On heroes
No one is coming to save us
[Full spoilers for Metaphor ReFantazio to follow.]
I found the ending of Metaphor ReFantazio to be a letdown mechanically, but more than that, it left me reflecting on how I’ve soured on a common kind of game story. That of the hero (and to some extent the hero’s party) single-handedly triumphing over a singular evil. In the case of Metaphor ReFantazio, the evil in question is that of a kind of retributional fascism carried out by the game’s central villain, Louis Guiabern. It is always known that he is a strongman figure looking to carry out what he sees as the triumph of the strong over the weak, but only very late in the game are we given the truth of his motivations: He, like the player, is an elda whose village was burned to the ground. He, like the player, is an outsider who wishes to reshape the world.
Louis represents a negative reaction to trauma, that of a calcification of hatred wherein the victim goes on to perpetuate the very violence that formed their hatred in the first place. The player, an amnesiac with a heart of gold, represents the opposite. Very late in the game, it is revealed (late-game reveals being this kind of game’s love language) that the player character is actually a magical manifestation of a kindhearted’s prince’s dying wish: to see the world and be amongst the people. Through your adventures, without knowing it, you have been demonstrating a more empathetic kingly archetype. By listening to the people, and by uniting the world’s disparate tribes in your very party, you are enacting a blueprint of utopia. Or so the game posits.
Anyway, if you’ve played a videogame before, it won’t surprise you to know that ultimately good triumphs over evil. The empathetic king defeats the fascistic king, and the world goes on. Through the actions of a few good people, the great evil is vanquished. Credits roll. Story complete. It’s a simplistic story, which accounts for why it sells. We want to feel that evil might be vanquished with surgical precision. We want to feel that we can be heroes.
I’m bored of these stories. The present historical era casts them in a harsh light. I wish we had a Louis Guiabern, honestly. I wish we had an opposing party of heroes. What we have instead is a game stacked so significantly against us, the working people of the United States, that there is in fact no singular villain to defeat and no party coming to save us. What we have is the consolidation of money and power. What we have is chaos and cruelty. As many have opined as of late, no one is coming to save us. Therefore, we must save ourselves.
I’ve been playing fewer games recently, owing partially to the fact that I am nearly, nearly through a revision of the book I’ve been working on forever. But more than this, I’ve been trying to get involved more locally with people who, like me, feel powerless in the face of the hollowing out of our country that is happening before our very eyes. I’ve been trying to be less on Bluesky, which, though it is my favorite Twitter alternative to have arisen, has taken on a depressing quality of late, as folks post update after update chronicling the myriad ways we are all under attack. I am trying not to check out, but rather to check in with my surroundings. I am convinced that the answer to what comes next will not be found online, but in the streets.
Videogames, by contrast, are often an excuse to stay sequestered in our houses. This does not have to be a bad thing (see the camaraderie people found in games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons during the early days of the pandemic), but, living through a moment in time where it is not hyperbolic to say that social media platforms want us to remain stuck in a loop of reposting pseudo-revolutionary content on platforms owned by a few wealthy men who have aligned themselves against the interests of working people, it is hard sometimes not to see videogames as another means by which to consume our time and attention.
I’m not saying that the people making games are thinking in this way. No one sets out to create any work of art with the goal of entrapping their audience into a state of non-resistance. (At least, no artist does this.) And of course one could argue that reading a book, or watching a movie, or watching television, or consuming any media all does the same thing: use our time. Likewise, it would be foolish of me to say that one shouldn’t engage in leisure in order to more properly fight back against the power structure. We need leisure like we need rest. We deserve leisure like we deserve rest.
It’s just that, when it comes to the stories being told through games, I think we’re being sold a false vision of resistance. And not simply in games like Metaphor, where the story is explicitly about resisting a fascistic figure, but in the very fabric of what it is to play a game. Games challenge us to overcome a certain level of adversity by teaching us that we can master it and overcome it by ourselves. Every game, no matter its content or difficulty, is a challenge to its player to overcome it. Just look at our verbs: win, defeat, kill, save, hero, enemy.
There are games out there that posit a collective method of resistance. In a way, a game like Helldivers 2 is one such game. A satire of fascistic iconography, the player’s goal is to spread democracy throughout the galaxy. To do so, you act as a team, throwing your bodies against the enemies without. Sure, it’s all played for laughs (and you are, in fact, playing the bad guys), but the very idea that you play as a faceless soldier who is but one tiny part of a larger resistance is resonant. Likewise, games like Citizen Sleeper 2 and (so I understand) Hardspace: Shipbreaker ask you to play a worker, not a hero, and thus your actions are limited to that which you can affect.
What I want is games with more limited protagonists who fight alongside other limited people toward limited ends. What I want is fewer heroes and more people. What I want are citizen-saboteurs. To quote the declassified CIA document Simple Sabotage Field Manual that’s been going around:
Where destruction is involved, the weapons of the citizen-saboteur are salt, nails, candles, pebbles, thread, or any other materials he might normally be expected to possess as a householder or as a worker in his particular occupation. His arsenal is the kitchen shelf, the trash pile, his own usual kit of tools and supplies. The targets of his sabotage are usually objects to which he has normal and inconspicuous access in everyday life.
What’s abundantly clear is I have to stop playing big-budget RPGs. I’m not going to be satisfied by the hero trope at this moment, which is not the fault of the developers or writers. It’s just a recognition of taste and desire. I bristle at the hero, and I bristle at the overly simplistic villain. No one is coming to save us. We must save ourselves. We must see ourselves as we are: not heroes, not adventurers, but pieces of a larger movement. To save the world, one must see themselves as a cog in a greater machine, grinding in our own small way toward freedom.
Bonus Links
My two Polygon columns from last month:
