I was recently hanging out with my friend Mike having some drinks, watching some movie (The Raid is amazing seriously go see it) and playing some games. Of course while doing this we were chatting about various things – mostly games – and we turned to stuff from back in the day that we liked, as us old-timers are prone to doing.
Something we both agreed on though was that for all the newfangled graphics and physics engines, and for all the gun games of recent years, gaming seemed poised to go down a particular path and then swerved violently away from it. Probably the best example of this path is Bushido Blade, a fighting game where you choose your character, weapon (such as the Ancient Hanzo Sledgehammer), and have at it. Thing is there are no health bars; you take swings, they take swings, and you might get one-hit killed or cripple their leg or all sorts of things. It’s ropey, because it’s an old game that never had a huge budget to begin with, but it’s honestly one of the best fighting games ever.
You know in Samurai movies when the two dudes stand facing each other for a long, long time before making a single sudden attack that decides things? Bushido Blade is the only game I’ve played where that can happen. You and your friend will be sitting there watching, circling each other, trying to feel each other out, and then there’ll be a sudden burst of violence that decides the round. It’s brilliant – and even by the time the second game came out it was abandoned in favor of health bars and too-crazy characters and so on and so forth. It was a shame, though the original is still worth popping in if you’ve got a copy.
You can also fight in a bamboo forest and chop bamboo down.
But it’s emblematic of a rather broader trend – namely, the reduction in experimentation over the years. Now to be fair this is picking back up a bit again, as indie games gain more and more ways to reach people, as kickstarters let people choose the sorts of things they want to see, and as publishers see the success of games they might not typically consider salable, such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Still, in this day and age you’d think we’d have developed depth that built on the sorts of ideas Bushido Blade seeded – locational damage in a fighter for instance. Or look at the game Sentinel, which had a very ambitious conversational system where you could actually ask NPCs things in a free-form manner. Underdeveloped and ropey, again, but a thing with so much potential. Instead we get yet another Soul Calibur, yet another Tekken, yet another Call of Duty. Nothing wrong with those in their own right, just sad to see there’s so little experimentation and attempts to use computing power for anything other than better graphics.
You’ve most likely already heard about this, but I thought I would share some of our thoughts about the situation anyway. As you may recall I’ve written at some length about the endings as they stand, so I won’t retread that here. And it wouldn’t be a revelation on the scale of Saint John’s to say I hope they do it well, though I am somewhat skeptical as it sounds like they are just adding to the cinematics rather than doing the work that I suspect needs to really be done in order to fix this up properly.
Still, there is something about this all that is very heartening. There has been a lot of talk about “artistic integrity” and whatnot in relation to the ending – that BioWare shouldn’t change the ending because of fan dissatisfaction. To some extent this is a fair point, as otherwise we would no doubt have all kinds of nonsense like Square trying to make games more like FFIX instead of, you know, good FFs. Nonetheless the attitude that fans are ‘entitled’ is bizarre, for a great number of reasons. First, yes we are. We’re entitled to getting our money’s worth and if a product, for whatever reason, doesn’t deliver that then we are perfectly within our rights to demand improvement. Maybe not to expect it, but to want it, certainly. If I buy a car and some aspect of it doesn’t function properly it’s not unreasonable to want that to be fixed, whether it’s something trivial or vital to the car’s functioning. Second, and our dear Pike can elaborate on this with far greater insight and expertise than I can, it is a pretty well-established notion when you create a creative work and put it out for people to consume, it becomes the property of the consumers. I’m a writer. I dread the idea of someone taking my work and finding it so thoroughly flawed that they want big changes made. But if that does happen, I sincerely hope I have the humility and integrity to sit down and consider the complaints on their own merits – and if they do indeed have merit, to see how a solution can be incorporated. When Pike first explained that to me I was somewhat horrified. “It’s mine!” I cried, “I can do what I want with it!” Well, yes. I can. That doesn’t make it wise to do so, and it may demonstrate great disrespect for the people who are sharing this work with me.
This has nothing to do with anything, but tell me that's not the most metal England you've ever seen.
The more interesting aspect here is that they’ve been willing to do this. To whatever extent they do make changes, to go back and change a fictional work once it’s done is fairly unusual. Yes you have, say, director’s cuts in movies when they’re out on DVD, and remixes of music tracks, but those aren’t really the same thing as making a change to the canonical version of the thing itself. The only real precedent I can think of, and Pike and I tried for some time to come up with something, was the Broken Steel DLC for Fallout 3. But even that was a small change, a simple “Oh you survived after all” and the ability to carry on after finishing the main quest, as it should be. And it was paid. The ME3 DLC is to be free, and at least has the potential to make significant, even sweeping, changes to the canon of the series.
What are your thoughts on this, readers? Are you hopeful, or do you despair about BW’s caving to angry mobs? Does this bode well or ill for the industry? Tell us what you think in the comments!
I shall warn you now: This is going to be a long post, and it is also going to contain an overabundance of spoilers, not only for the very end of ME3 but plot points throughout the series. Therefore if you are not interested in having it spoilt for you, http://offsecnewbie.com/2018/05/11/fluxcapacitor-hackthebox/ do not read beyond this point!
Now we’ve all seen the great hullabaloo surrounding the ending of Mass Effect 3 – RPS provides a good summation of the current state of affairs – and that lets us launch into one of the core points that needs to be made explicit right from the beginning. People are invested in this game, this series, and deeply so. Mass Effect has been going for five years now, encompasses three vast games, and a number of other media like books and comics. A core concept of creative endeavor is that the creator and the consumer of it are engaged in a compact – at the very simplest level this compact is that the reader/player/watching agrees to suspend disbelief, while the creator agrees to deliver a satisfying story. The suspension of disbelief is vital. When you find the story coherent and internally consistent, you’ve got yourself a stew going. When you encounter something that is obviously nonsensical, contradictory, or the like, your ability to suspend disbelief is harmed, perhaps even shattered, and that makes your ability to enjoy the tale weaker. You can read a fairly excellent summation of this whole concept here, although the last bulletpoint may not apply!
In short this does matter. It’s not just the ending of a game, it’s the ending of something that people have invested in. Invested their money, their time, and their emotions. If anything the outrage is a testament to BioWare. Nobody gets too worked up about something they don’t care much about, but when we do get attached to things we naturally have expectations.
This honestly has nothing to do with anything, we just needed a picture to break up the text.
The problem, therefore, is not that the ending was anything in particular. It’s not that it was sad or happy or bitter-sweet or anything in-between. There’s nothing wrong with any particular ending, but it does have to have thematic ties, foreshadowing, and when it purports to be the ending of a series, it needs to provide satisfaction. Mass Effect 3 only succeeds on the first two in a very shaky fashion, and falls down on the third entirely.
The three choices given at the end of the game, by Magical Star Child von Ex Machina III, are roughly as follows – you can choose to either Destroy the Reapers, to Control the Reapers, or to merge all organic and synthetic life in the galaxy. The first of these options is fine – you’ve been trying to do that all game. The second is problematic. You’ve been specifically trying to stop the Illusive Man from figuring out how to control them throughout the game, and it’s pretty much outright stated that it’s not possible to control them. It turns out they can be, but you’re never given much reason to think it’s a good idea. In previous ME games choices like that were always given context and meaning. In the original game at the end you are presented with a choice of whether to charge in to save the Galactic Council, or hang back as it will help you fight more effectively. Sacrificing them has another purpose however – throughout the game you’ve seen humanity’s place in the galaxy, and how they are not given the due they feel they deserve. Failing to save the Council would propel your species to a position of power, as the new Council would be built around the people who saved the Citadel itself.
Conversely, although the possibility is raised in ME3 of controlling the Reapers, it’s never highlighted as a serious proposition. It’s something a madman is doing, something that the Reapers themselves have suggested to him in order to divide humanity’s efforts.
But at least that has some measure of foreshadowing, hamfisted as it is. The third option, “Synthesis”, comes right out of left field. Now, let’s be clear, I am an ardent transhumanist in the real world and fully desire ascension to becoming cybernetic. However, in this game it is completely insane to think Shep would choose that in the state he reaches the end in. He’s seen synthesis – it’s how the Reapers get their ground forces. There would need to be a HELL of a lot more in the way of setting this up beforehand for it to be remotely palatable.
The third problem with the choices given is that Shepard is not the kind of person who just accepts the choices given. The series is about defying the inevitable fate others have prescribed, and it doesn’t just come through in the big picture. A lot of small quests throughout the game can have an alternative option that Shepard figures out where nobody else could. At this point he should absolutely be able to say “Fuck you, we’re done playing by your rules.” as a Renegade, and “But look at the evidence” as a Paragon. And then what you have done in the series to date has an effect on what happens next.
How you have played should totally influence how the endings work out. Here’s how I envision things: You have brought peace to the Geth and Quarian, and present this to the Catalyst as evidence. It responds by saying “Yes, temporary peace has been achieved. Only through our presence. We have seen this in preceding cycles.” and they give you a long list where it has occurred. Then you can offer “EDI and Joker are in love.” as evidence, and the Catalyst says something like “Interesting. We do not have enough reference points to determine the outcome of this eventuality.” and then you have speech checks to convince the Catalyst to at least give the galaxy a chance to see if it can work. Alternatively you can choose to fight on, and then the battle just plays out. The outcome is determined by your War Assets – you should entirely be able to lose everything here! That would be a really great bad ending that made sense. And either of this would put things in the player’s hands, and made the choices over the game and series fundamentally matter. You could have three tiers of outcome – victory, a close defeat that is a Pyrrhic Victory for the Reapers and gives hope that the remaining galactic powers might be able to muster enough force to survive (or at least that the next cycle will), and total, crushing defeat.
So much for the choices. Let’s move on to the consequences. The choices of the ending are bad, but the outcomes are if anything even worse. Very little makes sense here. You see almost nothing except a few dying repears or whatever, and then the Mass Relays start blowing up (Seriously all it took was ONE LINE from Hackett earlier about how the Crucible’s effects seem to be propagated through the Relay system) while Joker is escaping through one. Why is he running when Shepard isn’t confirmed dead, and indeed the Citadel just opened, so Shep is probably not dead? How did Ashley and Liara get back aboard the Normandy? Who knows! Anyway the advertised multiple endings just plain don’t exist. You get a couple different colors of explosions, and you get a few minor scene changes, and that is that.
Gamers want choices. And we want choices that matter – choices and consequences used to be the watchwords of the RPG genre, and it is something we have sadly come to almost totally lack. One of the reasons Mass Effect was always so exciting was that it promised to oppose this trend – but it hasn’t done anything of the kind. It presented a total copout, in fact. Now, take my suggestions above, and you can see just how disappointing it is. I’ve not been spending forever drafting ideas, I pretty much plucked them out of thin air in the course of a few minutes. And though I’m not going to say I should be writing for videogame (I should totally be writing for videogames) it demonstrates that it would be easy to have come up with alternative endings that made sense. Endings that, as I’ve said but must hammer home, synthesize the gameplay and narrative choices over the course of the series to adjust your final options and their outcomes. This is surely the Holy Grail of games that purport to give the player significant choice – we all make gameplay choices constantly. Who to shoot in which order with which weapons, etc. etc., and how a battle plays out is the consequence thereof. In ME we make narrative choices regularly as well. Combine the two and baby, you’ve got a stew going!
Of course, this entire post rests on the concept that companies aren't evil bastards who destroy the best things ever.
Finally, when it comes to consequences, whatever the outcome we should have seen a lot more about your allies. Mass Effect is really about your other party members and how you interact with them. To see nothing except that they are stranded on an alien world is completely unsatisfying. Fair enough if you had a bad ending where Joker fled the battle once it was totally lost, I suppose, but otherwise just what. Assuming a good ending, like one where you convince the Reapers to leave or your superweapon works as advertised, you should see vignettes of where your comrades are five or ten years down the line. Liara excavating the ruins of Tuchanka. Javik is with her if you convinced him to become a bro, and they are working together to search for other Prothean ruins and perhaps other Protheans who survive in stasis. Garrus is a highup on Palaven helping to organize rebuilding. Wrex is doing the same on Tuchanka, keeping the tribes in line and working to create a new krogan identity. You see others as well, if they’re still alive. And finally you come to a scene maybe thirty years on, where you are older now, and your comrades too, and everyone who survived the series has gathered at the opening of a new Normandy Memorial Museum or something, a definitive and permanent memorial to the Reaper War and its heroes. You see a wall of the lost, as on the Normandy, you listen to your comrades make brief speeches about you, and you get to make a final one yourself about where the galaxy should go now.
That’s only one possibility of course. I understand that we all have our ideas about how everything should be different, too. I’m not trying to say I have all the answers and my ideas are best, but I am hoping to point out that not only is the current situation a bad one, it’s doubly bad because a better ending would not have been difficult to come up with, and given the money invested in the series, it wouldn’t have been an undue strain on resources to implement more.
Fundamentally it’s not disappointing just because of choices ignored, or consequences ignored, but because both are ignored in combination. Add a bit of nonsense and there we are. It’s disappointing not just as series fans, not just as paying customers, but as people who love the medium – because it could have been so much more, with so little extra effort. Maybe even enough to have a very clear way to demonstrate to Ebert that an experience can be enhanced by player agency and control, not diminished.
So, though there’s not a huge amount of information yet, the new SimCity looks like it has potential! Here is the good stuff we know so far:
Curved roads.
PC-only.*
Modding supported.
Launch Arcologies
And the GlassBox engine seems to have a great deal of potential for detail. Here is a link to a GamaSutra interview regarding it, and I’ll quote one of the most interesting parts. It may look a little intimidating if you’ve never seen code before but if you take a minute to read through it you’ll see it’s really rather simple and intuitive.
Here is an example of a unit rule, showing a chaining effect: as a sim consumes mustard, they create an empty bottle, which then adds to a city’s pollution. If mustard is unavailable, they then go buy more mustard.
unitRule mustardFactory
rate 10
global Simoleans in 1
local YellowMustard in 6
local EmptyBottle in 1
local BottleOfMustard out 1
Map rules are simpler than that. In this example, grass will grow only where there’s soil, water and nutrients, which are all depletable resources
Putting aside the amusing image of your Sims eating an entire bottle of mustard and nothing else for a meal, I don’t know if that is the actual way GlassBox stuff can be written, or if modders will have access to this side of the thing, but if it is it will be simple for modders to wrap their heads around but have a great deal of potential for changing how the game operates. It does sound like, hopefully, they are aiming to have a level of detail and fidelity that even SC4 fell far short of, and that in turn should help the development of natural looking cities.
If that still doesn’t make sense, take a look at these videos from the GDC giving some examples of how the engine works:
Of course these are early days. There’s a great many ways this game could go wrong, and there are already things I’m wary of, such as the DLC elements already announced, and how multiplayer is involved. Nonetheless, although rather cautiously, I do have a smidged of confidence that this game will be a worthy update to the series – and if it isn’t, that modders will be able to fix it! What do you all think of what we know so far?
*I have nothing against console games, it’s just that a game as complex as a good SimCity is something that no right-minded company should consider porting to a console.
In videogames, difficulty is a difficult thing to get right. It’s one of the reasons multiplayer is so popular after all; to date we’ve not come up with an AI that comes close to a human opponent, outside of chess at least. Now, it’s not hard to just make an enemy hit harder, have more health, or shoot with greater accuracy. Those things aren’t difficulty in a meaningful sense, but they do make the game harder.
Still, there’s not a lot original to say about this tendency to take the easy route and bump up the enemy’s pure abilities rather than their intelligence. What I want to talk about is a different aspect of AIs, which is something I’ve not seen often addressed, but which will ultimately be core in creating convincing enemies who are challenging, but can be defeated.
That aspect is making mistakes. Making believable mistakes, based on oversight, or failure to account for something by accident, and so on and so forth, rather than the result of glitches or the programmer’s failure to account for something. This may not seem like a huge concern while we’ve still got to figure out a way to be outwitted by the AI, but as we do get better at that this sort of thing is going to be crucial to correct for it in order to keep the game both fun and engaging.
A lot of victories in real conflicts are borne from taking advantage of mistakes the enemy makes. Sometimes this is a tactical error, sometimes strategic, and sometimes it’s more deeply rooted and occurs in the years before the war breaks out, when someone’s guess about the important factors of the next war prove to be incorrect. Oftentimes these things will be corrected over the course of the conflict, but sometimes not. In any event the point is that for the player to remain engaged and interested there can’t be an optimum strategy in all situations, which a ‘good’ AI would seemingly be prone towards, and which would thus force the same degree of efficiency from the player.
Of course in the real world there are all kinds of factors that are very hard to emulate. The Confederacy’s best option was probably a Fabian strategy – ceding land for time, and winning by attrition. But the political nature of the CSA meant that border states could not be sacrificed in such a fashion, and they had to be fought for (Well, except when McClellan was in charge of the Army of the Potomac, then not much of anything needed to be done by the Confederates). You can, to some extent, work with this in a game through mechanics like supply lines, dissent, and partisans, but it really has trouble with the nuances of the situation.
Had Lee had this little filly on his side, things would have been different.
Now, getting games to that stage would be a tall order of course. Nevertheless I think we could stand to start thinking about how AIs might make believable, varied mistakes. Things that an astute player can see and exploit, but which the AI might realize and fix very quickly as well. This isn’t a completely untried concept of course, Galactic Civilizations 2 is the obvious example of an AI being designed to do this sort of thing, and it’s a commendable attempt, especially because the AI is actually pretty darned smart without cheating. Halo likewise had some clever foes, for its day, and their dynamic nature meant mistakes on their part could emerge pretty naturally and an observant, smart player could exploit those very well.
What do you all think about this idea? Am I getting too far ahead of our current, braindead AIs, or is this something we should look towards?
A sentiment I’m sure many other gamers share is the belief that we could do it better. “If only I were in charge” we think “the latest installment of X would not have been so casual and dire!” Well, I’ve been bouncing around a videogame idea in my head for some time now, and I’m thinking that when I finish my current novel – not too far off now – I’m going to switch away from writing and begin learning how I might make this thing. I thought I would throw the idea out there to see if anyone has any ideas they might like to add to it, or general comments! Anything welcome!
My working name for this thing is An Ancient Evil Has Awoken. The twist is that said ancient evil is you – the objective of the game is to use your malevolent powers to wipe out the human race, evolving from newly-awoken small-timer to Eldritch Abomination. My design document at the moment proposes three main avenues of attack; the inducement of natural disasters, the use of psychic abilities to mess with human’s minds, and finally the use of supernatural events like Biblical plagues or creating zombies or things like that.
I envision the game to play as something between a cross of Pandemic and Populous. You would acquire your resource – tentatively called Terror – through things you do, as well as a slow trickle from the natural disasters (As in actual natural ones) and expend it on causing more death and mayhem. The world would be divided into a number of zones, and as the humans begin to grow aware that things are not right, they would develop more effective defenses against you and eventually could find a way to either destroy you, or to save themselves some other way. Of course the idea of a malevolent god out to destroy humanity is going to be a bit scarier than just bad things happening, so you’ve got a major decision to make; are you overt, increasing terror but making humans more able to resist you, or covert, which gives you a much more constrained ‘budget’ but lets you work in relative peace.
It should be possible though to do things in a variety of ways, and the player should fundamentally feel they are in control of how they are destroying the world. Ideally you would be able to cause an obscene amount of global mayhem without ever doing anything overtly recognizable as supernatural or weird. An economic crash here, a war there, and in the end you can just step in to finish off the survivors.
Pretty much a game where you play as this guy, yeah
What say you, fellow malevolent omnicidal lunatics? Any ideas, thoughts, comments?
I’m not a huge fan of most racing games, though of course there are exceptions like Wipeout, Rollcage, and Burnout. However the apex of the genre is without question Gran Turismo, which might not necessarily be to my taste in genre terms, but which has one incredibly strong appeal that really does tempt me.
You can customize everything. This game offers the kind of spergy detailed control and tweaking that really should make Strategy gamers think twice about our claims to be spergy over details. The same sort of thing appears in the NASCAR games which my dad used to play; you can customize the shock absorbance of each individual shock… thingy… look I’m not a car guy, that’s not the point.
The point is why don’t we have this sort of thing in other genres? I’m 100% behind racing game fans having a game like GT, it’s only good. I just want to know where the game that lets you design a train with that level of detail is, or an airplane. And then we get to the things I really want to see personally, which starts Gran Turismo crossed with Wipeout. Can you even fathom that level of detailed control and tweaking over your nifty little Auricom F-3600 AG racer?
Of course if you recall my recent post on different ship design methods in 4X games, you can probably see where this is going. Yep. I want a game where you can tweak the voltage that runs through the coils of your gauss cannon. I want a game where you can change the total range of movement of your ion thruster nacelles and get different effects. I want a game so incredibly complex that it makes Aurora look small-time.
I also want a game where you can do this with mechs. Armored Core is nice, but I don’t just want a bunch of different components, I want to modify each and every component individually. When will the world realize how desperately it needs to fulfill my unbelievably specific requirements?
Here’s a thing we’ve all experience! Something that shows just how wonderful games can be, as rare with games as a real pageturner with books, and the mark of a classic. One More Turn!
A couple of nights ago my co-host Pike had gone to bed early and I found myself not yet tired enough to do the same. “I know” I thought “I shall play a little Hearts of Iron for half an hour or so.” Two and a half hours later I noticed the same, and also the sunrise, and finally crawled into bed. The thing with a lot of games which have this appeal is that they have some really tangible sense of progression. I think that’s why we generally it call “One more turn” – it came from playing Civ until the wee hours.
Twilight just can't decide. Operation Sealion, or Operation Barbarossa?
With strategy games, good ones at least, you’ve always got something really tangible dangling in front of you. You’re always about to build a wonder, or conquer a city, or research a technology, or otherwise get some sort of reward. (Incidentally I think this is the major area where Civ V falls down; you get punished for many things, compared to Civ IV’s model where at worst you’ve lost due to opportunity cost. You might build unwisely but you still get something from it.) For me on Tuesday it was the conquest of Ethiopia, then of Egypt, then I had to fight Hashemite Arabia and Persia. After that I took on the Ottomans and their allies in Libya, Armenia, and Crete. Then I was ready to grab the remains of National French Africa. Throughout this I was researching new units and building new units and factories to improve my industry. See how it always cascades and there’s always something new to look towards? It’s admittedly a real-time game, but it functions similarly enough to turn-based for this to still work.
Compare to other games with more discrete levels. You do a level, great! Maybe you got a new toy in it. But now the level is over, there’s little that keeps you immediately hooked, the game might be superb but the immediacy matters a great deal in hooking you and keeping you hooked. I was playing some Skyrim and had a great time in this little dungeon, it was fun to explore, lots of fights, all that stuff. But once it was done, it was, well, done. I still want to play Skyrim but there was nothing keeping me there right at that moment.
Which games have the strongest One More Turn effect for you guys? We all know that Pike’s answer is SMAC, but what about our dear readers?
So Pike found an article online with the amusing and attention-getting title The Fascist Politics of the Infinite Respawn and, because I am not doing anything better with my copious qualifications, I thought I would take a look at it and provide a critique. I shall forewarn you, this is certain to be a long post and liable to be nothing more than masturbatory self-importance and a bunch of political jargon that has little use outside demonstrating that I know what political jargon is.
Maybe some Latin, too!
Fiat equus, et pereat mundus
Now, the article isn’t without some merit. Indeed for a medium to be considered an art, saying meaningful things is part and parcel of the deal. If we look at, say, movies, it’s very easy to find a very wide range of movies that have commented very seriously on a very wide range of political and social issues, from all kinds of angles. And we can find plenty of writing about what movies which don’t avowedly take a political torch up are saying as well; whether that be a feminist perspective on why strong women always get killed or a political examination of what hyper-macho 80’s action movies are all about.
I should state that I tend to shy away from overly analyzing every single movie/book/game etc. that comes along. Yes lots have things to say, and many more betray prejudice (conscious or simply not cared about) on the parts of their creators, but sometimes a big dumb action movie is just a big dumb action movie and trying to read more into it is silly. Still, the article I linked to is one which talks about an entire swathe of game mechanics and their implications, rather than any particular game, so I feel it’s worth engaging with. The argument, essentially, is that the mechanics of your typical modern FPS are ultimately “fascist” in nature, because they simultaneously represent A) The immovable and perfect State, in the form of the player character, and B) The numberless and overwhelming Enemies, in the form of… well, the numberless and overwhelming enemies.
A word about fascism itself. Fascism is a political philosophy with a single concept at its core: That the People and Polity should be the same thing, indeed must be, and that any other scenario is quite literally against the natural order of things and will by definition lead to the destruction of “Us”. It is important to note that Fascism does not consider this the consequence of living in a chaotic world or a lack of understanding on anyone’s part – it is a deliberate and concerted effort on the part of “Them” to destroy “Us”. “We” is fairly easy to define; “We” as a Nation (the only legitimate political unit for Fascism) are the natural owners of This Land who speak This Language and have This Culture. We have existed in this form since the mythical time immemorial (cf. just about any national origin myth you care to mention) and only in recent years, usually due to internal treason, are we being undone by alien influences of some nature. I reiterate that these aliens are acting very deliberately, with full knowledge of what they are doing and it’s consequences.
This leads itself to a whole host of interesting issues for the Fascist. We can see one of the most relevant if we take a look at Eco’s writings on the matter (You will generally find yourself enlightened if you ready Eco’s writings on any matter), most specifically the following quote:
When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.
Eco goes to one of Fascism’s absolute core contradictions here; the Enemy (and Fascism MUST have an Enemy because it is defined entirely in terms of “Us” and “Them” and cannot exist without both) are both cockroaches and masterminds; we are both superhumanly glorious as a people and fundamentally threatened by the enemies. Both parties are simultaneously incredibly strong and completely vulnerable. This is necessary for the Fascist; the Enemy must be strong enough to necessitate the Fascist’s proposed solutions (Obviously if They were actually a bunch of feckless layabouts with barely the mental ability to read, We would never be in any danger from Them), but We must be strong because the foundation on which Fascism is built shows and requires this to be fact. We are at risk of being overwhelmed despite the fact that we are almost divine in our nature and the greatest of all nations, and the fact that our enemies are “rats” and “cockroaches” and – a perennial favorite of the Fascist – “germs”.
The Fascist narrative is a clever one however; they shift the rhetorical focus, but they can do so damned well by simultaneously appealing to an actual or imagined historical Golden Age and current actual or perceived difficulties, or usually a mix of both in both cases, coupled with identifying an Enemy. The Enemy which is identified is only one part of the true foe of the Fascist, which is essentially anything that dilutes the power of the Race and Nation. This is why they object to homosexuality. Homosexuals do not reproduce and they do not fulfill the ‘natural’ roles of men and women in their roles as breadwinners and reproducers. Here we see how Fascism uses the mythologized past as well; the past was an agricultural idyll where men did honest work on the land and women did honest work creating and raising the young. Enemies are conflated in part due to this. To use a classic example, Jews not only must own the media because they are insidious and have influence everywhere, but the media must be owned by Jews because the media is a fancy, “not real” entity which does little honest work. The contradiction of using the media for propaganda purposes need not be addressed. There is a good reason Orwell’s 1984 has Doublethink as a central conceit.
So how does all this tie into the article linked, and into videogames? The article apprehends a lot of things quite well, in my eyes, but there are a handful of fundamental issues that it overlooks, or at least fails to properly address.
Yes, games do tend to provide an endless stream of undifferentiated enemies for the player to destroy and, yes, they do tend to do so in a fashion which gives little to no insight into them as people. But this is a necessity. First, games are fast-paced and involve large numbers. It would be very impractical to give every single person you kill in your average CoD a background and some characteristics, and I sorely doubt that it would be remotely enjoyable to play. Second, and similarly, games are made on a timeline and a budget. I dearly wish there were more games which offered the player more options with greatly diverging consequences, but that’s simply not the path that was taken, a failure of the art and medium certainly but far from inherently political in any way except, perhaps, love of the dollar.
Still, whilst I feel there is merit in criticizing how games present the enemies, I find the argument that the Player represents the Fascist State/Nation to be a rather shaky one. Indeed the player’s avatar is generally a superhuman force who performs impossible feats of endurance at the very least, but what is the alternative? There are games out there where the player is a very vulnerable figure, even manshooters (ARMA II being the obvious example), and they certainly have their place but I sincerely doubt that “realism” would serve CoD very well (No matter how much they might want to proclaim themselves a realistic military shooter).
It’s my opinion that the article has things backwards. Games use an arguably fascistic attitude in order to serve their ends, and thus they must have elements of fascism in them. My interpretation approaches it from the other direction – games make use of “fascistic” elements not because they are fascistic, but because they happen to share propagandistic tools. We see exactly the same tools employed by all manner of people, from state ideologues in fascist dictatorships to comic book writers in countries where free speech is sacrosanct. That the fascists happen to make use of such rhetorical tools does not ipso facto mean that using such tools makes one a fascist, nor that the tools themselves are fascist. We can use another example brought up by the article, that of zombies, to expand on this point.
The article states,
The zombie genre, in its various media incarnations, has been using the unstoppable mindlessness of its enemies as a justification for brutality for years. There’s a definite streak of fascist thought in the vanilla concept of zombies, although it’s usually complicated and subverted by the now-cliché “We Are The Real Monsters” subtext.
Now, despite the caveat, I take considerable issue with this assessment. The zombie genre is not a pro-fascist one (Overtly or subconsciously or otherwise), but one which generally opposes the “mass” against the “individual”. The enemies are by their nature a mindless undifferentiated mass of bodies; the survivors are by their nature the ones we can identify with, if only by virtue of the fact that they can, you know, speak and otherwise emote. But again we are seeing things conflated when they shouldn’t be. The survivors in any zombie fiction are by definition individuals when measured against their foes. This is often read as a critique of unthinking capitalism, as indeed it very much was in such movies as Dawn of the Dead, but could just as easily be read as a caution of communism (A horde of creatures acting in instinctive unison to exterminate the handful of individuals still alive by either devouring or infecting them). The critiques provided by zombies are thus not inherently fascist, but rather they are inherently individualist. It is true that the Fascist at times has recourse to utilize such imagery, especially in the Anglo world with our extremely strong emphasis on individualism. For the American demographic even more so the zombie doesn’t have a fascist narrative but a survivalist, libertarian one, which emphases self-reliance, individuality, and generally a rejection of whatever structures may exist to help. There are those on the American right who have a very similar set of talking points to this, but it’s due to a similarity of perceived past and as a means of capitalization on current discontent, not necessarily an actual confluence of either goals or attitudes.
Similarly all polities utilize a mythologized past and concoct a present and national identity to some degree. These things are not natural, they hinge on collective agreed-upon beliefs about the past. Individuals may differ and disagree but the overarching narrative of any body politic has to be held to be generally true by a fair proportion of the population if said politic is to be effective. This does not necessarily have to be fictional, but human history is an ugly business and few, if any, can lay claim to a bloodless history. Still the fact that fascists utilize something everyone else utilizes does not make everyone fascist, any more than David Duke drinking milk makes all milk-drinkers Grand Wizards of the KKK.
The same thing applies, then, in their assessment of games as vehicles of fascist ideology or rhetoric. We have things that we might identify as Fascist in nature but only if we take the attitude that “Fascists do X, games do X, games = fascist”. We see in the article that the case is very clearly laid out; “I don’t mean to imply that the developers of these games are full-on fascists. In my opinion, however, their design decisions are a clear demonstration of fascist ideology expressed through the video game form.” This statement only works if my above one is held to be true, for if the game makers are not fascist, and the games don’t share fascist characteristics, the point has nothing to stand on.
None of this is to suggest that games should not strive to have more nuanced, deeper narratives, that they should not seek to humanize the other (Sometimes – but as I said, sometimes a big dumb action movie is just that and I don’t WANT Saints Row Goes Forth to have some huge thing about everyone you run over). These are very valuable things that games absolutely should be pursuing in order to grow and to begin saying more. I just think that the article in question is ascribing rather more to the current situation than it can justifiably be saddled with. Games may lack imagination and depth at the moment, but that is due to risk-aversion on the part of publishers long before it is due to fascist ideology, consciously implemented or otherwise.
I’ve written previously about how strategy games give you a pretty weird angle compared to reality due to how they function, specifically that because they put you in charge of a state and they have a win condition, you become pretty psychopathic with regards to your state. It is only a means to your end.
I’m going to come at this from another angle today. I was thinking about it when I was playing GalCiv, because as I am playing as the Humans I’m sort-of-but-not-quite RPing them as they’re written in the backstory; canny traders, excellent diplomats, with an iron fist in the velvet glove. Now GalCiv has election events that are incredibly trivial. You choose a political party and have regular elections. If your party wins you keep their bonuses (Say, +20% to your influence). If they lose, the bonuses go away until you reclaim control. But if they lose you are still in control. Now from a gameplay perspective this makes perfect sense. Nobody wants to sit back and watch your civ get run into the ground by the AI over the next 30 turns or whatever. That doesn’t make it any more sensible or less jarring; ultimately in strategy games you are your state/country, and anything along the lines of elections, changing dynasties, or anything else is entirely secondary at best.
What’s weird isn’t that they do this, it’s that they try and pretend they don’t. I don’t mind being told “You are the overarching driving force behind the French Empire rather than any particular leader or government therein”. But then a game will turn around and I will be presented as being the particular leader or government, such as EU3 where every notification is addressed to “My Emir” or “My King” or what have you. But how can you address this?
Of course the problem is lessened if you're an immortal Goddess-Queen
The Tropico series has possibly the best approach. You are a tinpot dictator and one of the ways in which your score is evaluated is by how much money you have embezzled from your own country over the years. This is a brilliant little mechanic, because you are actively reducing your abilities in one field in order to bump up your endgame results elsewhere. You’re still just going for the nebulous “score” but it’s something. One idea I had was to essentially provide you with ostentatious monuments to build, of truly obscene scale (Think Bender when he becomes Pharaoh), and the larger you build it the better you are. Civ used to do something vaguely similar where a good performance would make your palace or throne room better, a nice sidebar to the main game, and there’s a mod for Civ IV where you really can lose control of your empire to the AI for a number of turns, an interesting if frustrating feature.
Do you have any examples of this issue being done well? How might a game merge leadership of an in-game actor like a country with being an individual leader? Thoughts and ideas!
