Corporate criticism and satire is rife in games these days, but to what end?

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Does anyone like mega-corporations? Whether it’s their talent for avoiding taxes, exploiting employees, privatizing critical resources, polluting nature, corrupting democracies, manipulating us through marketing, or simply imploding the economy, there are plenty of reasons not to. do. As wealth grows steadily, leaving the rest of us more vulnerable and in debt, it’s hardly surprising that companies and the people who run them often become the baddies of popular culture.

There is nothing new about it either. Corporate greed and corruption have long been the target of satire and social criticism in novels, movies, TV shows, and games. So much so, in fact, that it’s hard to imagine it having more impact. Isn’t it too standardized, too obvious, too easy to ignore even something that corporate publishers themselves can include in their products to sound self-critical and relevant?

So we might well applaud the capitalist excess cuts in the scattered satire of Borderlands and Grand Theft Auto V, or the deeper social machinations of RPGs like The Outer Worlds and Cyberpunk 2077. But we might also find them more heartwarming than empowering. They take us to dystopian worlds, but where our power, wealth and influence grows as we play. Despite all the blows they deal with big tech, pharma, media, etc., they don’t cause anger that lasts after the escape is over, and often end up turning into playgrounds for fantasy. capitalist.

Borderlands 3. Credit: Gearbox Software

In the Borderlands series, for example, we play as lone mercenaries (or a small team) shooting at enemies to accumulate loot and weapons. The basic game is to watch the numbers increase on our damage and our bank accounts. We can take down business leaders like Handsome Jack, but only by playing his game and enjoying it. Meanwhile, the shots Borderlands takes at corporate social control are all part of the fun, an easy way to get us involved.

Something like The Outer Worlds is more nuanced, of course. His description of a privatized space colony includes some incredibly believable scenarios, especially when it comes to the exploitation of workers and the lack of investment in infrastructure. But here in the land of moral dilemma RPGs, the need to equivocate every choice you can make dilutes many of these issues into questions of competing interests and a quest to balance what appears to be a fundamentally unbalanced society. The different outcomes that we could trigger for each colony arrive as menu options from the mythical free market of ideas, and it’s the customer who decides the best argument.

One problem with games like these is that they stick to gender norms without thinking about how their mechanics might actually bolster business logic. In The Outer Worlds, the configuration of dialogue trees and quest-giver NPCs reduces human interaction to a series of cool business transactions and calculations. While it contains plenty of observations about capitalist pride and dehumanization, what is missing is something that shatters the comforts of the game loop itself. Without it, the satirical commentary looks like sheer catharsis, confirming what we already know.

The outer worlds. Credit: Obsidian Entertainment

So what is the alternative? How do games create a sense of discomfort or a sticky source of thought? Well, a recent example is Cruelty Squad, which contrasts the routine dystopian imagery of Cyberpunk 2077 by presenting us with a truly hideous cyberpunk reality. Nothing in 2077 captures the mundane horror of consumer waste like the walls of Cruelty Squads textured in images of Funkopop boxes. But more than that, the gaming world as a whole is ugly, incomprehensible, and unfair, and succeeding in it seems less rewarding than degrading.

The satire in Cruelty Squad is therefore less part of the narrative framing than a friction in the experience itself. For example, this makes change scarce from the start and deducts a significant portion of it every time you die, which can happen all too easily. Moving forward you must harvest organs from dead guards, then purchase a range of disgusting and disfiguring cybernetic implants and upgrades like gunkboosters that give you an extra leap by spraying bodily waste from your heels to one. mile of cool chrome modifications from Deus Ex or Cyberpunk 2077. Ultimately you have heaps of money and nothing to spend it on, underscoring the dehumanizing obscenity of the whole business.

Likewise, we can look to last year’s Paradise Killer, which also uses sickly and garish visuals to make a point. Its Vaporwave aesthetic of bright but washed-out blues and pinks, combined with a bland and catchy synth soundtrack, opposes the island regime of mass slavery and ritual sacrifice. It’s absurd and extreme, but that’s what makes it work. It is only in games like Cruelty Squad and Paradise Killer that the dark sides of consumer capitalism are shown not only as morally bad things to be frowned upon or mocked at, but as truly insane and intolerable aspects of systems.

Cyberpunk 2077. Credit: CD Projekt RED

Paradise Killer also asks us how we respond to systemic injustices and whether we can do something about them. Your role in the game is to investigate the brutal murder of the ruling council, and you gather evidence, decide who is responsible, and carefully present your case at trial to convict the culprits. But along the way, you’ll also learn about the deranged fanaticism of the Ruling Class Union, so you might decide to use your legal power to have as many executed as possible. The dilemma here isn’t which side is right, just whether you’ll kill old friends who help oversee a genocidal economy.

However, corporate power isn’t limited to deadly excesses, and games are just as well suited for exploring how it affects us on a regular basis, in ways we might not even be aware of. The Return of the Obra Dinn, for example, is a nice study of the capitalist bureaucracy, without announcing anything of the sort. Here you play as an early 19th-century insurance investigator working for the Imperialist East India Company, tasked with determining the fate of the crew of a long-lost merchant ship that mysteriously reappeared unmanned in the Falmouth harbor.

Using a magic stopwatch, you trigger freeze frame dioramas revealing the scene at the exact moment each crew member dies. And what you find out is horrible. Yet because the events are shown in monochrome stills and because you focus on who and how they died, the terror barely registers. So Obra Dinn is making you play the kind of low-level bond by just doing our job that helps businesses thrive. The cause of death records you create reduce the massacre scenes to simple facts devoid of context or emotion and can lead to difficult results. You may correctly note that a crew member was killed by a cannon lit by his mate, although there is no intention that the cannon was knocked down from his chariot by a giant tentacle just before shoot. Yet, according to your documents, the company will consider the death murder and refuse to compensate the guilty family of the crew members.

GTA V. Credit: Rockstar Games

Finally, when it comes to potentially imagining how to fight social inequalities, too often games simply turn us into overpowered characters who reorganize society through our individual power. An easy fantasy that moves away from the difficulties of real change. In that sense, while it’s not specifically about fighting corporate power, we could find more inspiration in something like Death Stranding. Fixing your world is a long, slow march of connecting isolated people, one step at a time, with many potholes and pitfalls. It’s also a game where success comes more easily by collaborating with other anonymous players, building an infrastructure of ladders, shelters, roads and ziplines to gradually gain momentum. Rather than simply describing a cooperative mass effort to overcome isolation, this is part of one.

Of course, these games haven’t suddenly changed our lives, but they’re tough in a way that average corporate satire isn’t. Criticism is more fundamental to them as a game and doesn’t just dissolve into the background noise once the game starts. And whatever it is, pushing the boundaries to help us subvert or challenge familiar thought patterns and gender routines can only be a good thing. The problem, then, is that as the development of the game itself becomes more corporate, the less likely it is to leave the safety of routines and plot points tested. That games contain effective critiques of business and modern capitalism therefore begins with how they are made and by who makes them, and with questioning the worst corporate excesses within the industry itself.

Jon Bailes is a frequent contributor to NME.

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