With the recent release of Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, I am reminded of a moment that I consider a highlight of 2006. Yes, a lot of people were busy curb stomping and chainsawing each other in Gears of War, but I believe that Rainbow Six: Vegas featured one of the more visceral moments that year.
On the level “Freemont Street”, you lead your team through a casino and into the eponymous street. When you open the door, the first thing you see is a family taking cover from terrorist fire. You notice that the child is separated from his anguished parents, telling their child to stay where he is as bullets fly past them. If you can clear out the terrorists fast enough, the child runs to his parents and the family is reunited. As you approach the family, the parents thank you for saving their child.
Yes, this is a scripted event. But one thing that people may not have noticed is that you can fail and the child can die. Unlike other sections of the game where a civilian death results in an instant game over screen, the game lets continue on if the child is shot by the terrorists. As you pass by the child’s parents, you see them hold each other in grief as they look at their child’s lifeless body. While you didn’t kill their child, you failed as a member of Rainbow and let the terrorist score a small victory.
In the end, this moment is inconsequential in a rather generic and uneventful story. Yet for me, it stands out as the most memorable moment in the game, if not in recent memory. This is a case where player performance directly affects the outcome of the narrative as opposed to the menu based system seen in many other games (for example, in Bioshock, press one button to harvest a little sister or another to save her) and where failure does not necessarily mean a game over screen. Yes, there have been many other games where mission failure does not necessarily mean game failure (Wing Commander instantly comes to mind), but not on this specific scale. This is yet another case where games, through game play, can provide an experience through interactivity that cannot be provided through the passivity of film or other media.
Unfortunately, this moment is not replicated anywhere else in the game or its sequel. Clearly, the designers were aware of this innovative method of storytelling, so it is disappointing that they did not choose to revisit it. One can only hope that they implement performance based narratives in a future game because it is a device that remains largely untapped.
As for the story itself? Well, there’s really not much to say. Both the game and its sequel are by the book techno-action Tom Clancy-like thrillers, except instead of killing incompetent Chinese people, you are killing incompetent Mexicans and/or Latin Americans. Perhaps the only interesting thing that appears in Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 is the fact that you can choose the gender of your character. As a male character, the story turns out to be a fairly standard Oedipal narrative, with the main antagonist feeling resentment towards you because you coddled and protected him from his failure. As a female character, the conflict suddenly becomes creepy as your character is caught in that grey area between mother figure and sexual object. Does Gabe resent “you” because you were too motherly, or because you rejected his sexual advances, or maybe even because he rejected your sexual advances? I have no doubt that this is completely unintentional and perhaps I am bordering on over-analysis... but play through the last chapter again with a female character and listen to that final piece of dialog between you and Gabe again. If you can tell me you don’t see anything weird in that relationship, you are probably less damaged than I am.
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