The problem with video games is that they’re just not punk.
Intuitively, it feels like they should be. They’re a new media form that you can create from your bedroom. They are digitally native, offering unprecedented opportunities in terms of their networks of creation and distribution. They should be punk. Instead, they are increasingly a corporate phenomenon, closer in genetic makeup to Meta or Google than the Ramones.
Video games have comfortably settled into the current stage of capitalism. Genres like 4X strategy vocally and unreservedly embrace a rapacious imperial project — the four X’s standing for explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate. These are games where players compete to consume and possess, to control. They celebrate and re-enact the systems currently dragging our benighted planet into climate disaster. They are games of death.
I say all of this as someone who loves video games. I know that’s a hard pivot, but I do. At an education conference in 2019, I saw a presentation by the Cyber Safety Project. They opened by telling us that they liked the internet, and they thought it did good and important things, but they only had half an hour and they were going to spend it talking about the risks. That conversation needed to come first, as the starting point for any of the more nuanced or complex conversations that followed. I’ve been writing about video games as a narrative form for nearly ten years. There are, in my view, more complex, nuanced conversations to have, but they need to happen against a frank backdrop. Video games belong to a culture of death. Individual developers might subvert it or advocate alternate politics, but they still work within that broader cultural context. When Robert Yang made gay hookup game The Tearoom, about picking up men in public bathrooms, he avoided streaming bans by replacing genitals with guns. He picked something he knew the video game industry would never censor.
We should acknowledge as well that these issues are exacerbated by marketing. The games that embed themselves in our cultural backdrop often come with a staggering advertising budget. Zelda, Pokemon and God of War have all run ads in the Super Bowl. They are saturators, buying their way into our consciousness. You’re not likely to come across The Tearoom on the side of a bus. You’ll not see TV ads for Heather Flower’s Extreme Meatpunks Forever, “a serial visual novel/mech brawler about four gay disasters beating up neonazis in giant robots made of meat.” Games that challenge or critique the prevailing hegemony can be hard to find. They have important things to say, but these can often go unheard. In the name of re-punkifying video games, here are three titles that work to interrupt the circuits of capitalism and its culture of death: Stardew Valley, Valley (no relation), and Terra Nil.
Stardew Valley (2016), easily the most well-known of the three, is a casual farming simulator in the style of the legendary Harvest Moon. The young city slicker protagonist (either male or female, depending on player choice) inherits their grandfather’s farm and abandons their corporate cubicle to move to the countryside and work the land. Stardew Valley is a casual game, but also weirdly something of an anti-capitalist utopia. The player-character is not confronted with bills or taxes. They are not driven into commerce to fulfil their basic needs: their home is free and eating is optional. Money exists, but it is only really used to unlock aesthetic lifestyle opportunities. For example, if you want, you can bring gold and supplies to the local carpenter, Robin, and get her to build you a chicken coop. You can raise chickens and sell their eggs, or get an incubator and rear cute little baby chicks. Technically these decisions have a financial dimension, but there are no financial stakes. They can earn you revenue, but revenue doesn’t really do anything other than unlock other diversions later down the line. It’s fully automated luxury chicken-rearing.
Valley, also from 2016, borrows heavily from Indian religious and cultural ideas, putting a Buddhist spin on the first-person shooter. The game revolves around the balance between the giving and taking of life force, referred to as “amrita energy”, and uses this concept to modify the act of shooting an enemy: the player fires amrita energy instead of bullets, giving life instead of taking it. It is a bit of a childish concept, and I have some lingering questions about how this Canadian-made game adopts and reinterprets Indian culture (we also encounter the “Soma” and “Astra” facilities, and a “Brahmastra” bomb). Even so, there is value in how this game works through the implications of its own genre. It is, in its way, struggling to articulate a different way of being.
Valley’s conflict between giving and taking is actualised by the relationship between researchers and military figures. The player explores the valley in the modern day, picking over the ruins of facilities left in the wake of the Second World War. The valley, it transpires, was originally the site of weapons testing and development, set in parallel to Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. The military figures attached to the project are positioned as “takers” — they want to operationalise amrita energy, creating a weapon of mass destruction capable of sucking the life out of everything at once. They draw life out of the valley, killing trees and animals, and leaving bomb craters scattered around the landscape. They store energy in large batteries, drawing it down and trapping it, placing their potential future needs over the actual contemporary needs of the living world around them.
The game associates the military with the image of the wendigo, a creature linked with both greed and famine, where the former creates the conditions for the latter. Take without giving, and the well dries up.
In opposition to the military, Valley sets a small group of researchers. These are people aligned with the valley, who seek to give energy in a restorative, generative, cyclical process. They work to create an ecology: give to the valley, and the valley gives in return. The goal of the game is to complete the researchers’ mission. You must restore balance to the valley, calming creatures starved of life force by “shooting” them full of amrita energy. Your remaining energy at any time is a measure of both your health and your ammunition; in Valley, your ability to give is limited by what has been given to you. The valley gives to you as a player. If you fall into a ravine or drown in a river, the valley uses some of its energy to bring you back to life. It takes from nearby beings and gives to you according to your need. Your role is to give back to the environment, empowering it to continue its cycle of restoration. If you take too much — if you draw down too much energy from the environment or die too many times without giving back — the valley dies and the cycle is broken. It’s not bad to take, Valley says, but the world needs something in return.
The third game I want to talk about, Terra Nil, is a 2023 release from South African developers Free Lives. It’s something of an anomaly for the studio, who have historically focused on raucous party games such as Broforce (a pastiche shooter based around 80s action heroes) and Genital Jousting (WiiSports with detached cocks, originally not released in Australia).
There is something subversive about the Free Lives catalogue — they are silly, but often deftly satirical, interrogating concepts of masculinity and the male body. Probably the most surprising element of Terra Nil is its strait-laced approach. The game is a post-industrial city builder. It uses the language and mechanics of city-builders and resource management games to explore environmental consequences that those genres typically minimize or overlook. Most city sims, such as Cities: Skylines or Sim City, start with an empty grassy field. They depict nature made compliant, straitjacketed into conditions suitable for property development — or, if it is not compliant, it is a virginal site, a depopulated land budding with minerals and resources, ready to be exploited.
These games typically enact an idealised version of colonisation, scrubbed of indigeneity, where industrialists can take possession of a true terra nullius and shape it according to their will. Terra Nil enters into that genre from a different perspective, showing not the process of acquisition and exploitation but the ragged territory left in its wake. Rather than starting with a grassy field, it opens with a polluted post-industrial wasteland. Rather than asking you to build up towns and cities, it asks you to restore the ecosystems that have been disrupted and destroyed by the process of urbanisation. You fill streams instead of building streets; you build up and restore natural ecosystems that rival the complexity and interconnectedness of any simulated urban environment.
Terra Nil uses the mechanics and motifs of the city builder to restore life to sickly post-urban regions, both acknowledging the devastation that accompanies the city-building process and criticising how city sims obscure that reality in favour of a glossy gameplay experience. It is a game of intertextual restoration. It works within a genre to critique that genre and present its vision of an alternate way of being.
There’s a running joke that Stardew Valley is about getting out of your cubicle and moving to the countryside, but then it’s also a video game. It’s something you play from your boxy apartment on your scheduled non-work days. Each of these games reaches for a different way of being, tweaking and reshaping their genres and working against the grain of their cultural context. But they are still tethered to that context. Stardew Valley is a game about getting out of the house that you play from your computer chair. It’s a game about escaping capitalism that you play during your scheduled unwaged hours. Valley is an anti-war game that draws on the language and structures of the shooter, a genre dominated by military-industrial titles like Call of Duty and Battlefield. The concept of shooting life instead of death is intriguing, but it still exists as a shooter, contributing to America’s gun culture, which is circulated and reproduced globally through media products, especially video games. Terra Nil is a restorative game about ecology, but it rises out of mourning for a world that has already been lost.
All of these games are interventions situated inside cultures of death. They very much depend on the master’s tools. For some, that might not be radical enough. To me, it feels honest. These games take as their starting point the places where we find ourselves, both in terms of video game culture and our wider biopolitical environment, and they look for ways to challenge it, to develop or change. They believe in our capacity to grow and evolve. They recognise that there is no gap between today and tomorrow. We must build to where we want to be from where we are.
Image: Stardew Valley
