The Article Where I Talk About Umurangi Generation In Full Detail (Total F*ckin Spoilers Ahead), Part One

Hello. This is part one of an article about Umurangi Generation, my favorite game in 2020 and probably the best game that came out in that whole year, cinematic storytelling and painstakingly-crafted 3D animations be damned. I liked the game a lot. It has recently come out on the Nintendo Switch. It fucking rules on the Nintendo Switch – really feels like you’re holding a camera, and that is exactly what I have wanted from this game. Go play it. This is your warning. There are spoilers for the game ahead. I’m done waiting for you, so close this article here. If anyone complains about spoilers after this point I’m coming for you at your work and we’re fighting in the god dang parking lot. I will go full sicko mode.

Are you gone?

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Surely you must have left at this point, unless you played the game.

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The shit one must do to make it clear we’re talking about spoilers for a piece of Digital Content™ these days…

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Okay, that’s good enough.

In Umurangi Generation the world is at the brink of destruction at the hands of Kaiju, big fuck-off creatures that destroy whole swathes of the planet, make things uninhabitable for people (and presumably wildlife, since you have a penguin in your crew), and are nearly unstoppable. To combat this, the UN has created Peace Sentinels, which are basically Evangelion models down to the young adult/late teen pilots, to fight the Kaiju – but they also act as riot-policing devices, and thus the UN has thrown a good chunk of the world into martial law. You see about 2% of this in your playthrough.

Instead, you get big hints that the world has severely mismanaged the Kaiju crisis, and instead of dealing with that mismanagement, heads of state have gone golfing for the weekend – but really more or less permanently. The people are left to deal with the destruction of their homes, rising fascism, steadily growing health crises and the impending sense that they will be the last living generation to lay eyes on Earth basically on their own. Through graffiti and flyers littering the landscape, from the gratuitous shop signage to the glut of movie and video game posters everywhere, it’s clear that the world is not just sick but rapidly dying, and we’re coping by burying ourselves in Culture.

In Umurangi Generation, the sky has been permanently tinged red from the smoke of endless fires. Imagine: the smoke from the fires that engulfed the West Coast of the US, or the Southeast chunk of Australia, or much of Brazil, in 2019 – but forever (however long that happens to be). In 2021 we’re ramping up for such a firestorm again, with temperatures in the western US already hitting the low 100s and such extreme drought conditions in California that Gov. Gavin Newsom had to declare a state of emergency earlier this year.

But the game doesn’t focus on the destruction and death, not at first. It doesn’t come out and tell you that it is about climate change, or that the fucks who let the preventable calamity happen have names and addresses. When you start out in Mauao View, you are just a kid on a rooftop with a camera you seem to have made out of trash, your three human friends – Micah, Atarau, and Kete – and a penguin named Pengi. You might wonder what the deal is with the artillery shells (or bullet casings) the size of concrete mixers, or the cobbled-together seawalls with “PROPERTY OF THE UN” stamped on them. But all you’re really supposed to do on this rooftop overlooking Mount Mauao is learn the game and vibe out to Thor HighHeels’ blissful soundtrack.

But you can look closer, even here.

Before you even start, in the tutorial you’re warned against shooting photos of blue bottles, or Portuguese Man O’ War, these translucent blue jellyfish that are basically everywhere in the ocean and can deliver a poisonous sting strong enough to kill a human. Considering these are aquatic creatures typically, you might think “ah, this should be fine.” Even if you miss the tutorial instructions to explicitly not take photos of these jellyfish, you won’t be penalized in the game for taking a photo of, say, twelve blue water bottles, for example. But these fuckers are actually everywhere. They are strewn around the perimeter of the rooftop in concerningly large numbers. And suddenly you kind of start to piece this other stuff together: the big bullet casings, the chain-link fences in disarray, the possibility of this rooftop possibly being neglected because it’s simply too dangerous to live or work this close to the ocean, the fact that we’re simply able to be up here with a makeshift pool and a bunch of art supplies and shit – it all isn’t because the aesthetic rocks (although to be clear, it does rock), it’s because nobody else has time to notice some abandoned construction area.

There is graffiti on nearly every wall on this rooftop, ranging from simple single-paint-can scrawls to massive murals of multicolored, splattered-on fluorescent paint. Some of the art is signed, much of it not – but it doesn’t really matter. The art is there to be appreciated, and I spent a lot of time on this rooftop just taking pictures of the walls. One piece of graffiti says “I am just a kid in a mixed up world,” it’s a piece you can shoot up close to nab an objective; another simply names the level (and is next to a Origame Digital logo); another is a little paragraph telling the story of Mauao, “caught by the light of day;” another is a sort-of abstract piece by Kete of a massive gun blowing a figure’s head off – possibly that of a Kaiju. It’s the only really explicit bit of storytelling (at least, when you’re first starting off) in the level.

On Otumoetai, we’re on a different rooftop. The color has seemingly drained from the world. It’s raining. The music has a much more somber air to it. Soldiers – UN peacekeepers, you can tell from the helmets – are everywhere. In fact, we seem to be on a rooftop military encampment.

There are still blue bottles everywhere, but they seem to be more pushed out of the way than on Mauao View. There’s a maze with person-sized targets, but on the targets little demon-creatures with scythes are drawn. A giant bullet casing has been tipped upright and fitted with a funnel to collect rainwater; as far as the eye can see, the UN group has set up solar panels to collect as much light into energy as they physically can, and they’ve even started a small garden to grow food and other plants. Surrounded by heavy barriers, a mortar the soldiers have called “Sharkie” rests dormant in the rain. Our friends are enjoying themselves at different levels of the high-rise; the soldiers we’re surrounded by don’t seem to care about our presence.

I’m not a good enough photographer to emulate war photographers like Ashley Gilbertson or James Nachtwey, and I’m not a good enough (or centrist enough) journalist to emulate an Evan Wright or a Dexter Filkins type, but I’ve seen their bodies of work all my life. These are the people who brought the War on Terror home to the west, by embedding with US-coalition soldiers as they fought an illegitimate war across a continent for nearly two decades. These writers and photographers have seen terrible things happening in front of them on a constant basis for years, and they don’t return unscathed; many of them suffer from severe PTSD, seeing mutilated remains of people in their dreams; their only solace is hoping their work reached others.

But as I move around this virtual sandbox, gaily traipsing around to do my photo bounties without getting blue bottles in each shot, two things strike out at me: one, how the fuck am I allowed up here, and two, an excerpt from Susan Sontag’s essay, “In Plato’s Cave.” The first thing is a major overriding question I will keep coming back to as the story progresses; the second thing is as follows:

A photograph is not just the result of an encounter between an event and a photographer; picture-taking is an event in itself, and one with ever more peremptory rights—to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going on. Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera’s interventions. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing. This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself— so that something else can be brought into the world, the photograph. After the event has ended, the picture will still exist, conferring on the event of kind of immortality (and importance) it would never otherwise have enjoyed. While real people are out there killing themselves or other real people, the photographer stays behind his or her camera, creating a tiny element of another world: the image-world that bids to outlast us all.

Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention. Part of the horror of such memorable coups of contemporary photojournalism as the pictures of a Vietnamese bonze reaching for the gasoline can, of a Bengali guerrilla in the act of bayoneting a trussed-up collaborator, comes from the awareness of how plausible it has become, in situations where the photographer has the choice between a photograph and a life, to choose the photograph. The person who intervenes cannot record; the person who is recording cannot intervene.

[…]

Although the camera is an observation station, the act of photographing is more than passive observing. Like sexual voyeurism, it is a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging whatever is going on to keep on happening. To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged (at least for as long as it takes to get a “good” picture), to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing—including, when that is the interest, another person’s pain or misfortune.^[1]Sontag, Susan. “In Plato’s Cave.” On Photography, Picador USA, 2001, pp. 11–12.

Every story I’ve seen written on Umurangi Generation since it came out has been heavy on the photography – and let’s be clear, it’s supposed to be. It’s a game where the creator has put so much god damn time and energy into making a fully-functional DSLR system work in a game engine with gyro controls that you better be taking some fuckin photos, and sharing them too. I am guilty of this, making my reviews and other ancillary articles about Umurangi Generation photo-heavy just to have a chance to share some of the literal thousands of shots I’ve taken in the game. But very few pieces I’ve seen have asked, “hey uh why are we taking all these photos? Who are they for, both in-game and out of the game?” And as I stand in front of a pair of sentries in front of a makeshift machine gun nest trying my best to frame one guy’s helmet that reads “Property of the UN,” that question and the “who let me in here” question kind of hit at once. What am I acting in complicity with every time I raise the viewfinder to my eye?

When I was younger, I participated in a copwatch program. Copwatch is exactly what it sounds like: we’d post up or drive around and basically gently hassle cops from a slight distance while videotaping their actions as they pulled people over and/or arrested them. The idea being, in 2012 or 2013 or whenever I was doing this, that a cop who knew there were witnesses broadcasting their actions to social media would be less likely to do something fucked, like kill a black person “by accident” or intentionally. In 2020, a teenage girl took a video on her phone of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of (by the knee of) Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, and in 2021, she won a Pulitzer special citation for it.

When I think of what Sontag is asking in “In Plato’s Cave,” I think about the training we got doing the copwatch program: keep your distance, let them know that you’re there and that you’re filming, don’t say anything too inflammatory. Follow any so-called “lawful” order, like “step back,” but don’t turn the cameras off. We were there to put pressure on a group that, as it turned out, could and would simply act with impunity anyway – but we weren’t interventionist. And when I think of that girl’s video, and of the people who gathered around Chauvin and the other members of the goon squad who helped kill Floyd, none of them could intervene, or their own lives would be at intense risk.

As protests kicked up internationally last summer, one topic of discourse materialized concerning whether or not photographers should be allowed at protests as documentarians, or whether they should keep their distance, don’t directly take pictures of protestors’ faces or only photograph cops, and even edit out people’s faces if they accidentally got into the image. Seasoned photographers were more often than not on the side that argued “of course we should be there taking pictures freely, it’s an event that people will want to know about.”

But as the summer dragged on and protests intensified, I found myself increasingly sympathetic to the other side, the side that argued that photographers were part of a sousveillance machine, basically a decentralized and distributed network of recording devices that would gather information on protest movements, individual actors and incriminating actions that police and other law enforcement and military agencies (last summer really was fucking wild) could then use to fill in their own intelligence gaps. This sousveillance machine couldn’t necessarily be stopped, but it could be limited – and one of the ways of doing so was to ask photographers (or videographers, or streamers – especially streamers) to not participate as freely in protests as they might have wanted to. A chunk of photographers didn’t listen, so then folks started threatening to break their cameras. Which, like, fuck around and find out, as the kids said last year for a very specific reason.

In a command tent on the lower level of this Otumoetai high rise, a sign hangs on the tent wall: “ATTENTION: Tauranga is an active combat zone. The Peace Korp will not be held responsible for damage inflicted to personal property. Follow all UN Peacekeeper instructions when sirens signals.” A newspaper hangs next to it: “ABSOLUTE CHAOS – Papamoa disaster sparks concern for wall project – Gillian proposes second nuke run.” And on the table, another paper, with the headline: “UNITED NATIONS FAILS TO PROTECT PAPAMOA – UN PEACEKEEPER PILOTS DECIMATED BY NEW THREAT.” While things are peaceful here, it’s clear that this is just a respite, and that things have been bad for at least a little while.

On the other side of the building, three soldiers sit around, smoking cigarettes and eating MREs. Above their heads, a scrawl in black marker: “War-chan Lives” and “My dealer is my healer.” And up above, in “Sharkie’s Tank,” someone has written on a big slab of plywood: “My dreams of being an audio engineer are over.”