playing and dreaming Uncharted 3

There’s an irony in the continual assertion of ‘immersive’ qualities in Uncharted. While it has the detail and animation to seem consistently ‘real world’, the world which Naughty have constructed is a childhood fantasy, dream realms for which their characters – human seeming but really sculpted from perfection, can fill with their ego and exploits. It’s jarring, much in the same way the often spoken upon ludo-narrative dissonance (that is the protagonist being a humanized everyman that ruthlessly butchers hundreds of third world mercenaries) and while the mechanics of the world are essentially fantasy, it wears the thin veil of the real world.  Because what is the world we’re really in right now? The characters are all written to fit in a generic simulacrum of modern time people and so in that regard Nathan Drake, the protagonist, is a simulacrum of modern traits (smartarse, American) but he comes from nowhere specifically. We learn, in flashbacks to his childhood, that Nathan Drake is a fake name. Even as a child he is in the process of inventing himself, making the name and stealing  Sir Francis Drake’s ring, so to frame himself as a descendant of greatness. This is exactly the same process the developers are going through, creating a hero bigger than any one person, real or fictitious. We learn that Drake was raised in a catholic orphanage, where he learned Latin. This too sounds like an invention – a character mockingly calls it ‘Dickensian’.  It is, and like everything about the game and its characters taking place against a wan, facelessly modern background. Rootless and baseless, just like the carefully unspecific details behind everyone. It may sound pedantic, particularly in comparison to the games pulp influences – but we knew with Indiana Jones the understated but crucial fact that he was a Harvard professor.  Where is Nathan Drake? Why do we gravitate towards him?

The answer is simple but not sufficient. He’s the hero we dream to be. It’s an escapist fantasy. True. But in filmic and novelized examples of similar pulp, we’re at a distance from our subject. And there’s more talking. The action, in which Indiana Jones may end up killing a few bad guys feel incidental and reactionary, briefly portrayed but not lingered over. But things are very different with video games. Firstly, Uncharted is a shooting series. This means there is less time talking than there is shooting, or more precisely, killing. We are also more intimately inhabiting the space of the hero and doing so for much longer. We can perhaps indulge in Drake more easily if he were constrained to a two hour film in which we see everything the filmmaker wants us too – but with games we have a more active role in creating our own perceptions.

Uncharted then operates an awkward space. It wants to be like the controlled frames of a cinematic adventure, but it has to deal with us and our imperfections as players, as well as action game conventions. There is less time for a real world than there is for a pretty world and that leaves us with a game that strides an unsettling place that looks modern enough for us to believe we are human, mortal and real people in the moment –to-moment excitement (Oh no! Drake almost fell to his death again!) but with extended periods of time there is something not quite right, the world around Drake seems a cardboard set in front of which he poses, trying to look cool. Somehow I find it easier to deal with a world in which the fantasy is upfront.  In a fantasy like Prince of Persia 08 or Lord of The rings, we can view behaviour and actions within a context that is made clear to us. Even the 2008 reboot of Prince of Persia, which contained the mildly irritating anachronism of ancient Iran being inhabited by two glib Americans was quelled by the games grandiose and magical fantasy world – one that elicited a suspension of disbelief instantly and cleanly. What about Uncharted? If we don’t look too closely, we can believe that we’re in some Nepalese Warzone (as in the second game) but if we do look we might just wonder when and why this is exactly happening. The world and Drake are an everyman in that they end up feeling generic. 

Uncharted 3 attempts to address some of these issues, but ends up mostly failing. By this point in the series I did not think I would be taken in by another entry.  The more you play, the more the stunning environments feel apart from the game. Tone has also been an issue, after the first game they’ve tried juggling light-pulp with darker drama, and it can sometimes feel clumsy. To date the the game with the cleanest suspension of reality was the first one. Partially because we had not seen many protagonists like Nathan Drake before in video games; slim figured, real sounding, plucky and reacting vulnerably to danger. But also because the game was so contained; its setting was a small abandoned island. Confined to this one area the whole thing felt like an intimate scuffle, the world itself easily identifiable by pulp adventure tropes. We were the hero because we needed to be, there were pirates because pirates are assholes. When the Ancient Gold turned out to be cursed so as to turn people into Zombies it was thrilling – but also funny because it was recognizable amongst the light-hearted landscape of referential pulp. By the end our three heroes sailed off into the sunset with a chest of Gold. Every aspect – pirates, uninhabited islands, lost treasure and rogue- become- hero protagonist fit seamlessly within certain Narrative and cinematic gestures. It was put-on, put perfectly so, like the flagrant cinematic genre fantasies you might find in a Tarantino film.

There are moments like that in later games, a dramatic reservoir-dogs walk across a London street with companions- it makes me think, to what degree do I keep playing these games because I’m taken in by Nathan Drake’  strut?

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When I was a kid the first favourite game I had was Crash Bandicoot. Also by Naughty Dog, and also with a protagonist strut that fascinated me.  I was so wound up in Crash I would mimic his mongaliodal movements, swinging my head from side to side as I threw up my arms. I was so fascinated by him, what the fuck was he? When did he wear jeans? The world of his seemed more like ours and less of the dreampop of Mario and Sonic. There were cryptic, human tribespeople who would kill me for merely trespassing on their land. The geography was of the real world, not floating in psychedelic colours.  There were a series of fucked up animal creatures, possibly created by the scientists villains, having escaped and maybe, like Crash does at the start of the first game, washed up on the shores of a nameless island. There was a whole mystery about it and I tried to find every hidden cut scene and piece together a story in my head that would neatly connect the fucked up animal humanoid things to the magical floating mask men.

I realize now that Naughty Dog has always followed trends with genre. In the ps1/n64 they made platformers (Crash Bandicoot) with ps2/xbox it was sandbox action adventures (Jak and Daxter) and with the PS3 it’s all about shooters (and most recently survival shooters with The Last of Us) but they’ve carved out an identity for themselves, most consistently with their animation and environmental design.  With Crash Bandicoot, there was all this mystery that was their just to add colour to a forced perspective plat former, but there was also this whole implied ecosystem you could take away from it, as you worked you’re way through a couple of islands as a strange fucked up animal. In a context where the hero is only the hero because he had a funny wolfish grin on his face, hostility between all made sense. It didn’t need a princess and an evil king.  Then with the following instalments that element got obscured until it was lost. Naughty Dog had gained success with the character so they kept him and changed everything else, making more varied but less intriguing platformers, with warp rooms and time travelling, there was no longer a centralized setting. What was lost would not return until the character was sold and Crash Twin-sanity was made, years later.

Jak and Daxter and Uncharted follow a similar course. They all start out on a mysterious couple of islands, making a very isolated first game, with touches of atmosphere. Then things ramp up and change. I’m not trying to bore you with the argument that Uncharted is a better game than it’s sequels – it simply isn’t, the second and third game are better shooters and are better paced. There is less atmosphere but the environments are more detailed and there are occasionally a few cool ways of interacting with it. No longer is it entirely look but not touch. But they resonate with less mystery.   

I do think there is something lost though and I think that might be why I get so wrapped up in the way the characters move.  Naughty Dog want you to love their landscape, you climb all over the damn thing, practically hugging it, but the only constant for us in an often loud, abrasive series is Drake. The series to me ultimately becomes about him and his body, the way it moves and what happens to it. It goes back to the vulnerability that made him so interesting to begin with, but is constantly coming into conflict with being a power fantasy shooter. A power fantasy dressed as a vulnerability fantasy sounds like gaming neurosis and maybe that’s partially why I have such complicated feelings towards an ostensibly simple, mainstream action series.

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Uncharted 3 wants to be about fear.  It’s as if the developers realize they can’t keep making his physical vulnerability compelling, so they decide to wax psychological on it,  camp British villainess telling him that he ‘gets off an all this’ so what’s he really scared of? The answer is pretty simple, he’s got parental issues, probably manifesting themselves as abandonment issues, which can only be deepened by the kind of picaresque lifestyle he seems to leads. Also people afraid of being abandoned often abandon others, and isn’t It interesting that in the unspoken space between each game Drake presumably leaves his One-True-Love Elena to get back into a life of bone breaking thievery and unlicensed archaeology. So in a way, though these games always have too many gunfights and the enemies always soak up way too many bullets to maintain mobility and tension, there’s an effort to psychologically develop Drake and bridge the dissonance.  There’s even attempts to make him less generic, as I mentioned earlier, and they don’t go all the way or convince except once; a scene which shows Drake to actually be a nerd, much to the contrast of both his friends and the invisible ‘everyman’ (When Sully knows some history Drake is about to tell them, him and Chloe fist-bump) Drake is an obsessive nerd and he fears absence, specifically a parental absence that Sully has filled. Sully being the guy who is almost getting killed most of the time, usually because of Drake. These are some pretty cool developments that promise early on for there to be an evolution in the series, except narratively rather than simply tighter gameplay. It’ doesn’t deliver though because these themes are not expressed in a whole lot of ways besides text. The plot is nonsensical and the only way the developers can seem to find to express fear through mechanics is being chased by giant spiders. Yeah.  I’m pretty sure spiders as absent parental metaphor was not the most thought out or intended part of the story.

Their attempts to marry gameplay to narrative theme are entirely in isolated instances. For instance there are a lot of chases in this game, meaning Drake is on the whipping end of a lot of conflict. Some of these chases (like the giant spider one) move with a shaky, constantly moving camera that gives the feeling of a dream. An early one has army men in suits rising up from the small streets of Cartagena, and whether intended or not, it feels a bit surreal. More so they add psychological fuck-buggery to Drake’s endless traumas. So to list a few, he’s fallen on his back from high heights, been punched, shot, tortured, almost drowned, almost frozen to death and more. Now we can add being drugged with hallucinatory chemicals. The conceptually best part of the game (in that it marries the physical and psychological pain together, of being alone and also having your life at risk) is when you wander aimlessly through the desert, lost, dying and losing your mind. It was kind of perfect for me because it wasn’t just a union of the suffering Drake’s endured, but also because all you do is move him along, entirely tethered to his all-too-human stumbling gait. Obviously the whole game can’t be like that, but from all the sequences I’ve played in this series (including the awesome yak-stroking village in the second game) it seemed to represent the heart of the games appeal, at least to me. But the world is as it is and so Drake has to somehow find his way to the bad guys at random, take their guns and kill them all. I knew it was coming, but I guess I almost fooled myself into expecting something more unique. The conceptual glimpse at wandering hopelessly through a desert really seems to suggest it.

And mechanically, these games are fun. They have good, gradually building but eventually balls-out set-pieces and they get you from one to the other with personality. But they’re mechanically at odds with themselves. Movies depend on pacing, and the flawlessness of the hero to win. But we die.  We die a lot. It breaks the game down. The perfect, utopian uncharted game would be one where you couldn’t die but where the game reacts and diverts to accompany your failings. Ah well.

At this point I’m probably sounding like a crazy person who has a few issues and an abusive-relationship with these games. And I kind of do, to be honest. They’re not my favourite games by any stretch, but I’ve played Uncharted 2 five times, more than any other game. By the end of this, having gotten Drake through a collapsing ship in a storm and a desert, with the creators showing this hurt so palpably upon his body I’m kind of exhausted. These games are fun and exhausting in equal measure. There’s always a point in these games (and it was in The Last of Us too) where I go into a trance, where I’m not exactly enjoying the game in the same way. I’m under some magical compulsion to get the characters to the end because goddamit, they’re so tired and I’m so tired, I can’t just leave them there in limbo. I’ll be dreaming in the day of their walking animations, climbing, falling. Can’t leave them.  So I get them to the end so we can both fucking rest. But I guess it’s like Drake, I think I’m out but I’m pulled back in. The adventure still rings in my ear. I keep coming back.