Dear Player: We Happy Few, Depression and Brexit
My horoscope told me to avoid polka dots
"The past is a foreign country," in the famous words of British novelist Leslie Poles Hartley, and in We' Happy Few, British society is an island that hates everything 'foreign'. "Happy is the country with no past," reads the main slogan of this fictional world, but the problem is that both fictional Wellington Wells and real world Britain have monstrous 'tracts' of past which vested interests wish we would forget. The past is a huge and highly contested territory, and this is an acute age of post-Brexit imperial nostalgia, WWI centenaries, and unending pre-war-era austerity policies. What follows is a depressed British reading of a immersive sim set in an alternate 1964 where a rigid class-segregated society uses drugs (Joy) and propaganda to forget its traumatic past and distract from its present economic problems.
“At it’s core Wellington Wells is a monstrous, bald pantomime that implores us to be sceptical of invocations to happiness and pushes us to scrutinise our world with all the depressive paranoia of the historical gaze.”
When a loading screen reminds us that the menacing smiles and violent cops all around us were 'once our former neighbours,' it is impossible not to remember 24th June 2016, the morning after the UK voted to leave the EU, when overnight half the population changed from being neighbours to... well, there are many things I would like to 'pop a joy' for. No longer feeling at home in a country seized by racist rhetoric is one of them, but over the past decade politicians have tried to make us forget many many things - from the essential importance of increased government spending in overcoming the Great Depression to British Imperial agendas in both World Wars to the twinning of remembrance practices to the endorsement of the War on Terror; from the significance of the Windrush generation to the importance of the welfare state and the social causes behind recent spikes in mental health issues. The past is foreign, and many would like to see it deported.
The list is long, and its bloated dimensions are palpable for the player of We Happy Few - we are sickened by a rotten stew of historical artefacts and broken signifiers bleeding out of everything from prop design to posters, letters, conversations and the omnipresent voice of the sociopathic Uncle Jack.
We happy Few (WHF) has been critically gutted on the grounds of systems and mechanics design, and if taken at face value its attitude to pharmaceuticals courts problematic territory, but there has been a lack of critical engagement with its narratives, aesthetics and politics. The lead developer has made very glib and short sighted comments on his intent to critique a culture which 'doesn't value sadness' (ignoring the lived reality of many like me who need anti-depressants to live), and Polygon has indeed compared the gameworld to Trump's America, but most commentators seem to have ignored the most explicit text of this game - its environmental story-telling as it stands in relation to the British context of right wing austerity policies and the Brexit debacle. This piece aims to fill this gap, and offer my personal reading of the game from my perspective as a very depressed Scottish person who has lived in England for the past seven years, and spent many of those years on high levels of anti-depressants.
I suffer from chronic major depression, and a daily 40mg of fluoxetine has definitely been instrumental in keeping me functional, keeping me alive, but I'm no friend of big pharma. My reading of WHF (perhaps not the auteur's intended one) is that the game condemns an administration that uses superstructural solutions like drugs and propaganda to fix a broken society that actually needs physical reconstruction, a welfare state and a proper reconciliation with Imperial guilt. Insofar as it clearly critiques the apparatus of Joy (its demonic Doctors) and not primarily the users (who are often given rich backstories for the player to uncover), the game is a Foucaultian criticism of medical and state Power as outlined in Madness and Civilisation (1964), coincidentally completed in the same year that the game is set.
I find it hard to read the game on its own terms as an ableist diatribe directed at anxious depressives like me - and even if its depiction of Joy's high's are a laughable exaggeration of drugs which in reality nuance our emotional horizons it remains tonally consistent with its absorbing world. We as players must make tactical use of the drug Joy throughout the experience to progress, much like I and many others use anti-depressants to function at work and pass as neurotypical in everyday life. While the cost of Joy is abstracted as stat debuffs and visibility when we run out of it, I don't feel like complaining that the game doesn't realistically represent SSRI side-effects as drowsiness and decreased libido... Whether or not We Happy Few handles drug use with grace though, it does raise the valid question (central to Adam Curtis's Century of the Self documentary (2002)) of why society encourages treatments which focus on the altering the self (SSRIs, CBT) rather than our environment (political activism).
What We Happy Few does nail, fundamentally, is an atmosphere. It's an experience common to many of us - strangers telling us to 'cheer up', well-meaning friends telling us to simply 'be happy', and bosses telling us to give service with a smile whether we feel like it or not. "Smiling takes less muscles than frowning!"; "It could be worse, you could be living in a former colony"; "Capitalism's not that bad, rampant greed and vicious competition have a silver lining" - I paraphrase, yes, but these are all things people say to me and they sound like a foreign language. Just last week I was given a 'Pay Award' which (accounting for inflation) was actually a pay cut - we live in a world whose nauseating rhetoric mirrors that of WHF. I'm no longer sure if the Prime Minister's famous tautology even holds anymore: does Brexit even mean Brexit? After all, Rudy Giuliani has recently told us "Truth isn't truth."
Those who profit from the current state of society have a vested interest in framing depression as an individual problem, one of rectifying one's own attitude rather than altering the conditions we live in. Post-recession Britain is a delusional state where our premiere's have sex with dead pigs, where 'we're all in it together' except for those with the most to give and even the buses lie to us - where the government tells us everything's fine while London stockpiles food.
In We Happy Few, WWII went badly, and our characters live life in a very British dystopia, run on cardboard and shoe-string and daydreams of past glory. This is a society which spatialises and restricts the past: gated bridges divide the blitz-bombed 1940s towns from the modernist 1960s suburbs, and there are no museums, only 'The House of Tomorrow'. This isn't a 'what if' Hitler won - Hitler lost to the USSR in this timeline, but not before occupying Britain and leaving it in ruins. And so the Little England of Wellington Wells must live with the trauma of collaboration, and instead of reconstruction and the emergence of the 1950s welfare state, society opts for mass delusion - a very British police state done on the cheap. What if we just pretended the War went great, that 'Great Britain' was and always will be great? That is the central 'what if' in We Happy Few, but in many ways it isn't counter-historical at all, and it's the question that motivates the political problems the UK finds itself in right now.
Growing up with Grandparents who fought in the war and spoke of it rarely and fondly (like a repressed Enid Blyton camping trip), and history teachers who valorised imperial war criminals (from Field Marshal Haig's mass slaughter to Churchill's starvation of a subcontinent), 'coloured' my childhood. The 'Keep Calm and Carry On' slogan that covers all the souvenir junk we sell to tourists (and sell to ourselves) is a kind of horrifying understatement unique to the British context which I've felt for as long as I can remember and one which We Happy Few violently brings from subtext into text.
This is a game which both understates and exaggerates, almost in the same breath, building on the tradition of subversive British comedy from Terry Gilliam to Armando Ianucci. The grotesquery of We Happy Few borrows from the Surrealism of Monty Python and the prognosticatory absurdism of Charlie Brooker (whose Black Mirror uncannily foreshadowed the revelation that our prime minister really did violated a pig with his genitalia). Mechanised games of 'Simon Says' wean out deviants in Wellington Wells in a mockery of social performativity, while an arch BBC presenter tells us how to make ersatz food stuffs in a manner reminiscent both of 'Make do and mend', and Sadiq Khan's recent think tanks considering rationing in the event of a hard Brexit. And god forbid you fail to say 'what a lovely day' to everyone you meet (a greeting that transforms into 'at least we're not dead yet' once you're around fellow downers).
The grinning white masks of all those around you echo the uncanny affect of Greek theatre and Commedia Dell'Arte as well as the timeless arrogance of medieval gargoyles - 'A Happy Face means a Happy Place', say the posters, and each smile is a lie. The exaggerated struts of those on Joy bring John Cleese to mind as much as my own childhood of teachers telling me to smile. This is a game in which I was tasked with posting leftist flyers which called for the redistribution of wealth while middle-aged NPCs shouted at me to 'be happy.' I'm pretty sure that was just an average Monday for me in my early twenties, but then again, memory is fungible.
To say the Brexit debate and Tory austerity policies have been as farcical as they are tragic, ableist and racist is... an understatement (after all, Boris Johnson is a person who exists). It's a farce which WHF captures brilliantly. In an age where our government deports second generation legal immigrants, threatens to build a figurative wall across Ireland and exacerbates the housing crisis, WHF gives us the Garden District where the poor are forced to starve in the bombed out remains of housing Wellington Wells never bothered to rebuild. Where the euphemistically labelled 'universal credit' cuts support for tens of thousands of disabled people in the UK, dooming thousands to death, WHF has the downers who can physically no longer stomach joy and are doomed to slow death on the fringes of society.
The old home-guardsmen which parade around papier mache tanks in We Happy Few are a scathing critique of Remembrance Day memorials which ask us to 'Help our Heroes' kill yet more innocents in the modern-day middle-east, and which offer us a minute's silence rather than ten seconds of discussion of Churchill's meat-grinder at Galipoli or the fire-bombing of civilian Dresden. Over the past decade imperial apologists such as Niall Ferguson and Boris Johnson; Victorian Laissez-faire policy makers such as Theresa May and David Cameron; and Racist patriots such as Nigel Farrage and Nick Griffith have all appealed to a Great British glory which never existed. Every empire is a gross tragedy, and no-one 'wins' in war.
“The past is a foreign country, and we need to make it feel at home.”
However, in a world where right wing figureheads happily play into darkly comic exaggerations of themselves, how effective can We Happy Few's satire be? When reality appears to be a grotesque political charade in the form of Jacob Rees-Mogg or Jeremy Clarkson, how scathing can a caricature be, how can it stand out from this confusion? Mogg might as well have been stepping out of Wellington Wells when he said that the increased number of people having to resort to foodbanks to survive is "rather uplifting" news. What We Happy Few shows us, however, is that the post-truth world is nothing new. It entreats us to view positive framings of reality with scepticism in the light of history.
We've been living in a house of mirrors for generations. Every play through of this game is a procedurally generated, a confusion of sequence where all the ingredients remain the same, there for the player to piece together. Here a house, once a tree, but always the same regime. The procedural generation and distribution of game elements stretches the player's critical engagement with narrative space and narrative time, and quickly the connections come. while the world's randomised confusion mirrors the drug-addled minds of its inhabitants, it also encourages us to deploy what Dali would call a paranoiac critical method - learning to draw new connections, to suddenly see the same world with different eyes and regard the ugliness in it's saturated light-bloom beauty. The gameworld is the same, on and off Joy, minus a shader or two, all that matters is how we see it and how we are seen.
“It is not a lovely day”
WHF constructs a carnival for us to explore, one filled with the gross iniquity and paralysing horror of 'Keep Calm and Carry On', our society's perennial refrain. The phrase itself comes from an emergency poster design intended to be deployed in the event of foreign occupation, and now it's our horrifying mantra as the human rights at gets abolished, our friends deported and our health service is undermined. Thousands are refused asylum owing to racist legislation, and thousands die because of ableist policies, yet people with the temerity to say the Prime-minister has blood on their hands are thrown in jail. WHF articulates the terror induced by the impossibility of being able to call a spade a spade and also a murder weapon, of being a stranger in your own body and lost behind so many masks. As graffiti in the Garden District reads: "It is NOT a lovely day."
With the current historical amnesia that the UK government perpetuates regarding the horrific past of the British Empire (and its continued neo-colonial aspirations), telling bare-faced lies about the economy and the possibility of post-Brexit autarky, playing WHF has been supremely cathartic to me. There are a myriad of interesting ways it plays with historical materials: the fabrication of fake cities in the countryside during WWII as an analogy for fake news and infamously the central inversion of the Evacuation into the betrayal of a generation. For me its world deeply resonates with Sebald's Rings of Saturn which meditates on repressed historical violence and the way our memory blends fact and fiction. In a memorable passage, the Sebald finds a map used by bombers to destroy German cities in WWII, and finds each foreign town marked with the symbol of a fantasy castle, as if Germany were a far-away fairy-tale land from deep in the past:
“Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life. How often this has caused me to feel that my memories, and the labours expended in writing them down are all part of the same humiliating and, at bottom, contemptible business! And yet, what would we be without memory?”
We've all seen 'guilt' represented in games before, but to me WHF articulates national humiliation and shame in myriad interesting ways both narratively and aesthetically. At it's core Wellington Wells is a monstrous, bald pantomime that implores us to be sceptical of invocations to happiness and pushes us to scrutinise our world with all the depressive paranoia of the historical gaze. The past is a foreign country, and we need to welcome it.
Dr Merlin Seller