Killing What Now?

When it was mentioned in class about the incompleteness of a novel in order to cue readers to start imagining, I found it interesting. I wondered if maybe this was different with video games considering that the world is essentially built for you. In your mind, you imagine every little thing in a novel. In games, not much is left to the imagination. Or so I thought, until I read Juul’s “Fiction” chapter. So I decided to test this out with a game called Killing Floor.

Killing Floor is a co-op first person shooter. And when I first played it, I had no idea what was going on. I was some army guy fighting a whole bunch of… creatures. They ranged from a pale creature with a bony body (humanlike) to a completely black creature that crawled on all fours.

Imagine all of these guys coming to devour your face on a farm.

Now, I felt a little lost so at first, I believed that these were mutated zombies or something. Until I read a little of the story that clarifies that they are experiments gone wrong. I imagined a different world than the people I was playing with (the power of incompleteness). As far as health goes, I filled in the blanks by my experience with most first person shooters – 100% or 100 pts of health and when you hit zero, you’re dead. Weapons (of course) are needed to kill more of these experiments and more efficiently (like any other FPS). Money for each creature you kill (you gotta buy weapons somehow). Then there’s armor which any good soldier will need to trudge through a group of ravenous mutants. The game plays like any other first person shooter, but you’re actually playing with a group of people to take down these experiments instead of shooting each other in the face and screaming obscenities into the microphone (well, that might still happen). So it looks as though the same thing that happens in a readers mind happens to video game players minds as well. Something that I never thought much about until Juul explored the subject in his fourth chapter of Half-Real.

Killing Floor leaves a lot to the imagination, especially when you have no idea what you’re doing. Though the graphics aren’t as amazing as most games now-a-days, it still makes for an interesting game. It also has a way of bringing friends together - one exploding head at a time.