Umurangi Generation (Origame Digital, 2020) is a photography game about being young and punk at the end of the world. Grab your camera and skates, disregard the caution tape, and dance with the roller goths and neon hipsters. It has vibes for days and is angry as hell. It’s the end of the world, after all. The water’s rising, the sky is red, freaking kaiju are demolishing the city! Maybe we could have stopped it at one point but now we’re just buying time. The most expensive, explosive time the UN military can buy. A billion homeless and they're building EVA!. Of course they're building EVAs.

Earlier this year Congress approved a $25b increase to military funding over the $715b Biden already requested. It is a staggering amount of money, enough to drown whole continents in lead. After more than a year of death, protests, failing infrastructure, and natural disasters, our leaders have once again invested in violence. More money means more guns means more poor kids to shoot them means more bodies to blanket the scorched earth. I’m sure in a bunker somewhere we’re building mechs.

The US is a colonial project. It has no claim to anything but a history of genocide, and facing the existential threat of a dying planet it reaches for what’s familiar: guns, police, nationalism. The billionaires are fleeing to space but the normal rich have to settle for bunkers in New Zealand and whatever sociopathic impulses they feel like funding. Millions are being evicted and our government is burning ants under a magnifying glass.

Umurangi isn’t set in the US – it takes place in Tauranga Aotearoa (what colonizers have named New Zealand) – but the US has functionally seized the country. UN propaganda – which, judging by flags, is now just the US and Britain, a colonial power couple – blankets the walls and claims ownership of anything it can stamp. PROPERTY OF THE UN. POLICE WILL NOT BE HELD RESPONSIBLE. Security walls stretch past the tops of buildings, a bounty on anyone who tries to climb out. Life in a trash compactor.

The kaiju and EVAs are fighting in the distance as I slip into “Gamer’s Paradise,” letting the nightclub bass wash over me like a bad trip. Topside the sirens are wailing, but here people are dancing, drinking, dozing in VR headsets. It’s the end of the world, after all. You can die a martyr or a hedonist but you’re gonna die either way. I’m too poor to blackout, so I take my pictures, pick up my pay, and go find my friends at the homeless camp.

Umurangi hums along with an understated tension. I’m chilling with my friends on a rooftop overlooking Mauao mountain. Sometimes the jets fly too close but if you try you can almost forget the war a few stories down. We stop at a military camp, drift through the streets of Kati Kati. Everyone’s waiting for the next attack, wondering if it’ll be their city that gets hit, but right now we can breathe.

A while back I wrote about camera confidence in Dear Future[kritiqal.com] (Dear Future Production Committee, 2021). Like Umurangi, Dear Future is also about taking photos of a dying world, only in that game, life has already moved on. There are no people to observe, no neon lights or gunshots blowing out the exposure. Even the trash is mostly gone. It’s easy to loiter, to spend precious minutes waiting for the sun to set and the shadows to land where I want them. The game ends when the sun goes down but somehow this only makes me move slower. Everything that is going to happen already has. There’s no need to rush.

Umurangi, conversely, is full of happenings. Stories litter the ground and pile up in corners as I try to track down my list of shots. I’m bumping into strangers and falling off ledges but I’m not satisfied leaving with just my delivery. Life in Umurangi is dense. Graffiti and music and resistance overflows from spaces that should be too small to hold them. These people have been forgotten but they’re alive. In spite of everything they’re alive and I want to preserve that somehow, to pretend that there is a future and someone will find these pictures and that will somehow make this OK. Not OK, but…not for nothing.

Who is buying all these photos? Are they UN propaganda? Newspaper exposés? Random prints for the few people with money to spare? Most likely it’s all of the above, different parties pulling apart the film for what they need and passing me a few bucks for my troubles. Every image is worth something to someone and when you are poor and homeless and hungry your decisions stop being about politics but about survival. I’m not an embedded journalist or government photographer, I’m just some kid with a camera. Someone who will throw themselves into firefights and army bunkers if it means I’m not sleeping on a park bench. I lean into that camera confidence, that feeling of invincibility behind the lens. Nobody with the power to pay me – with the power to do ♥♥♥♥ to stop this – wants to be here themselves. They’re off on holiday or deep underground getting drunk with hologram girls. I send them postcards of rooftops on fire. They wire me $5.

As hyper aware as I am of Umurangi’s citizens, nobody seems to care that I’m there. I slip past barricades, poke my camera into the faces of strangers, and am utterly ignored. This is a game and I’m the player doing random ♥♥♥♥ like jumping on the damn robot, but also, why _should_ anyone bother with me? We are all tired and scared and just existing. These aren’t our problems but we’re the ones out here trying to fix them. Umurangi is angry as hell and its people don’t have time for cops and petty fights.

When Umurangi’s tutorial asks if I’ve played a first-person shooter it isn’t explicitly making a correlation between itself and a game like Doom. FPS is just videogame shorthand, ultimately. We know how to look and shoot and move with WASD so let’s not waste time with the basics. But the acknowledgement lingers with me. There are many trite things to be said about the mechanical similarities between guns and cameras – of triggers and flashes and the reaping of souls – but Umurangi doesn’t care about them and frankly neither do I. I’m too busy noticing that there are only guns and cameras. Kids who look like me leaning on rifles as I take their portraits; kids counting munitions in the sewers; kids bleeding out as the sky turns red and their bullets do ♥♥♥♥ all to save them. My camera is just as useless, just as much a tool, just as impassionate about who it shoots.

What were these kids’ options? They could join the army – be given a gun, authority, a momentary sense of safety – or they could run the same streets with a camera like me, making deliveries and trying not to get shot. I can’t blame them for enlisting. I save my anger for the recruiters, the arms dealers, and everyone else who told this kid they’d be taken care of. I take one last picture as the medic tries to stop the bleeding. The shot’s not on my list and I don’t know who it’s for but it’s all I can do to acknowledge they were here. That they were alive. I feel sick as my wallet grows $3 heavier.

Umurangi is the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ future we occupy, the compromises and pain and small moments of joy all combusting at once. There are no good choices left, they’ve all been stolen from us. What do you do when the world’s on fire but you’re hungry and the landlord’s demanding rent? At what point does the dark comedy of capitalism finally break? Umurangi knows we’ve passed the point of no return but have to keep living like we still have time. It acknowledges our anger but refuses to give up on the people left behind.

We hold on to each other and make what we can of the time that’s left. It’s the end of the world, after all.

This essay appeared on KRITIQAL[kritiqal.com].

The following contains spoilers for Lucah: Born of a Dream

Last summer The Last of Us: Part II (Naughty Dog, 2020) released to near-universal acclaim. The sequel to 2013’s morose ponderance on the fragile relationships of Bad Dads, Part II shifts the focus to Elle to reckon with the cycles of violence she‘s become trapped in as she seeks revenge for her surrogate Bad Dad’s murder. In the background of this release were alarming reports of the studio’s habitual labor abuse[www.eurogamer.net], which one ex-animator described as requiring "weeks of recovery afterwards." Running parallel to these reports was Naughty Dog’s ongoing denial of sexual harassment allegations[www.gamespot.com]. As Part II racked up awards for its supposedly “stunning, nuanced exploration of the strength and fragility of the human spirit” the victims of the studio’s cycles of violence have received no justice.

Video games are built on violence. Violence towards their creators at the hands of industry overlords. Violence towards their fans through the cultivation of toxic communities. Violence to the planet by the manufacturing of useless hardware and the ballooning footprint of server farms. Violence as the primary verb through which we understand our interactions in these digital worlds. The argument of whether games should be violent is over, violence has won.

For as entwined with violence as games have always been they are remarkably bad at understanding or discussing it. The Last of Us compartmentalizes violence as the actions of individuals, some human pathogen that will inevitably erupt should we lose the organization of the state. Bioshock: Infinite (Irrational Games, 2013) crudely equates black liberationists with their white abusers as if the only justifiable violence is that done by The Player. Bioshock (Irrational Games, 2007), infamously, tries to criticize our unquestioning involvement in digital violence but forgets it‘s a shooter with the philosophical sophistication of a high schooler. Hotline: Miami (Dennaton Games, 2013) is Fight Club (Fincher, 1999). Spec-Ops: The Line (Yager, 2012) is Heart of Darkness (Conrad, 1899). We can find better examples digging through small projects but looking at games that have been culturally impactful the best we can get are literary adaptations crammed into marketable genres (even Spec-Ops had online multiplayer).

Not every game needs to be a treatise on video game violence (the thought is nauseating). But what is revealing is how any admittance and interrogation of violence within a game’s text – no matter how shallow – is accepted uncritically as a profound commentary on the medium. Video games are so desperate for recognition as SERIOUS ART and are keenly aware of their juvenile tendencies. The most anyone is prepared to do, though, is wink at the camera and remind you that “actually, you like the violence” as they crunch their teams again.

///

Lucah: Born of a Dream (melessthanthree, 2018) opens with the imperative that “you must fight…it’s all you know.” The world comes into focus, all scratches and harsh colors. Almost immediately you are beset upon by monsters. Towering red sprites clipping in and out of existence, cutting off exits, demanding a confrontation. So you fight, dodging, slashing, summoning familiars, calling up unknown magiks to aid you. Every system is precision forged, building out further and further as you gain new attacks, new skills, a deeper appreciation for how each move compliments its neighbor. As you rest beneath a cross a level-up screen tempts you with a handful of possibilities, funds disappearing into one path as the others close. As if to remind you, despite all your might you are not in control.

Halfway into your journey through this hell, this purgatory, this void – whatever you call it the feeling’s the same – you come across an arcade. LCD screens cut small windows of light in the dim interior but it’s only the final game in the far corner that is playable. I Am Not A Machine. Ironic.

Inside the game is yourself, a little crushed, the darkness that much more invasive. Your skills are the same but the visibility is gone. You lash out recklessly at the endless waves of enemies, accomplishing nothing, always falling. You wake up on the ground of the arcade, groggy but unharmed. It’s just a game after all.

In this one scene, the often inscrutable Lucah comes into sharp focus. From the beginning, this world has been a collage of Catholic iconography, lingering trauma, and the inescapable presence of violence. It is a world built on pain, capable of inflicting only more pain, and which tries to craft that pain into something compelling. In this arcade, we are thrown out. We are reminded of our humanity and the necessity to move forward. This arcade can only amplify and regurgitate our pain. It does nothing to heal it.

Lucah is not a game to linger in. Its citizens are desperate to escape to the point of death and you’ve come carrying a blade. To get caught up at this arcade, to revel in this violence sans all-purpose, is to lose yourself to the architects of this damnation. The church commands blood, calls acolytes to self-flagellate as they wait for the messiah to strike them down. Only violence exists here because violence is the only goal. It can achieve no end.

Lucah is not unusual in having its primary mode of interaction be violence. Nor is it unusual for creating a world that is both horrific and compelling. But where it transcends its contemporaries is recognizing the source and limits of that violence, contextualizing it not as blunt mechanic but a terrible shackle to the player’s freedom. We speak to this world in violence but always with the hope a new sound will emerge.

Lucah arises out of trauma. In scattered scenes we see the pain inflicted by the church; by bigotry and authority. We watch characters transform from defiantly loving to agents of violent retribution. At some point, this past collides with the present, or perhaps it was always this dark. What is clear is that this violence did not come from nowhere. It was built and is now turning against its makers.

Due to Steam character limits the full essay cannot be posted here. You can read the full essay on Kritiqal[www.kritiqal.com].