One thing that struck me throughout our discussion of Podcasts was the relativity which was revealed in our perceptions regarding them. Some people thought that podcasting was dead or at the very least dying, while others knew this to be the furthest thing from the truth. The presentation about podcasts dissected and discussed these views, and the reality of the situation.

The discrepancy between what some people thought about a wide-ranging, culturally important phenomenon and what was the case led me to undertake some introspection and explore the possibility of that I had similarly discounted something which deserves my attention.

It turns out I most certainly did, a fact I discovered in a roundabout way. While researching the game Hotline Miami for a paper I am writing, I stumbled on this article written by Liz Ryerson. While I disagreed with Ryerson’s analysis of the game, she did not lack in eloquence, and so off I went exploring her other writing and work. In this process, I discovered this YouTube series she created, entitled “DOOM MIXTAPE”, being a series of videos of her playing Doom maps and talking about them and many other things.

I was, of course, familiar with Doom and its place in the history of video games, but I fear I was not familiar enough. Through her YouTube series, I was introduced to the Doom community, one far larger and wide-reaching than I ever knew existed.

Doom is a video game released in 1993, and a sequel released in 1994. While a third game was released, it is nowhere near as popular as the two that preceded it.

Doom represents a game stripped down to the essentials (at least to the modern view, back then it was not stripped at all), to the abstract. Rather than violence shrouded in narrative mishaps and attempts at morality, Doom forewent any focus on story, instead recognizing the genre of first person shooters for what they’re good at: action. The medium is truly the message, and with FPS’s the message is action, simultaneous creation and destruction. A FPS lets the player most directly assert themselves in game, and Doom does nothing to get in the way of this. It’s utterly unpretentious, not maintaining a moral stance or positing a positive end to violence. It recognizes the limited ability of FPS’ to deliver meaningful narratives given their mechanics and focuses on what it does best.

While Doom may be unreservedly violent, there is place for it in the diaspora of human experience. It doesn’t stand up to Shakespeare or Hotline Miami or Citizen Kane, but it’s not meant to stand next to them. It has its own place, a place that Shakespeare can’t approach (thought Titus might think otherwise), and its violence is markably different than that of Hotline Miami. It stands up to any attempts to assert morality, or argue a deeper meaning into the game. It is pure, pixellated violence, at its apex.

P.S.

Two important aspects of the game bear mentioning: the movement and the modding.

The biggest difference (besides the graphics) between modern shooters and Doom is the way in which you move and shoot. In Doom, you only aim along a 2 dimensional axis: you cannot look up or down. A mouse/cursor is not necessarily to play the game, and so the issue becomes less about aiming, and more about moving. This contrasts the modern focus on aiming, and instead focusing on movement and the players physical progression through levels.

Players making maps for most modern shooters is nearly impossible, given the graphical toolset necessary to do so (a toolset found mainly to be in the hands of professional level designers). With Doom this was and is not at all the case, given the low-resolution graphics and tiles necessary to piece a level together. This combined with the tools being readily available for use led to many players of the game being turned into creators of it, producing content that advanced and transformed the nature of the game.

While the levels of the official campaigns totalled 57, the developers included an additional 1830 amateur-made maps in an expansion for Doom II, and estimates of the number of doom maps now in circulation are in the six digits, and new ones are released daily. I never imagined such a community existing, and so I wondered why indeed it did exist, and why was it centered around these games in particular?