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DOOM is our equivalent to Catcher in the Rye, and Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold our Mark David Chapman. DOOM is a defining, controversial artifact. It is central to Generation Y’s teenage geek angst. And for months after April 20, 1999 it was central to a national debate: was this artifact an instigator of mass murder? While you can’t believe for a second that DOOM can be vilified for its immeasurable role upon the Columbine tragedy, this game did mean something significant to Harris and Klebold and have we ever really tried to comprehend what that was?
DOOM is again available for public consumption on Xbox Live Arcade and, basically, I’m trying to play this through the eyes of killers. I recognize that this is potentially offensive given past and current events, while recognizing that this is actually not offensive at all; 99.9% of games want you in this frame anyways, DOOM included. And why DOOM? Between the years of 1994 and 1999, about 10,000 good first person shooters were released (e.g. DOOM II, Thief, System Shock, Half-Life, and the two Quakes), so why did (and does) this continue to endure?
The first notion is that DOOM offers unequaled escapism, which, if true, I find completely terrifying. All games are catered to escapees: they present worlds in serious need of saving, achieved only through aggression. And this aggression is carried out by magic spells, hand-to-hand combat, and fantastic machinery, controlled by angry young men and drama queens. And this is true escapism. The architecture in these games is prettier, the emotions are amplified, the music is more rousing, and the people are better looking. These worlds may be messed up, but you and I still want to go on vacation there and plant a tree or something.
Games have to be something like Vin Diesel would star in: hip, cool, maybe slightly ironic. There is nothing cool about DOOM.
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Meanwhile, DOOM’s escapism is totally incoherent. The game gets my ass to Mars and instantly places me as the planet’s sole human. The job: cleanse the demons, zombies, and other various unspeakables pouring through the gates of Hell. There will be no search and rescue, no plot and character development. Extermination is my sole motivation as I wander through Hell’s repetitive hallways and corridors. Even the manmade bases are obtuse labyrinths, with repeating wall and floor tiles and pools of radioactive waste everywhere. There is nothing appealing about DOOM’s bleak, joyless dystopia. In the future, the fight is all there is.
And that’s why someone would reject modern gaming over DOOM. As games become more cinematic while catering to a widening audience, games compete on the same level as Paramount’s summer schedule. Games have to be something like Vin Diesel would star in: hip, cool, maybe slightly ironic. There is nothing cool about DOOM. Or, rather, DOOM tries to be overtly cool and fails. It’s dorky, plus awkward. The summary text in-between the four game episodes attempts to be hard-boiled, but comes off more like drunken fan fiction. The soundtrack is perfect for connoisseurs of hard metal Muzak. And the pentagrams and devil imagery seen throughout don’t look the art of adults, but doodles from a Goth’s earth science textbook. Everything about DOOM is earnestly, sincerely uncool. And this communicates more directly to outcasts and misfits than a brooding Jedi or a whining Final Fantasy hero could.
Yet even I know that there are few other games that get me to fire it up, shut off the lights, and put the volume to max. The music’s as repetitive as the gameplay, but it’s also eerily seducing. It can’t be helped: It’s this primal dirge that compels play for hours and hours. DOOM reaches perfect equilibrium; no first person shooter has been so accessible yet so satisfying. Due to the limited game engine, I can’t look or down, I can’t jump, and I don’t need to plan because no strategy is involved at all. And those aren’t faults. They let me zip through these flat claustrophobic buildings, to relentlessly slaughter the satanic menace with miraculous ease and speed.
By 1993, designers had all the basic tools necessary to tell any story, and DOOM rejects them. It was the last ditch effort before gaming got smart, a masterpiece for the mediocre. Monotonous, unintelligent, childish in its “you against the world” creed, and all around insanely brilliant, DOOM fills you and me with a sense of illicit, invincible power. The same that prompted Eric Harris to proclaim that holding his shotgun was just “like fucking DOOM.” Room after room, corridor after corridor, we become messiah of a painful, limited world.
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