The Discomfort of Playing a Shooter Game Set in Your Own City
​Image: Dirty Bomb/Splash Damage

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The Discomfort of Playing a Shooter Game Set in Your Own City

Dirty Bomb is a free, British-made shooter in which you can call in a missile attack on Waterloo Station.

Much of the time, British independent developer Splash Damage's free-to-play shooter Dirty Bomb feels like inconsequential fun. Its strutting characters and bulbous weapons are patent comic-book fantasy, and thanks to a magical plethora of indestructible terrain, its skirmishes are more like gleeful paintball rallies than live fire exercises.

There are moments, however, when it jolts you out of your comfort zone—especially if you're from London. Scuttling out of an alleyway, I toss down a gun turret that unfolds like a self-inflating life-raft, just as a friend's laser pointer douses an armoured car in artillery shells. Peering through a shop window at the smoke cloud, I spy enemy sappers galloping up the street. And behind them, the dirty fang of the Shard, looming over the familiar girders of London Bridge Market.

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As a long-time shooter aficionado, I've gotten used to the sight of places like Basra in video games—locations plucked wholesale from Western news coverage of war in the developing world. Seeing my hometown represented this way is disconcerting. Dirty Bomb isn't photorealistic; certain colours stand out, such as the cherry-red of letterboxes, and objects have the slightly distended, goofy appearance of Pixar movie props. But there are similarities enough to mesmerise, if you're at all familiar with the capital.

Image: Dirty Bomb/Splash Damage

We shouldn't be surprised that shooters created by Western developers are moving closer and closer to home. Events like 9/11 and the London Riots of 2011 have created a lingering anxiety about the vulnerability of European and North American cities, for all their wealth and glamour. Urban warfare also now makes up a significant fraction of conflict around the world, as populations continue to migrate from the countryside—according to ​recent Oxfam research, the idea that refugees are mostly to be found well away from towns is thoroughly out of date.

Major action game franchises like Call of Duty and Battlefield have thrived in this climate, seizing upon the small-scale tactics and gadgets adopted by militaries working in built-up areas, while squeezing dramatic tension from deeply entrenched fears of terrorist attack and insurrection. This spring's Battlefield Hardline is an esp​ecially controversial example, for a variety of reasons: developer Visceral's depiction of police work as a Wild Western duel between evenly matched cop and robber teams might have seemed more outlandish, if it didn't parallel the real-life militarisation of US police departments.

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Dirty Bomb escapes a similar controversy by venturing into the realm of science fiction. The year is 2020, and London has been evacuated following a nuclear explosion. Its only remaining inhabitants are gun-toting mercenaries acting on behalf of international corporations—a gentle satire, perhaps, of how the UK's financial centre has come to serve as a playground for overseas investors.​

Image: Dirty Bomb/Splash Damage

"There's not many places in London that make for a good first-person shooter level."

This disaster has also allowed creator Splash Damage to adjust London's layout, blocking off passages with abandoned vehicles, ventilation tubes, and medical bunkers; at other times, the designers have simply changed the terrain outright to suit its purposes.

"They're primarily game spaces," observed Stephen Gaffney, executive producer. "They have to be good levels to play. There's not many places in London that make for a good first-person shooter level, funnily enough! Doors are wider in most first-person shooters, and there are fewer objects covering up the corners."

Splash Damage did attempt to recreate one of London's districts exactly as is, but was obliged to concede defeat in the face of the capital's tortured infrastructure. "We tried it with one of the maps—I won't say which one it is. We started with an accurate layout, but then we adjusted it over time, because it just wasn't working. It was an interesting experiment though."

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These difficulties are a reminder that most of the biggest shooters are created by Americans, accustomed to a newer, more accommodating breed of urban terrain. California-made Hardline, for instance, takes you from Miami through the deserts of Nevada to Los Angeles, all relatively spacious and easy to "read." That isn't the case with London.

Image: Dirty Bomb/Splash Damage

"They got to start anew when they built the cities in the States, and they built them after the cars turned up," noted Gaffney. "Whereas London is a mess! Everything got built on top of each other. Half the roads in the city centre aren't built for cars, they're built for horses and carts, and we've had to work around that. London's a funny old place."

If this poses problems when designing a theatre of war that gives each team an equal shot at victory, it also makes for more of a storified backdrop than is true of many shooters. London's age and chaos creates plenty of intriguing contrasts—the bowed brickwork of an old railway bridge hugging up to a modern concrete facade. "When you construct the levels, you see that these things are completely disparate," said Gaffney. "Why did they end up next to each other? Even though the levels aren't real, you've got to represent that flavour in the game."

Drawing a line between "flavour" and straight portrayal may grow difficult, as bumps in processing power allow game developers to represent cities not just as lively scenery, but as living, breathing environments.

Dirty Bomb gives us the morbid yet undeniably entertaining opportunity to rig elevators at Canary Wharf with plastic explosive, then lurk in the vicinity with a shotgun as foes drop airstrikes through gaps in the roof. For Gaffney, such scenarios are absolutely a celebration of the setting rather than a desecration of it.

"We're a British developer and we're proud of being British. Particularly the kind of game that we make—there's not a lot of people in this country making them, or in Europe to be honest, so it was kind of nice to represent our hometown in the game."