Umurangi Generation, Spoiled (Part Four)

There will be spoilers, etc. etc. Go back and read the rest of the series. First post: here. Second post: here. Previous post: here.

If Umurangi Generation‘s base game uses photography to tell a cautionary tale, a warning to players about what might happen if climate change is allowed to get worse than it even is right now, then Umurangi Generation: MACRO explores the fascist terrain with the same goal in mind. It says, “not only must we prevent climate change from worsening, we have to prevent fascists from gaining any more ground, because they will assuredly lead to our collective destruction.” If climate destruction is acutely possible in the capitalist so-called “democracy” much of the world exists under, then it is inevitable under authoritarianism.

Gamer’s Palace

With just four levels to lay out exactly how fascist (and in which ways) the world of Umurangi Generation is, Naphtali Faulkner wastes no time, and neither should we. The very first level of the DLC is Gamer’s Palace, and in a word, this level’s defining characteristic is saturation. This is a media hellscape in physical form, the walls are covered in posters for anime and games and ultranationalistic movies of all flavors. There are four “floors” to Gamer’s Palace, and on each is a symbol of subjugation: at the very bottom of the level is the imprisoned cyborg dolphin and DJ known as TARIQ, a stand-in for the ways capitalism and the state has enslaved and twisted nature to its own ends in pursuit of profit and imperial prowess. TARIQ doesn’t move, I suspect it’s all but dead, but you can hear its beats and grooves play out over the loudspeaker throughout your stay at Gamer’s Palace. It’s both horrifying and catchy as hell, and I am ashamed (not really) to admit my favorite song Thor High Heels made for this DLC is Costa del Dolphin.

The rest of the floor is your average neon-accented dancehall, with a view of the underground city below, a bar, and some dancing clubgoers. There’s a shop down here as well, called “Anti-Est. Clothing Company,” which has the slogan “The System Needs A Reboot” that I find fascinating for its pretty spot-on recuperation of radical or progressive-sounding rhetoric for utterly no good ends.

Upstairs things are a little weirder, if it’s possible to get more macabre than a zombified dolphin DJ. At first, what you think you’re looking at are slightly-oversized arcade cabinets, like maybe they were placed at the wrong scale for the level, but as you examine them you realize that no, they’re actually the correct size, and they’re not actually arcade cabinets at all. They’re VR pods. And people are inside them. Some are watching far-right YouTube video essays like “collateral damage is good actually” and “human rights? who needs them!” while others are watching porn, playing Doom-likes, and generally just vegging out. This is a really interesting escalation of something I noticed in other levels: people dazedly wearing VR goggles in the street, completely immersed in some digital world or other while laying in a (literal) bed of trash.

By itself, it feels like the game is making the claim that VR (or video games in general) is an opiate of the masses type beat, the bread and circuses that distracts the people as the end swiftly approaches. In the context of critiquing the rise of fascism, I get the sense that rather than merely being a distraction, VR/digital culture as presented is a facilitator of/a platform for fascist ideas, permitting fascists to simply take power with little (meaningful) opposition. It’s not that the masses have been distracted here, it’s that consent has been manufactured to such an extent in the world of Umurangi Generation that folks have essentially been tricked into agreeing with and supporting politicians who send condolences to the creators of “nazi supersoldiers.” This is where I think the game departs from mere capitalist realism and fully embarks on its mission to dissect how fascism gets and maintains its hold on power.

We still haven’t fully ascended to the top of this level yet. Upstairs from the VR pods is the VIP section. This section is fascinating, in part because we’re explicitly allowed up there while the rest of the club isn’t. And like, here’s the thing. I’ve written hundreds of words you’ll never see about how maybe the Courier has some kind of connection to the UN peacekeepers, but it doesn’t ultimately matter. Whether we’re simply stumbling into these situations, or taking advantage of the doors our camera gets us through to make some extra scratch, or if we indeed are some fuckin uhhh UN peacekeeper informant or something, our role is really the same. We’re part of the same media machine that manufactures consent for the people crammed into the VR pods downstairs.

And the reason this is important (and why I’m calling this out) is because I don’t think the Courier – our player-character – is explicitly guilty of anything here. This is what fascism does. It takes pre-existing mechanisms of recuperation and amplifies them so that unless you’re explicitly resisting, even if you’re merely bearing witness to what a fascist regime is doing, you’re giving it life. And that’s uncomfortable, because the price of resistance is not light. One of the TV screens in this level has a Chiron prompt that says, “Epic Victory Win: Anti-UN Terrorist Cell Finally Captured,” followed by an announcement that one of the other TV stations has secured the broadcast rights to the terrorists’ live execution. “Minors will be tried as adults.”

We sure do love us a chill game about photography huh boys?

The UN party upstairs looks like every stereotypical corporate party-gone-stupid, with sniveling accountant and analyst types double-fisting light beers and dancing on tables as a cadre of club employees dressed like bunny girls look directly into the middle distance, counting down the hours until the Kaiju-caused(?) lockdown is over. Sitting prim and proper in the corner is an extremely distinguished person dressed in all-white and looking like Maximillion Pegasus, complete with that same self-satisfied smirk. I don’t know who this is but if I had to guess, it’s Scarlett Victory, the commander of the Peace Sentinels or maybe the broader UN peacekeeping force at large.

Like, look at this person and tell me they don’t laugh like a villain after every staff meeting.

The role the United Nations plays in Umurangi Generation is fascinating to me. It’s meant to critique western colonialism and imperialism writ large, but it’s also specifically a criticism of the Australian and American governments and their response to climate change and creeping fascism, respectively. Throughout the game, we only really see the effects of their decisions: lives ruined and lost, communities destroyed, the literal end of the world swiftly approaching. But here we can see another side to them: they don’t care. We’re in the middle of a Kaiju lockdown in this level, and they’re partying. Not concerned at all with the results of their actions, or with the possibility that they could be ushering in the very destruction they’re ostensibly trying to prevent. Because they’ve got what they actually want: power, and specifically the kind of power that dominates and subjugates others.

One of the things I haven’t done such a great job with as I’ve been doing this blog is interrogate the ways colonialism benefits me individually, as well as the video game industry at large. Mostly because that kind of interrogation means that I would have to admit some uncomfortable truths to myself. And I’m not going to make this into a space where I flagellate myself for not being some mythical “perfect ally” or some shit, but the gulf between me playing and enjoying a video game on my Xbox® Series S™ and someone whose land and water has been utterly destroyed by the kind of extractive exploitation necessary to build my console is extremely wide.

I am – we are – sheltered from the destruction of people and the planet necessary to keep our current entertainment paradigms (to say nothing of every other structure of modern capitalist society) afloat. It’s not that I don’t care about these things, because of course I do, or that I’m somehow unaffected by them. It’s that I’ve been brought up to believe that the benefits I get personally and socially from these systems outweigh the damage they’re doing to all of us. And chances are good, you’ve been brought up in this belief as well. It’s hard to shake this belief if you’re not directly impacted by the harms we do for fun and profit, but if we don’t want to be the UN flunkies partying while the world burns, we have to get rid of it.

There’s one more level to Gamer’s Palace. It’s upstairs past a set of UN blast doors, and it looks like part of the street topside has been closed off to protect a small group of shelter-seekers. The Courier’s friends huddle together on a bench up here, and compared to the cacophony in the club below, things are eerily silent. The separation is noticeable, and by all rights intentional. We’re meant to wonder about these topsiders and their relationship to the ultrasaturated fascist hellscape below. Insta-waifus still beckon. Signs on the wall still promise “Games, Gatchas, Girls.” Alerts over the loudspeaker remind us we’re under emergency lockdown. But our friends still have each other. Right?