Doom Loses Its Edge
Once upon a time, Doom was the biggest villain in video games. Released in installments over the early internet beginning in 1993, the game about shooting tons of demons on Mars was a sensation like no other, popularizing the now-common first-person-shooter genre and marking a tectonic shift in the rapidly growing medium. This also made it a target: After reports that the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre were avid fans of the game, the moral panic over whether or not violent video games inspire real-life violence reached a fever pitch. It was already controversial for being a game that put a (big fucking) gun in your hand and lo-fi heavy metal in your ears as you mowed down demonic hordes, but with real-life school shooters citing it? It would fuel another decade of culture war.
Now, Doom is unremarkable, at least culturally. Reborn in a 2016 reboot also titled Doom, the shooter arrived in an industry that, while still often under the microscope for its content, is more secure in its standing, with more players, critics, and developers interested in exploring violence on merits. Or, as the popularity of games like The Last of Us has demonstrated, interrogating that violence. This is what separates the new era of Doom —now with a third entry, the medieval/sci-fi gorefest Doom: The Dark Ages —from the prior one: Games are no longer defensive about violence but more fascinated with it than before. It is the preferred love language of modern games.
Consider Doom: The Dark Ages. A prequel to 2016’s Doom, the player inhabits the Slayer from that game, minimally fleshing out a backstory that really doesn’t need the meat. You’re an unstoppable demon-killing force of nature, a blunt instrument in some kind of war between — well, frankly, I don’t really know. It’s all nonsense. What matters is that they give you a shield now, and that shield changes everything about the game. Where Doom and its sequel, Doom Eternal, prioritized skate-park-esque movement, constantly zipping about from one side of an arena to another, The Dark Ages wants you to move and brawl, charging into the heat of things to plant your feet, deliver a combo with whatever you’ve got in your hands, and shoot your way back to safety to do it all over again. You’re a dive-bomber, as opposed to the fighter jet of the previous two games.
A major trouble for video games as a medium has always been that it’s extremely hard to talk about violence in games to people who don’t play them without sounding like an insane person. A recent interview with the showrunners of HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation, Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, underlines this:
“I asked Druckmann and Mazin about all the violence in the game, and they almost laughed, as if I was asking a soccer coach why his players don’t just throw the ball. That’s how games are played. ‘The violence is problem-solving,’ Mazin said. ‘That’s the play. That’s the fun part.’”
Problem-solving is right. At the tremendous speed in which Doom games unfold, this can feel like clearing sudoku puzzles while on a roller coaster. Unlike The Last of Us, however, Doom is entirely uninterested in interrogating the meaning of that violence — a theme that has become a shorthand for mature storytelling in games, whether or not that descriptor is earned. Instead, The Dark Ages overwhelms. While it gives you more tools to kill demons than prior games, each of those tools are meant to counter a specific kind of demon, which means the violence is less about problem-solving and lateral thinking than it is about pattern recognition. Frankly, it gets boring, even with the cartoonish heavy-metal imagery of demons towering in the distance — a key reason that Doom is fun, and not horrific.
Playing Doom: The Dark Ages just feels recursive. In spite of its swerves, the new game is still too beholden to the adrenaline-fueled thrill of its 1993 predecessor, and not terribly interested in really expanding the vocabulary of that violence. Adding Punch-Out!–style pugilism to the mix is a decision that, ultimately, feels more safe than interesting. And there are so many interesting things being done with video-game violence right now.
Doom’s throwback philosophy no longer runs counter to anything. In the nine years since the 2016 reboot, “boomer shooters” — modern games made in the lo-fi style of Doom — have come and gone, the original Doom’s mod scene has received both official new releases and avant-garde experiments like MyHouse, and garish, off-putting indie games like Cruelty Squad have endeavored to assault players with a sensory violence in addition to the expected simulated killing. This is the irony of the franchise’s legacy: You are more likely to stumble across something compelling by booting up the very affordable, readily available Doom I + II, with its curated selection of surprisingly recent new levels, or browsing amateur fan levels, than in Doom: The Dark Ages, as sick as it looks.
Video games, in other words, have never been better at thinking about, and effectively implementing, violence. The Dark Ages, then, is adequately named. Doom has never felt so stuck in the past.
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