bear with me on this one

it’s an admirable feat for pixel pusher union to supplant the domineering individualist (and disturbingly often, bordering on authoritarian) power fantasies common to the medium with a collectivist power fantasy, and certainly it’s worth noting that the fledgling studio has put their money where their mouth is by operating as a worker-owned cooperative. still, one look at tonight we riot’s tongue-in-cheek steam page and you can easily see how they’ve mobilized to target their chosen niche. the only two prominent reviews chosen to represent their title shine a spotlight on the game’s overt politics. one, offered by variety, is a rather bog standard but affable description of the title’s unapologetically political nature, and the other undercuts variety’s blank cheque review vis-à-vis this political quality because it is written by a middle-aged economist chud who claims the game is socially ‘repulsive’ with all the intellectual grace and cutting rhetoric of that one infamous matt bors comic (‘yet you participate in society. curious!’) this kind of clearly ironic spotlight on bad-faith condemnation doesn’t necessarily call the sincerity of PPU’s endeavour into question, but it does function as a kind of signal to the intended audience. ‘come on, look at this petty bourgeois rube…don’t you want to stick it to this guy who so clearly represents the structures of power you’re starving to utterly demolish, to gloriously overthrow?’

while i am loathe to admit it, and while he obviously didn’t intend it in this way, the chud may have a point in the grace note of his dismissive conjecture when he suggests that as an alternative to tonight we riot, you can ‘download streets of rage 2 for a dollar’. that title is, of course, a dystopian beat ‘em up in which four turned-vigilantes from varying socioeconomic classes unite to thwart the machinations of white collar criminal mr. x, a man whose accrued wealth, power, and despotic nature gives him carte blanche to inflict systemic pain on wood oak city and to treat disenfranchised individuals as nothing more than cogs in his exploitative machine, which disempowers the entire city on a macro-level and on a micro-level, whittles down the beauty of everyday life – the desolation of wood oak city contrasted with the opulence of his headquarters, the devolution of martial arts’ inherent philosophical honor seen in shiva’s character or in the eagle mini-bosses (that martial arts is often a path out of poverty remains a despairingly easy connection to make), the mechanization of society running as an undercurrent throughout the streets of rage 2 campaign. ive always argued that a hallmark of streets of rage is its humanist bent when contrasted against other beat ‘em ups, corny though it is. you’re fighting for the future, the only way you know how, which maybe in itself turns out to be a problem. this is prominently, albeit inadvertently, demonstrated through the franchise’s successive entries, which implicitly question just how sustainable those hard-fought victories are. the fight goes on, the rage never dies down, the future must always be defended by egalitarian vanguards – the existence of a world untainted by corruption and power is never denied.

i bring all this up not only because the existence of a better world is a thread that both of these titles share in common, but also because by contrast, tonight we riot has no easily identifiable hooks to sink into; there’s no imagination here. if i described the game to you as ‘insular leftist agitprop brawling power fantasy’, everything that could reasonably come to mind for you is on offer here, like it’s some kind of derivative checklist borne from endless amounts of doomscrolling. the trumpian caricature, a narcissistic billionaire – he’s the antagonist, and when you whittle away his means of production and armed forces throughout the game he turns out to be the most pitiful opponent you’ve ever faced. check. okay, we got the literal invisible hands of the market as a mecha boss battle. check. we threw in leftist myths with a degree of universality and cuteness behind ‘em in the form of shoutouts to loukanikos and possibly even el negro matapocos, check. corrupt media denouncing your efforts only to then demonstrate fear as your success continues, check. it is what it is – unambitious, serving as an attempt at an antidote to a perceived conservative culture in games. you could make the argument that conservatism in gaming isn’t borne out of anything other than malaise – apoliticism taken to its furthest extent, with developers treating their audiences as pigs lining up for escapism slop. but then that ignores the culture that breeds this sentiment, and it ignores the role the state plays in the creation of all kinds of media. just as the pentagon finances film if they can be depicted benevolently, so too does the military fund games like call of duty and use these titles as recruitment tools. so maybe there is in fact a need for titles that do the opposite.

but, see, here’s where i get kind of hung up on this. depicting collective action in a mechanics-driven arcade format is difficult. that’s the primary reason the individual is venerated in action games – it’s borne not out of conservatism necessarily, but out of constraint and out of an understanding that any of these concepts could easily be abstracted and then transposed onto the actions of the individual. the only title that springs to mind that may serve as an exception to the difficulty in portraying collective mechanics is the fantastical and tokusatsu-influenced the wonderful 101, which many in action-game circles purport is one of the greatest games ever made, so while it’s not a politically driven game per se already there’s a particularly high bar to clear for this kind of thing. not beholden to any tokusatsu schmaltz, the way in which tonight we riot depicts this collective action – by still conforming to standards of dozens of arcade action titles – feels hollow to me. the fact that it’s not well-designed by any metric or even cathartic to play is ancillary to me. (and no, it’s not cathartic to play when it wears the aches of the world as pastiche and when its core gameplay loop still revolves around managing faceless comrades, who can and will get brutalized, played out against the backdrop of a brazenly idealistic take on a revolution…the game tries to sidestep concerns that you’ll see everyone as gamified Units To Sacrifice and Expend by having no narrative hooks/leader role protagonists but it’s not a great solution either. also good god those controls are horrid) the problem for me is that what should be ample opportunity to subvert expectations or preconceived notions is done away with in favour of a terribly bland arcade experience that seems to only exist to affirm people’s political beliefs, like some kind of reward for Good Online Leftism, and it’s made worse by how insular the whole thing is. it uses the language of an aging aesthetic and of a particular kind of power fantasy and just wears its skin without doing much more with the concept. im left wondering who is left for this to appeal to, and i kind of have an answer, but it’s not a particularly nice one so i see no reason to write about it.

‘why get hung up about a game that still unabashedly shares your politics, it’s fine that it exists! six days in fallujah just got greenlit again out of nowhere in the most unhinged move the medium has seen in years, talk about how that’s fucked up instead!’ im only writing this because i do care! because i think games of this kind should do more than be escapism or reiterate what we already know ala cynically celebrated films like parasite, itself revered in a similar vein to tonight we riot. i think there’s genuine room for emotionally mature experiences that respect audience intelligence, that reveal deep and moving truths, and that achieve more than just being the same kind of escapism under a different ideology or that exist only to plainly acknowledge blanket issues (i don’t expect remedy but i do love insight). and i think it’s part of a weird overall trend in discourse that largely revolves around the sanitation of art and the rejection of anything that doesn’t 100% conform to our stringent politics.

ultimately, tonight we riot has no charred or abrasive edges, in spite of what it sells to you – it’s every bit as inoffensive and unremarkable as it claims to not want to be.