As with the last article, I must insist that if you haven’t played the very good video game Umurangi Generation that you turn away from this article now, or else you release me from a responsibility of indemnification if you decide that your video game experience has been ruined by reading the words in this piece.
No long breaks this time because I felt that was a bit much.
Everyone situated? Cool.
Susan Sontag said, “Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention.” Roland Barthes said, “What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially. In the Photograph, the event is never transcended for the sake of something else: the Photograph always leads the corpus I need back to the body I see; it is the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency, matte and somehow stupid, the this (this photograph, and not Photography).”[1]Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. 1980. Hill and Wang, 2010. Page 4
Umurangi Generation lives in the world of reproduction. The true reason why nobody impedes our movement is because we are meant to exist in the diorama of each level as though time stood still and we were the only ones aware of it. Our goal is not to capture the dynamism of life as we, the Voyeurs, experience it, but essentially our job is to make our own postcards. It’s no wonder that is literally one of our bonus missions on each level. Every moment in Umurangi Generation is supposed to be picture-perfect; you just have to find it, pick it up, and put it in your pocket to show friends later.
Having watched the coverage of this game over the past year, it has been fascinating to see what reviewers decided to show us – compared to what they leave out – in their posts and videos. Photos of our in-game friends (especially Pengi), of the dance party in the street later on, the abundance of neon signage. Video clips through the viewfinder of the camera to show off the UI. What’s telling is what we don’t usually see. Very rarely do we see the Peace Sentinels, silhouetted in the distance, on the Mauao View rooftop. We’re not meant to confront Otumoetai at night. Glimpsing a Kaiju as it bears down on us is basically out of the question.
Into The Spine founder and EIC Diego Nicolás Argüello covered the game last September with a photo essay and a writeup, and it is easily the least-spoiler-averse photo essay I’ve seen. But the essay also presents these moments largely without context, essentially spoiler-free spoilers. The reason I have to be so stringent about informing you about spoilers in this post is because, almost accidentally, we (the games media, reviewers, critics, whatever) placed a hard limit on what in this game could be shared – what was acceptable to share. And so it is that playing Umurangi Generation, experiencing it directly, is fundamentally very different from being told about it.
This is reflected in some of the (very few) negative reviews for the game on Steam (at least, the ones operating in relative good faith). Some reviewers mentioned hearing about how good the game was, and how they shouldn’t go in with any spoilers, only to run into wonky controls or visuals they didn’t find appealing, or to find that the story itself wasn’t hitting for them the way it was for others. There is of course no accounting for taste, and not everyone is going to like a given game. But this becomes part of the metanarrative too: “Everyone said this game ruled but I didn’t like it” is itself a reproduction of an experience with the game, done with text rather than images. It can be influential in its own way; just as the “I can’t believe you got politics in my video games” crowd can be.
The politics of Umurangi Generation are typically felt rather than expressed explicitly. You tend to catch a vibe in this game more than you are told “here’s what is going on, and here’s what you should think about it.” That being said, we know the creator of the game has a specific direction he would like for players to take here. And applying his framework to the game does lend to an interesting analysis in itself. Each level in Umurangi Generation is a kind of emotional vignette, a moment in time that can delineate the priorities and values of the people in a given space. Kati Kati Walled City takes on a funereal affect, reflected by the memorials to fallen neighbors that spread over the space with the abundance of rooftop blue bottles. The dance party in the street on the Strand is immersed in surreality, surrounded as it is on all sides by signs for seedy bars and VR cafés, and just around the corner from the limp hand of a fallen Peace Sentinel. You might say the attitude is supposed to be celebratory – the neighborhood survived, in this case – but there’s enough going on at the margins to tell complicated versions of that story, at the least.
Kati Kati is fascinating as an example of the tensions present in the environment this game presents us with. It is designated as a “no-go zone” by UN police. Anti-cop sentiment is high in the neighborhood. There are probably legitimate reasons for this that we simply haven’t seen; I’m sure that if we were there, we’d know why (at any rate, it’s not hard to speculate). But one member of the neighborhood – Maxine – is celebrated and memorialized here. From all the context clues you can pick up around the underground city, she joined the UN, became a Peace Sentinel pilot, and died protecting Kati Kati. She alone is remembered – not as a cop or occupying force, but as an actual defender.
Maxine’s memorial has always hit me hard, for some reason. Even now, just thinking about it is making me emotional. Sure, there’s the implication that she knew and maybe was friendly with the Courier and their friends (a personal stake), but there’s something about the way it’s made – it feels natural, unforced, like it’s been part of this environment for a long time. This is a special place. To date, the only similar thing I can think of that has done something similar is the underwater miners’ memorial in Kentucky Route Zero.
The Strand is fascinating in a similar, if opposite way. A surface read puts the consumerist excess on display: the Strand is a place where hedonism reigns supreme. Even the elated revelry of the street party is sucked up into this, surrounded as it is by zonked-out kids wearing VR headsets in a way that suggests they’re lost to the physical world; a van nearby advertises “Gaming/Gatcha/Girls” in the way you might see a strip club be advertised in a pleasure district. But I don’t think that’s the entire story the Strand is trying to tell.
I think, for example, the weird art in the metro tunnels – all fluorescent graffiti and chairs fastened to the ceiling – is a suggestion that more Culture is happening here than mere Consumerism, and the street above isn’t wholly given over to VR cafés and whatnot. There are apartment blocks surrounding the area with people standing on balconies and looking outside. The neighborhood is still alive, in a similar way that Kati Kati is still very much alive – and it seems for the same reasons.
Which brings us to the tableau of the Peace Sentinel pilot, alone save for the armed guards, visibly shaken and bloody, right around the corner from the party. If the neighborhood’s residents are celebrating, it is suggested that even if this Peace Sentinel pilot wanted to, they could not join in. The pilot has given up the opportunity to forge normal human connections in exchange for the power to defeat kaiju, and even granted that power, it’s not a sure shot that they will live to tell about it.
Of course, the danger with analyses like this is that they can be accused of “reading too much into things that aren’t there,” and you know what – those critics might be absolutely right. There’s an obvious aesthetic choice being made in this level that does kind of supersede all of the little narrative tidbits one might dig up. Put simply, cities full of neon are cool as hell, visually. Also cool: the limbs of defeated mecha, with people standing on their fingertips to scale. But you’ve seen those photos before.
References
| ↑1 | Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. 1980. Hill and Wang, 2010. Page 4 |
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