Epic Games is a privately owned company and does not disclose its earnings. But on a Monday morning in late April, while standing in Epic’s parking lot, at Crossroads Corporate Park, in Cary, North Carolina, awaiting the arrival of Cliff Bleszinski, the company’s thirty-three-year-old design director, I realized that my surroundings were their own sort of Nasdaq. Ten feet away was a red Hummer H3. Nearby was a Lotus Elise, and next to it a pumpkin-orange Porsche. Many of the cars had personalized plates: “PS3CODER” (a reference to Sony’s PlayStation3), “EPICBOY,” “GRSOFWAR.”
The last is shorthand for Gears of War, a shooter game, which Epic released in November, 2006, for play on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console. Gears of War was quickly recognized as the first game to provide the sensually overwhelming experience for which the console, launched a year earlier, had been designed. Gears won virtually every available industry award, and was the 360’s best-selling game for nearly a year; it has now sold five million copies. On November 7th, a sequel, Gears of War 2, will be released; its development, long rumored, was not confirmed until this past February, when, at the Game Developers’ Conference, in San Francisco, Bleszinski made the announcement after bursting through an onstage partition wielding a replica of one of Gears of War’s signature weapons—an assault rifle mounted with a chainsaw bayonet.
Despite the rapid growth of the video-game industry—last year, sales were higher than either box-office receipts or DVD sales—designers are largely invisible within the wider culture. But Bleszinski, who is known to his many fans and occasional detractors as CliffyB, tends to stand out among his colleagues. Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby’s “Smartbomb,” a book about the industry, recounts the peacockish outfits and hair styles he has showcased at industry expos over the years. In 2001, he affected the stylings of a twenty-first-century Tom Wolfe, with white snakeskin shoes and bleached hair. In 2002, he took to leather jackets and an early-Clooney Caesar cut. By 2003, he was wearing long fur-lined coats, his hair skater-punk red. In recent years, he let his hair grow shaggy, which gave him the mellow aura of a fourth Bee Gee.
Bleszinski drove into Epic’s parking lot in a red Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder, the top down despite an impending rainstorm. His current haircut is short and cowlicked, his bangs twirled up into a tiny moussed horn. He was wearing what in my high school would have been called “exchange-student jeans”—obviously expensive but slightly the wrong color and of a somehow non-American cut. Beneath a tight, fashionably out-of-style black nylon jacket was a T-shirt that read “TECHNOLOGY!” His sunglasses were of the oversized, county-sheriff variety, and each of his earlobes held a small, bright diamond earring. He could have been either a boyish Dolce & Gabbana model or a small-town weed dealer.
Bleszinski suggested that we go to a local diner. He professes an aversion to mornings, and to Monday mornings especially, but he seemed dauntingly alert. “This car’s like a wakeup call,” he said. “By the time I get to work, my heart’s pumping and I’m ready to crank.” Before we were even out of the parking lot, we were travelling at forty-five miles an hour. At a stoplight, Bleszinski exchanged waves with the driver of an adjacent red Ferrari—another Epic employee. When we hit a hundred miles per hour on a highway entrance ramp, Bleszinski announced, “Never got one ticket!” On the highway, he slowed to seventy-five. “One of my jobs in life,” Bleszinski said, cutting over to an exit, “is to make this look a little cooler.” By “this,” he meant his job.
Bleszinski’s brand of mild outrageousness—the “Cliffycam” on his blog page, which, some years ago, allowed visitors to observe him online while he worked; the photographs of him on his MySpace page alongside the splatter-film director Eli Roth and the porn stars Jenna Jameson and Ron Jeremy—qualifies him as exceptional in an industry that is, as he says, widely assumed to be a preserve inhabited by pale, withdrawn, molelike creatures. There is some truth to this stereotype: most game designers are not like CliffyB. But neither, really, is Bleszinski. The nickname, he told me, was bestowed on him by some “jock kid,” when he was a small, shy teen-ager, and was meant as a taunt. Bleszinski took the name and fashioned a tougher persona around it, but, after spending a little time with him, one has the sensation of watching someone observing himself. Video games are founded upon such complicated transference. Gamers are allowed, for a time, all manner of ontological assumptions. They can also terminate their assumed personalities whenever they wish, and, lately, Bleszinski has been asking game-industry journalists if they might not “sit on” the CliffyB moniker “for a while.”
Bleszinski was born in Boston, in 1975, eleven years to the day after the birth of his oldest brother, Greg. His father, whom Bleszinski describes as a “very stressed-out guy,” was an engineer for Polaroid. The Bleszinskis were a close family. His mother, Karyn, told me, “We always sat down at the dinner table together. That was always important to my husband and me.” One of Bleszinski’s earliest and strongest memories is the smell of popcorn spreading thickly throughout the house after he had gone to bed, which convinced him that his “parents were having a great time and throwing a party” without him. In truth, this was merely his father’s pre-bedtime ritual: over this nightly bowl of popcorn he would often melt an entire stick of butter. In 1990, when Bleszinski was fifteen, his forty-seven-year-old father died when an aortic aneurysm ruptured while he was golfing. Bleszinski still remembers what game he was playing when he learned of his father’s death: the Nintendo game Blaster Master. He never played it again.
“He took it very hard,” Karyn told me. She described Bleszinski as her “unique child,” noting that he was “the most difficult, but he was difficult because he was the most inquisitive. He’d take apart whatever you got for him.” After her husband’s death, Karyn moved the family to the Los Angeles suburbs, where she worked as a restaurant manager. In 1991, she bought a computer for her son. “I’m not that technical of a guy,” Bleszinski told me. “I started off programming my own games and doing the art for them, but I was a crappy coder and a crappier artist. But I didn’t want to let that stop me. I was going to kick and scream and claw my way into the business any way possible.” He thinks that it was perhaps only the death of his father that allowed him to do this. “If he hadn’t passed, he probably would have made me go to Northeastern and become an engineer,” he said.
In 1992, a year after Bleszinski had taught himself the rudiments of computer programming, he sent a game submission to Tim Sweeney, the twenty-two-year-old C.E.O. of Epic Megagames, who had recently dropped out of a mechanical-engineering program at the University of Maryland. (Epic’s original name, Sweeney told me, was “a big scam” to make it look legitimate. “When you’re this one single person in your parents’ garage trying to start a company, you want to look like you’re really big,” he said.) Sweeney still remembers Bleszinski’s submission, a P.C. game called Dare to Dream, in which a boy gets trapped, appropriately enough, inside his own dreamworld. “At that time,” Sweeney said, “we’d gotten sixty or seventy game submissions from different people and we went ahead with five of them, and Cliff was one of the best.” Once his game was in development, Bleszinski became more involved with the company. Sweeney said, “We’d have four or five different projects in development with different teams, and every time one started to reach completion we’d send it off to Cliff, and he’d write off his big list of what’s good about this game and what needs to be fixed. Cliff’s lists kept growing bigger and bigger.” Bleszinski was only seventeen. When I asked Sweeney if he had had any reservations about entrusting his company’s fate to a teen-ager whose driver’s-license lamination was still warm, Sweeney said, “That’s what the industry was like.”
Upon its release, Dare to Dream, in Bleszinski’s words, “bombed.” His second game for Epic, released a year later, featured what he calls a “Rambo rabbit” named Jazz, who carried a large gun and hunted frenetically for intergalactic treasure. Jazz Jackrabbit, which imported to a P.C. platform innovations previously exclusive to Sega and Nintendo consoles, made Bleszinski’s reputation. Epic had begun as a company churning out somewhat rechauffé fare—pinball simulators, clone-ish retreads, an uninspired but popular game known as Unreal Tournament. It was Bleszinski, in no small part, who filled Epic’s parking lot with sports cars.
At the diner, I asked Bleszinski which games had most influenced him. Super Mario Brothers, he said, “is where it really kicked into high gear.” Indeed, the first issue of Nintendo Power, published in 1988, listed the high scores of a handful of Super Mario devotees, the thirteen-year-old Bleszinski’s among them. “There’s something about the whole hidden element to Mario, where you jump and hit your head on a block and just out of nowhere secret things would appear,” Bleszinski said. “They made you feel like a kid in the woods.”
Issued in 1985, Super Mario Brothers was a game of summer-vacation-consuming scope and unprecedented inventiveness. It was among the first video games to suggest that it might contain a world. It was also hallucinogenically strange. Why did mushrooms make Mario grow larger? Why did flowers give Mario the ability to spit fire? Why did bashing Mario’s head against bricks sometimes produce coins? And why was Mario’s enemy, Bowser, a saurian, spiky-shelled turtle?
In film and literature, such surrealistic fantasy typically occurs at the outer edge of experimentalism, but early video games depended on symbols for the simple reason that the technological limitations of the time made realism impossible. Mario, for instance, wore a porkpie hat not for aesthetic reasons but because hair was too difficult to render. Bleszinski retains affection for many older games, but he says, “If you go back and play the majority of old games, they really aren’t very good.” He suspects that what made them seem so good at the time was the imaginative involvement of players: “You wanted to believe, you wanted to fill in the gaps.”
Games like Gears of War, which offer literal representations of what the gamer “sees” and “does,” differ so profoundly from a game like Super Mario Brothers that they appear to share as many commonalities as a trilobite does with a Great Dane. The new games fill in all the gaps, and they have also done away with many of the symbolic prerequisites of video-game play, such as the number of “lives” a player has, the score, health bars, and so on. In Gears, there is no score. The player gets a single life; if it is forfeited, one must start again at the nearest passed checkpoint. The health bar is invisible; the only indication of one’s injury status is a gradually reddening icon, known as the Crimson Omen. Super Mario requires an ability to recognize patterns, considerable hand-eye coördination, and quick reflexes. Gears requires the ability to think tactically and make subtle judgments based on scant information, a constant awareness of multiple variables (ammunition stores, enemy weaknesses) as they change throughout the game, and the spatial sensitivity to control one’s movement through a space in which the “right” direction is not always apparent. Anyone who plays modern games such as Gears does not so much learn the rules as develop a kind of intuition for how the game operates. Often, there is no single way to accomplish a given task; improvisation is rewarded. Older games, like Super Mario, punish improvisation: you live or die according to their algebra alone.
Gears is largely the story of a soldier, Marcus Fenix, who, as the game begins, has been imprisoned for abandoning his comrades (who are known as COGs, or Gears) in order to save his father, who dies before Fenix can reach him. He is released because a fourteen-year war with a tunnel-using alien army known as the Locusts has depleted the human army’s ranks. This much we learn in the first two minutes of the game; the next ten hours or so are an ingeniously paced march through frequent and elaborately staged firefights with Locusts, Wretches, Dark Wretches, Corpsers, Boomers, three blind and terrifying Berserkers, and the vile General Raam. Along the way, players can treat themselves to the singular experience of using the chainsaw bayonets on their Lancer assault rifles to cut their enemies in half, during which the in-game camera is gleefully splashed with blood. (Gears is one of the most violent games ever made, but Bleszinski maintains that it contains “very much a laughable kind of violence,” like “watching a melon explode in a Gallagher show.” Still, one act of violence in Gears 2 is intimate and upsetting enough to have given one of the designers pause, until Bleszinski and others convinced him that the act grew out of a necessary dramatic trajectory.)
The story line and the narrative dilemmas of Gears are not very sophisticated. What is sophisticated about Gears is its mood. The world in which the action takes place is a kind of destroyed utopia; its architecture, weapons, and characters are chunky and oversized but, somehow, never cartoonish. Most video-game worlds, however well conceived, are essenceless. Gears felt dirty and inhabited, and everything from the mechanics of its gameplay to its elliptical backstory was forcefully conceived, giving it an experiential depth rare in the genre.
The novelist Nathan Englander, a fan of the game, cites its third-person viewpoint, in which the player looks over the shoulder of the character being controlled, as a key to its success. “In literary terms,” Englander told me, “it’s a close-second-person shooter. It’s Jay McInerney and Lorrie Moore territory. You’re both totally involved and totally watching.” As for the collapsed architecture and blown-open spaces of the Gears world, Englander said, “There’s the hospital from ‘Blindness’ and the house from ‘The Ghost Writer,’ and I know that beautiful, ruined world of Gears as well as either of those.”
Much of the resonance of Gears can be directly attributed to the character of Fenix. Video-game characters tend to be emptily iconic. Pac-Man, for instance, is some sort of notionally symbolic being. Mario (who was originally known only as Jumpman) is merely the vessel of the player’s desired task. Halo’s Master Chief is notable mainly for his golden-visored unknowableness. Fenix, encased within armor so thick that his arms and legs resemble hydrants, his head covered by a black bandanna, and his eyes as tiny as BBs, is different. He shows constant caution and, occasionally, fear. Although he can dive gracefully, his normal gait has the lumbering heaviness of an abandoned herd animal. His face is badly scarred, and his voice (excellently rendered by the actor John DiMaggio, who also provided the voice of Bender on Matt Groening’s “Futurama”) is a three-packs-a-day growl, less angry than exhausted. Unlike the protagonists of many shooters, Fenix rarely seems particularly eager to kill anything. The advertising campaign for the first Gears was centered on a strangely affecting sixty-second spot in which Fenix twice flees from enemies, only to be cornered by a Corpser, a monstrous arachnoid creature, on which he opens fire. But it was the soundtrack—Gary Jules’s spare, mournful cover of the 1982 Tears for Fears song “Mad World”—that gave the spot its harsh-tender dissonance. This helped signal that Fenix was something that few video-game characters had yet managed to be: disappointedly adult.
When I asked about the melancholy at the core of Gears, Bleszinski said, “I was never geeky enough for the geeks and I was never cool enough for the cool people. I’ve always been in that weird purgatory.” That slight feeling of identity crisis persists. A few years ago, Bleszinski divorced his high-school sweetheart. “I woke up one day, and had the two Labs, and the house in the suburbs, and I’m, like, What the hell am I doing here?” he told me. His mother told me that she loves watching him introduce his games on YouTube. “I can also tell he’s nervous, but only a mother would know that,” she said.
Bleszinski admitted that much of Gears is, in its way, autobiographical. Its look and its aesthetic, for example, were influenced by his first trip to London, where he climbed to the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral and, with “a shitty little camera,” snapped a picture of a yolky sun setting over the Thames, the sky streaked with nursery blues and pinks. Bleszinski’s London photograph is one of the reasons that much of Gears takes place in twilight—a lighting condition prized by cinematographers but comparatively neglected in video games. Bleszinski asked his artists to create a “sci-fi” hybrid of London and Washington, D.C., but advised them to keep the futuristic well balanced with the historical. The big flaw in most depictions of the future, he says, “is that they always forget to leave in the past. Everyone always assumes that the entire world would just explode and be rebuilt in this kind of super-futuristic style. I still see old cars from the thirties and forties around, right next to things that look like they’re from the year 2000. It’s that mix that makes things interesting.”
Gears also contains what Bleszinski calls a “going home” narrative: “There’s a sublevel to Gears that so many people missed out on because it’s such a big testosterone-filled chainsaw-fest. Marcus Fenix goes back to his childhood home in the game. I dream about my house in Boston, basically every other night. It was up on a hill.” In Gears of War, the fatherless Fenix’s manse is on a hill, too, and getting to its front door involves some of the most harried and ridiculously frantic fighting in the game. When I told Bleszinski that Fenix’s homecoming was one of my favorite levels in Gears, he asked if I knew where its title, “Imaginary Place,” had come from. I thought for a moment. Earlier, he had made a nicely observed reference to the novelist Cormac McCarthy, and I was attuned to the possibility of an altogether unexpected window into his imagination. Was it from Auden? No. It was a reference to a line from Zach Braff’s film “Garden State,” in which “family” is defined as “a group of people who miss the same imaginary place.” When you start to peel back the layers of the Gears world, Bleszinski told me, “there’s a lot of sadness there.”
In addition to the prevailing mood of wistful savagery, the singularity of Gears of War resides in what designers describe as its “feel”—the way that the game’s mechanics are orchestrated to create both a compelling experience for the player and the illusion of an internally consistent world. The importance of this sensation is something that Bleszinski has made his special focus and passion. “I’m looking for a fun core-loop of what you’re doing for thirty seconds over and over again,” he told me. “I want it to grab me quick and fast. I want it to have an interesting game mechanic, but I also want it to be a fascinating universe that I want to spend time in, because you’re spending often dozens of hours in this universe.” Rod Fergusson, an Epic senior producer who, with Bleszinski, oversees the continuity of the Gears universe, told me that Bleszinski is “a designer by feel” who conceives of games in “big picture” terms “yet tweaks the smallest things.” He told me, “If you look at people who tried to copy Gears’s mechanics, they don’t have that guy doing that hands-on, touchy-feely way of designing. They kind of get the broad strokes, but they don’t get the little detaily things.”
An example of this is Gears’s famous “cover” system, an innovation of Bleszinski’s, which demands that the player move with chess-like care and efficiency around the battle space, using walls, doorways, barricades, and the scorched husks of vehicles as cover. Bleszinski told me that a paintball match had impressed upon him the ludicrousness of how most shooters operated, with players running around in the open, strafing their enemies and jumping to avoid being shot. “Getting hit by a paintball freaking hurts like hell,” he said. It occurred to him that a shooter based on the idea of taking cover would be a more realistic and primal experience. A 2003 game called kill.switch was the first game to attempt a cover system, but Bleszinski streamlined and augmented the concept. In Gears, an exposed player is actively punished by the game, as the damage inflicted by enemy bullets and explosives spikes nastily whenever cover is abandoned. Bleszinski became fixated on making sure that, when cover is taken, the right amount of dust is kicked up against the controlled character’s back and that the character’s grunt has just the right timbre and volume. In this way, the reward for seeking cover becomes subliminally sensory.
The most frequently imitated aspect of Gears is a feature known as the “roadie run,” so named for the crouch into which a player’s hustling character lowers himself, and which Bleszinski thought resembled a rock-show roadie’s attempt to move discreetly across the stage. While in roadie-run mode, the in-game camera goes jitteringly handheld and fish-eyed and sinks into a miasma of dust. It is difficult to see exactly where one is going, and the over-all effect is that of intense panic. Bleszinski calls it “the Falluja follow-cam,” and likens it to the viewpoint of an embedded journalist. Yet in roadie run the player is travelling only one and a half times faster than normal. The feature is both a brilliant distortion of perspective and a cunning approximation of the confusion of combat.
When a tech company begins to refer to its headquarters as a “campus,” a certain threshold of success has been attained. Microsoft and Google both have campuses that rival those of many academic institutions. Epic is still a small company, relatively speaking, but it recently bought a neighboring lot and will soon begin construction of another building, which will make it, in tech-industry terms, an official “campus.” Already, it has a gym, a large motion-capture studio for its in-game animation, a small arcade, a basketball court, and a walk-in closet filled with free snacks and drinks whose total caloric worth must be somewhere in the low millions.
The Epic offices display a kind of low-key egalitarianism. None of the parking spaces are reserved, there are no cubicles, and window and corner offices have been somewhat heedlessly assigned. I glimpsed one Epic employee, who appeared to be, roughly, twelve years old, typing away at his desk in a window office, while Gears’s senior producer and the company’s senior gameplay designer toiled in small, windowless rooms. Bleszinski himself shares his office with two other Epic employees.
If one were to commission a very bright and unusually tasteful adolescent to design his ideal workplace, Epic’s headquarters would probably be the result. Its many blacks, grays, and corrugated-metal surfaces might best be labelled Bachelor Futurist, even though, by now, most of Epic’s male employees wear wedding rings. The office furnishings come in three styles: Neo-Living Room (easy-rocking, lever-activated recliners), Casual Satanist (black leather couches), and Romper Room Gothic (beanbag chairs). The aroma of lingering adolescence carries over into the mementos, knickknacks, and emblems that Epic’s employees use to decorate their offices. Tim Sweeney, with the earnestness of a teen-age boy, has a prominent Ferrari flag hanging in his office—though Sweeney, unlike most teen-age boys, actually owns a Ferrari. Chris Perna, the art director of Gears 2, displays on one of the shelves in his office a foot-high silver-cast Darth Vader Pez dispenser. Bleszinski’s office resembles a toy-store yard sale. These are boyish affectations, certainly, but boyishness is the realm in which these men seek inspiration, not a code by which they live.
A Microsoft employee who works closely with Epic described the company as having a “band dynamic.” Staff turnover is low, and many of Epic’s most senior employees have been friends for more than a decade. This does not seem a very long time until one sits in on an Epic meeting and realizes that anyone over the age of thirty-five achieves the temporal stature of Methuselah. Epic’s recent growth is regarded with wary gratitude by many of its employees, though some miss the old days, when, as Sweeney put it, “we were just a bunch of kids who had some cool ideas and were doing neat things.”
When surrounded by his colleagues and discussing the gravities of gameplay, Bleszinski discards his self-consciously laid-back manner, and the precision of his gaming mind quickly becomes apparent. A colleague told me that Bleszinski’s “huge strength is his basic ability to just get it—pick something up and give you a one-minute usability report.”
It is unusual for any game company to allow an outsider access to its meetings, for fear of the game’s features being prematurely disclosed. While discussing Gears 2’s new “crowd” system, which will allow an unprecedented number of individually functioning enemies to flock across the battle space, Bleszinski mentioned how excited he was to open fire upon them with a certain weapon. Within minutes, I was pulled aside by a Microsoft representative and informed that this weapon’s existence would not be confirmed until later in the summer and could I please refrain from mentioning it. The gaming media is largely made up of obsessive enthusiasts, and the carefully planned release of information tantalizes them with the promise of insider knowledge. “How do you reach the core?” Jeff Bell, who used to oversee global marketing for Microsoft’s interactive-entertainment division, asked me. “How?” I asked. “Secrets,” he said, his eyes sparkling in the manner of a supervillain announcing his plan to poison the Eastern Seaboard’s water supply. The game industry is more or less leakproof, and possesses a strange kind of innocence: it guards its secrets as guilelessly as a boy might hide from his mother—but not from his brother and sister—the extraterrestrial living in his bedroom.
I was warned, before attending a play-through of one of Gears 2’s unfinished levels, that it was still “janky.” Although the level was fully voice-acted, it was only partially scored, and many sound effects had yet to be added. Some of the virtual lighting was not yet functional, and the onscreen Fenix flickered. From time to time, the game crashed altogether. Nonetheless, we watched the level’s lead designer guide Fenix through what looked to be an enthusiastically mortared office building. Ahead, in the shadows, numerous monsters scrambled—the goosebumpy Gears warning that a violent engagement was somewhere ahead. By the third iteration of this, Bleszinski was shaking his head: “Enough monster foreplay.” When Fenix and a comrade had to walk a bomb to a door in need of obliteration, Bleszinski said that they should be moving “ten to fifteen per cent faster.” When the play-through was complete, he said that too much of the level involved going into one room to hit a switch that activated a door in another. The otherwise superlative Grand Theft Auto series is particularly afflicted with this mouse-coaxed-through-a-maze problem, and Bleszinski’s only complaint about the G.T.A. games, which he admires, is that they can sometimes “feel like work.” This emphasis on making players aware of why they were choosing certain paths without being reminded that their choice was essentially illusory recalled the “vivid and continuous dream” that John Gardner once spoke of concerning fiction.
In a discussion of another level of the game, known as “Hospital,” Bleszinski, sitting by himself on a long couch, wondered if, in the online multiplayer version of the level, which pits players against each other, a building’s sprinkler system could be used to extinguish the pilot light of an opponent’s flamethrower. “Wouldn’t that be cool?” he asked. A similar moment resulted in one of Gears 1’s most notorious features. One day, late in the game’s production, Bleszinski expressed his frustration at having to finish off downed enemies by shooting them. “You know,” he said, “I just want to stomp on his head!” From this came the game’s gratuitously fatal coup de grâce: the “curb stomp,” whereby a player crushes his opponent’s skull beneath the anvil of an enormous metal boot. Rod Fergusson later told me, “I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the next two weeks, there’s a hallway with a sprinkler system that puts out the pilot light of the flamethrower.”
Discussion at Epic is collegial and to the point; modern game design is too complex and collaborative for any individual to feel proprietary about his own ideas. At one meeting I attended, a disagreement about weaponry was swiftly resolved. “There’s no direct counter to the flamethrower,” Ray Davis, the game’s lead programmer, pointed out, with exasperation. A colleague, who had obviously heard this before, sighed. “I don’t know. I think it’s a superweapon,” he said. Then someone else observed that the boomshot, another devastatingly fatal weapon, had no direct counter, either, and Davis recognized with a grin that his argument had been destroyed. Bleszinski took the opportunity to raise a singular annoyance of the boomshot, familiar to anyone with experience of the multiplayer version of Gears: the impossibility of knowing whether someone you are charging toward happens to be carrying it. “The boomshot needs something to warn you your opponent’s got it,” Bleszinski said. He suggested adding small glowing lights around its four barrels, which everyone agreed was a fine solution. Davis, who works most directly with the programmers and was therefore most familiar with what remained janky, brought up the “inconsistent, unfun lethality” of a certain kind of grenade. This segued into Gears 2’s inclusion of ink grenades, which create a highly damaging toxic cloud—the proper gameplay use of which no one, so far, had been able to decide.
Until very recently, almost no literature was devoted to game design, and what there was tended to be quickly made obsolete by the speed of technological developments. After the day’s final meeting had ended, I realized that, for the two decades that I had been playing games, I had unwittingly been at the mercy of the constantly changing orthodoxies of game design. I knew that some games seemed more fun than others, but I would have struggled to explain why. Bleszinski and the other Epic designers came to this form as children. Growing up playing games, they absorbed the governing logic of the medium, but no institutions existed for them to transform what they learned into a methodology. Gradually, though, they turned a hobby into a creative profession that is now as complex as any other. They have established the principles of a grammar of fun.
Before leaving Epic, I was invited to take part in the daily playtest, which occupies an hour or two of every afternoon. That day, the team was testing the multiplayer modes of Gears 2. Games that feature multiplayer options have proved to be the Xbox 360’s most popular, a fact that is easily explained. One of the most common criticisms of video games is that they can wrap those who play in enforced and occasionally deranging solitude. But to take part in a multiplayer game is to give a game new life every time one plays, because one is matched against human players, whose ingenuity and fallibility no computer can hope to equal, and because one can exchange with one’s fellow-players advice, taunts, and congratulations. A dozen Epic employees gathered in the test lab and signed in to the individual consoles that lined the walls. The battle would pit one side of the room against the other. I was assigned my slot and selected my avatar—a Drone Locust.
Testing is among the more consuming aspects of modern game design. I was told that Gears 2 would be subject to roughly forty thousand hours of testing before its release. This is an impressive number—until one realizes that the first forty thousand people who buy and play Gears 2 will, in one hour, equal that amount of testing. Gears 1 was released with a few bugs—instances in which the game behaves in a way that was not intended—a fact that many at Epic remain bitterly embarrassed about, even though it is nearly impossible to completely eliminate bugs from any game. Testing of multiplayer modes involves something more sociological than purely technical assessment: learning what tendencies a given environment fosters. If there are places to hide, they must always have a fatal weakness. If a particularly powerful weapon is hidden somewhere, it must be difficult and risky to reach. If a large number of players are being killed at a certain location, the game designers must ask themselves why, and decide whether to correct for this. The aim is to eliminate all ineradicable advantages, but this goal is seldom attained. Two weeks after the release of Gears 1, Bleszinski told me, “I’d go online and get completely destroyed by everybody.”
In our first multiplayer game, which was called Guardian, one had to kill the opposing team’s leader and all those who protect him. By the end, a teammate and I happened to be the only survivors (I achieved this status largely by hiding), and we encountered Bleszinski crouching behind a stack of sandbags. We decided to charge. Bleszinski popped out from cover and, with a shotgun, expertly exploded the head of my teammate before beating me to death as I rounded the edge of his hiding place. Bleszinski ended the game with twenty-one kills; I had three.
The next contest, then known as Meat-flag but since renamed, amounted to a game of capture the flag—though the flag was, bracingly, a human being. In this match, I was simultaneously chainsawed to death by three people, a spectacle that everyone in the room claimed never to have seen before, in all their hours of play. Our final game was called Wingman, which is played in pairs. Bleszinski and I buddied up, and I shouted across the room to him for some general guidance. “Basically,” he said, “kill anyone who doesn’t look like you. Our foreign policy.”
I fared miserably again, and pride compelled me to point out that I had beaten Gears 1 on its most challenging difficulty level. No one was listening, and Bleszinski stood up. “Now’s the fun part,” he said. “Figure out what’s a bug and what’s not a bug.” He conferred in a huddle with the other designers about what to enter into the defect-tracking database. “You tell people what you do for a living,” Bleszinski said later, “and they’re like, ‘Oh, you play video games for a living.’ No, I play a game that’s not as fun as it should be, that’s broken, until it’s no longer broken. Then I give it to other people to have fun with.” ♦
