Doom is a game about vicera.
A long time ago I was a boat person. A boat person is a person in the Navy that lives on a boat. Imagine literally living at work. Imagine your whole life fitting in a coffin. Imagine your home pulling anchor and moving while you sleep. That sort of thing.
I lived on an Aircraft Carrier. An Aircraft Carrier is a floating fortress staffed by morons that didn't feel college was the right fit at the time. My job was flight deck ordnance (I.Y.A.O.Y.A.S). We were tasked to build, issue, and install bombs and guns onto airplanes on the flight deck of the Aircraft Carrier.
Every job on the flight deck required the worker to wear a different color shirt, because the flight deck gets very loud and very chaotic. Yellow shirts were aircraft handlers, green shirts handled aircraft catapults and arresting gear, blue shirts took care of airplanes, purple shirts were aviation fuel, brown shirts were plane captains, white shirts were safety observers, and red shirts were people that handled things that blew up. It was very important to learn the colors, roles, and sounds of the flight deck because there was an exponential number of ways to get yourself killed up there.
When I wasn't working or drinking or partying I was at the recreation center of whatever base we happened to be at. I was always there because TV time on the ship was always taken up by guys watching wrestling. The Rec center had rows of televisions and was open twenty four hours a day. I would cart my Dreamcast over and play Skies of Arcadia and Powerstone in peace and quiet for as long as I liked. It was nerd heaven.
It was heaven until this grape (purple shirt) kid fresh out of M.E.P.S from my boat showed up and started hanging around the tiny universe I had claimed. He had seen me at work and I had seen him. He was that goober holding up the bird load line cause he couldn't twist the gas pump angle, he was asking dumb questions to people during general quarters, and generally being that gigantic turd on the deck to step over.
My dad was fond of saying, "Stupid is a loaded gun." I interpreted that to mean that a stupid person will damage everyone in their gravity, not out of malice, simply because they don't know any better. Can't blame the gun. So I was very careful to follow the rules that my father and Stockton California taught me about surviving dangerous environments. Stay quiet, stay smart, and be very, very careful about who you allow into your life. I could tell this kid was a loaded gun, so I told him to kick rocks, and went back to business.
The next time I saw the kid was at work. 9/11 had just happened and the boat was scrambling to prepare for an impromptu engagement in the middle east. We had taken on different squadrons who were hitching a ride, things were happening a mile a minute, and somehow this kid found himself under the fuselage of a catapult as it was closing. Instead of staying in the fuselage, the kid tried to crawl out before the blast plate closed. He made it halfway.
I was humping GBU's to the bomb farm when I heard the sirens. I looked over and saw the kid laying face up on the deck, torso and legs wedged under the blast door. I left my load and ran over, along with the green shirts, the brown, the white, and the yellow. We looked like a bust open pack of skittles at a funeral for the purple one. The kid was in shock, awake, and staring at us like we were all famished and he had spilled the coffee carrier in Starbucks.
When he realized everything was very much not ok he panicked and attempted to remove himself. We begged him to not move until the Doc's arrived but he just pushed and pushed, we watched his tendons snapping from his waist, blood and purple, capillaries in his face bursting from the screaming. Then it was done, he died right there on that deck. A loaded gun kid that backfired.
I said I was fine but my gunny insisted I take a couple days to decompress. So I stayed in base housing for a week and finished Skies of Arcadia before hitching a helo ride back to the boat. I spent most of my time wondering if I could have helped the kid, I still do.
Anyway, Doom is a fun game. It's the same Doom they have been making for years. A flashy, fast paced, grindhouse with no soul or context. Demons, Zombies, Insurgents, it doesn't matter. Just head from one set piece to the next and mow them down, or hop online and mow humans dressed as avatars down for catharsis achievements.
Whatever, it's what our audience wants, and I now realize most people that make the games have no experience with real life pain (with noted exceptions. Sup Lance, sup Michal, sup Navid) so they can't make explain or frame what they don't know. Old children making games for young children.
So lets just keep video games irresponsible on every level and rake in the money. I'm not going to blame people for looking down on video games as a base artistic medium because lets be honest, we are, and at large we aren't trying to change. Such is life.
I hope information rocks the pillars of heaven at the store opening. It's big, congrats. Also, this shit is not cool. I don't blame the guns, I feel sorry for them. Also Jobs.
The Protoculture Mixtape : Issue : People : Pummel
