‘Alba: A Wildlife Adventure’ as Propaganda of the Deed

Alba: A Wildlife Adventure is the second Apple Arcade game by ustwo games, following 2020’s much smaller and more constrained Assemble With Care. It puts you in the shoes of Alba, a 11- or 12-year-old girl who is visiting her grandparents on the Iberian island of Pinar Del Mar for a week. The core gameplay loop is pretty simple – it really boils down to roaming the island picking up trash, taking pictures of animals and occasionally saving them from environmental hazards, and talking to residents of the town. The world is completely open, with new quests or side-missions coming in via text, and you’re free to do whatever you want within the confines of a daytime cycle. Each night, you talk to Alba’s grandparents, and we move to the next day.

I’ve gotten used to the way ustwo makes games – is what I would be saying if Alba: A Wildlife Adventure followed what I view to be the standard ustwo format at all. Their previous games, including Assemble With Care, have essentially all been digital playthings, puzzle boxes packed full of emotional affect – albeit very beautiful ones – that told stories in the simplest of terms. I would go so far as to stake the claim that their most notable games – Monument Valley and its sequel, specifically – were made for the sole purpose of proving that mobile games could be “artistic,” that even a short game on your phone with the simplest control scheme imaginable could engage players and pack an emotional punch. In short, ustwo traffics in games that are art pieces-as-games.

Alba: A Wildlife Adventure is simply a game. It is full of art and emotional affect and a genuinely good story, but it is these things without the pretenses of being an artistic statement that “mobile games can be good” or even simply “games can be good.” It does not “redefine games,” as promised by Apple Arcade’s mission statement, but in falling squarely into what we commonly recognize non-mobile games as being, I would say it absolutely helps to blur the line between “games” and “mobile games.”

And I have to admit to being blindsided by how powerful this game’s story actually is. I knew I was in trouble when, during the first in-game day, a dolphin gets stuck in a net and stranded on the beach, and your friend Ines tells you to go get help while she removes the net. Watching this little kid run around this tiny islet off the coast of the main island, gathering up all the adults she can find to rescue this dolphin — and they actually do it, they help the dolphin — had tears streaming down my face before I knew what was really happening to me. I admit to being pretty emotional all the time, but I don’t think that takes away from this moment in the slightest.

Alba and her friend do what any kids who just saved a dolphin might do: they make up the Alba and Ines Wildlife Rescue League (AIWRL) on the spot. All the nearby adults are vaguely amused and indistinctly supportive, as typically is the case in these situations. As the founder of quite a few childhood organizations (like the time I tried unionizing my elementary to get Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! cards unbanned), I am quite aware of the usual efficacy of such groups. While it rarely hits absolute zero, I think as adults we all know precisely how little we (as a collective body) let the protestations of children effect our modes of operation. When we depart this scene, and Alba and her grandparents are returning to the main island, we surmise that by the next day, the AIWRL is likely to be relegated to the recesses of memory, as childhood attempts at organizing for a better world sometimes do.

Except that… isn’t what happens here. Instead, we are informed that the town mayor has made a deal with Paco, a local wealthy and unscrupulous industrialist, to build a massive luxury hotel on the island to draw in tourists. In order to do this, Paco (who also owns the island’s gas and power concern) must pave over the island’s decaying and too-expensive-to-fix nature reserve — effective immediately. Ines storms off to the reserve entrance, where she and Alba stumble on the idea to renovate the reserve and bring attention to the fauna on the island in order to collect 50 signatures for a petition to stop the hotel, thanks to the casual suggestion of a nearby biologist. From here the rest of the game springs forward.

Here’s where you might find a quip that the game depicts activism unrealistically, but you already know I’m not going to do that because of the title. I’m not going to talk about how absurd I found it that this 12-year-old child is better at picking up trash and, fuckin, carpentry than the perfectly ambulatory and capable adults around her. Or how it’s not exactly a great look that when we say “it’s in the hands of the next generation” we literally mean we just want to let the next generation do all of the work, AKA literally picking up all our fucking trash for us. I’m not going to talk about any of that because part of what I think really works about Alba: A Wildlife Adventure is that it breaks the spell of “there’s nothing I can do” in a satisfying, and more importantly, actually feasible way.

Alba: A Wildlife Adventure demonstrates two important and fundamental anarchist principles (likely without intending to, but hey): direct action (and by extension, light propaganda by the deed) and mutual aid. Put simply, direct action is exactly what it sounds like: a person is taking action themselves to fix a problem – in this case, Alba and Ines are fixing bridges and signs, picking up trash and cleaning oil off birds themselves. This direct action garners direct results: wildlife returns to the reserve and other areas of the island not fully developed, and since it’s a small island, people take notice. At first this merely inspires adults to sign Alba and Ines’s petition to stop the hotel construction, but as time passes more folks get wrapped up in actively helping the AIWRL with their environmental protection efforts. The town vet provides Alba with a first aid kit; the town carpenter lends some of her tools; other island kids will text Alba when an animal is in trouble on the beach or elsewhere on the island. Where it becomes mutual aid happens in the endgame.

As you can probably already guess, you eventually learn that Paco and the Mayor are corrupt, and the hotel is just one step in Paco’s evil master urban development plan on Pinar Del Mar. After the Mayor turns himself in, he confirms what he only mentions at the beginning of the story: there really isn’t enough money to completely renovate the nature reserve, meaning that while Alba’s work wasn’t totally meaningless, there’s really nowhere else to go from here. But all the townspeople who we’ve been talking to and helping now vow to pitch in, pooling their resources and expertise to turn the rebuilding and maintenance of the nature reserve into a collective project^[1]This isn’t quite so far-fetched an idea on its own. Elinor Ostrom, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, spent decades researching how various forces, both state and commercial (as well as those that … Continue reading.

What I want to be very clear about is that I’m not saying that Alba and Ines single-handedly inspired a proletarian revolution on this island. They simply got 50 people to sign a petition and agree to pick up trash more than the never they’d been doing so previously. However, by simply acting when no one else would (or could), they broke the illusion that there was nothing at all the townsfolk could do about the future of their island, and got everyone to embrace the tendencies they all already had to help each other and work to make their little teardrop of paradise in the Mediterranean better.

One thing I can’t not mention here is that ustwo games fired a programmer who tried to get a group of his fellow workers involved with the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain – Games Workers Unite in 2019. While GWU has flaws, its goal – and the goal of many similar independent game industry labor movements, big and small – is to help build rank-and-file worker power to effectively fight for better labor conditions in the games industry. Any company that would sell a genuinely moving narrative like Alba to the public but not extend the lesson of that narrative to its workers is extremely suspect to me. Definitely feels a little bit like “do as I say, not as I do” behavior.

I don’t regret playing Alba at all, especially as it was included in the 150+ game library of Apple Arcade alongside its console and PC releases. But these things can’t just be mere mentions. I enjoyed my time, especially just soaking up the atmosphere (the music, by Lorena Alvarez, is fucking phenomenal). It’s a genuinely good game. But as far as ustwo games as a whole goes? Maybe they’ll give unionization a second try, and maybe this time their upper management won’t fire them for doing so this time.