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The Ethics of Oppression, or at least the Optics: a review of half of the game, December 20, 2022I feel like I failed to a certain extent getting through this and trying to evaluate it. There's a lot to grasp, but on the bright side, what I was able to grasp lasted. I'm just finding it hard to build the courage to try again. You see, it's a two-player game, and I only played one side, which gave me so much to think about. I may choose to update this later once I've gotten through both sides. But this is enough. So I hope this is, at least, an endorsement even just to play on one side.
I played as the officer in an army that was occupying a much smaller country. My father was a prominent oligarch, but somehow I'd never made as much of my family connections as I should have. But I had a position of some authority, of breaking up fights between privates, and so forth. There was a good deal of pushing them around as I kept them in line. I guess that's war, whether you're the good guys or bad guys. It reached a new level because I had something called the Throne that I put prisoners of war in. The Throne couldn't read minds, but it did know what questions to ask. Which, ostensibly made my job easier, except it sort of didn't. I-the-player realized I-the-character would be responsible for my actions and judged in the same way. So I sort of hedged. How much should I let prisoners go? I'd say, from my own chair where war is assuredly bad but at least not happening to me, "Well, of course I'd let them go." But on the other hand, I wondered how much my decisions would reflect of my playing partner. Would they wonder what the heck I was doing? Would I ruin the experience for them? Would I be too self-contradictory? And this was well apart from even the human considerations! Certainly there are some oppressors we wish we could put in a throne, but of course, oppressors being oppressors, they'd seize access to the throne and use it.
And that's what happened here. And I-the-player wound up sympathizing very much with the people in the thrones. I enjoyed their arguments to try to get out of the AI style questioning, and it reminded me of stuff I wished to say when I was being interrogated (nothing warlike, of course! Just entitled jerks! Now's not the time for details, much as I want to spill them.) But being able to rebel and speak out like that, well, I like examples like that, wherever I can find it, so I wound up wanting to see more of how they defied me and the Throne AI. Each such session seemed woven in with some happenings in the barracks where fellow soldiers had beefs. It often seemed my character was madder at his cohorts than with the people he captured. Or maybe I was just more interested in the dissident writer and his crazy-sounding books I'd totally have read. Or maybe I was just remembering all the times I'd been interrogated by someone who was just looking out for my own good, you know, and if they didn't get to interrogate me, someone meaner would years down the road, and I wouldn't be prepared. It sure as heck felt like they had a Throne to put me in so they'd ask just the right question to drive me semi-crazy. (That wasn't the case. It just felt this way. And people know how to play tricks. So the thought of something being REALLY accurate and asking the questions I really fear does, in fact, scare me as no amount of blood could.)
I found myself hedging a lot to the authorities I figured were in the game–I had a feeling they would strike me down as wrong no matter what I said. Many thoughts went through my mind, from "hey I respect this guy" to "oh god he'll just get captured anyway and probably killed, maybe I should keep him for his own good." Where of course his own good wasn't very good.
I sat back and wondered what power the other person had over me, if they had any at all, waiting for punishment that never quite came, beyond frequent debriefings by my direct superior. I suspected anything I did would not be good enough. ACR wouldn't be the first game to pull this trick, but being on both ends of someone being told they are not good enough is harrowing, and I remembered times where someone said that to me and probably had someone above them saying the same thing. I found it hard to have sympathy for them. I still do, even after my experience with ACR, but I see the whys and hows a bit more clearly now.
This is a lot, yet I walked away from ACR pretty sure I missed a big chunk of what it was about. The verbal sparring with the prisoners interested me immensely, and the big themes, not so much. I'd meant to play through as Caroline, but I couldn't help but feel I'd been lucky enough to choose the side that interested me more. It made me think about things entirely unrelated to war, but to persuasion and manipulation in general.
It was uniquely disturbing to me, not in the "look at all my content warnings" sort of way, but in that I was put in a position to make really sticky decisions I did not want to, and in this I think it was superior to Alexisgrad, the author's entry from last year, where so much seemed a foregone conclusion. I felt trapped here, but the tough questions and issues felt more personalized. The prisoners felt more real than the Dictator, and the privates I had to keep in line felt more real than the higher-ranking generals. There were big ideas in each work, but I felt like I could access them a bit more, so I feel more than okay acknowledging I must've missed a heck of a lot, and I think I need a lot of help from other reviewers to ask the sort of questions that ACR wants me to ask, if I really want to get the full experience. Because it does seem to want the reader to ask them, without forcing anything, and they are important questions without being drenched in importancy.
