Dear Player: Far Cry Primal and Digital Archaeology
I want to talk about how we might 'excavate' games, explore their ruins and their leftovers, and by doing so I want us to reflect on the paranoid way in which we’re learning to play. I’ve recently encountered a new term in game studies, ‘Archaeogaming’, being pioneered by the researcher Andrew Reinhard. Archaeology is the study of leftovers and recycling, forgotten foundations and the bodies beneath our feet – it harvest everything as data, nothing is too old or too insignificant. What 'archaeogaming' involves is playing games and analysing code with a view to tracing the history of development and any hidden secrets there might be for the finding. It’s inclusive of a range of methods being promoted by ludologists such as Ian Bogost who are keen on finding methodologies that can engage with the unique qualities of games as a medium: from the archival work that goes into remastering, to forms of critical play such as mapping hidden assets and encountering glitches (artefacts/gamifacts).
[Image: http://archaeogaming.com/]
Here as my example I want to take the controversy around Far Cry Primal and how we treat the genealogy of games. This game, I argue, is definitely a fossil – but in a good way. The game interests me for two reasons: firstly, it represents an intriguing example of ludo-narrative convergence, and secondly because for many of its critics it feels oddly out of date. Why is consonance creating dissonance?
It’s read as incoherent and incomplete even though I will argue the series has never been more internally consistent, and its read as too similar to Far Cry 4 even though one could argue it’s never been more different.
In terms of marketing and development the games pretensions and recycling of mater have a basic explanation - money, but why does this lead to controversy and contradiction? There’s something interesting about the way the franchise’s latest rehashing of assets and mechanics has been taken by some as an affront. That the game has left people questioning its price-point and reading it as a step backwards in the series brings into question the relationship of ‘value’ and ‘significance’ to ‘innovation’ and ‘coherence’. While the game is more ludo-narratively consonant than any other in the series, and boasts some of the largest changes in the franchise to date, it’s been received as perhaps the worst Far Cry ever. For many it’s nothing more than inflated DLC, or a re-skin of its predecessor.
The obsession with quantity and novelty that dogs the reception of games and breeds interesting expectations – games must give us more hours of play than we have to play them, and every one must be new but regular and conventional. Ubisoft went to the extent of reconstructing a proto-indo-european language for this game, but yet it’s perceived to have lacked time and investment. There’s a completely new combat system, a redefined crafting system, an enriched relationship with animals, twice the number of enemy factions (both of which have complex and interrelated fears and desires unlike the paper thin dictatorships of previous games) and there’s twice the number of skills, a meaningful day/night cycle, a whole new base-building mode, completely new environmental assets and textures and a leap in the quality of lighting. And let’s not forget the owl – there are no cars, but you do have a drone… Yet despite there being a bigger jump thematically and mechanically between Far Cry 4 and Primal than between Far Cry 3 and 4, the game is considered ‘uncanny’, too similar but also not quite similar enough.
Despite the franchise finally achieving ludo-narrative consonance, it’s read as oddly dissonant in spatial and graphical terms. Finally, as a caveman, we have an internal logic to justify the use of bows and the necessity of skinning animals and attacking small-scale camps. Finally there are no more bullet-resistant bears or rocket-resistant elephants. Finally we’ve dispensed with paper-thin characters and the most gross and obvious transgressions in terms of racism and sexism. Finally we have a Far Cry that’s more Far Cry than any previous Far Cry and yet we find players alienated, disturbed and underwhelmed. If Primal had come out first, the other games might have looked like botched attempts to extend the mechanics into the present day.
The game is read as too similar in ways which render it uncanny, whereas a close-reading suggests it’s innovative in ways which actually exemplify the series. Why do these elements fail to align? Why is the game read as limited rather than expanded and monotonous rather than refined?
I think the answer lies in the online culture of visual comparison – and what I loosely refer to as digital archaeology - in the gaming community. From the Calico Chamaeleon to mock-ups of NX controllers, players in recent years have begun mining images in depth, mapping them with near-obsession for hidden detail and contextual cues. A tree reflected in a screen becomes an indicator of the studio the technology is being developed in, a transparent case exposes hardware to copyright challenges and a team of ‘independent investigators’ as if arms were being hidden inside a retro console. I don’t want to suggest that both analyses are equally delusional, but I would suggest they exhibit the form or shape of a new scopic paranoia. There is increasingly a pressure to analyse and probe and search for similarities and correspondences nearly invisible to the naked eye. This isn’t negative, it’s fascinating. Some of these endeavours are deeply creative too – from the mapping of Bloodborne and its infernal logics to the surveying of Fallout 4’s seabed, players love to uncover patterns, to map the uncharted and to revel in discovering something unique. Without this, games can become monstrously opaque or painfully transparent. When we dig, we often find traces of the making of the game, strange artefacts of production that either beg explanation, or else disappointingly spoil immersion. Sometimes conspiracy is needed to supplement an open world that seems too banal.
People like to find patterns, but like the paranoiac delusion, these patterns can be misleading or disturbing and often result in the uncanny. The banal can seem mysterious, or vice versa. Moreover this can be a coping mechanism for the player – we want to dominate the game, expose its secrets. But Illusions and artificial worlds unravel when we dig too deep. In-game archaeology can often face us with the harsh banality and pragmatism of design. We want to map these virtual worlds, but in doing so we erase the unknowns that kept us playing in the first place. We want to master games, but secretly we almost want to fail, to keep it going. We want to be proved right and wrong at the same time. Even before its commercial release, the speed-run time for Dark Souls III – an exemplar of difficulty and gruelling opacity – was reduced to under two hours. When the use of no-clip in Skyrim revealed whole new empires we found them to be disappointingly empty – adjacent kingdoms were in fact deserts, mirages never meant to be reached. It is perhaps no coincidence that Primal’s problems stem from its map. For a Neolithic game, the trouble starts when we go digging in the digital archaeology.
Criticism has focused on similarities between the topography of Far Cry 4 and Primal. Their maps, it’s argued, are disappointingly similar, sharing, as Eurogamer points out “the same road and river layouts”. This is despite the fact that the roads in Primal’s map refer to nothing in this Neolithic environment, and the lay of the land at no point reads the same as the previous title – masked by altered hills and foliage and dominated by glacial sky-lines. In fact the similarities are only obvious after a lot of hard work mapping. It might be easy to dismiss player complaints as an exaggerated sense of entitlement were it not for the vast, questionable, profits generated by Ubisoft, and it might be easy to chastise the developer for the taking shortcuts were these cut-corners more obvious or underhanded, but these anxieties indicate something deeper. There is something peculiar at work when the most coherent and innovative in the series sparks such dissatisfaction.
Simply put, this Far Cry is yet more Far Cry, a sprawl of Ubisoft task-lists – but perhaps this is a step too far for a AAA standard-bearer of open-world gaming. Character has been stripped down to systems and caricature, crafting has become ubiquitous, and even the map itself declares the priority of interchangeability and modularity – a world borrowed from Far Cry 4. It’s claimed that Primal cheats us, but perhaps the problem is that it’s too honest – it’s a to-do list without disguise, it’s a hunting sim without pretensions. In digging, players want to find something magical, but end up dispelling the magic, and Primal wears its prehistory on its sleeve. Critics’ problems with Primal are perhaps the realisation of problems they’ve always had with Ubisoft, and the ‘Far Creed’ games. Outrage at the similarity of Far Cry 4 and Primal belies wider anxieties about being sold the same AAA games every year.
Moreover, Primal does something with this. It’s the newest Far Cry, but it gleefully predates all the others. In the game’s opening we see a calendar running backwards, and yet the game surprises us by revealing its foundations are older than we thought. It subverts expectations to the point of self-awareness. If Far Cry 3 had its player turn from tourist to assassin in the blink of an eye, in Primal we’re at the bottom of the food chain. We’re not a super-powered gunslinger, we’re afraid of the dark and our weapons break. When we craft something from a rock and a stick, it looks like a rock on a stick. As a chaos engine to play in, it makes us its play thing as we survive a bear and jaguar only to be killed by a mean elk. If we turn off the subtitles we can’t understand a word of anything in the game, but funnily enough we’ve heard this prehistoric story before. Like a satire of the monomyth, we climb up further into the cold, picking up ever bigger rocks, in order to kill a chieftain who’s already dying. This world, like its siblings, is a task master, the same but different.
Primal makes the familiar strange, and the strange familiar. Like an existentialist novel, the player finds that everything is just a ‘thing’ – blank, ineffable, monstrous and mute. Assets are just pixels, honey badgers are prehistoric ad fire burns without discrimination. If this were Sartre’s book La Nausea, we might see a jungle gym running at us through the woods before realising it was just a mammoth – or perhaps more tellingly a jeep driving us down which turns out, in fact, to be a woolly rhino doing the same. In an absurd world, significance is what we make it.
This is a game, like its many peers, about nauseous repetition, but it retains enough honest indifference to create a world that’s coherent. Both new and old, perhaps conceptually the first and last open-world, this is a self-aware space that’s oddly fulfilling to inhabit.
Merlin Seller