In the beginning, video game settings were predominantly fantastical, usually galactic: the technical and financial cost of rendering a scene on a computer screen made space, with that affordable blackness, the ideal locale. Thus 1962’s Spacewar!, 1979’s Galaxian and 1984’s Elite were all games whose settings were defined as much by those boundaries as authorial intent. Those limitations are now gone, freeing game-makers to set their sights on closer, more detailed locales: Los Santos, Grand Theft Auto V’s gently fictionalised Los Angeles, Watch Dogs 2’s Silicon Valley-skewering version of San Francisco and, in the forthcoming Far Cry 5, a dramatised version of rural Montana.
Shifting the shoot-them-before-they-shoot-you-first principle established by Space Invaders et al to contemporary settings represents more than an aesthetic manoeuvre: it inevitably adds a political dimension to what was, once, a mere test of reactions, the sort you might find at a funfair. Mostly, game-makers don’t take overt political sides in their games, which, so the wisdom goes, must appeal to players of all political alignments and degrees of engagement. Many people use entertainment as escapism; they want to focus solely on the thrill and challenge of firing a digital weapon, not ponder the implications of who is aiming it at whom.
Far Cry 5, by contrast, promises to push into the sociopolitical elements of its contemporary theme. The setting was conceived in the grim aftermath of the 2008 recession, and focuses explicitly on the rise of rural American militias during Obama’s presidency, such as the “sovereign citizen” paramilitary group that took over Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016. You play as a junior deputy, who arrives at the job just as one of these cultish groups, the Project at Eden’s Gate, becomes more aggressive toward those who do not share its agenda. “Freedom, Faith, Firearms” is the militia’s rallying cry, the kind of slogan that would surely do for bumper stickers what “Make America Great Again” did for baseball caps.
The rural US, routinely blamed or celebrated, depending on your perspective, for Trump’s rise, is increasingly the subject du jour for narrative-led media, from True Detective’s hick horror porn, to its more nuanced treatment in the podcast series S-Town (facilitated by the cliche-flipping protagonist: an intellectual clockmaker who speaks with a stigmatic Alabama drawl). How Far Cry 5 handles the charged subject matter, and whether it treats its characters with both dignity and critical diligence, is as yet unknown. But there are significant challenges.
Open world games – where the player is free to choose to follow a predetermined storyline, or splash about, engaging in extracurricular activities throughout the world – must act as both a political biome and a playground. Most developers hedge and pay only lip service to the theme. This is because video games are still predominantly designed to entertain rather than provoke. How can any game built in this context tell a difficult, transgressive story while simultaneously flattering and delighting its player? Last year’s hit TV series Westworldskilfully revealed the vapidity of the genre, its wild west themepark filled with peril-free stories in which the paying players always triumphed.
2008’s Far Cry 2 is one of the only games to steer a different path. Set in a war-torn African country, your protagonist was infected with malaria, which caused him sporadically to pass out. The rusted guns and jeeps would lock up, leaving you vulnerable, and frequently you’d have to ally with awful people to further your progress. It was a ghastly, often unpleasant journey, and the game was all the stronger and more memorable for it. Few video games have followed its risky example. We are poorer for it.
