Stick fight: the games

 

Stick fight: the games

I invite you, slovenly constituted reader, to invoke powers hence untapped. Imagine with me; if only for a fleeting moment. Set the scene in hues of deepest black and orange, no wait - noir and ochre, add strings and flutes and drums: their pace quickening. Garnish the moment with the brutal glare of the sun’s gaze, the sink of sulphur and knowledge that only one man may live.

 

We stand equidistant, hands at our hips, four desperados, blue, red, yellow and green, for whom words have failed, and all that remains is the cradle of our heritage. 3,2,1 lunge. Hands run along the grain of the oak grips, we squeeze off wild shots, snapping the air with their howls. Screams shatter the tension like glass. Falling into cover, our hearts pound, sweat pours as every sinew strains to cling to life.

 

Red and yellow, rising like the dawn, turn their guns on each other. Hammers fall and blood sprays. Yellow takes a shot to the shoulder: their arm flies out wildly, hosepipe in its movement. It sends him off balance. The revolver races from his hand. Red’s head is whiplashed, lashing the air with yet more red. He’s dead.

 

Before he can hit the ground green is up, sparks fly from the barrel of his gun, nailing yellow in the side again. Green is seizing the moment by the throat; he jumps over cover, gun arcing down to lay the deathblow on yellow. He chokes. Yellow's foot, in a flurry of movement plants itself in his chest, his limbs shoot out spasmodically. The gun fires, nailing the already dead red. No redemption to be found.

 

Yellow is on him now, fists like a torrent of hail, he wails, wailing on green too stunted to process this reversal until finally he slumps down, and quietly expires.

 

Blue, the bastard, the dalliance dilettante, waits behind cover. Cradling his firearm, watching coldly while all but the pigs fly. Yellow, holding his claret soaked side, snatches a gun off the floor, and takes aim.

 

When blue doesn’t move, yellow inches closer, and closer. Until at last, blue doesn’t move just one too many fucking times, yellow screams,

”Shit on it!”

He fires wildly, leaps and spins and comes down with all the unfettered malice of a Valkyrie. There is an exchange. Here’s what’s traded: blows, bullets, insults, and a life. Yellow stands with a golden crown resting on their head. Blue lays with a glassy expression, laid out to rest.

 

Then the scene changes, the items swap around, but the ordeal repeats.

 

This is stick fight’s joy, sudden focused bouts of hyper violence, done to stick figures of course. While subjected to increasingly chaotic level designs and to the fickle whims of anyone wielding a snake based weapon, I'm not talking metal gear here.

 

We as people have a fascination with violence, one might suggest some evolutionary or cultural benefit of such, but really that’s beside the point. We have the horny now, and it needs indulging, or at least we like to think it does. The problem is, hurting people actually fucking sucks; or at least that’s what I keep insisting to myself: my experiments with flies and small rodents supports a different conclusion.

 

Movies are nice, but they lack the agency of games. While many games are starting to feel too realistic to depict hyper violence with all its kinetic rapture intact. Violence, like sex, largely lies in our own fantasies, hence why its depictions are best served stylized. Stick fight then is fun abstracted violence, caffeine free Pepsi max. Its lobbying system is really straightforward; taking place inside the game itself to do away with any menus, and it’s a fun way to kill a while on the sofa or over the interwebs.

 

As well as being violent, each round is an exercise in game theory; but that’s just a pretentious way of saying be careful not to be beaten while you beat others. Don’t let your own shotgun knockback send you flying into lava. Avoid snakes, no really, they’re hateful fuckers. And if ever you see a laser beam on a pivot: get to cover without hesitation.

 

I don’t think there’s much more to be said about it than that. It’s a very simple game that feels a bit like the web flash games of fifteen ago, but is much more polished in its design. So I won’t waste any more of your time gushing about it, unless you kept reading past that last comma, at which point you’re just reading another dollop of endless word salad that isn’t furthering any particular point other than to call attention to its own redundancy and lack of context, and so by your very reading it you become part of a vacuous moment that just doesn’t seem to have