Emergency!

Those moments in freeform (or even just slightly non-linear, open plan-) games where a system of systems, a mass of simulated rules combine, quite soullessly and without intention to produce unplanned but amazing moments. Dwarf Fortress is made of these, MMOs are a laboratory table of thriving petri dishes for such occurences, between imaginative players.

I'm not sure whether there are enough of us here, playing enough games to maintain a thread of these, but I'd like to see what happens – share your favourite memories if you want, but consider this first and foremost a place to share those magical moments that strike at 4am when you've no-one around to talk to about how "this really cool things just happened, you see, the Inbred Tentacle was moving toward my flame sigil and then.."..

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Well, I'll start off – as I'm creating this simply because such a thing, and a simple one at that, just occurred as I began my playthrough of Red Faction Guerilla.

I was wandering around Parker, the starting sector of the game (named after the protagonist of the first game, regarded as a hero) – I get into a good sandbox world, perhaps too far into. My imagination starts to run wild. Unashamedly, I roleplay it all by my lonesome. If there is a walk button in a game, you won't see me running except when I have a reason to run. If there is food, I will carry it and I will eat it whether I need to or not. Because it is right. Because it is real. Because it makes the game a lot more fun.

So, in my head, Alec Mason is mourning the death of his brother Dan, gunned down by a hovering EDF aircraft in the opening moments of the game. He hasn't yet served the Red Faction in any way, or done anything to the gameworld. He's a blank slate – and in my head he has not yet decided whether or not to take part in the conflict. I can't simply dive into a mission and start hammering skulls simply because I have a gun and an objective marker. I need justification, in any game, for every choice I make. It's no longer about 'fun' so much as something deeper and more satisfying. Make no mistake, though – I haven't grown up; I did this with my toys when I was five.

SO, I'm walking around Red Rock trading outpost (THIEVES WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT), hammer in hand, examining the place. My surface-mind is shallowly considering the death of Dan and the morality of the conflict, its likelihood of success and so on. Deeper down, I'm thinking about the way the small village-like set of buildings in a canyon was put together, and pleased at the way the stilted, awkward phrases the local NPCs keep coming out with are at least competently acted, very varied, and dynamically suited to recent events in the gameworld.

I cross a footbridge over the main settlement, loop around, and step inside a grocery store of sorts, boxes on shelves, vending machines and a girl behind a cash register – lost in just such a revery about game design on one level, and personal loss in fiction, a tremendous crash shakes my speakers (thank god for having an independent dial for bass volume), an explosion mixed into the cacophany and a terrified male scream – I run outside, along with everyone else in the shop, the AI compelled to do exactly the same thing as me (run and investigate the noise), and we all circle around an EDF gunship, exactly like the one that just killed my brother a few hours before in the canyons to the south! it's on fire and its wings are strewn in pieces around us – it's ground nose-first into a dirty slope and its smouldering, smoking tail end is resting in the rubble of a wall it ploughed through – clambering over the wreckage I find the corpse of the pilot in his terracotta brown armour spreadeagled on the floor nearby.

… A bloody EDF gunship -accidentally- crashed into the Red Rock trading outpost purely by chance five metres from my location, missing all the buildings and important structures by just a few metres and killing no-one but the pilot.

Just to clarify, I've played this game through twice before, and played at least 10-20 anomalous hours of modding+testing, and I've seen only one of these vehicles crash before, and that was into a distant cliff-face when it misjudged altitude in its pathfinding. I have not the faintest clue how this one just happened to beautifully and noisily crashland into a small town right in the middle of open skies, in a cacophany of scraping, crashing and screaming noises.

Simple, but sweet.

*a happy Jack remembers why he loves games*