A little dramatic perhaps, but I felt a curious flash of revelation whilst playing Red Faction 2 a little while ago.
I'd played through a couple of hours worth of random missions - there was a sufficiently amusing selection thereof. Free-form demolish this building, rescue these people using whatever method it takes (even ramming a truck through their house) as well as some linear scripted ones... but there was something hollow about the experience. I was supposed to be a Martian revolutionary, a kind of bad-ass space faring George Washington or something and yet I didn't really feel it. There was a very tenuous sense of connection to the NPCs that milled about the rebel bases in that they dressed much the same as I did, and were correctly aligned faction-wise to the mission givers back at the base. I had trouble pinning it down until I realised that the audio cues are rather ham-fisted; it's hard to empathise with people who only yell slogans like "I almost feel proud to be a Martian today" or "The EDF killed my mother just like that!"
It was at this precise moment that my mum happened to wander past me and mutter in very disappointed Farsi "
Ugh, so you've joined the Taliban"
At first I thought this was a glib and stupid comparison. Sure, both Red Faction and the real life Taliban fight a guerrilla campaign against much larger, foreign forces for control of mostly arid desert like environments. Surely this was a silly comparison?
But I couldn't shake the thought that Mum had come across something actually rather clever.
I realised eventually that I'd been following a laundry list of revolutionary acts to do, no matter how apparently random them might seem. Demolishing artillery positions or watch towers made sense. But demolishing the Dust City town hall because the EDF had taken it over for use as a HQ? That seemed a little over the top; I gleefully did it by ramming multiple trucks through it and planting charges. Other priority targets were wind farms, mining machinery and even an apartment block.
Where was my faculty for critical thought? Why could I not determine which were and were not valuable targets?
In the end, I did it for the fun of working out how much damage and where to apply it on a given structure to make it topple over. I did it for the curiosity value - I wondered how they hell they could have made a level editor for the designers to use where the physics of the building was critical to being able to have dudes walking about inside and on top of it. Never once though, did I do it because of a diagetic need for me to rescue an oppressed people or because I sympathised with the Martian colonists' plight.
The Taliban comparison seemed apt therefore - extremists with a conviction about eradicating whole groups of people or structures from maps and history books; men who were inculcated in a warped version of Muslim doctrine. Extremists who thrive where there is no critical voice to counter their wild rhetoric, they are men who are disconnected from the flow of normal every day life - the quiet life of the family man, the businessman, the tradesman or the artisan were not for them. They sought to stand apart, to play a strange micro version of the grand Kissingerian game of geopolitical warfare. They may make the right noises about standing up for their oppressed Muslim brothers, but are they really? is it not the thinnest of veils, the faintest of pretexts?
Are they not, in a word, playing a game? Are they not then, the Red Faction?
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