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The main theme of killer7 as a videogame seems to be integration. The menus are integrated into the game at least as ingeniously as the tutorial is integrated into the first level. Though it may not seem so the first time we play the first five minutes of the game, Iwazaru's creepy orders to use certain buttons fit into the game as an experience about as well as the character-changing menu does. In an early cut-scene, just after killing the enemies in the circular room, Garcian Smith makes eye contact with the player through the viewpoint of a surveillance camera. With a olive-green blink and a rumbling of static, Garcian becomes someone else -- Dan Smith, the token revolver-toting tough white hitman. Throughout the game, as we run using the circle button down railed paths the designers laid for us, we come across options for direction change; these are labeled like skewed panels in a comic book. Yet they're not meant to resemble a comic book -- they're very much their own thing, very much part of a videogame. You might be able to choose to enter the hallway to the south, and choosing this requires you to press the analog stick in the exact same direction as the sliced-out arrow is pointing. It's a little disorienting, though soon enough you can run on the rails and change directions smoothly enough so that the game starts to look kind of like a warped movie. Sometimes, one of the choices for direction change is "Harman's Room." Though if you haven't read the instruction manual you'll have no idea who the hell "Harman" is (Iwazaru, when he pops up to give hints, begins every conversation with "The Master. It is dangerous. It is ______ and dangerous" and ends with "We all reside under Harman's name," which only adds to the mystique), you'll go in anyway, and find it a friendly, if not pleasant place. Iwazaru is tucked away in a corner, semi-transparent as always, dangling from a rope on the ceiling, and he offers hints in Babelfished Japanese-to-English translations which really, at the end of the day, don't help anything. There's also a girl in the room, and the menu selector tells us her name is Samantha. Sometimes she's collapsed in a chair, and talking to her does no good. Sometimes she's wearing a maid outfit, and at these times, if you talk to her, she instantly aims a television remote at the television, and clicks a button. The TV turns on in a burst of angry static, and our hero looks at it and is mesmerized. This is how we save the game. If Samantha isn't around, or even if she is, we can look at the TV ourselves, and flick through the channels; this is how we change characters. Each channel shows, with fisheye-lens distortion and tasteful, so-unrealistic-it's-realer-than-real static, the vital details of one of the members of the "killer7," which the instruction manual tells us are the seven personalities of a man named Harman Smith, a once-brilliant hitman who is now confined to a wheelchair and stark-raving crazy. We don't need the manual to tell us that, thank you very much; it's more interesting to just let the game reveal its secrets itself, and when the game finally reveals Harman in all his glory, if we haven't read the instruction manual or read writings online about the game, it'll be quite a surprise. At the same time, it's not a surprise at all, and even so, it's kind of nagging. If this guy is in a wheelchair, how does he keep getting up and down these steep staircases without hurting himself? Just because his personalities have legs doesn't mean he can use them, right?[1]
This is where I inform you that, as a piece of "art" -- no, not that word; let's say, "as a significant work," the main theme of killer7 is atmosphere. Whether the hero is an old rich man in a wheelchair or not is inconsequential. What matters is that we are in control of a hitman with legs and a gun (or two guns, in the case of Con Smith, or two grenade launchers, in the case of the professional wrestler Mask de Smith, or a goddam hand cannon, in the case of Coyote Smith), who is on his way to assassinate a gangster who's done something wrong the game doesn't speak of; our hitman has to keep stopping in place during his stomping whenever he hears a giggle, so that he can aim, blink, and shoot infinite bullets at shambling zombie creatures that -- you know what? -- might not even be real. The game raises important questions early on, and we can answer them without reading the instruction manual, which goes into gory details about every element of the world, even why the hitman has to blink to reveal his enemies (I won't spoil it because it's silly and unnecessary -- I'd rather use my imagination) probably so the Japanese players won't be confused: are the zombies real? Answer: Probably not. They're probably just nightmares the hero is conjuring up. Why are all these people able to change into one another? Probably because it's a metaphor for something. Who is this "Travis" guy, this eyeless, blue-faced ghoul wearing a black A-shirt proudly displaying the hot-pink word "FUNK"? Well, he says the first time you meet him, in the elevator, all translucent as he is, in that Babelfished English, with a low, breathless computerized reading, that he's the first man you ever killed. Why does he keep popping up and talking to me? What the hell does he want? He doesn't say anything useful. The hell if I know what he wants. Probably the same thing as the zombies, only he lacks the recklessness to explode himself at you. Also, the designers seem to have a great deal of fun putting him in the weirdest places, like the driver's seat of a car in a parking garage, or browsing bookshelves in the library. His body is lanky and disproportionate; he doesn't seem to belong anywhere that he appears, and it is for precisely this reason that a person not clued in on all the magic tricks that make an "artist's" mind work will go ahead and conclude that he's used exactly as he's intended to be used.
This raises curious questions. I will forsake asking the question "Is killer7 art?" because I think asking if anything is art is a silly question. I will only say that it is evident a great deal of thought has been crammed into it. Obviously the producer had a sound fetish, as the sound effects design alone would probably earn him an MFA from any pretentious art school. Sometimes, for no reason, you'll fire a gun, and the game will freeze, fade to white, with the sound of the gunshot elongated and stretched out to fill a full five seconds. I clawed off my headphones the first time that happened to me. Yet it only happened maybe three times in twelve hours of playing. Its occurence was not regular. During loading screens, as blocky, obviously not-real static glows and pulsates on the screen, mechanical sounds flutter and crash in the background; we hear guns being reloaded, revolver chambers spinning, washing machines humming, all manner of distractions. Sometimes, for no reason at all, an electric guitar comes in, letting a surf-rock chord hang in the air reverberating. There's no rhythm or reason to any of it, and certain schools would therefore declare it postmodern art, in that postmodernists seek to illuminate the fact that the rhythms and reasons in life are outweighed by utter maddening randomness. killer7 expresses this utter maddening randomness in universally stimulating ways; this makes it something of the anti-Rez, with its player-touching, force-feedback-loving impeccable rhythms. That game, above all else, featured beats the player could always expect to sound just so, right here, right now, when I press this button. killer7 draws all of its strength and its randomness from inside its own world; I believe it was Tecmo's Tomonobu Itagaki who asked, of the otherwise critically loved Resident Evil 4, "What's with the guy having to stop in place every time he has to shoot a gun?" (He also said it was stupid for the hero to hold the gun with two hands: "No one holds a gun with two hands"; that's dead wrong, though hey, that's why we love Itagaki: he's bold, and daring, and not afraid to be dead wrong.) Though in killer7 we play the part of a hardened hitman on his way to murder a crime boss, that we have to stop in place to kill numerous vague ghouls along the wired-in path is nearly a moot point. I doubt even Itagaki would ask, ten minutes into playing killer7, why the hero has to stop to shoot. This is because of the bigger question -- "Why does he have to blink before the enemies will appear?" In killer7, there are always bigger questions that pop up just when you're about to ask a small question, and the frequency of these questions' popping reaches such a fever pitch that eventually some subconscious part of you will reach the decision to just go with the flow, and from then you're going to be sitting crouched in front of the television like a blubbering fool, biting your bottom lip for fear of the sounds you might make.
This is to say, effectively, that killer7 is the ultimate freak-out game because it does things that are truly unexpected, and without rhythm. It is the Noh Drama to Resident Evil's Kabuki Theater. The majority of games that slot into a "horror" genre, whenever they do something "unexpected," only do them at times when it is possible to expect the unexpected. With the first Resident Evil came the first truly "WHOA" moment in horror games -- the dog jumping through the window as you walk down the hallway. Since then, we the seasoned game players of the world have walked down hallways in horror games aware that a dog could jump from a window at any moment. The horror game genre has quickly expired most of its greatest surprises; that games like Eternal Darkness pop up to lay out and poke gentle, intriguing fun at the conventions of the genre is curious and appreciated, though at the same time, introspection is unnecessary, and it won't, by nature of cleverness alone, scare players the way Resident Evil did nearly ten years ago. Inducing fear is hard for a clever person; inducing fear involves cruelty and blatant disregard for rhythm and conventions.
[Next: Consciousness]
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