The Games which made 2020 the 2020 of Years.
(The following contains spoilers for The Last of Us Part II as well as discussions of homophobia and transphobia)
I’m starting this as I’m watching The Game Awards, which I feel I’m a lot more positive on than most folks. Seems like most people I talk to are just there for the trailers but I enjoy the festivities and I think Geoff Keighley has done a great job legitimizing the idea of an awards show for this medium out of the terrible past experiences he’s had. I wasn’t as big on this year’s show (I think all the years since 2017 have largely been in that show’s shadow, but then you could say the same for games in general — 2017 will be hard to top for a while) but there were still some great announcements and a few games got very well-deserved awards.
But more than once during the show I was reminded that Cyberpunk 2077 just came out, and of course that this was the year The Last of Us Part II came out, and we learned Ubisoft has covered up YEARS of sexual abuse, and at some point that it hit me: in a year that already has so much awful stuff going on this medium that I care so dearly about has just made me more and more exhausted. Don’t worry, I’m not here talk your ears off about the new consoles launching with two or three exclusives, the most high-profile of which is a remake of a game from 2009, or the abysmal failure of Avengers, or the fact that a film director presented the Game of the Year award instead of a game developer (though all of these topics are well worth discussing certainly, and I would love to do so, particularly the last one). I’m talking about the way two of this year’s biggest releases carry so much unnecessary baggage and will be rewarded for their bad behavior. It makes me so tired and so sick to my stomach to once again be reminded loudly that basic decency and empathy mean nothing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not wringing my hands over Man’s inability to find common ground or some such meaningless tosh, we’re broken creatures and the Sun can’t rise in the West quickly enough, but seeing again how little your average person cares about this industry’s worst side doesn’t fail to bring me down again and again.
Starting with The Last of Us Part Deux, since it came out earlier in the year, and we can already quantify its long-term success to a degree. It sold four million copies in a weekend and received rave reviews with some folks calling it a game of the generation contender. Those sales frustrate me to a great degree, because it’s hard not to read it as a sign of my last point: the average consumer doesn’t pay much heed to the way the sausage is made. Perhaps they don’t pay attention to the latest industry news, maybe they can’t resist the way the industry markets games (get the thing day one, order in advance to make sure you get the thing day one, you don’t wanna miss out do you?), but it’s infuriating all the same to see people rush out rather than wait to see how a game is received and potentially pick up a used copy instead to send a message to publishers. I’m not going to act as if I’m casting stones without having sinned — I’ve bought products from sketchy and outright evil companies in the past, and if Konami were to re-release MGS3 on PC I’d have to fight myself over it — but between this, and Call of Duty, and Cyberpunk, what reason do we have to think publishers will ever change? With millions in sales and awards aplenty from The Game Such, why would they ever change?
But I’m getting off track, back to The Last of Us 2: Sons of Liberty. I want to preface this by saying I’m not here to complain about the way the game “betrays” the original’s story with the ways the characters have changed, I don’t think it does, but I’m also not a fan of the first game to begin with. The following discussion is not born of expectations for a sequel because the praise for the original confuses me at times. Yes, I too enjoy The Road. No, I did not a fifteen-hour version of it.
The primary theme of this game is the idea that revenge only creates tragedy and will never satisfy whatever emptiness you have inside; “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”. The two plot developments that carry this theme loudest are Ellie staying her hand just before killing Abby, and Dina leaving Ellie when she refuses to abandon the quest for revenge. The inciting incident of the plot is even an act of revenge, Abby killing Joel for having killed her father, and Ellie’s refusal to kill in kind is a dramatic breaking of the cycle of violence. That grand epiphany is hollow, however, in the context of the game up to that point: Ellie is standing ankle-deep in the blood of people whose crime against her was being associated with Abby or even just standing vaguely in-between the two women. And only after building a body count that would make Max Payne wince, when she is confronted with the person she actually has a grievance against, does Ellie find religion and lay down her arms, forgiving, and breaking the cycle. This doesn’t feel like a grand statement against revenge and violence, it’s a fumble at the one-yard line in service of an ending meant to make you feel guilty for wanting Ellie to kill Abby. This is one symptom of a greater problem the game has: wanting you to feel bad for doing what it forces you to do. You will kill a dog in this game, you will be responsible for a great deal of incredibly horrific violence, and even at a base level you will pay for Joel’s decision at the end of the first game even though you were not given a choice in the matter. And no, “just stop playing” isn’t a choice, it’s a cop-out. Never will you receive a reprieve from the incessant reminders by the game’s tone that you are the real monster, not the actual monsters wandering around biting people.
None of that even touches on the game’s handling of queer characters in Lev and Ellie’s relationship with Dina. One scene between the latter duo involves a random man calling Dina a slur. Nothing comes of this and there is no prompting for it — it exists so that Neil Druckmann and Halley Gross can inform you homophobia exists in the post-apocalypse they created. Ellie’s story isn’t about overcoming bigotry and learning to forgive homophobes, so what does this scene accomplish other than again crushing the player with the weight of the world? The real shame is that it interrupts what is otherwise one of the few bright spots in the entire story: the slow dance between Ellie and Dina is human, and even a little awkward in the way young love usually is. This could have been the glance above the darkness the game needed to make the violence all the more impactful if it had been allowed to stay fun. Both divorced from context and surrounded by it, the moment is an exploitation of queer suffering for dramatic effect and nothing more.
And then there’s Lev. Lev’s story revolves around his misery at the hands of the Seraphite cult for being transgender, and how Abby represents tolerance, and potential salvation, and it often feels as if the point of Lev’s character is to suffer. There’s an argument to be made that the journey is meant to mirror the real-life tortures that trans people go through, and that his story is meant to offer trans players some degree of catharsis in getting to carry out revenge against the kinds of people who hurt them in real life. I would never want to deny someone that kind of power fantasy — a huge appeal of the recent Wolfenstein games is getting to kill Nazis while living in a world where such monsters are still so loudly among us — but does this not fly in the face of the message the game is sending with Ellie’s story?
If revenge is wrong, if continuing this cycle of violence is futile and will only beget more violence, why are we meant to sympathize with Lev’s return to his mother and killing of her (even in self-defense)? This is not to say his mother “deserved” to live, or that I sympathize with her: bigots be-got shot and the world continues to spin. Lev may have more justification to kill his mother than Ellie does Abby, but she only dies in the story because he seeks her out knowing that she hates him and it may mean his own death. Yara even mentions that their mother’s level of devotion to the Seraphite beliefs will protect her from greater consequence, so Lev could continue on with Abby and, what is it Ellie wants us to do at the end of the game?
Forgive.
Why are we supposed to accept that Lev is justified in killing for revenge but Ellie isn’t when both drive the conflict?
Stepping back a hair to refocus on the queer side of things, Lev’s presence is primarily a commentary by other characters on him but ultimately little is said by him about what being trans means besides “it sucks because of the bigots” which isn’t just true in the post-apocalypse, it’s simply the reality of being non-cisgender and non-heterosexual. Similar to the slur leveled at Ellie, it’s brought up, commented on, and then nothing is done with that commentary before credits roll. This is not to say that characters need a “reason” to be trans, or a woman, or black, but if it’s going to be the foundation of his story, and especially if you’re going to deadname them in a script written by two cisgender people, you need to have a damn good justification.
Oh, and crunch. Remember crunch? Sometimes it’s a delicious candy bar, most of the time it’s a terrible business practice (one that actually harms more than it helps) where hardworking people are treated like disposable chattel and sometimes have their work tossed out without being informed until well after the fact. There’s one quote from a developer in Schreier’s report that has always stuck out to me:
“It’s what the studio looks for when hiring people. They are looking for people with that drive to actually put in those extra hours, for better or worse.”
There’s an acknowledgement there that some developers are willing to put in those crazy hours, to skip meals night after night toiling over getting the skin textures juuuuuuuuuust right, but it also points out how the studio heads go into every project knowing crunch will happen. That at this point there is no effort put into changing the studio’s development processes, that the workers will work, and break, and if they aren’t willing to put up with it? The door is in the same place as when they walked in.
Speaking of transphobia and crunch, let’s pivot to Cyberpunk 2077, shall we? One of the most highly-anticipated games of last generation, CD Projekt RED’s big follow-up to The Witcher 3, the newest in the Keanu Reeves Cinematic Universe. And also the game that put its employees through crunch, pandered to the worst sector of games fandom, and managed to get delisted from PSN before Life of Black Tiger. Most games can’t even manage ONE of those!
Starting with the crunch, for the chocolate bar is likely still on your screen. Remember when the CEO of CDPR, Marcin Iwiński told the press that the company would in no way put devs through crunch, just to score brownie points with the public? I remember. It turns out lying about this game is something the company would have a real fondness for. The game’s production went into crunch mode even after a delay nearly twice as long as that of the studio’s previous massive release (along with another one at the last possible moment but that delay was almost comical in its terrible timing, really).
I’ve always found something interesting in the responses to the crunch news for The Last of Us Part II and Cyberpunk 2077. Whereas the former seemed to rally people in their criticism of the game and of Naughty Dog, the report for CDPR received a far greater share of backlash. Push-back from the crowds who had already assured themselves that Cyberpunk was going to rock their worlds and set a new standard for game design, and so this rabble-rouser Jason Schreier must be off his rocker to dare criticize their beloved Witcher studio.
One voice in the dissenting crowd was Liana Ruppert, the same Game Informer employee who would go on to write a report about the game’s lack of epilepsy warning and be assaulted by CDPR fanatics for it. Back when Schreier’s report was released and he responded to the game’s director’s attempt to save face (by stating that the majority of developers suppourted the crunch period), she took to Twitter to refer to him as a “bully”, chastising him for seemingly no other reason than his refusal to tow the company line and act as an arm of its marketing campaign. The same publication this woman works for hosted Adam Badowski to give the aforementioned statement and would award the game which caused her seizure a 9 out of 10.
[Insert record-scratch noise and/or meta joke here]
Back up a moment, what was that about someone being assaulted over a video game? Right, after Ruppert published a PSA about the game including a visual sequence very similar to medical devices designed to induce seizures without appropriate warning, she was sent hundreds of videos meant to further trigger seizures which could have killed her. A woman was attacked because she published a piece about the possibility that others may be harmed playing a game, and the lack of warning by the game’s publisher. Some people just could not accept this mild criticism of a game they had already decided was perfect and beyond critique and responded with violence. If that sounds at all familiar, it should, because the games community is still dealing with the fallout from when similar things happened on a bigger scale in 2014. We wouldn’t necessarily need to refer to GamerGate, however, if CDPR hadn’t first. Their official social media account posted a joke about the “death of games journalism” on the anniversary of a harassment campaign that targeted female and queer voices in the games space, mocking the threats that drove people out of their homes and attempted to silence their perspectives on a medium of art. This isn’t a matter for debate, by the way, GamerGate was started by a guy who spread lies about reporters and developers which led to years of uncaring animosity towards non-male and non-white people who dared to opine on video-based-game-entertainement, and was never once about “ethics in games journalism”, and apparently CDPR decided the hateful aggressors in that situation were the kinds of people they needed to market to.
Polygon published a very good article by Stacey Henley detailing this, and the rest of the gross marketing by the company (specifically around Cyberpunk but also other instances), which makes mention of the transphobia displayed on the company’s social media accounts, joking of fake gender identities with the same sort of “triggered yet snowflake” rhetoric that has come to define the kinds of people least worth spending your time on. In a similar vein to The Last of Us Part II it exploits trans people, this time for sexual titillation (almost of an attempted “gross out” variety) rather than for their suffering. Most depressing, as is the point of the article, is that this approach to marketing has worked: the pre-orders alone recouped the development costs.
Now, am I going to shame every individual who bought the game, or bought The Last of Us Part II, or any number of games which were published by unscrupulous companies made by developers who were put through nightmarish productions? No. I would hope that as time goes on, people make the effort to be more well-informed about the purchases they make, even as much as it sucks to learn how the sausage is made. I would hope they stop buying into FOMO and needing to have that AAA game right on release. Wait for reviews, buy used, just pay attention to these sorts of things — but I’m not going to shun anyone for it (as long as you’re not being a jerk about it, loudly shouting “crunch rules, Supergiant drools”) because we live in a world with many bad things happening and keeping track of every bad thing we’re supposed to care about can be exhausting, and sometimes you just want to play a video game. All I ask is that people be aware.
Then there’s the matter of its actual release state, which, I must confess, I cannot muster the same degree of emotion over. Do I think it’s gross that CDPR so blatantly misled consumers? Absolutely. What I find hilarious, however, is that CDPR managed to anger Sony enough to get the game completely removed from their store and put them in a position where they more or less have to refund the game. Do you know how much Sony hates giving refunds? A LOT. And CDPR decided to go ahead and, seemingly without consulting their biggest publishing partner, guarantee refunds on platforms they don’t control. I would not be shocked to find future CDPR games barred from the PlayStation family (or at least facing a much steeper climb to get released there).
The CEO of CDPR issued a public statement trying once more for brownie points by calling for the criticism of the last-gen console launch state to be levied at him and the other heads of the studio, rather than developers. This started off well enough until he threw the QA team under the bus by stating that they had not encountered the bugs being showcased at launch and after.
Now, even if this were not a studio with over a thousand employees at time of writing, even if this were not a game that had been delayed multiple months, I would not believe this. They do not deserve the benefit of the doubt. There is no way these bugs were not reported, there is no way they weren’t brought to the attention of the higher-ups (potentially even Iwiński himself given the severity of some of them), but there is very much a way they were ignored in favour of rushing the game out. QA teams are on the lowest rung of the social ladder of the games industry and anything short of a bug which sets the console alight can be passed off as a “known shippable”. The statement also doesn’t acknowledge why the game wasn’t delayed again when they’d realized they’d taken on more than they could handle, nor why they thought it was a good idea to try to target the highest PC specs possible and then try to work backwards to reach a game that could work on last-generation consoles — consoles that, as you might remember, were the as-of-yet unannounced next-gen consoles when the game was first revealed to be on the horizon.
I don’t see long-term consequences in their future though. “Gamers” have short memories for such things and all CDPR needs to do is announce How Ciri Got Her Groove Back or a Geralt skin for Fortnite and all will be forgotten. And that’s probably what bothered me most about this past year in games. As the world grappled with a pandemic, incompetent leadership, the ongoing resurgence of right-wing extremism, economic hardship, and the announcement of the Snyder Cut, even games couldn’t provide an escape from the knowledge that bad people exist, bad things happen, and oftentimes we are powerless to stop them. Companies still treat people like dirt while making millions, and people will still be punished for the failings of management. And that really sucks.
I wish I had some more erudite manner to espouse my melancholy because Lord knows I am a fan of using big words to sound smart, but I don’t, because it really sucks. Did anything good happen to games in 2020? Well, we got a sequel to Deadly Premonition. And in some ways that’s pretty fitting for both the game and the year.
Bit funny, in a cosmic sort of way.
