The Paradox Man

The FPS genre, Timesplitters, and the strangulation of "presentness".

Yahtzee once said that a good parody stands on its own without needing the source material like Airplane, a bad parody is merely reference. Saints Row 3 for example, has a chapter “parodying” Metal Gear Solid, and for Yahtzee it falls flat because they just do what they do in metal gear. You can’t really parody something with imitation, if the original is authentic or at least straight earnest. Metal Gear Solid – the game takes itself seriously yes; but the small bits of fun, non-realism and details are just played straight as if natural. Just pointing to the game and copying it without the context and saying “look what this game does” is not only not parody, it’s not even funny.

I give you these examples to ask the question; Can you parody something that doesn’t exist?

See, Timesplitters: Future Perfect sits in a special place in gaming history. Towards the end of the PS2 era, and staring down the barrels of Gears of War. With facial animations done in the same way as Crash Bandicoot, and a concentration on the arcade and multiplayer from the Quake arena shooter genre and the main story has an entire level taking a stab at Half Life 2. Compared to TimeSplitters 2, one could say it has all the showings of what would overtake gaming – at least the FPS scene. Set pieces, slighty-wider-rails shooters, lots of brown but it’s all very tongue-in cheek. Cortez, the protagonist seems to be played completely straight and the opening mission sucks you in to thinking you’re playing another franchise that has hit the homogenous spunkgargleweewee horizon.

Except, he’s not. Cortez is charming. He doesn’t care about the plot that much, he openly ignores lore or any sort of consistency, tries to keep his 90s catchphrase, is occasionally a pervert but the game never stops being charming. Even him trying to do what would be considered a Marvel quip is sniped by other characters, it’s laughed at. Compared to Marcus Feenix, Cortez is a parody of the strong armored space marine. The game, the characters, the presentation all feels like it’s taking the piss of the Xbox 360 shooters.

But they didn’t exist at the time.

This leaves us with two questions: Was Free Redical ahead of curve; Could they foresee, what many others did including the likes of John Carmack, the way the industry was going? The second question could then be, did gaming – or at least FPSes – become a parody of themselves? The way Baudrillard described the map and city, that gaming built this monolith next to itself, that is identical but now has lost its way?

Now see, these are the wrong questions. 1, because the game is clearly a parody of things that were occurring at the time, especially towards the like of Half Life – which was a boogeyman at the time by many of the LAN party enthusiasts. It also doesn’t quite, have all the entire hallmarks of modern gaming – the writing is too charming. A type of self-awareness is not the same as the irony-poisoned self-awareness now. It’s not pastiche either, it’s something different.

A timeloop, almost. Just as Cortez keeps getting past and futures of himself to activate switches. The future, is now the present, for which the present is now staked upon the unknown future. Future Perfect absolutely embodies this in game when you’re never sure what puzzle future-Cortez has solved or what turret section he has done, but he gives you the ability to make progress.

The only difference is, at least in the game, the unknown future becomes known and everything flattens out. In the meta-side of things, the gaming industry just kept this loop up. And that will beour answer to the nature of parodying a future that doesn’t exist yet: It’s the time to split (pun intended)

I’ll be using Jameson’s “End of Temporality” here. Specifically because of his hesitation after being trapped in the visual image nature of movies at the end of the paper, lets not the full fruits of the labour come to fruition as it would with videogames. His main text, Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, is relevant at least within cultural schizophrenia, but that’s for fandom commentary another day. Let us focus on just time, temporality and space. ‘Cause no matter what side of the “cancer killing gaming” you’re on, all of it has this same issue, this underlying presentness-repeating.

Time To Space.

“This situation has been characterized as a dramatic and alarming shrinkage of existential time and the reduction to a present that hardly qualifies as such any longer, given the virtual effacement of that past and future that can alone define a present in the first place.”- Frederic Jameson, The End of Temporality.

“Just think, I could tell [himself] about Crow and the time crystals, the island? I could stop this whole thing?” “No, Cortez, We’re close now.”, “Yeah, I know” – Cortez and Anna on choosing to help the past and the future, instead of the apocalyptic present.

Consider going from DOOM, to Quake, to Perfect Dark, to Halo to Gears of War. There’s a progression here; refinement, expansion, iteration on the past but steps towards the future. There’s a bunch more games you could probably name too, that’s part of the point but the difference from single player straight shooter, to LAN party focused shooters, to (real) three dimensions, to arena-shooters, to arena-but-bigger-multiplayer shooter, then to the cinematic shooters or what was affectionately known as the “spunkgargleweewee”. There was space and temporality within these, from WADs, to community to servers to simply what you took from early Call of Duty to Battlefield. Even in the maligned spunkgargleweewee shooters, they at least were a vehicle for something other than raw “space” (or entertainment). The SOCOM series gave consoles team-tactics-with-slight-realism shooters on the eve of console networking. Even Medal of Honor: Warfighter at least followed the storyline, and introduced dynamic entries and environmental damage that sat just nicely post-Battlefield: Bad Company and pre-Rainbow Six: Siege. What’s amusing with this, and relevant to our opening is that Medal of Honor: Warfighter (2012) and BattleBit (2023) were knocking off the same thing: Battlefield circa the 2010s – not Battlefield 2042 (2022). One could even say that they want the ideology of Battlefield.

So what happened that we are getting pastiches of older series? Presentness! From Overwatch (arena shooter with abilities) to PUBG (Battle Royale) and then variations of these two, which emphasises everything from Fortnite to Apex Legends. Maybe I should include Escape from Tarkov now that Marathon (which I wrote about here) has been revived to mimic it, but it seems nobody wants to leave Tarkov after all. Throughout this we see Battlefield begin to repeat itself, then finally strip down its single player, then its destruction, and then…its realism identity. Throughout this we see Call of Duty begin to repeat itself, then finally strip down its single player, then selling zombies separately, and then…its arcade identity. Oh, they’ve hit the homogeneity line! Not for lack of trying, Call of Duty tried to recapture its glory nuke-ending days by having Kevin Spacey be a villain, but – as noted by Yahtzee – the Black Ops and Ghosts series had just collided into themselves into nothingness without even remembering what their own identity was. Erased by ever-chasing the present, erasing the past (or even selling it back to you as DLC with the PRESENT game).

What I’m getting here is take Overwatch to Overwatch 2; the “space” difference is very little, the “history” or “time” from Overwatch was instantly turned off. Anything that could reconstitute time in an epistemological way at least, such as community servers, gets burned off. Overwatch, was probably closer to a sort of post-modern FPS in that sense, its presentness was always there and was only exasperated further in the “sequel”. Interesting that the phenomenological parts of Overwatch have been gently abandoned without so much as a fuss, but there was a lot of kickback about premium currencies. Character silhouettes, aesthetics, lore, the meaning of anything other than the functioning bottom level stuff, or the vaguest non-connected virtues like the anti-homeless bench is thrown out. The ideology of Overwatch then is rooted in this space-filled raw situation, but with none of the extra spice on top. One may say “but that’s just because it’s gameplay only!”, the thing is DOOM, Quake, Unreal, Team Fortress 2 all had these things enough that even later iterations of them were still connected beyond just a font and a logo – the images. Consider the backlash and how devastating Demopan was for Team Fortress 2, considered a death knell for a game, because now the split is happening in front of players. So we are left with more shooter games, taking up more space, but their temporality is limited to “just now” and the most post modern of all developments – the Battle Pass.

What’s left behind are EA controlled “experiences” of their “live services”, where any sort of longevity is killed. What’s great about the battle pass, and the roadmaps too, is that they are selling you the future, and only near future, into the present. Then the company gets all control of this unknown near future, as well as the current. Anthem did exactly what it needed, exist only for the present, be sold on a near future, and sell you the present space-consuming cosmetics then to be thrown away. Anthem is great further because the presentness goes all the way down to its engine. From Mass Effect: Andromeda (stats/narrative/shooter) to Dragon Age: Inquisition (ARPG/Story focused/Pen and paper) to Anthem (Looter shooter) to Battlefield (multiplayer shooter) were directed by EA to all be on the same Frostbite engine. Call it excuses if you want, but it’s consistent that the developers all struggled to jam their game in. Engines are woven – just like any craft – with the person’s own touches, made for the game, sculpted for what the game and engine needed. Not to say that things on the same engine peter out – Dark Messiah doesn’t feel like Half-Life – but it abstracts the temporality that people play, it’s another framing of the player-dev “thunderdome” I’ve referenced a few times. I cannot tell you if this abstraction, this severing of the craft in coding and the final product or at least the ideology of the game is intentional, but it does a hell of a lot of damage. This comes from both sides of epistemology and ideology: Battlefield: Hardline feels completely like a Battlefield game but without the aesthetic ideology of the franchise; Battlefield V had the aesthetics but this separation/abstraction of the frostbite engine meant they could no longer replicate something as simple as clarity of hearing and footsteps losing the epistemology of the franchise. You’ll notice that this has been a reoccurring thing so far, two things end up being abstracted into a homogeneity horizon. Just space filling, in a sense, nothing to immerse yourself or lock in a “place”.

Overwatch 2, is such an egregious example of this, ESPECIALLY when it’s original announcement was shoved out the door to cover up the Blitzchung-Hong Kong Protest controversy. You may say it’s cleaning out the news cycle, and this is what the politicians do. Yet, it goes everywhere – from the lore abandonment, aesthetic abandonment, the death of menus and the simplification of logos. Blizzard now root everything back into the pin point of Battle.net and Overwatch 2. This is what Jameson would label total ontologization of the present. It is controlled by the future, exists only for the present, without the past or history.

What’s crazy about this is, this strangles everything: language, personal experience etc. This is the games-as-a-service taken into a temporality stage, to be shown that your language must be controlled by the game. (Even if your native language is considered “toxic”), the actions and win-rate (Skill Based Match Making existing to force a 50-50 for example and we’ll get to that hell later) are now fully predetermined that personal experience is now a matter of the service. No wonder why then, that smurfing is on the rise; the natural flow of climbing the ranks, of chewing a newbie or getting better against the fall has been washed away. The community servers of randomness, abusive admins and shitty illegal knife fights is too subjective, too phenomenal, too uncontrollable. The thing is, videogames haven’t been the only genre to feel this.

Time To Know

Mitchum Huehls’s “Knowing What We Are Doing: Time, Form, and the Reading of Postmodernity” also provides us a wonderful example of not only the failures of things that are quite post-modern presenting in literature, but also the air of arse-sniffing from critics of this society AND the complicit-not-complicit self-knowledge of the individuals stuck in the cultural logic. Building directly off of Jameson’s work on temporality, as well as many ideology-thinkers of the post-modern sphere gives us White Noise as an example of the temporality trap one ends up. Huehls examines how the post-modern cultural diagnosis novel White Noise keeps the characters entirely aware, rational – complicit in the system they hate, but not a learned helplessness out of the over-stimulation but gently parallelling with it. So much of the narrative is the typical range of post-capitalism criticisms: media saturation, consumer culture, and the fear of death and the disjointed nature of contemporary life. Shit you probably saw in Hyenas but it’s more of the ground level aware consumer. A gacha player who rationalises his rolls and just plays the game knowing End of Service is around the corner or their team will be power crept out of existence.

Huelhs bemoans – more interestingly for us – that the scholarship standing around backpatting themselves for awareness of ideology, and to try mythologise Delillo as this grand declaration of all the ills of our society while conveniently also being the symptom. A lot of videogame critique, and the sort of smarmy self-awareness that gamers often have (y’know the ones that are so much better than the film consumers) but not an open narcissistic self-awareness. They’ll be conflicted knowing things are a scam, they’ll know their Fifa ultimate team won’t pass the next year. A streamer of the Battlefield games irks out a smile because he knows the last game’s servers are gonna get shitdinged at best, or end up like Titanfall at worst. The entire class of “entitled gamers”  is cooked with the plague, and even for White Noise, its own self-awareness isn’t on itself: “own formal inability to identify a form for producing meaning out of our world that does justice to the "subjectivity, resistance, and agency" that it and its critics so clearly want to discover.”  If you can’t follow the quote, don’t worry, think of it as comparing Timesplitters 2 letting you come up with your own experiences to enjoy or make your own maps to Battlefield 2042’s fake community-server portals that are about as pre-determined and controlled with no agency or subjective team fun. Hyenas, and all the other AA-AAA experiences that seem to be so self-aware of their own memes: of Todd Howard admitting bugs; they aren’t even over-hyping and being salesman like Peter Molyneux, hell they aren’t even lying. They’re just replicating a pre-determined space for you, with an outcome that you will go along with. The companies know you hate them, they know their self-awareness and irony is fake, but that pretend is all you need:

“The text's form and style irreparably compromise the promise of its message, and the consistent treatment of White Noise as a text that paradigmatically diagnoses our ailing postmodern culture has established the work as a formal symptom of the very maladies it seeks to diagnose.”

Videogames? You may ask, but is this now what we have seen replicated in videogames? Everyone loves to sit around and laugh at Hyenas that I’ve mentioned a couple times for example and their anti-capitalist cringe-ass-nay-nay (internal) direction movie and the shitcanned beta. We’re all aware, so wonderfully, that battlepasses are basically a scam and most cosmetics are there to attract big whales, and maybe a score from the average joe – which as my Father once said upon buying an Apex Legends battlepass “I know it’s a scam, but the game is free and I’d pay 20 quid for a decent game like this”. This sentiment is probably shared, same with the whales, same with the people with jobs who want to jerk off on a MMO after earning their money. It’s awareness, this faux-awareness increases the destruction of temporality. Hell, not even the neo-liberal DEI style culture war stuff ever means anything because it’s smoke and mirrors, whose entire system of live service shoots it’s pro-audience message in the foot.

One of the only big redevelopments from Overwatch to Overwatch 2, is the nature of their monetisation, and more forcefulness of the presentness. The instant shutdown of the older game, the pushing for new types of coins, the locking in of the battle pass. Instead of just gambling on lootboxes for some Olympic themed cosmetics, where everyone has the chance to gamble, instead it turns into the battle pass. Your cosmetics get even more exclusive than before! In a way, the Stellar Blade bickering is an example of this, the entire failed temporality check of the presentness being locked down to costume changes and day 1 patches; quietly fixing something post-release even if it’s minute one of releasee. Not saying that people should’ve seen it coming, but certainly making petitions is not going to help. Capital only answers to capital, as Helldivers 2 players figured out with refunds – ‘cause that reminds Sony that the future exists. See, that’s the thing. The repeated awareness, now you’re in the cycle, time without temporality in a sense.

And yet no matter what, these companies still keep going, keep getting worse. From one openly shitty monetisation thing to the next. Y’all know this, y’all self-aware, you probably filled in a survey. But that makes you White Noise. That’s the point, they are pre-determined.

I’m not here to be your therapist on the matter, and don’t take this so pessimistically. There are ways out of it, there are ways to smash the abstraction down – and no the answer isn’t just “hurr buy indies” because nobody said the indies aren’t free from this either. The media liberation movement imploded spectacularly enough that you have wage through the unity tutorial packs thrown on steam.

Time To Die

So then, when it’s all said and done, you end up with two futures; and neither of them is a future perfect. You have future (unknown, undeclared) and future (present). An optimisation (overoptimization being a symptom of a lot of temporality issues too) of both to the present, because the future (present) is pre-determined, like reading ahead of a novel. People respond better to trailers if you put spoilers in them, y’know? Remember though that this end of temporality, is a situation, not a period, something which you must “face” in a sense.

See, the Internet (capital I), with its teleological nature that I’ve bickered on about before was still temporal. Even if it didn’t have time, and if anything it had human-coded time, it still contained pockets of history, past and communication between the two. Ask a dumb question that’s been asked before, and you’ll be referred to former posts. Have a problem? You’d meet the dead corpse of an account with a ½ chance of a dead link that will solve your problem. We even call it “necroing” to bump a dead thread. And you can see the way in the post-teleological internet, this has been destroyed. Walkthroughs, with their ascii art, handed down by little bits of communities get replaced with poorly written spam website walkthroughs, and now even worse with flooded webpages of adverts and generated content. Timestamps are manufactured, or the same things are reposted into the present year just to keep it “present” even if the game is from the 90s, and the guide from 2010s.  Answers are now obfuscating, SEO rankings and being scrambled. Hell there’s even a Serbian DJ who buys up old “trusted” domains and fills them with nonsense GPT written articles. These domains are “trusted” because they have a degree of temporality with them, this becomes trust. But you’ll notice that all this, sometimes referred to as the “dead internet theory” has this irony about it, because death is exactly what’s now missing.

Remember sequelitis? There was a time for a while that people complained that games (and TV shows) never had satisfying endings because they were made to have sequels, or DLCs. This has gone into live service where even the ending of your game can be thrown behind maybe a future update or something to throw on the roadmap. Just look at the clusterfuck of Overwatch lore, and how any sort of death, destiny or anything regarding the temporality of the characters is thrown out. Funny enough, it was Team Fortress 2, that did the opposite to this, making immortal but complete stories. Some of tragedy, some of love, but all collected finished stories. You know really gets me? Conker’s Bad Fur Day, of all fucking things, has a tragic, bitter-sweet ending that lives rent free – except I never had an N64, I played it on a hacked xbox and spent more time in the multiplayer mode designed to sell internet subscriptions. I loved that multiplayer mode, but I can’t really remember anything other than vague feelings of me spending a lot of “time” (reality: space) there. I did however, replay the game just to see if the ending was the same on the N64, because that temporality of an experience, that imprinting even if it’s fucking Conker – lasts. The ultimate tragedy of “winning” the game, the losing of everything becoming king – Conker was a Greek tragedy with a song about poo. I don’t think that’s quite what Jameson had meant when he talked about the nature of Greek tragedies mind you.

This is all part of the shrinkage of existential time and the reduction to a present, because you don’t get a death-death, you get an end of service. There’s no ending only obsolescence into pastiche – MMOs being “revived” away from private servers like World of Warcraft: Classic or  the multiple Ragnorok Online revvivals. I tagged on this a little, at the end of The Hardcore Man in regards to the duty to grieve. I concluded in the end, that you probably shouldn’t resurrect your hardcore character, and y’know we could do with a little more death-death. Instead of this hellish Buddhist Mahayama reincarnation cycle of tranquillity. Instead of a stilled sea, you get Dostoevsky’s picture of hell – labouring rocks back and forth across a space. And all this gives us is an internet (lower case i) and gaming-as-a-service that hardly qualifies as even “presentness”; erasure and burying or straight up editing of the past (Last of Us Remaster, or Dead Space Remaster for example)  and the obliteration of any future other than a handwave shrug, that can’t even define a present in the first place.

And you know, Dostoevsky’s picture of hell sounds awfully like the forced 50-50 in skill based match making. No advancement, no decline, no dunking on a newbie for an ego boost, no better player to get a revenge kill on. Play, fill your battle pass so you’ll get a few .jpgs that will be a new texture for your gun.

Is that enough? Is that worth your space? If it was, why skip levels?

Time To Split

Timesplitters is such a good franchise spanning the two connecting generations. The first, an experiment for moving the Goldeneye-Rare shooters up into the next console age. The sequel, now playing with single player to demonstrate, train the player, go through all the weapons and have a moderately satisfying ending. Then Future Perfect, which quite literally is. A send off for an older era of games. Cortez himself being such a charismatic, cheesy main character, has all the little bits being updated for the incoming cinematic style of videogames. It’s rougher, but still as playable – if not more – and then it ends. The series is generally over, and everyone is happy. It’s almost beautiful then, that the reboots of Timespliiters have all failed to come to pass, because they are failed futures, not perfect. “Perfect” in its original meaning is to be complete, the project is finished, that’s how you are supposed to point to God instead, doneness, oneness. Lord, praise Timesplitters that it may be enjoyed by zoomers stumbling across Timesplitters 2 port in Homefront: The Revolution once more and enjoy what once was lost.

And that’s the weird thing with Cortez and Future Perfect. The female characters are sexualised in a cartoony way, but it’s the male who gets sexualised directly. Female characters are all competent and go through all the modern day femme fatale stereotypes. You’d malign the earlier Timesplitters games as being absurdly sexualised, but everything is so cartoony and over stereotyped that it’s hard to pin down. This change between early and late Timesplitters I hesitantly tip toe around because Jameson talks about the subject-subject changing, the reductionism to the body and the mechanical sense comes out of something rather interesting about action movies at the time:

“The alternate characterization of such films as violence pornography may simply be another expression of their form problem, which demands that they minimally evade the absolutely episodic nature of sexual pornography, whose intermittent closures are allowed to be a good deal more final.”

The weird splattering of violence, and commentary of why videogames are bad/cause every ill of the world, almost echoes this. From the DOOM days, we have not only gotten more trapped in this loop, but videogames have become so much more cleaner, and more expendable. Deliberately edgy traps like Hatred only exist to be a short jive around the maypole, edginess brought into the presentness. No lessons are learned, but also lessons are actively over-written. The old rebuttal against feminist frequency was to list all the Laura Bows, all of the Sierra-Online games, the representation of the past that has been blown away. A seminar I went to, with a lecturer who ended up being the destroyer of marks on my dissertation, criticised games in a lack-of-temporality way too. They use modern Fallout and Bioshock as lazy dilemmas, lazy moral things, and we have to be more Marxist (in a vague, neoliberal way, without irony.) Play RPGmaker games, but no don’t mention their legacy or the trauma people wove into them back in the day. Her entire seminar was quite premised on the fact that somewhere in the (unknown) future videogames will be better, so now consume these [Presentness] games. And yeah it’s probably a better choice than deathless live service garbage, but even the very act of maligning is left in this body-based, rationalism, anti-subjectivity presentness. And you know, Jameson ends The End of Temporality with this:

“Moralizing is not a very effective way of dealing with those symptoms, nor indeed with the end of temporality itself.”

There’s a second irony to that lecture, the accursed Depression Quest, is probably as close to my version of Jameson raging about Speed. or Huehl pointing out the paradox of White Noise. That while there is such a thing as experience appropriation, it is allowed for when you are to express the phenomenology of depression through the tactile nature of videogames. You are supposed to do the Hegelian Impossibility of assuming someone else’s body, phenomenologically through a medium. Which conveniently the lecturer had constant rows with a philosophy of mind professor exactly about the impossibility of replication using future virtual reality tech. Jameson is weaker here, because videogames offer more than just “kinetic images”, but is that not what a walking simulator is at its heart? A functioning microcosm of phenomenologically transferred experiences, that must be transplanted as strictly as possible? Jameson says the fragmentation here, deconstructs his own argument but I believe it’s even more apparent in videogames of all things. The thunderdome, I keep always going on about, is supposed to be a two player back and forth, an exchange – an encounter to use a Deleuzian term – but that is replaced not entirely with the kinetic image but with that of a pre-determined, controlled novel. Recall the White Noise complaint, how its own formal structure undermines its own point, when the joy of literature is that one can play with temporality play with narrative. To fall to such straight, pre-determined narrative is to sell away the actual joy of time and reading. To force a walking sim, to pin down even the microsim of senses (that Jameson reflects on as a deconstruction) in a false freedom of “presentness” is to pin down even pre-determinism itself into a false awareness of itself. You can leave a movie early, sure but a million playthroughs of that one RPGmaker game about being a depressed person in New York is pinning down your actions, your fingers, your senses, every single bit of your phenomenological interaction into their presentness.

I leave this rantful ending, with a thought from Jameson in the middle of the paper. After talking about two philosopher’s standpoints on the nature of time, he gives something that, while taken to be pessimistic, is also optimistic. At least for videogames. Timesplitters will always be history now, and Cortez, of all people. understand this:

“whenever one attempts to escape a situatedness in the past and the future or in other words to escape our being-in-time as such, the temporal present offers a rather flimsy support and a doubtful or fragile autonomy.”