Ever since the back-to-back
mail bombing attempts and
synagogue shooting last month I've had an uncomfortable feeling that this project I'm working on is a little too close to life. LCS lives in a space where it references real-world violence and pretends endorsement of it, but operates outside the realm of the reasonable, beyond normal political discourse. It works because it commits hard to a fantasy far beyond the pale, and assures itself that this is okay because the fantasy is so far removed from reality.
Organizations like the original real-world SLA that the LCS was based on operate based on a sense of victimhood and distrust for democratic institutions, and are only absurd to the extent that people
don't really feel that way. When they do, it starts to sound more reasonable, more relevant. LCS wants to be relating to whiff of relevance, but not too much; it keyed off of a bit of that feeling on the left in frustration about the 2000 election, anger that the president lost the popular vote and wouldn't have won the electoral college but for a badly designed ballot in palm beach county, a feeling that they
should have won an election but
didn't and
now everything is terrible. But you didn't see people actually resorting to violence; it was still exaggeration.
Making a game that riffs off of those themes today in response to similar frustrations toward Trump on the left seemed like it was more relevant than ever, but I had to push further to keep things exaggerated; once again, the US President got fewer votes than his opponent, and once again, the left was full of righteous indignation, but I wanted to push past the political situation of the original game and cast things as
actual dictatorship to keep things squarely in fantasy land. But now I'm having second thoughts about whether that's enough. What worries me more today is that the current US President strives to cultivate that sense of victimhood and distrust in democratic institutions among his own followers, a sort of eternal power struggle against widespread institutional oppression and injustice that casts him as a sole beacon of white light. Every election is a victory for his team, or illegitimate, or both. Every elected official is either his ally or corrupt. Every journalist is either favorable to him or a lying and despicable sack of shit. This is the sort of cultish SLA-style thinking that gets people into violence. It deserves to be parodied, and it should be opposed. Initially, I was thinking that makes LCS/NCS just more relevant than ever.
But there's a bit of a problem. It's satirizing the wrong people. And I'm worried that, under the current environment, that's potentially dangerous.
NCS, like LCS, would cast you as elements in
opposition to the current political establishment, now inspired by the sitting US President. Then it portrays your opposition as violent, over-the-top, entitled, and disconnected from reality. There's a comedy there; there's a dark satire about how people out of power feel like victims and fantasize about taking things way too far. But part of the fun of NCS is playing into the idea of "what if those centrists were radical extremists who would do anything to hold onto power, ho ho ho isn't that funny". Unfortunately, there are real people on the extreme right who maintain this mentality of victimhood and distrust for democracy, and they
do fear that
those other guys are so unscrupulous, so evil, that they'll stop at nothing to maintain their hold on power. So sure, part of the idea of NCS is tapping into that, saying "oh, yeah, people on the far left/right think the establishment is corrupt and clings to power with inappropriate means, so let's play with that concept and cast you as someone like that". But it kind of stopped being funny to me when it became evident that this concept is taken so seriously and so far by a few folks that they're willing to kill because they
already feel like oppressed victims of an imagined cabal of corrupt criminals. And I guess we already knew that, to some extent, but the events last month really brought it to the fore of my attention. Making a game that postulates that they're right could work, but it really needs to point its satirical sights squarely on at that crazy fringe, and this game doesn't really do that.
I don't feel like I'm quite explaining my misgivings properly. There's another component of this discomfort that is simpler to explain. LCS is a dark game and it's inspired by real-world political violence, but it's time-removed from its source material and operates on the premise that everyone who sits down to play it can see how ridiculous these people are acting, that no matter hard the game pretends to take its premise seriously, the concept is too outlandish. But today's political environment has seen multiple incidents in the run-up to the last election where real people in the US have been willing to kill political opponents, even killing just regular folks that they have cultural disagreements with, over these big picture political views. These are, thankfully, just extremists on the fringe, and extremists like that have always been a thing and likely always will be, but I'm worried that it's becoming
too common these days for the game NCS to comfortably exist, and NCS would be making light of something that
actually happens these days. If the material it covers is getting too close to reality is stops being safely in a fantasy space, and that would mean I would need to treat the subject matter seriously and with some amount of responsibility, more so than this game really wants. NCS wants to be irreverent and irresponsible, it wants to be able to excuse itself because it's pure fantasy; it doesn't want to be a responsible, ethical game that operates in an environment in which people are actually killing each other. This game doesn't want to be careful about not fanning that flame, it wants to be secure in the belief that absolutely nobody will take it seriously or get the wrong idea, because it's so ridiculous.
If someone else was making this game, I would be excited, I would download it, and I would gladly play it. I'm just having a lot of difficulty getting
myself to work on it because I've been in constant doubt about whether it's a game I
should be making in this environment. I'm not worried about you guys -- I'm not worried that regular decent people are going to play the game and suddenly go "Yeah, time to go be a political terrorist IRL, that's a good idea" -- and I don't think that anyone should feel bad for wanting me to make this game, or for disagreeing with my misgivings. I just worry, and don't want my actions to feed in, even a little bit, to the psychosis of actual political terrorists, or to promote a mentality of vilification of other human beings in a time when, if anything, our politics desperately need a larger dose of humanity and better understanding of each other. I mean, you could say the same of any era; but these days that sort of decency is in especially short supply, and I'd rather not be part of the problem.
I'm confident that I could get this game into a stable, minimum viable state in a month or two of focused and enthusiastic free time development. I might still go for that goal. But right now that's difficult to promise. I'm having a hard time mustering the enthusiasm to work on it when I'm having moral doubts about finishing and releasing it at all.
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Topic: Some sort of Crime Squad, I guess (Read 36437 times)