This is me having completed a Deathmatch game on the famous Deck16][ map against "Skilled" bots. When I feel ambitious I turn up the difficulty to "Adept," but then it's touch and go. "Skilled" is as high as I can go and still be assured of a win.
None of the sequels caught the perfect fluidity and feel of the original Unreal Tournament. The weapons feel sharp, crunchy, and responsive. The speed is liquid-fast. The voiceover taunts, the screams, the low-polygon giblets, the background music living somewhere between a space opera and a '90s rave. It all comes together: if there is a better "dumb shooter" in gamedom, I haven't played it.
On some level it still bothers me that I should derive so much pleasure from a game steeped in some sort of extreme-bro aesthetic, in which death and gore, however stylized and impermanent, flow toward you unremittingly while the booming voice of the announcer approvingly declares "Head shot!" and "Killing spree!" Perhaps that's an instinctive response to a decade and a half of post-Columbine hectoring, or perhaps it's just intellectual insecurity: running around shooting people isn't very deep, is it?
Is it true that violent games get aggression out? I'm not sure. Games are more likely to make me aggressive than to provide a useful outlet for my aggressive impulses. But that's not because they're violent; it's because they're games. There's a sting every time your skill is found lacking, whether it be at whacking a tennis ball or lining up the perfect rocket launcher deflection shot. I've never liked to lose, at anything, independent of my skill level or my realistic expectations of what that skill level is ever going to be. That's why I keep the botmatch difficulty carefully calibrated, like Commodus arranging arena games with the understanding that he will always triumph.
What UT deathmatch does for me, more than maybe any other game, is place me entirely in the moment. You don't worry about anything because there isn't time. No sooner have you dispatched one opponent and gotten your endorphin drip off the laconic blue words "You killed X," than your screen is flashing red with damage from someone else or you hear bullets pinging off the wall next to you. And it's on to the next opponent, and then the next. When you're killed, there's no respawn timer. You don't have to wait 10 seconds to get back into the action. 10 seconds would be an eternity: it would destroy the flow altogether. You're constantly moving, reacting, aiming, firing, dodging. The game attains a wonderful blankness, a sublimation of all rational thought. Sports do the same thing, and they improve your cardiovascular health to boot. But they are not so convenient, nor so perfectly aestheticized, nor so compactable into 5-minute chunks of time.
At the risk of becoming unbearably pretentious I would like to say that the game also reminds me of Simone Weil's essay, "The Iliad, or the Poem of Force." Weil states: "To define force -- it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing." In Unreal Tournament -- as in countless other games, but for me, never so efficiently -- you experience a constant oscillation between being a creature of will, and a victim of force. This is particularly the case with those weapons which don't merely damage you but which knock you back or sideways. The shock rifle and rocket launcher, especially. One moment you're a creature of will, executing your wishes by way of the WASD keys and the mouse button, scanning your environment, anticipating the next kill; the next, you're a subject of force, pushed to the side, disoriented, incapable of influencing anything. A split-second later, you recover, your will asserts itself, and the cycle begins again.
I could imagine all of this seeming like an enervating experience. But to me, at least, it's rather meditative.