Tonight We Riot is a video game and it’s more video game than communist propaganda. I think. It’s also the only video game that was created by its own protagonists, a worker owned collective. Let me put that a different way: communism is real and this video game proves it.
When the game opens up it directly states “The year is 20XX and the world is in the throes of global capitalism,” and then, “Those who own for a living rule those who work for a living.” Tonight We Riot takes a fully leftist stance in it’s text which is inarguably tenacious. Through design it wants me to fall head over heels with communism. The game put a checked tablecloth over a barrel in an alleyway and played accordion while communism and I shared a plate of spaghetti. The spaghetti was ok!
Mechanically, Tonight We Riot asks what if Pikmin were a brawler and there was no Olimar to lead. You guide a crowd of rioters as they smash and burn their way across 2D stages themed on factory towns, lumber yards, docks, and finally McMansion hell. They’re opposed by a police force which starts at riot control and ends at mechs.
You directly control one of the workers who’s marked with a little red flag they carry. Less directly, you control the rest of the crowd you’re a part of. They will follow your actions, more or less. If you start throwing bricks at riot cops and their drones then your crowd will too. If you hold back, they will halt. If you die, your control switches to another worker. There is no default leader character design. There are a diverse amount of worker looks the game will choose for you at random. Collectivism insists there be no leader, and here there isn’t one, at least not a permanent one.
At the end of the level you are graded on how many workers survived. Here the designers are forcing you to consider the notion of Acceptable Losses. In fact, the number of workers that actually need to survive any given encounter with violent authority is frankly quite low. It’s still difficult to hit that number in many of the stages, or it requires some planning but if you manage it you get a prize: a permanent power-up that stays with you for the rest of the game.
This is actually the most serious ideological expression in Tonight We Riot, we’re talking about the number of casualties here. It’s big and bold and right in the center of the level completion screen. It makes me feel weird! I don’t want to think about this! I’m not very good at it!
The crowd control mechanics both during the level and how it’s graded afterwards are the most prominent examples of this “ludo-propaganda,” but there’s lots of little details throughout as well. None of your characters use guns, for instance. Most of the power ups you earn for doing well in a level are defensive like I said: gas masks, riot shields, sunglasses which protect you from lasers, etc. And you’ll need it too, some of these stages throw a lot at you. But never too much… there’s never a moment of sheer mechanical difficulty that becomes too great a hill to climb. Like any good propaganda the game wants to be accessible and legible to as many people as possible. I think this might be part of the impulse for the referential humor in the game. A spoonful of memes to help the Marxism go down.
There are a few moments in the introduction, like with the above screenshot, where the tone feels like it’s clashing so hard with itself. This dorky reference shares the picture with what can be a difficult pill to swallow for some. On another screen we see a fast food worker at a register dealing with what’s probably a dreadful, demanding customer. The moon is visible through a window reminding us of his long hours. His uniform and the customer’s posture and framing all help emphasize the degradation and diminishment which this worker, one of a multitude, is experiencing. And… the price on the LED display is “$4.20.” Am I supposed to “lol” here? How does this game’s liberal use of reference improve my play experience, or more importantly to the game, my ideology retention?
I want to reiterate something: Tonight We Riot is a video game. It is a video game before anything else. The designers know what the deal is with video games, which is to say, the designers are very familiar with Super Mario Brothers. The greater world of the game is experienced along a linear path which winds you across a few islands and landmasses where the levels are little stops along the way. At the end of every level you raise a red flag over a castle-esque fortification. Sometimes you have to jump. I’m good with all this, and you should be too. This is directly what I meant about a game being accessible and legible. Nothing is more familiar than Super Mario. What minor content you could read into the imagery of Super Mario Brothers could be narrowed down into decent ingredients for a revolutionary stew. Well, I said spaghetti earlier. Maybe it’s spaghetti. Mama mia.
Not to pick a fight, but I think using Mario to talk about a worker’s revolution makes a ton more sense than using it to tell a story about a time traveling bomb diffuser or whatever. (No, ignore that. I do like Braid. It’s fine.)
Tonight We Riot feels so sincere because of who made it, because of the direct calls to action and talking points about capitalism and the power of the masses, and because of the very real stake it has in illuminating class conflict. But the game itself is thin, and actually quite brief. And as propaganda it fails in the most obvious way: it does not instruct us on what to do next. Not explicitly anyway, there’s some talk about shop democracy and public ownership of the means of production after you beat the final boss, but that’s all. Listen, I don’t need a video game to tell me I need to read Kropotkin: I KNOW I need to read Kropotkin. But this lack of direction, combined with the dull referential humor (the sunglasses power-up I mentioned includes the phrase “deal with it” in the description) often make the whole thing feel like a pastiche on leftist revolution.
Someone once told me the reason they didn’t want to join our local Democratic Socialists of America was because their Twitter account was too “meme-y.” So, do I think this game will be effective propaganda? Maybe. The fact that it’s even allowed to be published in the mainstream probably says something about the cultural climate it’s in. Or maybe I’m not revolutionary enough. When I say there’s no explicit instruction am I willfully ignoring the smashing of the status quo and violent liberation? Is this game which I said had a muddled message in fact making me ask myself hard questions about my real stance on direct action? Shit. I probably need to go read some Kropotkin or something.
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