DOOM and Clarity

Because Red Mist is Better Than Self Doubt

The biggest load of horseshit fed to the parents of people of my generation was that violent videogames were creating a generation of crazed killers. Aside from being the same old trash about jazz, weed, rock and roll and hip hop once again spun into a new way to stoke suburban fears of Kids These Days, it was also telling as to the priorities of the Western World- there was a lot of hubbub around Dave Grossman’s writings about the similarities between games and psychological techniques used by the US military to accustom people to killing; everyone of course screams about videogames, instead of whatever psy-ops shit the Army’s doing to its own people. You know, whatever. Point is, whatever worries there were to be had about Mortal Kombat, Night Trap and Doom, they were consumed seemingly by touchy-feely-liberal-feelgood parenting that has ended us up with a generation that sympathizes with white supremacists whenever they get punched in their stupid haircut, because “people are entitled to their own opinions.”

DOOM doesn’t time for such petty bullshit. DOOM is smarter than that, because DOOM went through tribulations to get to us in the form it did. DOOM knows about growing and becoming in touch with who you are. It wants you to understand this, and it endeavors to show you this, through the medium of Games and Anger.

DOOM was almost a bad Call of Duty game. Let’s not mince words as to whether or not a game that didn’t exist beyond prototyping would be bad or not, because, for one, the game sucking is a fairly common reason as to why projects get cancelled, and for another, who in the fuck wanted a Doom that played like Call of Duty? It was a bad idea, and only a little bit of footage ever made it out to the general public, that’s how hard they Alcatrazed it. The next iteration of New Doom Videogame was something that looked like Doom, and in fact strongly resembled the final product we know and love, but was slower and more indulgent. It swaggered, almost like it was a little too cool for its own name, taking its sweet time chainsawing imps in the manner of a technically sound but demo-focused martial artist, fluidly and unimpressively laying his staged opponents down on the mat. It was bland, and worries had simply only changed- Doom wasn’t being made into something everyone would hate, it was instead being made into something nobody could like.

Yeah, this isn't from a Homefront game, this is what Doom 4 was going to be at first.

Apparently, the team at id took matters personal. Whether from the frustrations of individuals who had been working on this shit too long, or simply the hunger of devs that wanted to be taken seriously while working on the newest iteration of a beloved series, something flipped between that showing and the final project. Maybe I’m reading into things too much, but hell, I do that a lot, it’s basically why you pay me what you do. But what I see is a game that itself got angry. Specifically, it got gnarly, hunched over, gritted teeth angry; it got clawing at your skin angry, tearing your clothes angry, ripping out your hair at the roots angry.

It got so angry, it tore itself apart and reassembled itself into the form it needed to be, at the exact moment it needed. It remembered what it was at its core, and with that as its template, ripped itself asunder into its ideal, like a werewolf of code, art and human effort. In this it found its clarity of purpose, as a game that is Tired of This Shit and Wants You to Get Angry About It. 

Anger is at the core of DOOM, and the clarity that comes with it. This could make it seem like a sinister thing, something unpleasant and destructive. This is because modern society has led all of us into decrying anger as something that is wrong, a “negative emotion” because it’s the opposite of happy, or perhaps more accurately, content. The state of being Content in matters is the cornerstone of Western Society, and specifically, the cornerstone that keeps people indecisive, unconcerned and oh-so-exploitable, which is of course why supremely stupid people have come to associate calm, emotionless discourse as being the most rational. Fact is, people are at their most decisive when angry, their most eager to act. This always doesn’t lead to the best decision being made, but it does, in fact, result in a decision being made, and usually quite quickly. People call these “rash decisions” and chide people with the tendency towards them; these are usually the same people who could feasibly die from old age in their indecision over flavors of toothpaste.

The thing about angry thinking is that it promotes a state of mind where a direct and simple course of action is the optimal route. This is what has led people to shooting yappy neighbor dogs instead of actually talking to the neighbors about their pet, which is undoubtedly a bad thing. But getting angry has a way of removing mental blocks on what you prioritize, with a tendency towards stripping away things you’d normally consider, like risk and consequence, but also doubt, uncertainty, fear, self-loathing and a bunch of other shit that weighs us down and makes us too heavy to move. It’s a rash decision to punch someone right in their fucking skull in public. However, when the “someone” is a nazi gloating over an ally’s victory, the punch is being thrown by a member of a leftist organization, and “public” is in front of an HD video camera capable of clearly recording the nazi’s tears of pain and fear as he runs away, things take on a different light. Things stop looking like the violent act of a man unhinged by his anger, and start looking more like an act of heroism, a reminder that yes, your man got his W, but guess what? We’re still here, and we’ve got hands. War on, motherfucker.

Take a nap, slim.

“Hands” was a thing this new game called DOOM showed off proudly. A new trailer, one with an atmospheric, horrific intro was capped off by having the skeletal face of a Revenant scream into the camera. Except the camera wasn’t a camera, it was a Doomguy, and one whose right hand immediately came loose from his side and made the skeleboy regret his past unlife decisions. That crunchy WHACK was the lead into the riff from Mick Gordon’s Harbinger, one of the more exultant and melodic tracks on a two and a half-hour progressive electronic metal foray into Hell that will introduce you to sounds you haven’t heard before. A shotgun discharges into a torso, and the torso explodes. Then several more torsos explode. A pinky demon had its eye gouged out with its own front tusk. Rip the spine out of the imp. Crush the head with your boot. Kill.

This was so far in the opposite direction from what was previously shown, it was ludicrous. This game hadn’t just thrown the leash, and it hadn’t just gone feral; it was like the devs finally realized what it needed to be, and that’s what gave it its life. It had grown a ferocious, unrestrained energy that was fast, loud, completely unrestrained and unashamed of its legacy of 90s excess and the sort of fandom in-jokes you that can only be cultivated across decades. It derived this energy from the anger on display in the game, that permeates the decision making of the player character and gives him, no joke, a maniacal charm that exudes mainly through simulated head motions and hand acting.

The anger isn’t superficial, either; it wouldn’t ring as true if there weren’t some people airing major frustrations through their work, specifically with the state of games themselves. In fact, DOOM itself seems to be telling us something in the manner of Lassie telling us another hapless child has been deposited once again at the bottom of Dimension Well. Our avatar, the Doomguy who fell through time, dimensions and sequels to reemerge as the demigod Doom Slayer in this new future-present, is never anything other than short-tempered and dismissive to other characters that try to talk to him or tell him what to do. Many cutscenes end with him simply shoving worthless things and interlopers out of his way, or him smashing things just so they’ll shut up at him. Go fuck yourself, cutscenes, I’m the one in control, not you.

Then there’s the fact that scattered throughout DOOM’s labyrinthine levels are artifacts of our own day to day discontent. It’s no mistake that there’s as many jokes about the awful ennui of working in an office as there is in DOOM, because DOOM has arrayed the corporate world as the real baddies; Hell is quite literally the thing they’re trying to make into fuel, it’s Evil, but more as an attribute, rather than a vocation. You find logs talking about how, upon being confronted by an unsanctioned demonic incursion, you should simply turn off any potentially damaging power tools and wait to be killed, as you can be just as useful to your boss in death as you were in life; logs about how someone decided using advanced technology to make dangerous, animalistic demons even more dangerous by giving them cloaking, and also, a mating pair escaped, and nobody can find them as they have cloaking. This is a game that knows capitalistic endeavor is greed driving progress through obstacles of mediocrity, poor life choices and environmental damage, and it did it all without explicitly saying any of that, or really even bothering to pause between setpieces of painting the walls red. Yet the message comes through loud and clear, because in these words, there is no coyness in the author's contempt for the subject matter, and no restraint in lampooning them.

More impressively, DOOM has the quality of reminding you, the player, what rage feels like without actually putting you in a frustrated frame of mind. My partner once commented that I was making a weird face while I was playing; I asked her if it was something like this:

This is the face you make when you love your work.

She said, “yeah, sort of.” When you consider the sensory overload of the game itself, dazzling, colourful and loud as armageddon, combined with the simplistic gameplay loop and the astonishing tactile feel of the combat and violence, it’s not hard to consider that this game is taking your brain to a different place than others would. This is because games today don’t feel as immediate as DOOM does, more a drip-feed of progression. You know how fast you run in DOOM? Picture any given modern shooter’s sprint speed, double it and make it infinite, that’s how fast. You know how long it takes you before you’re strong enough to punch a zombie’s head messily off in DOOM? From game start, about a second, all of which are spent getting the zombie’s head in arm’s reach. This game knows you’ve got things to do, which is why it does level gate shit, it just makes you find it in the level; you upgrade your suit by crushing globes of Argent Energy HELL POWER in your fist and upgrade your guns by punching the kits out of the end effectors of courier drones. Everything you do is a power fantasy, nothing is twattle. Nothing is an inconvenience you can’t just power past or punch out as you run by. You can do this. Hell can’t stop you. Stay in the fight, stay hungry, stay angry. From that anger, feel the pulse thud in your ears, feel the heat in your heart, feel the resistance of your jaw tightening against your cranium. Let it in, and let it do freaky stuff to your brain, make something you were conditioned to be adverse to and ashamed of feel great instead. More to the point, make it feel like a frame of mind where you’re in control, where everything else can only yell at you to stop, wait, don’t do this, think of the money, you’re doing a lot of damage, please stop, you’re ruining everything.

You don’t, because you’re angry, and more to the point, you’re right. You’re right in what you’re doing, and you’re right to feel the anger about it. Wrong gets done in the world; people don’t try to frack Hell, because that’s ridiculous. People just price-jack medications for terminal illnesses by exorbitant amounts, or try to explain that the slavery they engaged in was really just contracting indentured servants. Like the machine/man CEO of DOOM’s UAC, the people that do this are propped up by a system that makes them seem civil, sane and responsible, and that you better listen to them, because they know better. Because they don’t get angry, ever. Look at how content they are, and how clear their thinking is. Also, please don’t smash that focusing lens, they need it to clear out the impurities in the flow of harvested damned souls that prevent them from converting cleanly into electricity.

Then you stomp it, after mockingly taking careful examination of the housing, because in that moment, you are euphoric. Not because of the blessing of any phony Doom Slayer legend, but because it was your personal policy of “fuck immediately everyone that is not me” that allowed you to act in the greater good. There was no moral choice to be made in blowing the head off an imp with a shotgun; the solution didn’t need greater analysis, just a direct application. It’s because you had clarity of mind, the context to know that this wasn’t anything other than a problem, and you solved it. It may have been angry clarity and an angry solution, but it was a solution nonetheless. When you’re the type to be pinned in place by doubt, or spin in circles with endless indecisiveness, this isn’t just the sort of thing that feels good to cut to the chase of, it’s downright therapeutic. Because the fact of the matter is, if we all were in as clear in our emotions as DOOM is in its clarity in anger, we’d all be a lot farther along and a lot better off than we are right now.

Aha, another satisfied patron, thank you sir!