yes, this image is very clear.
A world composed of old tea bags

Why is Gears so relentlessly ugly? Look at this indiscernible blob of man, meat, mud, and murder. The game is, in its own way, calling out desperately for me to not play it. Its screaming that its not for me, so in a lot of ways my distaste is entirely my fault for continuing to look. Gears is working its ass off, making millions of fans worldwide and delivering a gratifying experience for said fans, and fuckin' Oscar Wilde over here is upset that there aren't enough flowing silks or floral-patterned settees.

I think this is even remastered

But man, all four of these guys manage to look as different from one another as 4 identical people can possibly look. I strain to see them at the correct angle for appreciation. They just look so fucking dumb. Coupled with the era-appropriate levels of brown and gray stains on everything, its a nice warm mud-bath of a game to really soak yourself in the shameless lack of aesthetically pleasing anything.¹

BUT ANYWAY--

So How About That Praise?

In the last decade or so, games have been dragged down by the frenetic urge to put as many "In" mechanics as possible, usually in the service of ensuring an easy-sell. When looking at games like Forespoken, its hard to glean what the original thoughts were guiding the design document. At times, it feels like games want any identity but their own; again, this is almost certainly due to fears of alienating some market or another, leading to a broad-brush methodology, 'Well something here ought to appeal to someone.'

But what of the other kind of game? The kind which is perfectly happy with its identity? What about the kind of game that feels so naked in its ambitions and whose core purpose bursts from the design document with sonic force, rattling your sternum and pulling down your ear lobes to drive in that wedge of unctuous sound-cheese, ready to dip its game-bread into your brain fondue and call it a party? What about the game that feels like every post-it note on it's beat sheet ends with "... and its absolutely badass." ?

Gears of War 2 is a game which feels distinctly confident. In turn, that confidence seems borne of a clear, unaltered, and thunderously repeated design ethos, which, going by the impressions left on the player following one of the game's credits, would be something like this: "Everything should be flippin' sick." The game should follow a squad of muscle-bound hunk with space armor. How about everyone gets a chainsaw on their gun? No one should wear a helmet. No wait, only guys who wear helmets should get ruthlessly killed at a moment's notice.

Gears 2 has admirable adherence to style and bombast rivaling the most enthusiastic of action-figure-players in any backyard anywhere. How to establish the new baddies as a threat? Sink the entirety of a city in a matter of seconds with an absurdly large worm. Want to reload your weapon? Well have you considered doing it.... but in a cool way?

That last one is not much of a joke; its an example of Gears thinking at its finest, When coming up with something "flippin' sick" to do, like reload a gun so quickly that your bullets get stronger, the team hit upon the risk-reward-repeat cycle which is so integral to Gears of War's identity. This game is supposed to make you feel like a badass, so we are encouraging you to go out of your way to do cool stuff-- if you do that cool stuff, we'll reward you with RAD stuff. Truncating the design document, I'm sure there was a motivational poster somewhere in the office that read something like,

When in doubt, be awesome.

Probably was over this photo

Everything Was Flippin' Sick

Alright, let me dial back a bit, for fear of appearing to damn with fine praise. I really do believe that the core purpose at the heart of every feature, narrative beat, and gunfight was to immerse players in the uncomplicated satisfaction of catharsis. Unabashed, confident, and straight-forward: the bad guys are ugly, brutish monsters, and every bit of in-universe work that was done to try to better understand their enemies or find some way of coexisting led to more brutish ugly monsters whose capacity for compromise is evidently non-existent. There's a chance that this was not strictly intentional, but instead a natural consequence of remaining internally consistent with your purpose. Ponderous nuance has its place, but that place is not well-served in the same breath as the term "chainsaw bayonet". Which is not to say that Gears doesn't vary its delivery, or offer it's own emotional moments-- far from it-- Gears of War 2 in particular marks the best execution, if not the first arrival, of reflective pathos. 

In many games, writers tend to broaden the player's scope over time, usually allowing the player character and the player themselves to learn about the world and it's events together; as the narrative begins to grow to fit the scale of the adventure, so to does the player's grasp of the universe they inhabit. In the context of shooting-heavy games, its common to the point of almost being custom to make the player rethink some of their earlier choices and reflect upon their combatants, muddying the waters of 'What are we fighting for?" Think of the Geth in Mass Effect, or the Rachni in Mass Effect, or the Krogan in Mass Eff-- Okay, there are others too, Mass Effect is just really into turning every experience on its head about three chapters down the line.

I still remember the initial shock that reverberated through gaming when, in the course of Halo 2's  campaign, you stopped playing Master Chief for a moment. Already giving us whiplash enough to have us calling our insurance providers for a quote, Bungie then decided to put our eyeballs into the hateable skull of an Elite. We got a glimpse of internal schisms among the Covenant forces. We saw the coalition of alien species as independent thinkers who made pacts, had hopes, and dreamt of improving their futures. What the heck; last game it was so simple! They were just the BAD GUYS.  But the effect was powerful-- we still wanted the Covenant to lose-- but there was something new. Something like... peace. We could see a universe where these beings lived along side one another, if only their various issues could be addressed. Somehow, once you can sort of imagine their grocery stores, it feels weird to pretend that an entire species exists solely for combat. Importantly, Halo started having the players imagine the broader scope of the Covenant war's impact, and how sticky and complicated the issues get when you recognize the fundamental rights of other sentient beings. Well, if you cared to imagine that broader scope-- you were also more than welcome to simply continue enjoying the new reasons to fight aliens in space.

Gears arguably does something similar, in that the Locust Horde's reasoning for attempting a hostile takeover of Sera, the Gears of War human home world, ends up being justifiable in its own way, as the Lambent/Infected threatened to destroy their subterranean home (or is that sub-SERAnean?). But the player characters are at no point so introspective as to spoil the fun. We learn that the Locust have a decent reason to rise up, sure-- but they are also gross, led by an embittered former science experiment who learned nothing about sharing generational trauma, and continues the cycle of creating unwieldy sentient experiments which are pretty much destined to go rogue. Even when you learn more about them, it just seems to provide greater context as to why... the player characters have been completely right to be fighting this whole time, and the solution to their problems is still probably to kill every last Locust in existence.

No, Gears takes a different tack, one which is far more congruous with its initial mission statement, "Everything Should Be Flippin' Sick". Unlike the humorless sycophants to the real world military-industrial machine who likely wrote the Modern Warfare and Battlefield 3 campaigns using their robotic vocabulators, emotions run high in Gears of War from start to finish. The dominant feeling is definitely weighty catharsis, but when Gears 2 dutifully switches into low gear at narratively-appropriate times,  the writers decide to explore the human cost of not just war, but being the type of person capable of fighting a war. Despite its otherwise bellicose enthusiasm for wanton violence, Gears of War 2 suggests in its margins that there were many tragedies that paved the way to our cool, badass action moments.²

Each Gear represents a painful, sick necessity; of the need to refine and distill many human children into near-mindless violence-distributors. And of course, there's the simile: was I talking about the Gears or the Locust? And just as you are about to be feeling a touch dissatisfied that the ultimate message is still basically, "But who are the real monsters", Gears proudly stands up, and with an expression that deflects counterpoint and says, "Uh, the Locust. Obviously." Following the round of confused stares from the navel-gazing society, it says, "Oh sorry for the confusion. Gears are definitely more valuable and worthy of life than the Locust. That is always true. FUCK the Locust. Its a super huge bummer that we have to fight like this, but we also have to fight like this. That's not our fault."³

And so there Gears leaves us, with a clear line drawn-- nothing in our pathos should suggest that understanding or non-violence will win the day-- its all violence, every time. But unlike say, DOOM, Gears feels that its very important for the player to be reminded that the Gears themselves, despite looking like ambulatory refrigerators, are indeed human beings, and in order to be as rad soldiers as they are, they undergo torture before, during, and after their deployment to a battlefield. That's where Gears hides its pathos; its in humanity.

Lightmass Industrial

Instead of analyzing the 'enemy' until they are recontextualized as something more worthy of respect, Gears takes a different angle to the human war story, albeit explored in a limited capacity. In order to score its points in consideration and war ponderance, Gears alludes to some pretty gristly questions that loom in the minds of our protagonists who all look like gorilla trashmen who still can't stand the stink. The series' most important person in the universe is Marcus Fenix's father, Adam, a man responsible for the devastating orbital weapon, The Hammer of Dawn (decent name ngl). The elder Fenix envisioned the Hammer of Dawn as the ultimate weapon of deterrence, and says some pretty haughty things about violent warfare that don't hold up to scrutiny,

[...] Someone has to create weapons so powerful that if politicians want to wage war, they'll face the same death as the men and women sent to fight it. A deterrent. A damn big deterrent. I can build a deterrent that'll bring governments to their sense.[...]

I mean, okay. Whatever, this is fine. I completely understand his motivations and they aren't uncharacteristic or something. But thus begins Gears' brief interlude into grand-scale introspection. Much like in our own world, it appears that the soldiers of the Coalition of Ordered Governments are very much pawns in the games of larger powers; many folks likely become Gears in order to rise out of some powerlessness, only to discover themselves to be just as trapped as they had been as civilians. And in the universe of Gears, that means people die, A LOT. When trying to sort out the Locust issue, the COG Army determines that its time to fire their orbital super weapon, and they destroy 90% of the planet in the process. Our heroes are not comfortable with this outcome, and we are given a glimpse of the characters finally wavering in their commitment to the cause. Like, yeah we want to kill some Grubs but... also 90% is a pretty high number... But ultimately, and to the game's benefit, we don't really dwell on this. Pragmatically speaking, it wouldn't do to have our space marines just give up at this point because they didn't like how dicey things got. The presentation of these mounting atrocities isn't a way of introducing complications or new variables to consider-- is simply a way of reinforcing the already drilled concept: Kill the Locust, but this time do it even more.

This is the point at which I really want to divert into an analysis of Gears 2's evident mulling of then-topical issues of culture and politics. I don't think that Gears does terribly much to make declarative statements about those issues. In fact, I think that the games are a surprisingly frank acknowledgment of the emotionally fraught times from which they hail. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had reached the stage at which most people just wanted to pretend that they were over, climate change fear had finally coalesced into a proper "political" issue, large agri-business began to reveal its ugliest side, and everyone was beginning to feel that their governments may not have their best interests at heart. That's not to say that Gears set out to explore these issues, but you can feel the importation of contemporary zeitgeist in the presentation.

This discussion is worthy of something more serious and structured than my ThinkThank series, so for now I'll leave it with the anecdote concerning the fate of series' co-protagonist and best bud Dom Santiago's wife, Maria. Removing all context for brevity, she is left in a vegetive state following torture, with no hope for recovery. In a moment which is as sad as it is anticipated, Dom ends her life in a mercy killing. The series' creator, Cliff Bleszinski, later explained that such was his answer to the famous case of Terri Schaivo, who was subject to 15 years of forced-life-support before her prior wishes were finally respected. In true Gears fashion, the game does not dwell for even a second on the validity of allowing Maria to live on for Dom's sake. He says his goodbyes, pulls out a gun, and ends her life.

And thus is the tone set for how Gears handles topical issues-- there will be no deliberation, we will just act. In keeping with the mission of catharsis, problems are solved in ways which make them final, if not satisfactory. The biggest, most horrifying threat faced by our heroes in the Gears universe is when problems DON'T get solved this way. Every mission, every quip, and every gunshot is delivered with the intent of ending this. That sort of set-jawed determination exemplifies the contemporary metatextual experience of Gears of War, 'I may be in pain, I may be angry, I may be surrounded by things that are not right-- But I will end this.' What had been a bad-ass line four years prior with Halo 2, "...Finishing this fight," had turned into a grim, desperate need. The public wanted The Fight, be it wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the crumbling ecosystem, corporate domination, and the widening divide between leaders and the governed, to simply end, for things to become simple and solvable.

The Nuts and Bolts (and Gears)

Narratively, Gears 2 is a pathos-driven convoluted mess of poor reasonings and suspended-disbelief, which I wholly mean only as a description and not a mark against it (all of Star Wars pretty much follows the above and you don't see me complaining (shut up)). But at no point is that narrative internally inconsistent, as I stated before, and mechanically the same is true. As Gears of War was the first cover-shooter of any note (the lead designer of Kill.Switch, Chris Esaki, was brought over to make Gears of War), it is clear from the outset that every feature of the game would be bottom-up oriented around the cover system. As the public's introduction to the mechanic, some of the perennial complaints had not yet their time to bloom in our grumping gardens. Finnicky controls for selecting the cover you want, upcoming "ambushes" being telegraphed in advance by open arenas of conveniently waist-height walls with little internal justification for their presence, and friendly AI which completely misunderstand the value of said cover. These issues were only ever noticed in hindsight really, as each subsequent title improved upon the last, and then Gears' dominance in the mechanical field it had developed was made ever more clear with each new imitator which reared its stupid, mystifyingly popular head (I'm talking about Nathan Drake, could you tell?). 

Too many eyes. 5/10

What those imitators failed to understand was that game design is holistic, and if you want to make a game whose primary gameplay loop is in combat, then that combat should inform the verbs one can take, the dialogue, the story, and even the presentation of that story. Arguably, you could tell the story off Gears of War through the eyes of Adam Fenix, and the game could be a 'typing on the computer and withholding important information' simulator. That game would be fucking boring, but you could tell it from that perspective and still arrive at many of the main conclusions and story beats. Whats important here is that the game is not told this way; instead its told through interspersed cinematic cutscenes, ostensibly rewards for completing missions, and dialogue shared between squadmates during play. That last part is crucial, as that is how we get into Gears of War 2, the game I am supposed to be specifically talking about.

Story overall is much improved over its predecessor, but Gears of War 2 gives itself every advantage by utilising its mechanical strengths for the interests of the story. Anything super boring, like a labcoat NERD doing some research or a friendly going back to base is acknowledged after the fact or via radio chatter, while all directly relevant dialogue is communicated between squad mates mid-battle (a little) and in the immediate mop-up (the most). Combat arenas often feel designed for the sake of pacing of delivered dialogue, much to the game's benefit. Before the era of "content" and drip-fed battle-pass (I misspelled and wrote "Battle-Ass" and I wish I had left it) micro-transacted story crumbs, games like Gears of War understood that just like any currency, ability, or upgrades, story moments could be used as rewards. When a squadmate's voice cuts out amidst the hateful sounds of Locust grunting, only to be followed by the player's own arena filling with grubs, its the prospect of finding out what happened to Cole that spurs the player into action and fuels their violence. By using crucial dialogue and cutscenes as evident rewards in of themselves, Gears was able to foster squadmate loyalty within players. Even with characters you may not like so much, there is still a sense of grudging responsibility to go see what the fuck Cole just got himself into. Marcus Fenix's bitter old goat attitude is useful in this sense, as his own way of expressing concern is identical to his way of expressing disgust. This lets the player maintain ludonarrative harmony; nice one!

In the months following the first game's breakout release, some constructive criticism began to pile around issues I mentioned before. On your first playthrough, you hardly noticed, but by the 2nd and 3rd playthrough, our your 7 billionth multiplayer match, one would begin to notice the frustrations of fumbling for contextual cover, magnetizing back and forth between two equally incorrect locations, and the first game's habit of overwhelming the player to raise stakes, without necessarily providing new abilities or strategies to bridge the distance. In Gears of War 2, the designers clearly utilised the fat budget being thrown their way, as they experimented with all kinds of new abilities and weapons for players with which to stamp out the Locust. Importantly, all of these new abilities were Flippin' Sweet, and only served to keep the momentum flowing forward. Guns have special, individualised active-reload abilities now, Locust bodies can be used as walking cover, and enemy AI has reached that magical place of being smarter and more reasonable to fight. I'm nearly certain that the obvious headway made in the AI department is what led to the introduction of Horde mode. In every conceivable metric, Gears of War 2 improved itself over its predecessor-- story, characters, gunplay, AI, graphics (even if I hate the art style I can appreciate the hard work and talent on display). and controls have all been improved to such a degree that can only be the result of tight, holistic understanding of the series' goals and motivations. Perhaps embedded in that praise is the damning future indictment of Gears 4 and beyond, games which appear to lack that same clarity of vision.

Thanks and I'm sorry.

As is customary for ThinkThank now, I've arrived at the "Thank" section. I, and many game designers, have a lot to be thankful for in the Gears series as a whole. I've written a bit praising the mechanics, but in the wider context, I am thankful for Gears of War preparing the world for a future in which console gaming was solidified as a meaningful platform. The series absolutely skyrocketed Xbox sales, providing an experience that was fundamentally, from the ground up, intended to be experienced at a television, controller in hand, likely with a bud. That sentiment is so far away from the other dominating assumption, that games ought to be played in a chair, at a desk, alone. Whether or not you find the couch or the desk a more comfortable gaming location is irrelevant-- it's the vibe at the core of each that matters. Gears of War also possessed pretentions of cinematic clout, a medium which is somewhat emotionally reliant on the assumed communal experience.

Among those designers who care, Gears of War inspired holistic design, carefully selecting mechanics and themes which feed into and inform one another, creating a web of satisfying and interwoven threads. It reminded us that we can be both holistic and bombastic. Not every carefully designed games-as-art video game ends up being a slow rumination on family or coming-of-age. Even the jocks can write sonnets. And they are every bit as sonorous and fulfilling, given the correct audience.

I spent a very long time reflexively projecting hate at this series out of a number of petty grievances: the popular thing was already popular enough, the game is ugly*, I don't like machismo, my bullies at school couldn't stop raving about Gears of War etc etc. But ultimately, I never actually had real bile churned up for it. I still wouldn't call myself a fan, but there is no value to pretending that the series is somehow bad and not worthy of its devoted fanbase. In an era in which video games are paradoxically Valuable™ and unvalued, the rare game which can deliver satisfying results to both the intrinsic and extrinsic value crowds should be celebrated, rarer still is one that can maintain a series. I am aware that the later titles disappointed most folks, but the upcoming E-Day seems promising, and with whatever is in the air that is making people like me line up to reminisce about a time when games like Gears of War were made, I believe a brighter future in games is on the horizo-- MARCUS GET OUT OF THE WAY.

Footnotes:

1. Okay the rest I can sneak in here. I think Marcus Fenix is thoroughly unlikable. Dom is fine. Dom's relationship to his wife is sweet but feels strangely false, as it is at odds with the otherwise sexlessness of Gears as a whole. I think this may come from the post hoc decision to grow Dom's character from his relative emptiness in the first game.
   
   
2. Although the game is clearly antagonistic towards the military-industrial complex's ability to ruin people's souls, that criticism ultimately feels leveled at the outcomes of the military-industrial complex, not its existence.
   
   
3. I don't have to justify dodging the ball that's covered in liquid shit. Understanding why the pitcher coated it in liquid shit may make for an interesting psyche report, but it will not fundamentally alter any of my decision making following the launch of the shitball. It is also not incongruous, after knocking over my friends who were in my path as I leapt to avoid the ball, to feel genuinely upset over the state of affairs, concerned for the well-being of my friends, and even guilty for their injury.