Have been playing more Far Cry 2 this week. In particular, I’ve become obsessed with being all stealthy and assassin-like. Slipping in and out unseen, carrying out my dirty job. To that end I obtained the only silenced weapon in the game (a dart rifle) and determined to use that to slickly pick off guards one by one, my jaw set in a grim, hard line.

Except for how this turns out to be extremely difficult, if not impossible (I wouldn’t discount players better than myself, obviously). One issue is that if you, say, kill someone and anyone sees it, or anyone hears it, or (in my case) if you miss them in the first place – everyone knows. Instantly. Once they know you’re around, you’re pretty much screwed. This happens to me all, the, time.

For a while there, I was kind of incensed. Why was the game preventing me from playing out my fantasy of stealth and sneaking? Then I thought some more, and figured: well, actually, this is kind of reasonable. Who can sneak around in an enemy compound filled with guards looking out for infiltrators such as himself? Who can shoot one of them without his buddies noticing? In reality: it’s unlikely that people can actually do this. And that’s what happens in the game. So chalk it down to a form of realism.

And if I want my sneaky sneakerson fantasies to come true I’ll have to play Hitman or something.

I’ve started working on a Flash game over the past couple of days, called She’s Leaving. It’s not so much a game as a really brief simulation of a (potential) relationship break-up. The general idea was to see if some really simple dynamics could lead to any kind of emotional experience during play.

Now, I have no idea yet because the representations involved are as depicted above. That’s the ’she’ who’s doing the leaving. Primitive, it has to be said, but then I’m really just working on the underlying mechanics right now, so the graphics don’t matter so much.

The weird thing about it, though, has been how protective I’ve felt about the She in the game, not wanting the player to be able to ‘treat her bad’ and so on. So I’ve been agonising over handling any potentially subversive cases adequately, all of which has been a really interesting challenge.

Today I found myself, as I often do, watching the psychotic violence of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Variously sized mean beat the shit out of each other for extended periods of time. Fights that go the distance are exceedingly rare. Men are choked, submitted, punched, and kicked out.

I like it.

This is a weird thing for me, because I feel that I exist in a cultural context in which it is probably not ‘okay’ to be into this kind of thing. The general idea being that it’s brutish to watch and enjoy the brutes. But I can’t help it, it’s inherently fascinating and enthralling to watch people wanting to hurt each other, hurting each other, bleeding, etc.

At an obvious level, the appeal is ‘natural’: it’s evolution baby, men are totally into violence and dominance – why wouldn’t we want to watch this stuff? And yet, it’s a bit of a cultural no-no. A bit unrefined. A bit grotesque. A bit crass.

(Funnily enough, this all ties in to the sci-fi book I’m reading right now, Black Man by Richard Morgan. The novel revolves around a breed of men who have been genetically engineered to be entirely predatory and violent, the way we used to be pre-civilisation.)