underbootsociety

[underbootsociety]

[underbootsociety]

[underbootsociety]

Recently a post has been doing the rounds about military propaganda in the latest COD, yea yeah, sky’s blue, fork in kitchen, et al et al. This got me thinking about the shooters I actually play, and one thing that strikes me about the multiplayer shooters I play is that a lot of them dodge that same major discourse bullet by expressly grounding themselves in amorality and Kafka-esque dysfunction- a structural fingerwag towards their own content, acting as a paradoxical green-light to enjoy the game with no sense of moral injury. And there’s a big example of one that didn’t do this that kinda winds up with egg on its face as a result. 

To start with, I’m thinking about Team Fortress 2. The original Team Fortress, inasmuch as it’s possible for a game where you shoot each other with real firearms to be apolitical, was fairly apolitical. The soldiers had no markers of identity beyond their arbitrary team affiliation; the fighting was over no discernable real-life resource or point of political tension; the environments were decontextualized labs and facilities. It was platonic violence. 

Team Fortress 2 rolls around. Now that the general novelty of a 3d multiplayer class shooter has eroded, development stalls out on the following aesthetic problem; you can’t have semi-realistic militaristic character models rocket-jumping themselves across the map in the early 2000s. The cartoonishness is too dissonant when you’ve got similar semi-realistic militaristic characters in much more “grounded” games. Eventually they resolve this by taking the other tack, leaning into the cartoonishness, crafting character models so completely bombastic and over the top that no action taken in gameplay, no matter how absurd, will ever feel dissonant. This philosophy extends into the map design; the environments are farcical. Military instillations built mere yards from each other, with paper-thin pretenses of being civilian facilities despite the constant gun battles occurring inside. It’s self parody. And when the game extends to the point of having lore and worldbuilding, the idiocy becomes diegetic. This is a conflict fought on the behalf of idiots, by idiots, over idiot-goals, in spaces designed by idiots. It’s completely amoral, but it’s also contained amorality, since the fighting doesn’t spill out of these Helleresque Designated Pointless Fight Zones- and that leaves the mercs sympathetic enough that you can play them as protagonists in stories that take place “off-the-clock” without a ton of tonal dissonance. I can’t stress enough that the TF2 protagonists are amoral PMCs who work for callous megacorps. In a vacuum, this is not a well-regarded Kind Of Guy around here. There is some implementation of this broad concept that would invite a shitload of discourse that I’ve never seen materialize!

A lot of hero-or-character-based multiplayer games do this, abandoning any pretense of player heroism or productivity in the conceit in a way that shields them from a lot of moral and logical criticisms. Apex Legends and Monday Night Combat are explicitly in-universe bloodsports. Atlas Reactor and Rogue Company are cyberpunk corp-on-corp warfare. Dirty Bomb is about loosely affiliated mercenaries picking over the remains of an evacuated city. I think that Valorant is PMCs in a resource war (Not completely sure on this one.) The never-released Battlecry was expressly tied to actual nation-states, an alternate history where great powers fight wars via singularly-powerful champions instead of via traditional warfare. And in Battleborn the PCs were a hastily-assembled coalition of smaller hastily-assembled coalitions, which means that it makes perfect sense that any combination of these people might be fighting alongside or against each other, at any given time.

Here we see commonalities. Amoral participants. Larger governing bodies delineating clear fight zones centered on specific, if deliberately silly or petty, goals. Most crucially, PCs that are very loosely affiliated with each other, such that you’d see them in different configurations, fight to fight, day to day, as they’re contracted or shuffled around by the powers that be.

You know a game that doesn’t do any of this? Overwatch. 

Overwatch gets 80% of the way to being a superhero universe; it falls short primarily because Blizzard chose not to explicitly market it as such, but it’s got everything short of the purposeful brand designation- powered heroes, super science, codenames, Faceless Hydraesque terrorist groups with shadowy, powered enforcers. There are specific allegiances implied by this; specific policy and interpersonal goals implied by this that aren’t really reflected in six-on-six grudge matches in a smattering of inexplicably depopulated civilian environments. There are roughly half-a-dozen villains associated with Talon, four or five independent villainous mercenaries, and everyone else is a would-be superhero. Why is most of the core roster of the world’s premier superhero team performing some kind of terror attack in London? Why is a woman who murdered a civil rights leader trying to stop them, with the help of two avowed anti-Omnic mercenaries and three Omnics? Why did a cryogenics researcher weaponize her tech and come along for the ride? Why are a dozen envoys from tech conglomerates, grassroots movements, and paramilitary defense forces throwing down over a Gazebo in a charming Greek resort? Fuck if I know. Fuck if the writers know!

So, to round it out, I think that there’s a structural difficulty for multiplayer shooters to stand for something, or advance a philosophy, or whatever. The smart ones embrace this by shielding themselves in ablative nihilism, preemptively deflecting criticism by painting the gameplay as hollow and barbaric, but fun! But Overwatch- Overwatch 2′s tagline is “Get back in the fight.” What Fight? Why? Against Who? Call Of Duty might be a horrific mouthpiece for militarism and imperialism, but when it valorizes the military, it’s at least picking a side! Overwatch is just so strange to me because it’s somehow got the worst of both worlds- it uses these heroic, aspirational language and visuals to hype up a gameplay loop that’s ultimately the exact same kind of cynical, aimless abattoir as the games that are smart enough to explicitly be about amoral paid killers!

[underbootsociety]

Team Fortress Two: Parahumans Edition

Like eight different people asked about the specific powers I had in mind for the wormverse iteration of Team Fortress. Here’s the reddit write-up, updated and expanded, now with additional Ms. Pauling and Administrator.

(Read more under the cut; this absolutely got the hell away from me. This is so so long)

Keep reading

[underbootsociety]

Team Fortress 2 ultimately really wound up giving Venture Bros energy with how all the high-level plot stuff ended up either self-negating (Grey getting backstabbed by his own mercs for control of a life extension machine that they don't actually know how to operate) or having been pointless the entire time (The Administrator) with most of the quote-unquote "net gain" of the story being the cast members finding ways to move on and find fulfillment in the face of, and ultimately outside of, an untenable genre-fiction status quo.

[underbootsociety]

No, what's really fascinating about the end of TF comics is that in the absence of Helen, Zephaniah Mann would be the Capitalist villain, he's a cartoonish embodiment of corporate upper-class 19th century industrial evil, and if the camera was pointed at a different section of the timeline this would be a triumphant story of a girlboss pulling a Count of Monte Cristo on one of the worst people alive. But instead we only catch hints of the very beginning and the tail end, we watch the sharp edges as they wreck havok on the entire world and the main cast for over 150 years. Whole coal mines full of bodies and the entire principal cast realizing that every stupid and demeaning thing that's happened to them for the past four+ years was the third-degree fallout of this woman digging up a corpse to piss on it.

[underbootsociety]

[Spoiler] For years People theorising, joking and talking about the 10th class

We all though it was him

But this whole time, This. Whole. Time.

It was him. He was here this whole time.

[underbootsociety]

The TF2 comic. The themes. The seven year wait, the seven year timeskip.

Of course it was all for nothing. No answer would be satisfying after seven years of waiting. Seventeen years, actually, if we count from when the game came out. So the passage of time becomes the point. The memories have faded. We keep going anyway. Because it was important, at some point. For some reason.

And at the end of it, we're left with the people we met along the way. The connections we share, the people we love. Because that *does* matter, more than lore, more than revenge. The characters have grown, and changed. Aged. So has the audience. None of us are the same people we were seven years ago. And yet, we come back to this. These characters we loved. Continue to love. Because that matters.

I'm really, truly satisfied.

[underbootsociety]

The Administrator

[underbootsociety]

The Administrator.

She lived for revenge, and she succeeded. She won. She executed her plan flawlessly, and ruined the life of the man she hated, fully and completely.

And then she found out she wasn't satisfied.

She lived for revenge, and that meant that without revenge to live for... she had nothing. So she, very literally, kept digging. She defies nature to keep her revenge going. And never stopped. For a hundred years.

This is contrasted by the TF team, who see her, what she has become. And choose to let go. To move on, to become older, and to be happy.

God I fucking love women's wrongs

[underbootsociety]

starting to think i'm into milfs

[underbootsociety]

Love this panel. The lighting. The moon. The perspective from inside the grave. The detail on her face. The symbolism of the noose still around her neck.

Best panel in the whole comic.

[underbootsociety]

The Administrator

[underbootsociety]

NEW !!! SNAKE DISCOVERED

ITS CALLED THE LIMESTONE EYELASH PIT VIPER. THAT iS SO CUTE. ITS SO PRETTY

[underbootsociety]

trans women pretty :3

[underbootsociety]

[underbootsociety]

something something about being denied your own agency about your life and something something queer metaphor. Yeah