The Literature Game
Depths of Payne
This is an article SFX asked me for back in 2005. I was looking for a chance to sound off about my growing sense that there is a form of, for want of a better word, literature emerging from the welter of low- grade crap that makes up the bulk of the gaming medium Nice of them to give me the impetus - and pay me for it too!
A couple of months ago, I got burgled by what seem to have been kids, and lost, among other items of apparent young thug appeal, my PS2 and all its games. Following advice from more hardened gamers than myself, I replaced the platform with an X-box and bought a few of the lost games again for the new format, more to get a feel for the X-box handset than anything else. And thus I found myself playing Max Payne through for the fifth time.
Wait a minute. The fifth time???
I repeat, I'm not a hardened gamer. My burglars got at best a half-dozen games for their trouble, and in all honesty, my preference is for gory First Person Shooters like Doom and Quake. I've never much liked the third person doll option so beloved of Tomb Raider and its brood - who wants to work a marionette when you can actually be there? And Max Payne , undeniably gory though it is, is just as undeniably a doll game. Yet here I was, playing it once again as if I'd never been down any of these snow-clogged mean streets before. To quote another iconic detective figure I'm obsessive about, what the hell was happening to me? What was the secret of Max Payne?
Well, it's been a tough case to crack, but as in so many detective tales, the answer was staring me in the face all along. For a writer, it should have been obvious. Max Payne isn't really a game.
It's a book.
Sure, you get to rush around shooting an almost endless supply of bad guys. Sure, you acquire an increasingly effective armoury of weapons to do it with as you progress. Sure you've got super-cool slow-mo bullet time on your side. But that's not it . What brought me back time and again was the story, and even more, the tone. From the moment Max loses his wife and child to marauding junkies in the prologue to the moment he commits his final act of retributive violence high above the streets of New York's downtown, I was hooked to a narrative tradition that has hauled us effortlessly through the dark ambiguities of the twentieth century and is still piling on steam as it hammers into the twenty first. A narrative tradition I owe more than a little to myself. The narrative tradition of American noir.
Like Sam Spade, like Philip Marlowe, like Rick Deckard and a hundred other shades of the same driven form, Max Payne is the Detective, a competent but morally-compromised slayer of minotaurs and a cynical commentator on the bleak iniquities of the labyrinth in which he must operate. The graphics build up this moral (really amoral) topography, layer by layer, just as you would with prose description in a noir novel. Prostitution, drug abuse and urban decay form the base level of the game's early stages. Bad guys are surprised poring over pornography in grey walled toilets or copping blow jobs from cheap whores. Slum tenement rooms have sleazy men's magazine pin-ups tacked to the walls, and the city's billboards seem like an insane echo of those we recognise only too well, as they tout alcohol and guns with anti-social abandon. Later, some of this will change, but not in any way that brings relief.
If the external signs of human frailty are there in abundance in Max Payne, so too are the more fleeting internal elements. Max's enemies may be gun-wielding thugs who'll shoot you into Game Over as soon as look at you, but at the same time you're never left in any doubt that these are human beings you're killing. Creep up on them, and you hear them chatting, about their job prospects, their families, the movies they love and even their attitude to the guns they carry. And then you have to kill them anyway. This is a tried and tested literary technique in action, a way of maximising the emotional impact of violent action in the narrative, while at the same time under-cutting and question-marking the blam-blam thrill of it all. The bad guys may be bad, but they're still flesh and blood like the rest of us. And at the same time, Max himself slides closer and closer to the moral edge as he transforms from broken-hearted cop to a suicidally-driven machine of retribution. His own interior narrative informs us that he knows this, and even his dreams become drenched in the knowledge of his own violent complicity in the noir world around him. Now this is the kind of thing that distinguishes a good genre novel from the dross. It's the refusal of an author to give you a world coloured black and white and a comforting Hollywood morality to suck on. It's the assertion that there is a price tag for every violent act, however satisfying, and that things are never as simple as gunfire seems. The predominant colour of noir, contrary to translation, is not black but a very human gray.
The same gray pervades the world of Max Payne, just as it does the real world, from top to bottom. Max may begin his odyssey at street level, but the twists of plot rapidly lead him into the corridors of mansions, municipal buildings and downtown skyscrapers. There is a solid symbolism in the way the narrative unfolds, from sneaking around below ground in the New York subway to the climax on the upper levels of the glass and steel towers of corporate America . His enemies transform from slang-mouthed gangland triggermen, through trained mercenary commandoes to well-dressed CIA types complete with agency sunglasses and suit and tie combos. What starts as a drug-related street tragedy slithers inexorably upward, roping in the US Army, City Hall and a whole slew of respectable men of influence. The rot, the subtext informs us, is through and through, from the lowest forms of junkie street-life to the richest, best dressed winners in the city. Don't look for good guys, there aren't any. At best you can cut a deal with someone who doesn't mind you staying alive.
Symbolism of this sort, fairly common in good literature, is an unusually sophisticated thing to find lying around in a video game, but Max Payne doesn't just exhibit it - it's the lifeblood of the story. At the same time that Max is shooting and bullet-dodging his way around New York , the whole city is locked in the grip of a monster snowstorm. It's a neat trick, conveniently keeping the game-play clear of complications like innocent bystanders and witnesses. But it also serves to underline Max's isolation in the labyrinth and echo the human conflict raging below the clouds. And as the final confrontation ends, as Max releases his grip on the trigger and his grief, the clouds begin to break up and the stars show through. Pointing up this classic as-above-so-below literary technique, the story makes use of a slew of references from Norse, and occasionally Greek, mythology: the storm itself echoes the awful final winter of the world that heralds Ragnarok, the new super-drug that lends its abusers berserk strength is called Valkyr, and the shadowy figure of the puppet master behind it all rejoices in the name Woden. A ship with a cargo of death is named Charon and its captain Dime, for the coins left on the eyes of corpses in payment to the ferryman. And the imagery of Max's dream sequences offer a rich, intelligently-textured nightmare that undercuts the gunblast simplicity of the rest of the game. With Max performing a balancing act on thread-like lines of blood suspended over the abyss, his murdered baby crying in the background and his wife screaming for mercy somewhere in an endless maze of corridors, you really badly want out of this segment as soon as possible, and yet it turns out to be one of the harder parts of the game to beat. You find yourself trapped there and the experience is genuinely nightmarish. Oh yes, and at one point, under the influence of Valkyr, Max hallucinates that he is a figure in a video game...
Now compare this - all this - with the muttonhead dialogue and Chuck Norris two dimensionality of games like Soldier of Fortune or Splinter Cell, and you'll see why I'm arguing for Max Payne as literature taken to a new level. In fact I don't think there's much to argue about. Really, only one serious question remains. What on Earth is this stuff doing in a game? Why did these guys bother?
They bothered - I'd guess - out of a deeply-rooted love of the form, an enthusiasm for the genre and its narrative discipline. They are, like me, noir devotees. The game's designers appear to be largely Scandinavian but, just as a white European art school band called the Rolling Stones went to America proselytising for a barely acknowledged American black blues heritage, so these guys are offering the MTV generation a direct line back to the bleak, dark inheritance of the American noir tradition. Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, James M Cain - the only thing Max Payne lacks is a recommended reading list.
Postscript - since I wrote this, I've stumbled across an even finer example of the tendency described above (and no, sadly, it wasn't Max Payne 2). Midway's The Suffering is a horror survival game set in a haunted prison where the accumulated evils of man's inhumanity to man are set loose as demonic creatures and bizarre morally ambiguous spirit guides for a central character who must fight his way to freedom and in so doing define his own soul and discover the secrets of his own past. Where Max Payne approached the level of a good pulp noir novel , the Suffering approaches the level of a good novel full stop. It has well-rendered characterisation, beautifully crafted symbolism and a powerful thematic undercurrent that addresses some of the more pressing social issues of our times. Oh yeah, and shitloads of terrifying blood-soaked action along the way. Enjoy!!!!!!!!!!