Tom Hanks And The Cart Life

First impressions are important for people, sure, but they might be even more important for things that can’t defend themselves or explain why they spilled two entire bottles of red wine on your new white leather couch. These things might be something like a movie or a video game wherein your attention must be grabbed immediately or you are likely to be lost forever. In person, social constructs limit you to at least some interaction, but with films and games, you can easily leave with a clear conscience five seconds into an encounter.

Aside from Up and its wholly depressing opening (one that is made all the more impactful precisely because of Carl’s passive lifestyle, one where he’s such a nonfactor that it makes their love story seem fantastical and thus more tragic by the end), The Terminal is a film that I feel could consist entirely of its first 10 or so minutes and still remain a viable movie. The Terminal, for those of you who haven’t seen it, stars Tom Hanks as Viktor Navorski, a Krakozhian national who gets stuck in JFK International Airport due to a revolution in his home country forcing US Customs to not allow Viktor to neither enter the United States nor go back home to Krakozhia. All he has is a single suitcase, a Planters peanuts can, and rough understanding of the English language. There’s Catherine Zeta-Jones, too, but she comes in later.

The opening sequence, though, is what matters here. In the introduction to the movie, Viktor arrives at JFK only to discover his passport is no longer valid. Confused, he soon learns from passing television news broadcasts that this is because his home country is thoroughly engulfed in a revolutionary war. He can’t go home and he can’t enter the US. He is stateless and, more importantly, lost and confused. It seems that he is surrounded by thousands upon thousands of people who do belong here or other countries, people who are on their way home or have a home to go back to. Everyone around him is driven by purpose and backed by a sense of belonging while he is paralyzed through loss of both of those things.

It’s a suffocating feeling of despair that is related to you through Tom Hanks’ superb acting, but also an innate empathetic understanding of what it means to be alone. Standing in the middle of the terminal, Viktor struggles to come to grips with the fact that he is suddenly without reason. More than that, no one is willing or handedly capable of communicating with him. He is alone and lacking the faculty to fix that (other than through his charm and friendly demeanor). The isolation is absolutely smothering in a metaphorical sense but it is also made literal by the fact that he can’t go two feet without bumping into another uncaring human being.

The game that immediately reminded me of the opening to The Terminal was a game that I recommended to you on Friday’s Weekend Play: Cart Life. Cart Life is an indie game that is described by its creator Richard Hofmeier as a retail simulator and is currently nominated for three awards at this year’s IGF Awards including the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. While you can choose from multiple characters such as Melanie Emberly, a coffee shop owner trying to prove she can provide for her daughter, and Vinny the bagel vendor, I started out as Andrus Poter. Andrus is a Ukrainian immigrant who has moved to the US in hopes of getting a fresh start as a newspaper stand owner. You’ll be managing both your life and your business in Cart Life and have to do everything from shower to unpack papers to making coffee to sell in the morning.

There is an intrinsic story to Cart Life, but it’s not told through traditional cutscenes and bits of exposition. Instead, it’s all told through the gameplay. How you function as a cart owner is how your character’s life will unfold. But you are dumped into the world as a fresh immigrant with little to nothing to go on. Andrus, in fact, learned English on the boat ride over to the United States, and the fact that you are living his immediately defeating but new life also makes you quickly empathetic to his situation: he’s lost and unknowing with no real purpose or home to speak of.

Owning this cart is not a purpose; it’s a step. What it’s a step towards has yet to be determined, which lends the entire ordeal a meandering sense of desperation. Where he sleeps is not his home; it’s a hotel, and a hotel is not a home. The only things familiar to him are the places and things he’s restricted to through necessity of surviving this new plight. Hell, he doesn’t even know what time it is until he buys a watch.

But even then, he is still alone. He is fighting against despair and apathy. It’s his despair, but it’s the world’s apathy towards him that his struggles marinate themselves in. He can’t readily communicate with others and he has an empty drive to do…something—anything! It’s impossible to pin down because Andrus himself has yet to nail the specifics. It’s just a sense that something must be done because he can’t do much of anything else.

If this sounds familiar, then you’ve been paying attention. This almost too perfectly reflects Viktor’s predicament in The Terminal. And it’s not just the overt stuff like the fact that they’re both foreigners stuck in the US with rudimentary English skills, but it’s about that battle against omnipresent apathy. No one much cares about this little fellow over here because everyone else has things to do. He may not have any especially pressing matters, but they do and that leaves them with little time or patience or energy to deal with unsolicited problems.

Andrus doesn’t know how to open a newspaper cart, he doesn’t know how to acquire inventory, and he doesn’t know how to do much of anything because no one is willing to teach him. Things are there for him, but it’s not given; it has to be taken, just as everything Viktor learns and gains in The Terminal is taken through his ambition to be more than a stateless foreigner. You are both fighting and playing into an expectation to work and wither. Get this guy a paper and show him your business license (hope you remember where you’re licensed to sell). Shuffle on home as your cough develops and is agitated. At the end of the day, you can see how completely broken he is by the way he just helplessly posts against the wall of his shower.

This may seem similar to Far Cry 2, but it’s not. This is vastly different—though still in the same camp—from the oppressive nature of Far Cry 2. That game was about an environment that constantly wanted to overpower you. It gave you nothing because it had nothing to offer; everything had already been looted from its dry, dusty corpse and is now being pointed in your direction as a warning. No, more than a warning: a promise. You were still isolated and left to your own devices, but it was a survival scenario of you against the environment. You are fighting against a tangible threat, whereas in Cart Life you are struggling against a concept of empty interactions and a desolate, night nonexistent personal life. The African savanna has got nothing on the apathy that fills every waking moment of Andrus’ day.

Depending on how you perform in the game, Cart Life may or may not mirror more of Viktor’s time in the airport, but the beginning of both the game and the movie draw the greatest comparisons. Viktor goes from hopeful as he arrives in a new land to completely deconstructed into a walking billboard of the weaknesses of the human condition. Andrus goes from charged fellow fresh off the boat to an immediately broken and lonely man unsure of what he’s doing and what he wants. Both The Terminal and Cart Life have incredibly powerful and meaningful openers. Experience them both. Be lonely for a while. Appreciate when you are not.

Far Cry 3’s Empowerment Over Oppression

Over the past few days, we’ve been going over the trends of the year from crowdfunding with Kickstarter to emerging stealth staples to callbacks to a sub-genre of games once long forgotten. But let’s take a break from all that. That broad overview is fun, but diving into the minutia of particular games is often a much more interesting proposition. In this case, we’ll break down one of this year’s best in Far Cry 3.

We’ll be doing so with the help of one of 2008’s most overlooked and most underrated titles in Far Cry 2.

An obvious choice, sure; sequels and franchise buddies often are used to compare one another. If lacking any other contemporaries, sibling entries into a series can often provide relative viewpoints from which you can quickly and accurately describe and compare new titles. Like how instead of taking a few hundred words to properly describe Batman: Arkham City, giving a quick summary of “it’s like Batman: Arkham Asylum but in a perpetually night-addled open-world city” works just as well (and probably better) if you go into the conversation having already playing the first game.

The problem—relatively speaking anyways, since this is only a problem in the fact that it becomes hard to use this summary shortcut—is that Far Cry 3 is about as similar to Far Cry 2 as chili dogs are to corn dogs; in the same vein and mostly using the same ingredients but also so vastly different that you can love one and hate the other without coming across as a lunatic.

Which isn’t really all that surprising given the massive departure Far Cry 2 was from the first Far Cry. The original game is so far the only Far Cry game to be developed by Crytek while the sequels have been developed and published by Ubisoft Montreal, so the absolute hard left made from FC1 to FC2 should inform the lack of shock going into FC3. In fact, Crysis is basically considered the flagship franchise of the CryEngine developers, not to mention the one that plays most heavily into the Cry-pun shenanigans (2013 will feature the first titles from the studio that don’t do that with Warface, Ryse, and, strangely enough, Homefront 2).

So why bring up FC2 at all? Because despite all of its differences, FC2 and FC3 are strikingly similar games. Chris Remo of the Idle Thumbs podcast/Double Fine Productions described it best: it’s like they’re both the same dish but made with completely different recipes. So say you and I both set out to make pancakes, but you throw in some blueberries and granola and top it off with a fruit compote and whipped cream while I make mine chocolate chip with strawberry chucks and drown it all in syrup and butter. Both are still pancake dishes but so vastly different and appeal to completely different people.

For all its faults, FC2 was severely ambitious. It aimed so remarkably high in so many ways that I’m surprised it even came out as cohesive and compelling as it does. Everything about it screamed one word at you for its 25-hour run: oppression.

Nothing ever felt easy because nothing ever was easy. You are dropped in media res with a mission in Central Africa to assassinate a gun runner known as The Jackal. Well, you never get around to doing that because you pass out from malaria, only to awaken to find The Jackal standing over you, quoting Nietzsche and waving around a menacing machete. He eventually lets you live, but this opening sequence sets the mood for the whole game: you are not in control.

The Jackal is quoting Nietzsche’s Beyond Good And Evil, a book by the famed philosopher that introduces his “will to power,” the concept that the single most prominent drive in human beings is ambition and the desire to impose superiority and dominion. It rejects knowledge, truth, and free will and instead accepts a place beyond good and evil.

And that’s where you live in FC2; you live beyond good and evil and simply exist in this world that doesn’t care about any of that. The land is dusty and empty yet full of life; you are afflicted with malaria, introducing a controlling construct in your life that is beyond your command; weapons degrade with use, forcing the notion that your grasp of the world weakens with time down your throat; and fire is an enemy unseen until it springs up in your face, uncontrollable and unquenchable so that it destroys without prejudice. You are in the most desolate, depressing, and manically oppressive world you’ve ever been in and you are choking, drowning in an arid wasteland of death and flame without a single drop of water in sight.

The mere act of loading up FC2 requires a moment or two of psyching yourself up, preparing yourself to be overpowered and overrun with problems, but it’s such a cohesive and amazingly realized milieu that it’s impossible not to admire and, on some masochistic level, enjoy it. Everything is out of your control and you rely on so much else in the world to survive (new weapons, medication, etc.), but at the same time so many people are relying on you to fight the oppression and fight The Jackal. It is Nietzsche’s will to power in video game form. There is no right and there is no wrong, two constructs of a fabled universal morality, and instead there is just you fighting for agency in this world.

And all of that heavy gravitas somehow came from the same studio that has turned out FC3. By most counts, FC3 is a better game. What that means in the definitive sense is obviously up for debate, but it works for now to say that it is a lot more fun to play. The guns shoot better, you move better, getting around and doing stuff is less frustrating, it looks better, the story is more coherent, etc. In essence, FC3 is much more what you would expect when you say “video game” to someone.

It is also the complete opposite of what you had experienced in FC2. Whereas that was depressing and nigh difficult to even consider playing, this sequel is a splendid breeze. Guns don’t degrade, you don’t have to deal with malaria, you seemingly run at Doom-like speeds, stealth actually works (and can be quite tense), enemies don’t respawn the moment you turn around, outposts unlock fast travel and weapons lockers, health items can be crafted and used in an instant from commonly found plants in the world, weapons loadouts are yours to customize, and so on and so on.

Not only is FC3 the complete antithesis of FC2 in terms of how it treats the player with its gameplay, but it also is the thematic counter as well. While FC2 was about making the player push himself in the face of adversity to gain power and gain influence over this crumbling spit of Central African land, FC3 is all about losing yourself (via a Lewis Carroll quote, the second from Ubisoft Montreal of the year!) as that power is placed in your untested hands. It is about earned—scratching and clawing as you are dragged down to grab on to anything that will save you—versus given as the Rakyat Tatau grows and grows on your previously unmarked arm. Your knowledge and abilities are gifted to you through the supernatural connection of the native people and native lands. Simply compare the environments, a hopelessly dry, cracked, landlocked mass instead of a lush tropical island, and you can intuitively understand the difference.

Along with the vehicles for the delivery of these themes (gameplay versus narrative), this presents the most striking comparison of dread against wonder. In FC2, there was never any wonder, never any hope. Around every corner was dread and a sense of despair. Driving to the next mission location was never an inspiring moment and instead every second was another spent considering turning around and hanging out under that nice shady tree. Regret and doubt fueled every move, but fuel like sugar in a gas tank would drive a car, it doesn’t really help anyone not looking for catastrophe, and that is all FC2‘s barren lands has to offer.

But everything in FC3 inspires wonder. Every road leads to a hidden cave or underwater treasure. Every hill reveals a greater mountain cresting into view. All you do is discover and mine for joy. Nothing poses a challenge to you (well, save for those god damn tigers, but I suppose that’s fair) and everything is available to you. If you want to take over that outpost, you do that and it’s yours. If you want to see more of the map, you climb that radio tower and you see it all. If you want more animal skins, if you want more weapons, if you want to carry more ammo, if you want this or if you want that, it’s all possible. Hang gliding? Sure. Jet skis? Why not!

Needless to say, I have a lot of love for both of those games (and a little for FC1, but that’s a different story altogether), but the reasons for loving one is so vastly different from the reasons for loving the other. They’re both the same dish of a first-person, open-world shooter, but their recipes are so insanely opposed that I wouldn’t even consider eating one after the other; it just wouldn’t make sense. But the contrast makes Far Cry 3 stand out all the more, from the sublime way it plays to the odd, interesting turns in the narrative. From oppression to empowerment, Far Cry makes the jump. But will you jump with it down that rabbit hole?