I Am the Good Shepherd. I Am War

Hotels are places where we go to not-live, suspensions from the reality of life and the demands of domesticity. Hotel stories are the antithesis of kitchen-sink dramas because the kitchen is out of bounds; it is where the staff exist, and in a hotel we are not-staff. Boundaries between interior and exterior spaces are further complicated by the negative space that is the hotel itself, a nullity sitting between the comfort of the guest-room and the outside world beyond the lobby. Hotel corridors are not places to exist in but places to pass through, places whose function is to create the space for all the other guests and staff that are not-you. To be in the interstitial space of a hotel is to know that, contrary to the secured and private promises of the room that you are staying in, the hotel is a space that is not for you.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine is a hotel of a game. Where play can be considered a holiday from real life, Space Marine is a mid-week stay in a mid-range business hotel just outside the ring-road of a mid-size city during conference season. The titular Space Marines are a roving force of military management consultants, sent from hot-spot to hot-spot when regional management can’t cope with the workload. They have the sort of work-life balance that you’d expect from such a meagre existence — kept in stasis between each warzone. They remind me of a pair of new-store specialists my partner once worked with when she worked for mid-range clothing company Peacocks during their bullish, pre-Primark expansionist phase. These two travelled the country, each fortnight overseeing the stocking, merchandising and opening of a new store in a new city; proud that they didn’t have permanent addresses; descending regularly into sexually frustrated banter; hating each other. Living in hotels. Space Marine is a hotel of a game, and it is beautiful.

I love staying in hotels, and the more faceless they are the better. The first time I ever stayed in a hotel was in South Africa, where my family is from, relatively soon after Apartheid ended. Having grown up in South East London my visits to South Africa, even when just staying with family, were always a culture shock, but this time we spent a few days in the Drakensberg Mountains as a special treat. I was a poor kid and I had never been waited on before, nor realised the extent to which so many people accepted it as a basic reality. I hated the idea of service, but fell in love with the separation from reality. After a family argument, my sister and I walked off into the mountain, along a treacherous stream-bed to a place called Rainbow Gorge. We didn’t tell anyone that we were going, it didn’t feel real enough a place for us to think that we would need to do so. When we got back it turned out that, had we got injured or lost, it was likely we would never have been found again. A hotel is a place from which you can just walk off, into the mist, and disappear. Unless you work there.

For me the ideal hotel is mid-range. A working building where the guests and the staff are on as equal a level as possible. Everyone is working; working behind the scenes or working at having fun. There is no luxury. There is no existence at the expense of others. The rich want to treat hotels as an extension of their own houses, places with a full internal life, hidden from the rich themselves. This is what the idea of being served upon always felt like to me, like a holiday that is permanent. Like a nothing sort of a life. Like a life that separates the elite from the normal. This is probably why I work in admin, thick in the logistics and bureaucracy of existence that an elite force of warriors like the Space Marines would consider unworthy of their time.

Space Marine is a corridor shooter. That means that you travel down predefined channels, emptying them. There are spectacular vistas, but these are inaccessible, marked ‘staff only’ or viewed through windows that are bolted closed. There are a great many corridors in Space Marine that are already empty. Games tend to use empty corridors for two purposes, to provide tension and pacing, or to allow them to work behind the scenes on preloading the next area.

Space Marine’s empty corridors are badly paced, and in a game with functionally unlimited ammo and health, and in which every enemy announces its presence clearly before attack it does not deal in tension either. The empty corridors are often placed just before loading screens appear, cutscenes run or any number of other pre-loading tricks are employed, suggesting that they do not serve that function either. The empty corridors must then exist to be empty. They exist to be that negative space, between inside and outside, where a person is not a person, neither their public nor their domestic face.

A Space Marine is not a person. Within the Warhammer 40,000 lore this is a rich source of drama and, inevitably, conflict. Warhammer 40,000 is a fictional universe that exists to tell stories of war, everything about it is in the service of the escalation rather than diffusion of violence. Space Marine, as a game, follows this pattern by making the Space Marines that you play as heal themselves through the brutal dispatching of their enemies. If you are dying then you must wade into the middle of the throng to survive, spreading death in order to continue the story of death. To hang back is to will the story to end. People do not act like this, but then people are not Space Marines. Space Marines have skin that is bonded to their armour; they have two hearts and no genitalia. They can spit acid and they worship a man who is a living god as if he were a father. They are a toxic masculinity and a depiction of male friendship all in one. A stag do and a mid-nineties business meeting merged into one hideous explosion of oily machismo, destroying the hotel. Only one token woman allowed and she has to act like a man. Everything falling apart.

The unreality of a hotel is of a different order to the unreality of war. War turns homes and bodies into shells, stripping all other meaning from them. A hotel is a shell imbued with meaning by the bodies that enter it. It is a machine that is transformed into a building by being lived in. War is a machine that perpetuates itself by making machines of everything it touches. A Space Marine is a machine that is built for war. Space Marine is not built for war. No corridor shooter is, because war is not clean and ordered but a mess of competing lives. Wars are not won by walking into the teeth of the enemy’s guns, as Call of Duty might have you believe. Wars are not won at all, they just end when one side has outwitted the other by tricking more of their soldiers and civilians into being dead. War requires real thinking outside the box, because very few people actually think being dead is the better option. But Space Marine is very bad at thinking outside the box. Its corridors are clean and solid, like the regularly hoovered passageways of a solid, mid-market hotel.

The corridors in Space Marine are too long and have too many turns in them. The whole doesn’t fit together into a functional setting, but instead makes sense only as a gauntlet, from training montage to quicktime boss battle, for the player to run through and prove themselves worthy. Hotels are full of hidden spaces, Space Marine is too. Space Marine is so badly designed as a coherent world that its secret areas are almost entirely hidden, unused even by its implied inhabitants. They are appendices, places no person would go. They do not encourage exploration, but instead imply other worlds. In Murakami’s novel series The Hotel Dolphin has a hidden floor where the Sheep Man resides. The Sheep Man is someone who you must find when you need to find him, but who otherwise remains hidden. He doesn’t emerge from the machine but instead draws you into it to discover its secret. And once you know the secrets of the machinery of the world, hidden in the parts of the hotel that are the hotel’s alone, acceptance and continuation is at last possible. You cannot change the way that the game will end, the steps of the dance you are dancing. Truth and depth and explication exists not in the real spaces but in the interstitial. In order to play Space Marine you have to play it wrong.

When my sister was coming out we stayed at another hotel in South Africa. This time it was in Durban. I wish I could say that my sister coming out was a perfect moment of progressive acceptance, but families are never perfect. She had left home a number of years before and so this was the first time in a while that we were all to live under the same roof. Durban is a strange city, a strip of high-rise glamour nestling between violent poverty and the impossible depth of the ocean. I saw my first ever hunter’s moon hanging over this unreal space. I saw the sun rise over the ocean. Our family re-formed itself in the rooms of a building that had never been built for families.

The unreality of the hotel and the unreality of war are inextricably linked, though. Wars make hotels out of houses, as invading armies drive people from their homes and set up billets; as shelling fractures domesticity into the temporary room, forces people into living from suitcases, makes world travellers of the most settled. The refugee camp shares the logic of the hotel-turned home, but twisted from servitude into domination. The modern hotel grew out of the asylum as it is, the Hotel-Dieu de Paris. Asylums became sanatoria, where the rich waited to die in luxury, or put their lives on hold. Eventually, the need to be dying disappeared, although the air of the liminal space remained. The clinic at Arosa in Switzerland is where Thomas Mann’s hero Hans Castorp stays in The Magic Mountain. He is not, to his knowledge, waiting to die, although his death is assured by a war that he descends to take part in. The clinic is where Hans Castorp learns about love. Erwin Schrödinger stayed at the same clinic, in real life, although he did later die of the tuberculosis he was there to cure. Schrödinger solved a fundamental aspect of wave theory in the clinic. He also had a lot of sex there, it helped him to think. Schrödinger hated quantum theory, ridiculing the idea that anything could be in two states at once, but the waveform collapsed anyway. The hotel both is and isn’t itself, is and isn’t home. It is and it isn’t a place for a warrior to enact war.

I have had some great sex in hotel rooms. When someone else has to clean the sheets. When the room is not one you have to live with yourself in. When you can leave that person behind. Melinda Gebbie and Alan Moore’s Lost Girls is about having sex in hotel rooms. And outside of hotel rooms. Mainly it is about how hotels are magical spaces, away from the horrors of war, that will let you access something of the deeper reality of who you are. The shades of our Victorian children’s fiction discover their true sexuality, and their true selves, in a world that is about to be destroyed by violence. And when the soldiers do come, when the Space Marines land in blood and glory, the joy and the truth that the lost girls discover has melted away, leaving only a mirror in which they can glimpse what they might have been if they had not chosen war. War and hotels and corridor shooters collapse, finally, in Cameron Kunzelman’s game Carl, A Dawdling Guest, a repeating loop of gun violence in hotel corridors. It is the game that Space Marine wishes it could be, but Space Marine, finally, cannot be other than it is.

The fighting and shooting in Space Marine is distraction, it is what you do when you are on holiday to be able to tell yourself that you had a good time. It is a conference room of seminar banalities, mission statements and worked examples while you stare through the window at a landscape you have no time to explore. The game is in the spaces between, alone and away from your everyday life, watching people work in a place designated for your rest and searching for the transformational key that will shift the world around you.

Space Marine is a hotel of a game. An enclosed labyrinth of constrained spaces offering vistas of change and of other worlds, but with no movement beyond its walls. It has windows but is a self-contained world; holiday and container and workplace and magical space all in one. Like the hotels of Murakami, and Gebbie and Moore, it contains and then changes its protagonist, who enters thinking he is one thing but leaves knowing he is another. For me it is a chance to enter the universe of Warhammer 40,000, a game I have been playing for decades, at eye level, to bask in my complicity in the systems of oppression. This is a world which I normally see from the top down, staring across a tabletop or abstracting out mathematical advantages from army rosters. Space Marine allows me to take a holiday there, but only in the constrained semi-world of the hotel. I can see the vistas of a new horizon but only from the confines of a conference-room-based arranged activity day. Only after getting lost amongst the corridors to find it. Space Marine is a game in which I was able to change myself, while remaining fundamentally the same. Space Marine is a war that you can visit.