Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is arguably the greatest stealth video game of all time. It features highly reactive AI that notices when you leave doors open, it discuses geopolitics with comrades, it re-lights candles when you blow them out, it gets scared, it gets pissed off, it jams out to the radio, it calls for backup, and it uses all the tactics available in your own arsenal against you. The atmosphere of Chaos Theory’s environments, generated by a brilliant mixing of the ambient trip-hop soundscapes of experimental music designer Amon Tobin and unparalleled lighting effects, made playing through each level feel like visiting a real place. In other words, the locations of the game feel real in a way I’ve rarely witnessed in other games. Even the storyline, which revolves around a nuanced and realistic international scenario involving Japanese re-armament and North Korean brinkmanship, felt like a snapshot pulled directly from the headlines.
As a young man, I became affectively situated in this world in a manner that had a lasting impact on my own personal development. At a time when the relationship with my girlfriend was deteriorating, my mental health and the relationship with my parents was deteriorating, I was becoming increasingly socially isolated, and yearned for a source of guidance. More specifically, I needed a strong father figure, someone I could model myself after and learn from in the way a young person looks up to and seeks to emulate a proper role model. In the character of Sam Fisher, voiced by actor Michael Ironside, I found that role model.
Sam was everything I wanted to be. Strong, snarky, competent, he was capable of violence while simultaneously being an ethical, compassionate decision-maker. He was also a father, which provided an opportunity for me to live vicariously as his daughter in the form of a 40-page fan-fiction novella I wrote that explored their relationship. One day at age 14 while reading through the fan-wikis, I stumbled upon a blog published by Ubisoft (the creators of Splinter Cell) that was supposedly written by the “real” Sam Fisher, the NSA agent the fictional character was based off of. It contained a goldmine of information on Sam Fisher’s lifestyle, including workout routines, fashion suggestions, personal tastes in road trip music, and even intimate anecdotes about fatherhood. This meta-blog became the tome I would spend the next 4 years of my life attempting to emulate. My workouts became Sam Fisher workouts. My clothing purchases shifted to black tactical-casual wear. I took up learning Krav Maga. I even taught myself how to walk like Sam after repeatedly practicing in a mirror (my friends referred to this as the “action hero” walk). And finally, at the height of it all, I purchased my own midnight navy stealth suit.
At the time, there was nothing more exhilarating than the moment I scaled that first rooftop, proceeding up a drainage pipe in the back of the Perinton Avenue strip mall, just like Sam would have done, wearing a skintight gortex top, black tactical pants, and matching balaclava. The sensual experience of night air brushing up against skin, of being totally invisible, above everything, listening to passing traffic and ambient chatter, was not only objectively an adrenaline filled moment, but in a subjective sense it signified a coming-of-age transformation during which I had managed to pull the affect-filled virtual world of Chaos Theory into my everyday reality. In that moment, my fear of heights suddenly vanished. I felt strong – invincible even. I felt like Sam. My nightly exits into this parallel reality, informed by the fiction of Splinter Cell, led me to infiltrate everything from local schools to malls and industrial parks. I was becoming a habitual trespasser, and from up on top of those structures, I felt the presence of my surrogate Dad Sam Fisher, guiding, instructing, and encouraging me to excel at what I was doing.
Now, before we continue, I’d like to formally mention that I in no way believe that this reality-altering trip was in any-way an intentional byproduct of Splinter Cell or of the oft-cited “negative influence” of video games in general. However, I do believe that, given my mental state at the time, I relied on the world of that game to carry me from fragile adolescence into the delicate period of early adulthood, for better or worse. I’d posit that coming of age media has the power to manifest in the lives of young people in these strange and often reality-bending ways, especially in the absence of more suitable social experiences or mentor figures. Virtual environments have become reflexively laced with the memories and transformative encounters of youth in a hyper-personal manner. I’d wager that many other people who grew up in the late 90s – early 2000s have formative texts in the form of virtual worlds that they came of age on, though these stories might be a little too embarrassing for most people to want to speak or write about.
Playing Splinter Cell now, I can still taste the surfaces and textures of its world in a way that feels like encountering a digital phantom. Sneaking about in the cargo hold of the Maria Narcissa plunges me back into the belly of my high school basement, as clambering about on the rooftops of Displace International affectively triggers that first experience of being up on the top of Perinton strip mall. The reality of Splinter Cell that once extended out into the world of the everyday has collapsed back into the inputs and interactions of the original game artifact, now charged with the nostalgic color palettes of growing older, to be revisited whenever I feel like booting it up, for a brief sneak around the shadows of those transformative memories.
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