The corridor in question is
bedecked in thick polythene cascading from its concrete ceiling, which
ripples down the walls and gives the place the same unsettling atmosphere
of recently cleaned up violence that I associate with crime
scene tents. Leaning up against these undulating surfaces (I’m sure they
weren’t actually animated, but there’s a lot to be said
for the human imagination) is a collection of tools, cones and other
construction doodads. It’s lit dimly at one end by cold fluorescent bulbs, the light
from which plays off the scaffold beams that support everything - the police
station, the streets, the chaos - that I’ve already trudged through. At the far
end is a solid looking wall about seven foot tall (we insist on saying foot not
feet in Yorkshire) which falls a little short of properly reaching the ceiling.
Flush with this barrier, though spanning the full height of the passage, is a
chain link fence with a little tear in its upper right-hand corner. Peeking
through this, just above the top of the wall, is the moon, sitting peacefully
in the black, starless skies above the city.
That is my memory of the place, anyway. Below is the actuality:
That is my memory of the place, anyway. Below is the actuality:
Not a bad effort, I reckon, though
maybe I’ve romanticised and embellished upon the place a little in the
intervening years, what did I say about that ol’ imagination, ey? What is important
though, is how I felt and continue to feel about this place. The unnecessarily
strong affinity I have for a pretty inconsequential corner of a sprawling game
comprised of its fair share of corridors. (As an aside: I always thought it
strange that, from a silly grounded in reality vs. game design standpoint,
each of the major areas of the police station all had wildly different
aesthetic and even architectural styles. Of course bits need
to be memorable enough to the player, but the formal differences throughout the
building are garishly abrasive.) I digress. The whole crux of that corridor’s
power lies in the foot or so gap between the top of the wall and where the ceiling
begins. Therein lies the video game embodiment of melancholy; the closest I’ve
ever come to feeling desperately, but not conventionally, sad whilst partaking
in play.
Raccoon City is an oppressive
place. Its streets are narrow, always flanked by two, three and four storey buildings with warren-like alleys
running around and in between. This discomfort is made all the worse by the
detritus left to clog the already constricted byways. Crashed vehicles, impotent
barriers and lots of stuff on fire all
conspire to make the traversal from one street to the next a war of slaloming,
uncertain attrition. Once these have been negotiated there’s the police
station, then the rest of the game is pretty much set underground. Welcoming is
not a word easily associated with Resident Evil 2 or its locales. What feeds
this confinement is the way many of these already tight spaces are shown to the
player. Rather than looking at the world from the more modern third-person
perspective, where the player views the game from behind the shoulder of the
protagonist, we’re forced to survey each area from a fixed, second-person viewpoint.
For a lovely examination of the perspective please look to this
by Stephen Beirne.
In an attempt to not repeat those
who have gone before me, I’ll simply say that by dictating exactly how the player views each of its areas,
the game fundamentally shapes our understanding of them. For instance, out on
the city streets - which are, as I’ve said, among the roomier of the game’s
locations - we’re regularly shown things from quite narrow medium and high-angle
shots. This not only acts as a disorientating force - they are often
uncomfortably skewed, tight or move disconcertingly to follow the protagonist -
but it further condenses our sense of space, channeling our eye into, rather
than across, a particular scene. What
were already oppressively cramped tracts of land are constricted even further,
effectively to choking point: compelling the
player, through sheer discomfort, to rush through the game’s precious few open
environments and into the mirage of safety lying behind the police station’s
door. In this way we’re coerced into running up the stairs
instead of out the front door, provoked, through fear, into immediate
action which ensures that we bowl headlong into our own oblivion, not away from it.
Which brings us back to the
corridor. It’s one of the few places in the game where we can see any
meaningful distance without our view being interrupted by a wall. It’s also one
of the rare occasions where we can see the sky, with the exception, to my
memory, of the approach to the police station (used to show the building’s vast
size) and another lovely ‘shot’ of the moon as one exits the factory late in
the story. Finally, it’s also an area entirely devoid of enemy encounters,
which, combined with the heavily artificial light and the plastic on the walls,
makes the corridor’s safety feel inviting in an eerily loaded way. In the world
of Resident Evil 2 this small subterranean passageway represents the safest and
calmest place it is possible for us to find our way into. It also provides us
with a tantalising glimpse
at an unattainable escape: the thought that if our character was lithe enough
we could have them through the gap in the fence and out into the shimmering
moonlight, running full-pelt through the fields and the hell away from Raccoon
City. My corridor is a false promise: safety -but to no end. It is the stinging
reminder that inaction is often more dangerous than its alternatives. That
we’re already in far too deep to
simply walk away, or even stay put, despite all the reasonable-to-assume dire consequences
we’ll bring upon ourselves. That realisation
of inescapable finality, as a metaphor for pretty much all
aspects of life, upset my still-optimistic child self. It kind of still does.
There’s just one slight problem.
There appears, you see, to have
been a wee misunderstanding between myself and Resident Evil 2, one which has coloured my opinions and memories of my
corridor for years, which has made me completely wrong about everything. There
is no moon hanging watchful in the sky. There is no melancholic promise of an
unachievable absconsion.
There’s not even anything remotely interesting beyond that two foot gap between
ceiling and wall. There’s just another corridor.
You are, I suppose, meant to play
the game twice to really get the whole story. Much like its progenitor it has
two heroes running around inside it, in this case a rookie cop called Leon
“Rookie Cop” S. Kennedy and Claire “Sister of Chris from the First One”
Redfield. Their stories are very much their own, largely self-contained things,
where they each run around the same locations conveniently missing one another
in largely the same way as Shrek 2
used to justify its abysmally lazy existence. So while these two adventures do present
somewhat different experiences, they weren’t offering little me enough diversity back in the year two
thousand, so I ended up just playing the Leon campaign. Which is kind of where
I went wrong, I reckon.
If I had been bothered to play as
both characters I’d’ve seen the corridor for what it is: just a corridor. And
not even a good one really, seeing as how its end wall - what up until writing
this I thought of as a harbinger of my emotional awakening - acts as an
annoying and very video gamey
barrier, arbitrarily dividing two adjacent spaces for seemingly no logical
reason and necessitating lots of
dicking about in order to circumvent. If I had played all the game I wouldn’t
have seen a beautifully evocative vista embodying sorrow, hope, longing and
learned resignation, I’d’ve seen this:
a wall at the end of a corridor
which separates it from another corridor, both of which are lit by a bare bulb
hanging from the ceiling - of a corridor. A pointless corridor that never had
anything near as interesting to say as the things I ascribed to it. A place
that doesn’t actually embody anything more meaningful than the deliberately
awkward design philosophies of a load of people working almost twenty years
ago, people who thought making a player traipse back and forth picking stuff up
and putting stuff down and walking for twenty
minutes to get around a wall that in the real world wouldn’t even exist
because it doing so doesn’t make sense
was a fair enough deal. I used to think my corridor meant something - but it doesn’t; it never did. However, finding
out that it doesn’t mean anything
actually makes me feel the same emotions about it as I did when I thought that
it did, indeed, mean something. So in
the end I’m not sure if it ever really matters if the things we see in, and in
turn feel about, games actually exist or not. It’s more our articulation of
them, our ability to talk others through our experiences and, ultimately, make
a convincing enough tale out of it. If people - ourselves included - listen and
believe, it doesn’t really matter if
any of it happened in the first place. So while my corridor probably isn’t, as I once assumed, a metaphor for any sort of
childhood self-realisation, it
- and by extension my long relationship with it - maybe is convincingly a metaphor for something: criticism.
###
The above prose is proud to be associated with Critical Distance's Blogs of the Round Table, an initiative which seeks to bring the diverse voices of video game criticism together about the person of a once again monthly topic. I think it's dead good, and so do these lovely individuals:
I’m going to make it my life’s work to tear down all the walls (man) that we don’t need in video games. It’s going to be a costly endeavor, so maybe consider supporting me via the Patreon. It’s probably only a little bit less worthy a cause than whatever you usually spend your money on and it resides here: patreon.com/ashouses. Chrz.
