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Games

How Come All Nightclubs in Video Games are Full of Strippers and Aliens?

It's almost as if the people who make games never really go clubbing...
Ein Haufen megacooler Gamer, die zusammen abhängen und gamertypisch Games zocken. Foto: Joel Stubston (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.5)

This article originally appeared on THUMP UK.

Gaming is a strange thing isn't it. On the one hand, it's an art form that most of us have grown up with and enjoyed thoroughly and still have—at the very least—a twinge of nostalgia for. On the other, video games are pretty much the sole preserve of bedroom bound man-babies who perpetually stink of Wotsits and sad-but-still-furious masturbation sessions. Only kidding, everyone! I love a good game of FIFA with the lads on a Friday night, and you can't keep me off Candy Crush!

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That said, in a world of virtual reality, where video games are nearing such close depictions of actuality you might very well be living inside a massive one right now, it deigns asking: why can't video games get nightclubs right? After all, if I can repeatedly crush Goombas under my tradesmen's boots, or ritualistically slaughter soldiers, even reel in some big virtual bass, then why can't I have good old fashioned digital night out?

I long for the moment when I can sit back in my custom made gaming rig—an old inflatable Homer Simpson chair I found next to a bin in Deptford, laden with a coverless, yellowing cushion, and a 3ltr bottle of Frosty Jack sellotaped to each armrest—turn all the lights off and get fully stuck into Call of Doorly 4. Forty years after both video games and clubs were foisted upon an untrusting and uncaring world, we're still no closer to that. Like oil and water, or pulled pork and weight loss, the two resolutely refuse to mix.

Here are some very cool looking gamers just hanging out and playing games like gamers do (photo via Wikipedia)

If I were being a bolshy sod, I'd probably argue that clubs in games are always awful because the people who make games aren't usually the kind of people you'd see down the front at Body Hammer. And that gaping chasm between concrete reality and it's computer rendered rendition results in scenes like this, from Mass Effect 2:

I'm not a bolshy sod, there's obviously more to it than that, but seriously? What on earth is going on here? Have you ever stepped foot in a club like this? Have you ever dropped a tenner on the door, been frisked by a bruising bouncer from Bradford, nipped in the men's for a quick pre-bar piss and then been confronted by…this? Last weekend were you forced to navigate your way around a big, cylindrical phallic object that plunged itself into the floor like a loved up Ron Jeremy? And were there scantily clad alien babes abseiling in front of said phallus? And, for that matter, was your double vodka and orange served by another alien of a different breed? It was? Oh, ok. But were you then given a lapdance by yet another type of alien? Thought not. No one has ever been to a club like this.

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"That's because the game is set in an alternate universe in the future," I hear you wheeze between mouthfuls of lard and slurps of of lukewarm dandelion and burdock. Yeah, but why do the ALWAYS HAVE TO LOOK LIKE THIS? Who said that the future was going to be topless alien women cavorting on top of neon-lit bartops? This isn't a future I want any part of, thank you very much. Is it all a big masturbatory fantasy created and propogated by people who've never seen actual real life human women in actual real life nightclubs? That's not for me to say. No, sir. Not my place at all.

Not even the big boys at Rockstar, the studio behind Grand Theft Auto—the popular traffic obedience simulator which allows players to spend virtual money on burgers and wife-beaters before letting them either run comically fast or walk painfully slowly—can get it right. Sure, the clubs that litter Vice City or San Andreas or the imaginatively titled double whammy of Grand Theft Auto IV and Grand Theft Auto V are a tad more recognizable than the space-wank garbage proffered by Mass Effect but they largely focus on the seedier, sadder, strippier end of the clubbing continuum, and you're left to either stand around in a virtual strip club like lonely loser, or lonelier still, you're tempted to start touching digital breasts until you realize the full horror of what you're doing and hurl the controller at your telly and the console out of the window. Again, is it my place to wonder why strip clubs are such a motif in video games and to ponder if there's a correlation between that and their maker's internal fantasies? Categorically not. No. Not at all.

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Still, there have been attempts at transmuting the glitz and glamour of clubland into Rockstar's series though, and for reasons that are completely beyond me, one dedicated gamer's wasted months of their life crafting a playable replica of a terrible looking Americanized take on a West End cesspool. If you've ever wanted to watch such a thing, you're in luck.

The problem with gaming's take on clubbing is simple: it's an experience that really can't be replicated in anything other than, well, lived experience. Even as games get more and more sophisticated. Even as we're told that dull, schlocky narrative devices are turning a diversion into a Serious Artform. Even as the popular conception of the gamer as a spotty, sweaty little virgin becomes an anachronism used by only the laziest of comedians, there are things that games simply cannot do, no matter how prettily they try. Clubbing is one of them.

The clubs you see in Heavy Rain, Just Cause 2, or Alien vs. Predator aren't the clubs we know, love, and tolerate, simply because the majority of clubs—and clubbing experiences—most of us are interested in would need a game built around them and not the other way round. The nightclubs that pop up in virtual worlds are nothing but afterthoughts. Hastily added environs to add "sex appeal" or "edge". Maybe one day we'll get that, maybe a time will come when you can power up a game which lets you virtually feel yourself getting more and more crushed in the queue for a drink before sprinting outside and hammering X for a hastily smoked cig. Perhaps there'll be a Quick Time Event where you can either score pingers or find yourself being glowered at by some very, very scary men. It's entirely within the realms of possibility that in a decade's time we'll have swapped actual clubs for their computerized cousins and Saturday nights will be spent with headsets on trying to hail an imaginary cab back to a digital stranger's flat for a virtual after party where you can smoke pixelated spliffs. All in glorious first person 3D.

For now though, just like their cinematic cousins, the clubs we're able to enter in the world of gaming are strange, disorientating spaces, clubs that we're only able to recognize as clubs because they're both dark and a bit flashy. Clubs you'd never want to enter, let alone play in.

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