Umurangi Generation, Spoiled (Part 3)

Don’t talk to me about spoilers. Y’all already know the drill.

The level known as “Contact” has been a thorn in my side since I finished the last post in this series five months ago. I’ve played and replayed it, tried casting it in the context of our previous conversation on war photography and what the game in general is saying about real issues like climate change, spent dozens of minutes walking around the ruins of Otumoetai contained in the level, and rather than continue to try and pull blood from a stone, I must simply conclude that this level is here because the game no longer wants to beat around the bush with you: this is the world. This bombed-out apartment complex rooftop is the result of policies made by rich white men with no stakes, no skin in the game; here we see a site of death, traumatization and displacement form in real time, and the only ones who are realistically going to face “consequences” for the decisions that led to this point are the survivors of this Kaiju attack.

This is the moment where the “shitty future” promised in the game’s marketing materials is supposed to come into full and clear relief. Yet the moment fell flat for me both in my initial playthrough – though this feeling was minor at the time of my initial review – and it hasn’t improved in subsequent playthroughs. You might call it a case of the bad old “ludonarrative dissonance,” though here instead I’m going to use a Tim Rogers remix from like eight years ago: here ludonarrative interference is at play. “Ludonarrative interference is a convenient phrase for pointing out instances of game-mechanicky elements flopping dead-fish-like at the feet or into the face of the story a game is trying to tell. Ludonarrative interference is when a little taken-for-granted videogame design trope unceremoniously bubbles corpse-like to the surface of a game’s story’s otherwise pristine ocean,” Rogers writes^[1]Bioshock Infinite | Action Button Dot Net. http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=3006. Accessed 1 Dec. 2021..

My friends are all huddled by the makeshift bunker. One of them – Micah, I believe, is going absolutely apeshit into a walkie-talkie, trying to negotiate any possible evacuation. Another friend, Kete, kneels next to a fallen UN Peacekeeper, fruitlessly trying to perform first aid. Gunfire is echoing all around. Flashes of artillery occasionally illuminate the hulking silhouette of the monster bearing down on us. This is probably the worst time to be fucking around. And what is The Courier doing? What am I looking for at this exact moment?

Six rolls of film scattered around the map, a shot of the word “Boomer,” ten green chemlights, four first aid kits, three targets, two body bags and a postcard recreation. All the same shit I got in the other levels, in other words, yet it’s baffling to me why this shitty job that doesn’t even pay that well – I made $107 off my most recent playthrough – is more important to me than my personal safety in this moment, and less importantly, why I’m willing to look like an utter clown in order to perform my job duties.

I’ve asked the question before: who is buying my photos? What are they being used for? What am I being used for? I desperately want to know the answer to this question. I’m thinking about how a lot of useful idiots for power and privilege, like shitty right-wing YouTuber Tim Pool, got their start in “movement photojournalism” during vortexes like Occupy Wall Street; this feels a lot like that. The tradeoff for “winning” this level is that I get two new pieces of gear, but what did it actually cost me, especially as the end of the game – and presumably, the end of the world – draws nearer? These are the questions I’m asking instead of reckoning with the carnage around me, and maybe that makes me shitty, but I’ve already talked about how this game is less a moving “game world” and more a static diorama. The game is not playing out around me so much as everything in it has been meticulously placed for my consumption and consideration.

The counterpoint must also be acknowledged: what else am I supposed to do in this moment? I don’t have a gun; I have a camera. Are long guns even effective against a monster the size of a building? Do I know CPR? Am I capable of calling for reinforcements, a rescue, or even a supply drop? I’m here on this roof anyway, might as well do my job. Right?

Who knows? The game gives us a picture; it’s up to us to interpret what’s in it, and what comes out of it.

Karangahake is named for the emergency train system that takes us away from the battle. We and our friends all made it on board safely. Several of the peacekeepers are onboard as well, bloodily injured but alive and otherwise kicking. A handful of families made it also. There’s a sense of respite but not relief as we once again race up and down the train corridor, snapping photos for our unseen benefactors of random objects and people. This is, as much as anything can be, a literally liminal space, a transition into the very most final stage of human history; the end of the world is here.

There’s little to say about the subway station we disembark into aside from remarking on how, once again, lots of little things are happening. There’s the line of passengers at the UN checkpoint; the synth-punk dance party across the tracks; the hazmat-suited UN agents loading supplies onto another train; of all the levels, this one feels normal by the sheer dint of feeling like a train station. The walls are, as with everywhere else we’ve been, covered in propaganda of some kind, movie and video game posters advertising all kind of violent victory against monstrous others. These two levels are really just a single big level. If there is a “vibe” that connects them, it’s exhaustion. Every person we see looks visibly tired, and next to the propaganda is advertising for services like soundproofing and “quake proofing” and cheap home repair contracting. We are in the end times and all we can do is offer palliative care.

If you get to this point in the game and you start feeling the tug and pull of nihilism, I can’t stop you from that interpretation. Umurangi Generation starts from a very nihilistic premise: the world is absolutely ending, humanity is going to go extinct, and there is nothing anyone can do about it now, because the people who could do anything about it declined to do so when there was an opportunity to reverse course. It is a doomer climate change narrative, yes absolutely. It is imagining the “shitty future” of a world warmed another two degrees celsius. This is not a happy story and it does not have a happy ending in the strictest sense. But the nihilism doesn’t extend backward, and I would caution you to think things through before walking away from this game with the idea that we’re in exactly the same boat.

There are obvious differences between the monsters we face and those in Umurangi Generation. Our monsters are ideological and economic, and while they might be as hard to defeat as a Kaiju, we don’t have to create Evangelions to do so. Climate change and the rise of the authoritarian right are the biggest threats to human flourishing in harmony with the natural world. There have already been numerous inflection points where regular people put their bodies on the line to fight back against these crises, like the Wet’suwet’en First Nations people are currently doing in opposition to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Coastal GasLink Pipeline; like the Charlottesville counterprotest; like the Ende Gelände action in Rhineland; like Standing Rock.

These moments of conflict between the state and capital on one side and the people and planet on the other should show us that, while the shitty future in Umurangi Generation is absolutely possible for us, it is not the only possible path forward. However, we should also heed another warning in the game: our leaders are not the ones who will take us to victory here. Heads of state and corporate CEOs are going to defend their own entrenched interests. A climate victory would likely mean the end of fossil fuel and rare earth mineral extraction, effectively destroying multiple industries that prop capital up, and the companies that make up these industries will fight harder the closer they are to death. Our leaders have already proven to be unreliable at best and antagonistic at worst. We will have to fight, and struggle, and win, and hold our progress against these massive forces likely alone, without much in the way of state assistance. And that’s hard, but the end result is a better world. The best possible scenario for Umurangi Generation’s legacy a decade or two down the line is that the world has improved to the point where the narrative is silly and implausible – we fought the monster and won.

But back in the game, we reach our end with a midnight dance party on the Mauao View rooftop, aurora australis flickering in and out overhead in the blood-red sky, Peace Sentinels fighting a Kaiju in the distance. Our friend group has grown. More shit is in the pool now. Pengi ended up on a roof somehow. Micah is dancing with abandon. And then, just like that, it’s over.

You don’t have a mission in the final level of the game, but nevertheless you still have your camera. As you progress down the path, you notice spirits floating serenely up into the night sky. At the end of the path are two human figures surrounded by a host of animal spirits. You can’t make out their faces. They’re full of stars. You can snap one more picture.

Make it count.