Dear Player: Far Cry 5 and the American West
Me in Far Cry
Far Cry 5 and Westworld illustrate how historical representations of lawless frontiers influence player behaviour in open world game environments. Moreover, I argue that sandboxes tell us as much about our relationship to our colonial past and the neocolonial present as they do about our psychology. The roles we learn are the roles we play. And with the spread of virtual worlds, the space of the lawless carnivalesque comes home to haunt us. Far Cry 5 and Westworld both wrestle with themes of privilege and the carnivalesque with similar materials but differing conclusions. Both offer us the opportunity to analyse contemporary 'postcolonial playgrounds' in Sybille Lammes (2010) sense, borrowed from Nash's Cultural Geography:
“Yet other work suggests that the ‘post’ in postcolonial registers neither a celebration of the end of colonialism nor the simple reproduction of the colonial in the present, but the mutated, impure and unsettling legacies of colonialism. ”
In March 2018, a live interactive theatre performance, the Westworld Experience, brought together the rich and the famous and the ticket-fee paying public with live actors. They performed as guests and hosts respectively, promoting the hit TV drama's second season. Steven Spielberg and Ellija Wood and many others hopped off the actual train from the actual show into the actual town of Sweetwater: all set-pieces crafted in Texas. As I'm sure Spielberg could tell you, 'no expense was spared', from props to costumes to faux android technicians. And just like the show, the guests expressed the full gamut of uninhibited behaviour short of murder - from debauchery, verbal abuse and inappropriate contact with the hosts, all the way to dramatic feats of empathy.
The Westworld Experience's guests were quick to forget that real actors played the part of hosts, and dived headlong into pushing the limits of the magic circle. People (rich ones, no less...) destroyed props and yelled at hosts for no other reason than the perceived artificiality of their environment excused their unruliness. A steam engine had whisked them away to the West, and the West, as we all know, was 'Wild'. Life, it seems, imitates art, and much like the show the guests found it easy to play the part of bandits and cowboys. Where the show may be an existential reflection on American Imperialism, and the cultural and psychological 'cornerstones' which drive us, the 'Experience' showed us just how easy it is to fall into stereotypical behaviours.
That same month, an open world game was released, set in the lawless reaches of the American West - this time a religious cult's territories in a near-future Montana. After a year of promotional material which situated Far Cry 5 as a timely reflection on US crises of violence and hate, what emerged was an ambivalent neo-liberal playground which pretended to be no more than apolitical fun - here the player could recover Trump's piss tape and blow up a bear or two in a single session. As a series previously focused on intervening in exotic foreign locales, Far Cry 5 was oddly anti-interventionist in its American outing. It argued in the rhetoric of its final scenes that both sides were 'wrong', and the best course of action was to just leave the sadistic cult alone (itself an alternate ending). At its most affirmative, it praised generic (and supposedly uncontroversial) American virtues (self-sufficiency, self-improvement, the right to bare arms (and arm bears)), and encouraged spectacular play with its systemic interactions (see a cultist randomly fighting a skunk? why not explode them with a rocket launcher while you sky-dive onto a boat? etc.). Fun stuff, there's no denying it.
The 'West' here, in both Far Cry 5 and Westworld, is a playground - the West of gold-panning and buffalo butchery where the land is free and the sights spectacular. While both examples ask different questions in different tones, what they both assume is that the West is a blank canvas for us to play with conceptually and materially, and what they both might suggest is that in the act of play we reveal the dark truth about ourselves. Like the 1971 Stanford Prison 'Experiment', they imply that - given the opportunity - we are all barbarians. Unfortunately for this line of argument however, the Stanford Prison experiment was not a rigorous experiment by any decent measure, and neither are these works of fiction. In 1971, in a culture on fire with televised police abuses of power, some young men were asked to play cops and prisoners, and those are the roles they played. In modern playgrounds we are primed by range of factors: an awareness of Far Cry's tradition of virtual tourism, a lusory attitude, and a history of treating the West as a lawless world in which we might explore our limits. Whether it's an RPG or not, all games have us playing roles, and sometimes all it takes to remove our inhibitions is the colour of our hat.
One might argue that the location of our sandboxes is (slowly) changing. Our colonial fantasies are migrating from the periphery to the centre, from the global south to the global north - from deserts and jungles to Western Metropoles. The CoD's and Battlefields have returned from space and the Middle East to revisit the European Theatres of WWI and WWII, while Homefront and The Division brought open world war to a United States context. Just as Just Cause 3 jumped the franchise from a South American archipelago to a Mediterranean one, Far Cry 5 has leapt from Nepal to Montana, but what can we say about the homecoming of chaotic conflict? Trend or not, as we see in the anticipation of the new Metro and Red Dead, there is certainly a current of interest in seeing the carnivalesque in western contexts as much as distant exotic lands, but why?
Well, nothing controversial about THIS picture
Games writers and critics from Austin Walker to Errant Signal have made good use of the following scene from Far Cry 5 as a metonym for, or critique of, the game as whole: off the beaten track the player encounters an unusual moment of calm reverie - a couple dancing around a campfire, beside a man gently playing a guitar. Perfect pastoral idyll, except for the fact that blood and dead bodies lie at their feet. This has been read as a point of dissonance, emblematic of game's mixed messaging and a missed opportunity to show emotional breadth. However, this bloodstained moment of joy can also be read as a perfect microcosm of the American West.
Montana was where the Indian Wars came to a climax, and where Sitting Bull attempted an exodus to Canada. In Far Cry there is none of this colonial history, no reference to the Lakota or any First Nation people, but the game finds its perfect reflection in the later career of Sitting Bull. Towards the end of his life, Sitting Bull found himself in the position of actor and re-enactor in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show - rehearsing all the condensed mythos of the Wild West in a travelling carnival, which staged hunts, battles and replica villages in what was billed "The Greatest Show on Earth". Real, Surreal, Hyperreal, this uncanny spectacle shaped the popular imagination of the lawless frontier as a space of indulgence and over-wrought entertainment. This is a tradition Far Cry epitomises in its singular series of historical side-quests, where the player must re-enact 'Clutch Nixon's' famous vehicular stunts - history here being the history of a simulacrum.
Rumour has it Far Cry 5 was built on an ancient stuntmans' graveyard.
I argue that the representational shift of spectacular chaos (with all its entertaining risks and rewards), from the margins to the the core geography of Western culture, is a symptom of both Western imperial power and its insecurity. The fear of what lies within, and the fear of what the military industrial complex might do if it were incapacitated, if America's dominance were checked and its dream collapsed. There is a melancholy in 'Detroit: Becoming Human's' return of industry to the post-industrial landscape and its corresponding oppression of a home-manufactured class of android workers, and even a post-apocalyptic nostalgia in DOOM Eternal bringing hell to Earth. In The Last of Us 2 and Red Dead 2, we will no doubt see the next steps in reckoning with (or pointedly side-stepping) the legacies of Western Barbarism. When the centre becomes the periphery, when America no longer appears 'Great', our fantasies cast us as cowboys in our own homes. Imperial melancholy invites us to dive deep into power fantasies.
Being jerks in our fantasies is not some necessary outcome of human nature or even scripted design, but it is evidence of the roles we've been taught to play. Open-world games are not narrative-less sandboxes or objective petri-dishes for testing the human psyche, but rather slices of the meta-narratives that underpin our lives. Like the colonial frontier, they are places of exposure, but since we've run out of Wild West and all its certainties the new frontier is the 'West' proper, the metropole as postcolonial playground. If our new lawless frontiers are virtual realities rather than new continents, it makes sense that we see similar behaviours in the Westworld LARP as in the Westworld show as in the Wild West itself.
Merlin Seller