Below is part three of a three-part feature on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Part one can be read here if you missed it, and part two can be read here.
The Chernobyl disaster has been a major factor in the Ukrainian consciousness of the last 30 years, and so it was only logical that GSC would be inspired to use materials from the abandoned area in their own work. Much of what you see in Stalker is landscape from around the zone, including the abandoned town where the workers from the plant lived with their families.
Many people have returned to the zone to live, including some of the former residents who are resigned to the damage the radiation will cause to their health, some criminal elements who use the 'off-grid' nature of the place to hide, and some refugees from wars in nearby Soviet republics.
An even smaller number of people now work here guiding people around the zone. One of these guides, Alexander Naumov, even describes himself as a "stalker". Naumov has said that to guide people around the zone for money is "blasphemous" and he told the Ukrainian writer Yanina Sokolovskaya, "A stalker risks his life, but does a useful job - makes people sense the Zone and understand how it lives."
There might not be a secret at the heart of the zone, or mutants, or bio-suited killers, but The Zone, the real zone, nevertheless has a meaning and poignancy that is as real and as undeniable as anything else on this Earth. It's not hard to see why it inspired the GSC team to their finest work. The Zone, it seems, is a message, a warning, an allegory, as well as a grim reality.
GHOSTS OF THE FUTURE The Zone is the perfect concept for a game. A closed-off realm that still has a powerful connection with the real world. It's a place where normal rules are suspended. A place where the conspiracies and realities collide. In some ways it is analogous to the position games find themselves in: pockets of reality that differ from our general everyday world in a few fundamental ways. Stalker might be set in the space of the real world, but it nevertheless remains utterly unlike any world we might know.
And it's not simply our urban decay fetish manifesting itself that makes Stalker's zone so appealing (although that's undoubtedly a part of it), it's the fact that it connects the dots between these rich Russian fictions and the most immediate form of gaming: first-person exploration. GSC's greatest achievement is probably in taking that most American of gaming forms, and managing to turn it into something that's distinctly Ukrainian, distinctly Chernobylian.
The fact is that videogames rely on American culture for the majority of the ideas. Indeed, many of the forms of games, their structures, are American. The FPS and the RTS both come from American studios. But there's more to it than that. Whatever the fiction, you can bet that there's something American about it. The noble space federation will be populated by actors with American accents and be vaguely analogous to the US in its foreign policy.
The wargame will feature America against a traditional enemy. Games are set in American cities, dominated by American music and populated by American myths and legends. You might argue that Tolkien inspired the fantasy genres, but it was Dungeons & Dragons that Americanised and therefore popularised the current conception of trad fantasy.
More significant than this is the way in which local development studios around the world produce Americanised content. Battlefield has an American faction, but no Scandinavian influence, despite being produced in Stockholm. Grand Theft Auto hasn't seemed British since GTA III. It's so American, in fact, that most gamers assume that Rockstar are American.
We're in danger of becoming like the comics industry, where every comic is a superhero comic, and where every other superhero comic is just another continuation of the American myths: Superman, Spiderman, Hulk...
That games concentrate on American culture means that all aspects of other cultures remain undeveloped, unused, perhaps (if we're feeling capitalistic) under-exploited. There's a kind of international loss of ideas, where other cultures give way to the American way of doing things for the sake of a globalised games market, for the sake of an American market.
It's telling that Japanese games are often deemed 'weird', when all that really means is that they're not delivering the usual American standards. They're not covering the same subjects as Hollywood or American TV. They're taking ideas from their native culture and their native environment.
The same is true of GSC's Stalker. This is a game which doesn't attempt to fill its game with American archetypes. Everyone in the game has an Eastern European accent, most of the dialogue is Russian, the place is a ruin of the old Ukraine, the politics, geography and mythology that inspired it are all Russian. This is a game that farms its own fertile (and polluted) soil to grow something unique. This is a game that's faithful to the world it was conceived to illustrate, and our world - the world of games at large - is far richer for it.
This is, in some way, the significance of science fiction as a genre, or as a theme. Science fiction allows a cross-pollination of ideas - from different cultures, from places that are separated by space and time. In 1971 British science fiction author Brian Aldiss called science fiction "the sub-literature of change". What he meant by that was this is not a genre that's defined by spaceships, or rayguns, or aliens, but rather by the fact that things never stay the same.
Science fiction suggests what the world might be like if it was changed in some way, be it subtle, or radical. American cultural critic Steven Shaviro suggests that science fiction's purpose is to create "ghosts of the future", ideas of what might come, or what might have been, or what might never be, which haunts us here in the present.
If ever an instance of science fiction could be said to be a ghost of the future, then it is Stalker, with its vision of what a modern civilisation looks like when it's abandoned, ruined, and distorted. Indeed, we can see the changes that we wrought in the world in Stalker.
You might be looking down on a digital world, but at the same time it is, as Shaviro suggests, a prosthetic world. A game like this enables you to walk around and examine the toxic ruins of the Chernobyl zone in a way that you will never be able to in real life. Games are an extension of our experience, and this one extends into the constant, oppressive illustration of what environmental damage could do to the world around us.
We mutter and grumble about global warming, but the possibilities - the changes we can and do inflict - can be far worse. Let's hope most of them remain contained in our games, and in our fictions.
Wonderful read. I agree completely that STALKER should have scored much much higher. Most reviewers look at games the way most hi-fi enthusiasts listen to music. Because of their fascination of the technical workings and intricate details of the production, they lose the ability to sit back, "suspend disbelief" and engross themselves in the art itself. STALKER wasn't pretty, it wasn't bug-free, it wasn't .. a magnificent technical achievement. But it was one of the most interesting and enjoyable games I've ever played in my 20 years as a gamer.
Oddly enough, the same can be said for Operation Flashpoint. These days, I'm playing BioShock on my Xbox360. I love it, and I love the immense "quality of production". No doubt it will win countless GOTY awards - and deservedly so - but it doesn't have the feel that STALKER and Flashpoint had.
Playing STALKER, there's that sense of "I have no clue what will happen next", and the unpredictability - and originality - of the story gets me hooked completely. Bioshock has it's twists and turns, but it's still like watching an american horror movie. I'm not REALLY surprised by the plot, and I've seen it all before. Not so with STALKER or Flashpoint.
I remember reading in a pamphlet that came with a pair of insanely overpriced audiocables. It said something like "We hope that after using our cables, you'll still be able to just enjoy music" (...instead of just listening for minute details, they meant). I want music, not focus-group, massproduced, sugarcoated predictability.
Even though the artists werent the best in their field, from a technical standpoint, STALKER was wonderful music.
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