Well, its been months, rather than the “week”
I projected after my last post, but that's life in Graduate school.
This post also wound up needing to be much longer (three times as
long) despite having a much narrower focus. Also, I haven't added anchors to make the footnotes work. Oh well - I'll try to make time to do so tomorrow. As this post involves a critique of the conventions of Fantasy as a genre,
including J.R.R. Tolkien's classic Lord of the Rings
(LotR), I hope to
to draw at least as many hostile posts as I did with “Muslim
Massacre, Roach Toaster and Iji.” We'll see.
Before
I can get into Battle for
Wesnoth
(Wesnoth)
specifically, I need to establish a baseline for racial and
postcolonial issues in fantasy fiction, including games. This is the
part that would be least controversial in a purely academic setting,
but that I expect will be most controversial on-line.
The short version is this: fantasy, and
especially the subgenre of “Epic” or High Fantasy,
contains colonial, racial and eugenic assumptions, and Tolkien's
work is no exception: quite the opposite, it is the prototype for
other Fantasy in terms of race relations just as it is in terms of
everything else.
Lord of the Rings
There
is an absolute notion of racial superiority in LotR:
Elves are superior in every way, Hobbits are morally superior to
Humans, themselves divided into a variety of races from the superior
High Men of old to the debased (and Orientalized) Southrons, Dwarves
are literally children of a lesser god,(1) and Orcs, the descendents
of corrupted Elves, are intellectually and morally impovrished.
Dungeons and Dragons
(DnD), which
shifted over time from imitating Tolkien's oeuvre to competing with
Middle Earth for the role of standardbearer for the genre, obscures
this “great chain of being”(2) in the name of game
balance. On a tangent, MMORPGs like Everquest
and World of Warcraft
(WoW) are now
competing with DnD
for the role, as is evidenced by the MMORPG-like DnD
4.0.
One
of the most important, and generally unquestioned, assumptions of
Fantasy is in the word “race.” In Science Fiction, most
“aliens” are, implicitly or explicitly, a different
species,
a modern scientific term that presumes an independent origin and
genetic incompatibility. This is not the case in fantasy, where
“race” means very nearly the same thing it did in
colonial English: it describes different “human” peoples,
who are (mostly) sexually compatible and capable of producing
offspring and differentiated by bloodline or pedigree rather than
heterogynous origin. Good breeding retains its old meaning:
capability and manners are inherited and can be diluted though mixing
with inferior bloodlines. One potential is determined by one's
breeding: Aragon is of the lineage of Kings, whereas Boromir and his
father, Denethor, are stewards and the descendants of stewards –
when they seek to rise above their station, they become corrupt.
As
noted, Tolkien's Dwarves, derived from the Dwarves of Teutonic
legend, have an explicitly separate origin from Humans and Elves and
thus may be a different “species,” but fantasy and
especially DnD
abounds with Half-Elves and other mestizo races such as Half-Orcs and
Half-Dragons. Tolkien's Orcs are explicitly of Elvish stock, an idea
which Peter Jackson explicitly worked into his adaptation of the
books (3). Also in accordance with the old racial and eugenic model,
it is possible to fall (there is no shortage of evil or low men in
Middle Earth, and Elves and even the semi-divine Wizards are not
immune to tempatation; but it is
not
possible to rise. There are no redeemed Orcs in Middle Earth, nor
even any Southrons who see the light. Virtue as well as strength is
in the breeding, and while it can be lost, it cannot be regained.
This
is the root of a certain illogic that persists in Fantasy Gaming:
Orcs, and other sentient but debased creatures are explicitly not
“people” and are generally killed on sight by players,
often preemptively. Even
in games like the Warcraft games, where Humans and Orcs are balanced
and equally playable, they are morally opposed, and it is the Humans
who are associated with virtue. You can play the bad guys, but an
Orc can't be a good guy, almost without exception.
The importance
of all this can be summed up in a simple question: who (not
what) is an Orc? In Jackson's movies, Orcs are primative, bestial,
tribal, simple-minded, easily fooled, ferocious, even fearless in
battle but also cowardly, treasonous and feckless. Visually, they
have sloped foreheads, jutting jaws, irregualar but sharp teeth,
narrow eyes, wide slits for nostrils, pointed ears (their only
Elf-like feature) dark braided or dreadlocked hair, and dark skin.
Jackson resisted the displacement (common in games) of giving them
green skin, which makes the parallel to the colonial view of
indiginous peoples, especially Africans, more obvious. Except for
their High Fantasy weapons and armor, they are the very picture of
the native savage: subhuman, apelike and dangerous, but obviously no
match for the white adventurer.
Saruman's
“perfected” Orcs, the Urok-Hai, die like flies at the
white hands of Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli and even Boromir, at the
climax of The Fellowship of the Ring.
They are marked with another white hand, that of Sarumon, whom they
obey slavishly. In The Two Towers,
the Elf and Dwarf make a game of war by competing for the most Orcish
kills at Helm's Deep, anticipating deathmatch computer games like
Quake and Halo
by over fourty years.
After
my last post, I was criticized for pointing out that, in Roach
Toaster, all of the player's
soldiers are white and the enemy is uniformly black or brown –
black anthropomorphic cockroaches in Roach Toaster,
brown giant roaches in the sequel. In Middle Earth, and in most
fantasy, everyone
is Caucasian in complexion except for the Orcs and other inherently
evil races. The only non-white Humans we see in Jackson's films are
the composite “Oriental” Southrons, who combine a
Carthaginian military (in the form of their trained “Oilaphants”),
Moorish North African complexion and dress, and a peppering of far
eastern style. The are the very picture of Edward Said's
Orientalized other: exotic and intriguing while also morally debased
and decontextualized. There is more wiggle room between the words of
Tolkein's original descriptions of these low men, but not much.
The broader conclusion one can draw from this is that, in
Tolkienesque fantasy, Orcs acquire all the traits that colonial
Europe projected onto native peoples. Perhaps the visual power of
Peter Jackson's Orcs is derived from the pan-Australian (Jackson
being from New Zealand) cultural imagination of the aboriginal
peoples of the region. In any case, he creates an almost Shaka
Zulu-like figure in the Uruk-Hai general, who becomes more of a
character in his own right than any of the Orcs in Tolkien's text,
though no effort is made to make him sympathetic.
Battle for
Wesnoth
Wesnoth
is an open-source Fantasy strategy game. The standard scenarios that
come with the game fall loosely into the racialization described
above, though there is an Orcish campaign that is much more
Warcraft-like than Tolkienesque in its racialization, viewing Orcs
and Humans as in constant and perhaps necessary conflict, but with
the humans being clearly more civilized and less bloodthirsty than
the Orcs, who enjoy fighting and are Machiavellian in their politics.
That said, I haven't played very far into the “standard”
Orcish campaign, “The Son of Black-Eye,” so it may yet
surprise me. If so, I'll make a follow-up post on the topic.
For
now, I want to consider to user-created scenarios that make a radical
break with fantasy racialization. Each of these scenarios has an
primary creator, but, unlike the single-creator games I considered
in my last post, creation of an original campaign for Wesnoth
tends to be highly collaborative, with many contributors who do
everything from playtesting to creating original art to suggesting
major changes to plot or level design. All the more reason to
consider these campaigns (and of Wesnoth
as a whole) in terms of their content alone, without regard to
authorial intent (my general methodology, and standard practice in
most literary study).
From here on, this post gets more scholarly and theoretical. I will
explain the terminology as I go, but non-academics may need to refer
to Wikipedia or even a dictionary of philosophy.
“Flight to Freedom”
Like nearly everything else in the open-source Wesnoth, the
creation of “Flight to Freedom” was made possible by
voluntary, unpaid collaboration. That said, “Flight to
Freedom” was originated by MadMax (forum handle), who is also
the principle creator and designer of the campaign.
The
protagonists in “Flight to Freedom” are Drakes, flying
lizard men who are most similar to DnD's
Draconians. Their racialization in “Flight to Freedom”
is that of the colonized native people, though in a symapthetic
“postcolonial” sense, as they are neither the
intellectual nor moral inferiors of the Knights of Wesnoth, and their
vulnerability to invasion, enslavement and literal colonization is a
result of the greed of humans and not a failing of the Drakes. Even
as they are treated sympathetically, they are not idealized, to the
campaign's credit: the “noble savage” is just as
colonized a figure as the slave and the headhunter.
The basic premise for “Flight to Freedom” is a shock: in
the opening narrative of the campaign, humans land on the Drakes'
island, and a tribal leader, Malakar, sends his daughter to parley
with them. She is killed out of hand, and the first scenario
consists of the humans overwhelming the player-controlled Drakes.
The player is expected to lose, though a campaign fork allows
the player to retreat into the swamp and ally with another tribe,
which only postpones defeat – the humans always conquer the
Drakes.
Either way, the surviving Drakes are captured and sold into slavery,
their young held captive to ensure their compliance. When Malakar
leads a slave revolt (this occurs in the second scenario of the
original campaign) the young Drakes are whipped and, if the player
does not move quickly enough, killed.
By this point, anyone familiar with High Fantasy can see a few
familiar tropes, and a number of departures. As many posters on the
forum for the campaign noted, the deposed king or surviving heir who
must recover his (nearly always his) kingdom is a common theme
in Fantasy, being, for example, the plot of “Heir to the
Throne,” a classic Wesnoth
campaign to which others are inevitably compared. Being sold
into slavery, usually in the Romanesque form of gladiatorial or
galley slavery, is also a common theme in pulp fantasy like that of
Edgar Rice Burrows and Robert E. Howard.
However, the narrative of “Flight to Freedom” undermines
the individualism and egocentrism of that scenario. The figure of
the rightful heir to the throne is not only mediaeval, it is
fundamentally patriarchal and oedipal: his battle cry is “my
people need me” which is just a reformulation of “le
etat c'est moi.” The “people” are infantilized
and oedipalized by this claim: only the great man of state can save
them. The absolute war of these scenarios amounts to a scorched
earth campaign: “if I can't be king, no one can,” a
notion so selfish that it can only be justified by the demonization
of the enemy (the party in power). In High Fantasy, the false king
is usually literally demonized as a figure of supernatural evil. In
LotR this is true, if one degree removed: it is the diabolical
evil of Sauron that forces Aragorn to reclaim the throne of Gondor
from its inferior Stewards.
“Flight to Freedom” deviates from this model: Malakar is
neither deposed nor separated from his tribe. His status as chieftain
is not only of no concern to the Knights of Wesnoth, it is
impercerptible: they see all Drakes as interchangeable. In fact,
they are semi-interchangeable, with Malakar serving less as the
exceptional Drake than as an “icon” of Drake life (3).
The collective identity of the Drakes is singularized (made into a
single instance) in him. When Malakar broods over the murder of his
daughter, that is our window onto the loss of family that all of his
tribe has suffered. His slow coming to acceptance of the human
pirate, Kogw, is analogous to the Drakes' experience of a suddenly
broader world, one that can never resume its precolonial shape. This
analogy is not complete, as it suggests that, if Malakar were to die
,another Drake would take his place, whereas, if Malakar unit dies in
a scenario, it's game over (in the Wesnoth engine, this is
normal).
The
experience of the Drakes in “Flight to Freedom” is almost
unheard-of in fantasy: they are captured en-masse and shipped oversea
to serve as plantation slaves. In early posts to the campaign forum,
there is concern that plantation slavery is “inappropriate”
and some posters complain that the scenerio is “un-Wesnothish.”
This discomfort may have its roots in the “Human”-centric
thinking common to High Fantasy (albeit absent in LotR,
where the “English” Hobbits steal the show). Early in
“Flight to Freedom's” development, turin posts: “Wesnoth
belongs to the humans. Drakes should not take over wesnoth.”(4)
Wesnoth's
Humans are typical fantasy Humans: that is to say that they are are a
white, feudal, “Arthurian” race. Dark skin is reserved
for non-human races, as are non-european styles, such as curved
swords and loincloths. After a while, these concerns cease to be
points of debate and
the parallels between the campaign and American history (and thus an
implicit rejection of the norms of High Fantasy) are generally
accepted.
Forum poster DavidByron is the first to justify the campaign in terms
of American history: “Slave
revolts are an interesting feature of US history. They usually don't
go well because the ruling class has all the advantages. As I
understand from reading the comments in this thread you have the
Drakes becoming something of a criminal mob, (beating up a caravan,
teaming up with pirates) as they attempt to flee back towards home --
a basically sound approach to an impossible dream. What else could
they do indeed?”(5). This kind of reasoning makes the text
narrative of “Flight to Freedom” morally complex, with
Malakar's decisions more often pragmatic than noble.
It is not merely the scripted story of Flight to Freedom that is
atypical: the nomadism,(6) morality, and pragmatism of the Drakes
are reflected in gameplay (“ludology”). In general, war
games are about taking and holding territory, and this is built into
the Wesnoth engine: units are recruited at “camps”
or “castles” by a singular “leader” and
conquer “villages” to increase a player's income. A
typical scenario for the game pits two or more players in a “war
of all against all”(7) to conquer all of the villages and kill
all other leaders. Though some of the scenarios in “Flight to
Freedom” follow this model, in many of them the goal is simply
travel: a pure nomadology, a line of flight.(8)
The Drakes are well-equipped for this: almost all of their units can
literally fly. In-game, this smooths out the striation of space
created by different kinds of terrain. This metaphor is carried
through ludologically: when the Drakes are enslaved, they loose the
ability to fly, and they only regain this ability after they kill
their master. Impeded travel scenarios are the most common challenge
in “Flight to Freedom.” The organized retreat is a
strategy game trope, but it is usually used sparingly and early on in
fantasy games, the prelude to a triumphal conquest. In “Flight
to Freedom” there are no classic fighting retreats (e.g. “hold
line X for Y turns, then fall back to Z”), but the player must
do all the following: flee superior forces, escape from a flanked
position, fall back on one front while advancing on another, contain
(rather than destroy) enemy forces, and maneuver through dangerous
and/or hostile territory as unobtrusively as possible.
In one scenario, while at sea with a pirate flotilla, the player must
pass through pea-soup fog (literalized fog of war) and evade sea
serpents and other monsters. It is impossible to win by fighting
though: instead, careful exploration and maneuvering and the
judicious sacrifice of your ships is necessary to get your flagship
through. Much later in the campaign, you have to sail though someone
else's warzone. Both sides will attack you, given a chance, and you
can't hold against either side, let alone both, so you must slip
through. But the most interesting scenario, and the one both most
commented on and most hated on the forum, was “River of
Skulls.”
The scenario is this: the Drakes are forced to flee undergound,
pursued by the Knights of Wesnoth, with no idea of where to go from
there. The Dwarves who live in the caves react with anger, and the
player must survive while trying to figure out what to do. Game
mechanics make it impossible to negotiate with the Dwarves, but
narrative text makes it clear that the goal of the scenario is to
find an exit, not to annhiliate the Dwarves, and defeating all
“enemy” groups, though possible, is not sufficient to win
the game (unlike most strategy games, where more specific goals can
be ignored if one wipes out the opposition). As escape is the goal
of many of “Flight to Freedom's” scenarios, “River
of Skulls”isn't unusual in that aspect.
What makes “River of Skulls” unique is that, to a degree
unequaled in any other scenario in the campaign, the Drakes' freedom
of movement is negated. Not only is the map a set of twisty little
passages (9), but the Drakes cannot fly in these small spaces, so
their movement is reduced greatly. The only advantage they derive
from having wings is that they can cross the occasional rift or pit
in the cave floor. In DeleuzoGuattarian terms, this is a highly
striated space (10). Striation is not evenhanded: in the caves, the
Drakes and Dwarves alike can only move along existing “paths,”
but the Drakes do so slowly and awkwardly (11), whereas the
archetypically slow Dwarves negotiate the caves with ease (perhaps
because they are too short to hit their heads on the stalactites) and
enjoy a high defense (dodge) rate. The final injury is that the
Drakes get a bonus at day and a penalty at night, and in the caves it
always counts as night. As a result, fighting through the Dwarves is
slow and difficult, bottleneck to bottleneck, with every unexplored
passage a risk of being flanked and every open space a risk of
encirclement.
The goal of “River of Skulls,” when it is eventually
revealed, is to move Malakar to a position on the bottom of the map,
so the “default” tactic for most strategy games (and
nearly all RTS games) of gradual expansion and resource accumulation
doesn't work. Nova, a poster who became a major contributor to
“Flight to Freedom” says of this part of the campaign
that “These next couple of missions are a Drake
deathmarch.”(12) This comment evokes the Bataan deathmarch
and, more interestingly, the trail of tears.(13) While the Drakes
are going home rather than being forced from it, playing “River
of Skulls” confirms the narrative and ludological truth of
this.
To successfully navigate the “River of Skulls,” the
player must recognize that that this scenario rewrites rules of the
game, as played up to this point. Instead of fighting against the
restrictions imposed by this highly striated space, one must figure
out how to take advantage of them. One possible strategy is to use
the bottlenecks to contain and bypass the Dwarven Lords and their
soldiers, rather than besieging them. This requires two changes in
the player's behavior, however. The first is the shift from thinking
of the Drakes as highly mobile, tough (high HP) units to thinking of
them as slow and vulnerable. The second, more difficult shift
requires that the player choose not to explore and conquer the
entire map. The second shift in thinking is the true “line of
flight” for the Drake war machine, because exploration and
conquest are basic components of Wesnoth and the entire genre
of strategy gaming. Deterritorializing strategy gaming in this way
necessarily throws the other conventions of the genre into question.
The ludological feeds back into the narrative, giving new meaning to
the game text in which Malakar claims that the Dwarves are not his
people's enemies and that the Drakes should only fight them where
necessary.
As a result, “River of Skulls” raises the question of
whether we, as players, should take pride in wiping out the enemy in
any videogame. This question of in-game violence, usually raised
only by the mainstrean media and only in terms of graphic 3-d
violence, is a nonstarter with most gamers. The common response is
“it's just a game.” And it is just a game, but I am far
from the first to suggest that we are trying to have our cake and eat
it too: if nothing one does in a game matters outside the game, then
games cannot be meaningful or useful in any way; but if games can be
meaningful, their meaning can be objectionable.(14) In my last post,
I praised Remar's Iji for offering narrative rewards for
keeping one's body count low in a genre (platform shooter) when
carnage is the norm. There is no narrative reward for sparing the
Dwarves in “Flight to Freedom,” but there are several
strategic rewards: a “contain and bypass” strategy not
only speeds up play, but it allows the Drakes to gain experience and
level up (necessary to success in future scenarios) with less risk of
getting pinned down and killed.
A slower, but viable and more conventional strategy is to work
cave-to-cave, keeping one's strongest units close together, putting
low-level (expendable) units first when entering open areas, and
making sure that no Dwarves, and especially no Dwarven Lords (who can
recruit new units) are left in one's wake. This leave-no-survivors
strategy makes the turn counter one's real opponent: extermination is
easy, but extermination in a hurry is hard. The image of one Drakes
scouring the Dwarves' subterranean home their fire breath evokes
unpleasant images of 20th century brushfire wars and
ethnic cleansings. Of course, “ethnic cleansing” is the
goal of many strategy games and CRPGs, whether one is cleaning out a
cave full of Orcs or nuking a Zerg hive. At the same time, the
“bypass” strategy I've described is similar to the
Rumsfeld gambit in the drive to Baghdad. It might be a good way to
pass through a hostile space, but its a lousy way to start an
occupation.
The darkest part of “Flight to Freedom's” narrative
unfolds after“River of Skulls.” The “river”
is of lava, and following it's path is too much even for the
descendants of Dragons. We are told that many Drakes die in the
journey, but all of your soldier units survive. This may be a
concession to playability, but it also makes a sad kind of narrative
sense: soldiers may die in battle, but civilians are more likely to
die of hunger, disease or exposure resulting from shortages war
damage and the necessity of procuring for the soldiers. This
tragedy prepares the player for the first scenario after the Drakes
finally return to the surface. As soon as they are out in the open
air, Malakar's chief lieutenant,
Theracar, rebels. The player is forced to put down the
uprising in an easy scenario: apparently, all of one's experienced
units remain loyal, and fighting Theracar's low-level rebels feels
less like a battle than a purge. That ugly aftermath of colonial
rule, ethnic cleansing, lurks under the surface of this scenario as
well as in “River of Skulls.” The horror is mitigated by
narrative text telling us that Malakar forgives the surviving rebels
after Theracar's death.
In military terms, Theracar commits mutiny, but the Drakes are a
tribe, and the rebellion is an issue of tribal identity: the
Drakes had to flee underground because they refused to give Kogw up
to the Elves, who promised safe passage away from the Wesnothians in
exchange for the pirate (15). Malakar justifies this decision by
adopting Kogw into the tribe. As all members of a Drake tribe are
Drakes, this also makes Kogw a Drake. Theracar claims that he has a
legitimate claim to challenge Malakar not only because of the deaths
of tribe members, but because Malakar broke the law in admitting Kogw
to the tribe. His case is that Kogw is not a Drake, so his admission
to the tribe was not just a mistake but an abomination.
This is more complex than it seems. Once again, it is important to
remember that this is fantasy and that Drakes, like Humans and Elves,
are races. The concept of species does not exist in this
contex. Since before history, human tribes, nations and family
groups have adopted individuals of other ethnic groups into their
society. A slave captured in battle may remain an outsider, but
someone (almost always a woman) who marries in becomes a member of
that group in every way. This was certainly true in colonial
America, where white women were sometimes taken captive by Native
Americans in raids: some were ransomed, but others married into the
tribe, becoming members not just of that family group but also of
that nation. In this context, Theracar is saying that Kogw cannot be
a member of the tribe because of the color of his skin (and his lack
of scales). The most morphologically distinctive traits of Drakes,
wings and the ability to breathe fire, are not possessed by all
Drakes, and so cannot be considered integral. We do not even know if
Drakes and Humans are sexually incompatible: if the anthropomophic
Drakes are “half-Dragons,” the other “half”
is implicitly human.
Thoughout the campaign, Kogw is engaged in a “becoming”
Drake,(16) a motion that can never reach it's goal. In The Ritual
Process, anthropologist Victor Turner described rites of passage
as involving a period of “liminality,” in which one's
former status is lost but no new status has been established. When
Deleuze and Guattari speak of becoming (becoming animal, becoming
woman, becoming imperceptible), they are talking about something
similar, but entirely “positive,” which is not to say
entirely good, merely that, like a line of flight it is a motion
towards, not a motion away from. Considered this way, some of the
apparent contractitions resolve themselves: Kogw never ceases to be
Human, he is just moving towards a Drake identity, which never
requires him to grow scales or breathe fire precisely because
it is never complete. In short, Kogw's becoming Drake is like
Turner's state of ritual liminality, only without its defining
characteristic, as the previous state is never (fully) lost, and the
“result” is never fully achieved.
Similarly, as Drake units level up, they are engaged in a becoming
Dragon, which reaches its highest degree in the Armageddon Drake, the
most powerful Drakish unit, described in-game as follows: “Were
it not for the armor they wear, some drakes might be
indistinguishable from true dragons.” What marks them as still
(and forever) becoming rather than being Dragon is a matter of
clothing: a “human” trait (in the general rather than the
High Fantasy sense), the icon of that which they cannot leave behind
. In “River of Skulls” there is a more unexpected
becoming Dragon: there is a statue of a Drake, and when one moves a
unit in front of it, that unit is lost only to be replaced by a
Skeleton Dragon.(17) Narrative text explains that the unit died in a
rockfall which woke the undead Dragon, but the gameplay effect is one
of becoming. Even here, the process of becoming Dragon is not
complete, though perhaps in the opposite direction: the the Skeleton
Dragon is not a complete Dragon (lacking organs and skin) because it
is becoming dead: that is to say, it cannot fully die.
In a scenario that comes shortly after the defeat of Theracar's
rebels, Kogw convinces Malakar that the Drakes must destroy the Gate
of Storms, a supernatural portal whose opening threatens the entire
world. This influence is made possible by Kogw's status as an
(incomplete) Drake and a member of the tribe, an shift singularized
in Malakar opening up to Kogw for the first time. By this point, the
Drakes' efforts to return home have earned them the emnity not only
of the Knights of Wesnoth, but also of the Elven, Dwarven and Oricsh
nations.
Narratively speaking, the Drakes don't have to lift a taloned finger:
there are four other armies in the area who could be left to deal
with the problem. Moreover, as those armies are hostile and in
pursuit of the Drakes, this would be strategically practical.
Instead, the Drakes give their pursuers a chance to catch up by
stopping to fight the storm demons and destroy the gate. One might
expect the campaign to end here, with the other races thanking the
Drakes for saving them, but “Flight to Freedom” is not so
melodramatic. Upon completion of this scenario, nothing changes.
Not only are the Drakes are not honored as heroes, but their good
deed goes not only unrewarded but apparently unnoticed. This strikes
another postcolonial note: as the Drakes are a “lesser”
race, their accomplishments are below the notice of the “civilized”
Elves and Wesnothians. This makes them subaltern in Gayatri Spivak's
sense of the word (18), albeit not fully, as the player sees things
from the Drakes' perspective.
When Malakar's Drakes get home, they find that their island has
literally been colonized, and the rest of the Drakes enslaved and
forced to work in mines. There is even a new unit representing the
children of the slaves, described as “suffer[ing] from stunted
growth and other deformations.” Metaphorically, these “Cave
Drakes” read as the victims of malnourishment and child labor,
physically and psychically scarred: “their internal fire never
burns as intensely” as it should.
In the end, “Flight to Freedom,” is nuanced and
“realistic” enough that there is no possibility of
justice and no point in retribution. However, it would be wrong for
me to conclude by giving the impression that this campaign is
intended to be didactic or depressing: gameplay is challenging and
enjoyable even as it breaks with High Fantasy conventions and raises
doubts about the in-game good of in-game violence. Doubtless some
players will feel that I am “reading too much into it,”
the perennial argument against attention to detail. To them I can
only say that it is not my goal to set MadMax or anyone else up as a
hero, or to demonize Tolkien, Wesnoth or High Fantasy: these
things are what they are. It is merely important to recognize the
history and assumptions that undergird any work of any genre,
especially those we consider to be “innocent,” “escapist”
or “fantasy.” “Flight to Freedom” seems to
be more aware of its own “ancestry” than most games, and
to do more with it. Minimally, it injects a little ethical decision
making and moral complexity into a typically ruthless genre, and,
contrary to the conventional wisdom, that makes it more, not less,
fun.
I may follow this post up with one considering another user-designed
campaign for Wesnoth, “Ooze Mini Campaign,” which
upends the concept of “monster” in a way somewhat like
“Flight to Freedom” does to fantasy “Races.”
(1)
JRR Tolkien, The Silmarilion.
(2) The “great
chain of being” is connected to the mediaeval Christian
justification of the “divine right” of kings to rule: the
basic idea is that there is an absolute hierarchy to reality, with
angels above kings, kings above nobles, above commoners etc. This is
a common theme in Shakespeare.
(3) In Peircian
semiotics, an “icon” is a sign that represents something
else by possessing the same traits as the thing it represents:
computer icons are not icons in the Peircian sense.
(4) “Flight
to Freedom” Forum, p. 1
(5) “Flight
to Freedom” Forum, p. 24
(6) I take the
term “nomadism” from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
along with several other key terms used here. In A Thousand
Plateaus, the nomad and the war machine are associated, as both
operate by ignoring or overcoming “territorialization” -
that is, they do not respect boundaries. The “war machine”
in this context is separated from the military organization (army) of
a nation-state, as the latter is a structure designed to direct and
contain the functioning of the war machine. The state operates by
capture and negotiation, which create boundaries: e.g.
“territorialization.” The war machine
de-territiorializes, breaking boundaries. Thus, being arrested by
the police for trespassing is illustrative of the behavior of state
power, whereas being swept away by a flash flood is illustrative of
the operation of the war machine.
(7) Thomas
Hobbes, Leviathan
(8) A line of
flight is an escape from control: an act of “deterritorialization”
(see note 6). In A Thousand Plateaus, lines of flight are
associated with thought that reaches for the unthinkable: this is
most emphatically not “thinking outside the box” because
that presupposes an already known inside and outside: a simple
dichotomy of confinement and freedom. A line of flight is not an
escape from something (it is not reactionary), but an escape to
something, that is, an act of discovery. All lines of flight, if
successful, end in reterritorializations, that is in reestablish a
new set of boundaries and norms (the Drakes' flight is aimed at the
impossible: the recovery of the past; but that is not to say that it
is unsuccessful as a “line of flight”).
(9) Twisty
Little Passages by Nick Montfort is the definitive work on
interactive fiction (IF), or “text adventure” games. The
relevance of this to Wesnoth is twofold: one, that it shares a
common ancestor with IF in DnD; and two, that, from my perspective,
the narratology/ludology divide in games is useful but also a false
dichotomy and that videogame narrative is produced by the process of
play. This may be the subject of a later post.
(10) In “The
Smooth and the Striated” from a Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and
Guattari describe how a space (physical, social, or psychological)
can be relatively smooth or striated. These are not opposites: one
might speak of perfect smoothness as a striation “value”
of zero, and absolute striation as having an infinite value. To the
degree that a space is striated, it resists lines of flight (new
ideas or unexpected behavior). Moreover, what is not permitted is,
to some degree, unthinkable (moving through the cave wall, for
example, or “up” off the map and off the computer
screen). In a purely smooth space, any motion would be a line of
flight.
(11) In this
context, “awkward” means unable to dodge attacks.
(12) “Flight
to Freedom” Forum, p. 33
(13) The trail
of tears refers the forced march of several Native American nations
to reservations west of the Mississippi in the 1830s, especially the
particularly brutal treatment of the Cherokee, about a third of whom
died in concentration camps or along the way.
(14) For
example, Mitch Dyer voices a similar concern in his “To the
Front Lines” (from The Escapist issue 167: “Boot
Camp”)
(15) The player
knows, though Malakar does not, that the Elves do not intend to honor
the deal, because the Drakes are monsters – e.g., they are not
“people.” The denigration of a race, ethnicity or
culture as sub-human or savage has been the justification for
everything from the breaking of treaties with indiginous peoples to
the horror of the Holocaust.
(16) “becoming”
specifically in the DeleuzoGuattarian sense (explained in-text)
(17) In an
earlier version of the game, the Skeleton Dragon was hostile.
(18) Deleuze and
Guattari write about “becoming imperceptible” in much the
same way they write about “becoming woman” - in both
cases, it is motion toward something that is not “supposed to
be” part of middle-class, white, male, western identity. The
Drakes, as a colonized people, have been made imperceptible:
individual Drakes do not matter to the Wesnothians, and everything
they do will be read in terms of their perceived inferiority. In
Spivak's sense of the subaltern, the truly oppressed are those who
are denied the opportunity for self-definition or even to speak
against how they are defined by others. From the player's
perspective, the Drakes are anything but subaltern: one experiences
them in their own words, but if one imagines a Wesnothian perspective
on the Drakes, they are fully defined before they do or say anything,
and, as a result, anything they do or say will be interpreted as
conforming to that definition.
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