GoldenEye: An Appreciation (or: Don’t sneak up on me, honey)

In common with a lot of folks my age, my first experience of multiplayer gaming was the ground-breaking console game GoldenEye. From the ostracism for the new boy who unknowingly picked OddJob to the wince at hearing seeing a curtain of red drop across my vision for the eighteenth time in a single game, it was a formative, incredibly fun ritual. We’d play for hours, usually with a beer or two, and between rounds and afterwards we’d chuckle together over that ridiculous snipe or rocket launcher death.

For the first time, shortly after GoldenEye came out, I had the slightly unnerving experience of feeling a very strong instinct to hug the wall and check corners for other players. At school. I kept expecting the tinkle of a grenade landing at my feet or the paff paff paff of a pistol being unloaded into my back. This is the point at which the anti-gaming lobby would throw up their hands in horror and claim my mind was irretrievably damaged, that blocky, pixellated headshots and a game that was way better than the film it took inspiration from, had turned me from mild-mannered kid into ticking time bomb. Sure, maybe if I was already halfway nuts then all-night sessions of GoldenEye may not have helped, but as a pretty well-adjusted kid with a great group of friends, I was exhibiting something much more harmless, and actually kind of cool – I had become immersed in the game.

At heart, we’re all pack animals, reacting to stimuli in the world around us, flocking in groups, constantly assessing and shifting in our relationships and hierarchies. The human brain has survived and prospered for so long precisely because it has an ability and aptitude for picking up new skills and patterns of behaviour. My mind was adapting to a new situation, learning new skills to help me ’survive’. You see it on sports pitches and in boardrooms every day – people learning the behaviours that get them through the day or game unscathed – why should gaming be any different? Especially when it’s the basis of comedy gold.

The learning and instinctive grasping of game mechanics continued, and not just in first person shooters or multiplayer blast-fests. I found myself automatically judging the speed and vector of approaching cars, ready to jack them, after months of Grand Theft Auto III. I wanted a flashlight and something hefty in my hand to enter dark spaces after Half Life 2. I learned the finer points of multi-tasking and developed a twitchy relationship with dealing with multiple inputs on a computer from micro-managing stockades across the New World in Sid Meier’s Colonization. All of these games succeeded in different ways, but they all shared a common factor – they were so good I played them at great length, and they were so immersive that they bled out into daydreams and odd moments during the day.

It’s continued of course. These days most of the games I play don’t even require a willing suspension of disbelief. With good headphones and the lights down low, the world of Rapture in Bioshock or a dust-blown street in Call of Duty 4 become incredibly real. Sound design, sharp graphics and realistic physics combine to create stunning virtual environments. It’s the reason I can’t bear to play the Condemned series – they set off genuine fight or flight reactions in me, and I can barely play for five minutes. I started to realise the power of this when sniping on Creek, one of the new maps released on multiplayer for COD4. I served in University reserve forces a few years ago, in an infantry unit. Years ago, I had actually lain on a hilltop with a rifle, scanning for enemy movement in the middle of a training exercise. In COD4, I did the same thing, waiting for the biological miracles that are my eyes to detect movement in the valley below, before snapping the rifle scope to my eye and blowing away another player. Two worlds merged – skills from life used in a game.

With games like Grand Theft Auto IV breaking new ground in immersive environments that invite exploration and experimentation, I’ll again be fighting the urge to jack the nearest car to get where I need to go or toss a grenade through a doorway before I enter, and every time I do, I’ll smile. Gaming is at its best when the borders blur, when strategies and memories and new ideas bubble up during our daily round. And its even better when we can stand up, turn off the gunfire and explosions and get a nice cup of tea.