At Play in a World of Savagery, but Not This One By Seth Schiesel (June 4, 2008).
In May 1934, two years before he killed himself in the driveway of his home in Cross Plains, Tex., Robert E. Howard published one of the finest adventures of his most famous character: the warrior, thief, swashbuckler and king called Conan the Cimmerian.
In the story, “Queen of the Black Coast,” Conan lounges in moonlit reverie on the deck of a galley beside the pirate queen Bêlit and reveals his elemental, live-for-the-moment spirit.
“Let me live deep while I live,” he says. “Let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.”
Conan is no hero. The best Conan stories end not in triumph but in an ambiguous, almost melancholy recognition that righteousness is scarce, perhaps even irrelevant. Conan’s world is not one of grand struggles between good and evil. Rather it is a world of avarice, of treachery, of raw power, slavery, embraced passions and ancient secrets best kept from man.
It is a world that could only now become a successful video game. Only now, as the culture comes to understand that not all games are for children, could a new game like Age of Conan bring Howard’s gritty world of Hyboria so fully to life. Developed by Funcom of Norway, Age of Conan could have used the depth and gameplay polish that would have come with a few more months in the studio. Nonetheless, Age of Conan has at least the potential to become the best new massively multiplayer game since World of Warcraft.
With its essentially amoral tenor, one can almost think of Age of Conan as akin to Grand Theft Auto, with swords instead of machine guns. Of course Age of Conan will not be a mass-market phenomenon like Grand Theft Auto, not least because Age of Conan is playable only on high-end PCs that can cost thousands of dollars, rather than living room consoles. (Funcom is promising a version for the Xbox 360 next year.)
And Age of Conan is just a very different sort of game. Grand Theft Auto and other popular console games like Call of Duty are playable online, but they are structured more like sports matches in which a few dozen players compete in a specific manner for perhaps 15 minutes at a time. By contrast, a massively multiplayer game like Age of Conan or World of Warcraft is an immense round-the-clock online environment where thousands of players simultaneously go about their virtual lives, exploring, fulfilling quests or just making friends.
But Age of Conan is similar to Grand Theft Auto in that the player is no emblem of honor. Instead, the player is an escaped slave trying to recapture an identity stolen in a harsh land.
As in literature, the low road has not historically been the respectable mode of fantasy storytelling. Like one of his closest friends, the master of eldritch horror H. P. Lovecraft, Howard found his literary home in the relatively obscure pages of pulp fiction magazines like Weird Tales. And like Lovecraft, Howard found enduring fame only in death.
Three years after “Queen of the Black Coast,” one year after Howard’s death, a British philologist named J. R. R. Tolkien published what was billed as a children’s book, “The Hobbit,” to immediate acclaim. Like his later work, “The Lord of the Rings,” “The Hobbit” was a sort of gussied-up fairy tale. While Conan hacked and slashed his way through a decaying, darkening world, Bilbo, Aragorn, Frodo and Gandalf became paragons of virtue, bulwarks against the quintessential bad guy, Sauron.
In games, as in books and films, the Tolkien style of high fantasy has generally proved more popular than the sword-and-sorcery (and cleavage) mode developed by Howard. In an effort to remain “family friendly,” fantasy games have almost invariably been set in fanciful, PG-sensibility lands of beatific elves, dour but incorruptible dwarves and fresh-faced heroes who can’t wait to rescue the next princess or slay the local warlord.
In Age of Conan, the player is more likely to be the local warlord.
“Howard wrote his short stories back in the ’30s, and they really have this sense of the world back then, this impression of loss, of being adrift in the environment and culture,” Gaute Godager, the game’s director, said in a phone interview. “Howard put Genghis Khan and the Mongolians in with the Romans and the Greeks, some Celts, and the sense of Africa pouring in a lot of this sense of darkness and put it on the stove, put the lid on and let it brew and simmer.”
“What works for the game is that Conan comes to this world and he is like the archangel Gabriel marching into Sodom and Gomorrah and he just levels it,” Mr. Godager explained. “He is this fane of destruction where our society was built. That image of the destructor coming from the outside into this world of filth and depredation is really powerful.”
And it is not surprising that Conan remains famous not least for what he represents in virility and a, shall we say, uncomplicated approach to women. I’ve spent about 50 hours playing Age of Conan recently (on an excellent PC from Nvidia), and one of the signature moments was when I broke into a fortresslike seraglio and was greeted by a mob of topless concubines rushing for the exit.
“It’s evoking universal themes with us guys where things are simpler and you can have women want you without too much complex back-and-forth sociologically and psychologically that appeals to many players and appeals to the adolescent in every man,” Mr. Godager said.
Conan himself would not have put it quite that way, but he would have agreed.
Source:
www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/arts/television/04conan.html
