The Play: When Genre, Code and Company Culture Collide, or My Starfield Life
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
This is me, at the funeral of a friend.
This is me, walking away from some nameless abandoned facility on some far-away planet.
This is not me, but I am dancing with him. He is a ruthless space pirate who has had a bit to drink and is enjoying some heavy metal.
This is the view through my rifle scope of a not-drunk, not-dancing space pirate who is about to go to the outer space equivalent of Davy Jones’ locker.
This looks like fun, or it would if I had not been playing it a lot and having less fun with it than I wish.
Which of course makes me ask myself, “So why are you doing this?” That question gets asked of the players of games more than it does than the audiences of many other media forms. People read novels closely and attentively that they end up deciding in the end are not good novels; people watch films that they end up feeling are disappointing or badly flawed. We do understand in those cases. We even understand, much of the time, why there is a need to say so.
I am not saying that the game Starfield is a work of art that requires my patient attention because of its exalted aesthetic aims and forms. I am not even saying that it is not fun. It is fun! I am still playing it.
But I am disappointed by it, and perhaps all the more so because other games by its creators, Bethesda Software, are so very much my jam. So much so that I still play some of them that are more than a decade old.
So perhaps a better route into thinking about Starfield’s disappointments is to ask, “Why are these games my jam?” There is nothing that I like better than Bethesda’s particular style of open-world role-playing game. Your player character is typically some sort of Chosen One figure who starts as a blank slate and wanders out into a world that they know nothing about and that knows nothing about them. There’s a main storyline that gives you choices. You can wander a post-apocalyptic America and decide either to side with a basically benign Republic of California, a brutal legion of militaristic outlaws, or someone who is basically an unfrozen version of Walt Disney hiding out in the surviving part of the Vegas Strip. Or in another game, side with militant quasi-Nordic rebels or an occupying empire—or ignore their squabbles and just focus on the dragons who want to end all existence.
You grow in skill and power, usually in a particular direction. You’re a science whiz! You’re a wizard! You’re a stealthy assassin! You’re a brute who swings a club made from a fencepole and a concrete plug. You’re a charismatic wheeler-dealer. You go where you want, but parts of the gameworld are really dangerous and you’ll likely end up dead if you go that direction while you’re still just a novice at everything. Almost everywhere you go you find little surprises, little side-stories. You often have companions. In their later games, you might get married (generally quite chastely). You might build a house.
You might collect ten thousand cabbages and fill your house with them. You might collect odd outfits. You might look for a legendary weapon. You might speed-run through the whole game or try to beat it while your character is naked. You might decide to do things the story doesn’t invite you to do.
The games scholar and designer Gordon Calleja has written about the concept of immersion and observed that though many game players imagine that the property of immersion belongs uniquely or distinctly to a subset of games (like those that Bethesda makes), it’s really a property of many art forms and many kinds of texts, it’s really a mode of consuming or interacting with culture. Some people approach most experiences of reading or viewing or interpreting in an immersive mode. Some people never do. And some people only privilege immersion as a primary mode of interaction in certain forms or with certain works.
The narrative around virtuality and virtual worlds never tires of imagining that complete immersion is the teleological goal of all culture, especially of games, that someday they’re going to find the killer app or the perfect technology and we will all be immersed all the time. Even though I would say that Bethesda games are my jam because I privilege them as a type of immersion that I enjoy, I haven’t enjoyed playing them with a 3d headset on as much I supposed. In fact, I don’t enjoy much of anything in that format because I only want to be so much in-game. This is one major reason that Calleja argues that immersion is the wrong word—overused, misattributed—and that he wants us to talk instead about incorporation, about being in-game in a particular way.
What about Starfield keeps me from being incorporated? In part, it is precisely because I know the designers’ work so well and find it wanting, as if I were a devotee of a novelist who is frustrated that a new work neither works from the novelist’s established strengths and skills nor demonstrates some new idea or theme or technique. Instead, it feels like a less technically accomplished and less imaginatively developed version of the same thing. The companions are simultaneously more boring and more annoying than any from the previous round of their work. You can visit 1,692 planets, but almost none of them have little special things to find with little out-of-the-way stories, just exact copies of the same places you found on the last planet. The major factions that you can connect with are bland, vaguely ideological sketches. (The pirates have a bit of personality but they’re not especially interesting even if you’re trying to tell a story about yourself as a rogue, an anarchist, a rugged individual, or what have you.) So it is in a simple sense a disappointment, with a lesser version of the pleasures the company’s other work has offered even if the template is still very involving.
But just as one asks on encountering a disappointing work by a writer or artist you have previously beloved, “Well, what happened? What went wrong?”, I find I have to ask that in this case. Interpreting the author of a so-called “AAA” game, the kind that takes millions of dollars and a huge staff to develop, is like interpreting any other corporation whose new product disappoints. You assume that maybe they spent less money on this one, or were rushed to get it to market. Or there was executive interference. Or a key creative staff person left the company. Maybe the scope was too big and they waited too long to recognize it. Maybe 20 planets, or 10 planets, would have been brilliant where 1692 planets was a bland, thin, uninvolving bunch of copy-pasting.
But you also read it aesthetically, creatively. In this case I wonder, “Well, did the move into a new genre leave these game producers a bit uncertain of where to proceed?” Their other two franchises have been gestating through multiple games for decades—they’ve built familiar worlds and iterated them into new stories, new forms, new locations within those worlds. They’ve known what to improve from the last one, what to keep. Maybe they just didn’t know what kind of story to tell in outer space.
I keep coming back to this last point. Part of what doesn’t work in Starfield is that it doesn’t carve out kind of genre originality but neither does it invoke any sort of genre standard very well. The Elder Scrolls games, most recently Skyrim, work with and iterate many of the standard genre markers of high fantasy: there are spells and there are swords, there are dragons and there are giants. But more importantly, there are ruins of ancient civilizations (several different kinds), there are secrets that everyone has forgotten, there are deep places in the earth that can be delved too deeply. The Fallout games very nearly invented the post-apocalyptic adventure in a gaming context, but they hit a lot of key tropes: the folly of civilization in its last days, the fearsomeness of hidden technologies, the rivalries of different alliances and groups in their desire to rebuild the world or keep it just as it is. The dangers of ruins and radiation, the struggle to survive.
Starfield just doesn’t scan when you try to figure out what the story of this corner of the galaxy, the “Settled Systems”, might be. Earth is lost to environmental catastrophe. Human beings live on—there are no intelligent aliens—with two primary political alliances, the United Colonies and the Freestar Collective. The former is sort-of kind-of a big centralized federation with lots of laws and taxes, the Freestar Collective is kind of a libertarian-capitalist anything-goes sort of thing. The closest riff you can whiff here is the universe of Firefly, with its Independent Planets vs. the Union of Allied Planets. There’s an organized pirate faction, the Crimson Pirates, who are most definitely not the Reavers of Firefly—they’re much tamer. And there’s a zealous, secretive religious faction that you can only learn so much about—it feels as if the details in that case got left on the cutting-room floor, to come as later expansion content.
Plus there are mysterious adversaries, the equivalent of the dragons of Skyrim or the Institute of Fallout 4, but you don’t learn much about them until close to the end of the game and who function mostly as an uninvolving nuisance even though your companions try to make a big deal out of them. (There’s a very forced story intervention that left me completely without emotional involvement not long after the adversaries first appear.)
The world just doesn’t draw me in. Its quirks feel less like something funny, like the frequently repeated dialogue of city guards in Skyrim, and more just kind of unfinished or buggy, like this civilian in the main city of the United Colonies, who I tried speaking with as he sat on a bench.
There are a few really great storylines—one dealing with the not-all-that-piratical pirates. But a lot of the time the world doesn’t just feel unfinished, or isn’t just filled up with identical copies of the same abandoned facility. It is that it feels bafflingly empty and nobody in the game seems to know it.
In the “big city” of New Atlantis, for example, you can wander outside the city and it quickly gives way to wilderness and “abandoned facilities” that are (as they are on almost all 1,692 planets) full of randomly generated pirates or bandits. The planet in no way feels like the capital of a multi-star-system federation. You could argue that maybe human beings have learned the lesson of poor destroyed Earth and thus no longer overbuild their civilizations. And the two major factions have learned a lesson not to war amongst themselves, which supposedly explains the many thousands of abandoned refineries, laboratories, research centers, etc. that you find all over the Settled Systems—that the two of them rushed to settle the galaxy, fought with each other, retreated into a tiny diminished version of themselves and made peace.
But there are so many pirates! Where did they all come from? So many ships in the navies of both major cultures. Where are they building them and how are they staffing them? There are teeny-tiny “civilian outposts” and “mining outposts” and “research outposts” that you find on some planets—ten, fifteen people—and they always beg you to go kill some pirates at an abandoned facility nearby. It’s a lot of planets and a lot of emptiness and a lot of pirates and the game’s story never seems to fully catch up to that. Nor understand what that means in genre terms.
It’s true that the ships in Star Trek mostly pull up to planets and visit one city, one place and imagine it represents the rest of the planet. Or sometimes just the only settlement on a remote planet where they’re mining dilithium. But the world-building, inconsistent as it is, invites us to think there’s so much more anywhere that Starfleet goes or it tells us why the new colony or old mining station is just this one place. If the Enterprise kept coming across abandoned stations built by the Federation that were now full of Orion pirates, eventually it would need to say: actually this is not a space opera in the conventional sense. It is a post-apocalyptic space opera. And the Enterprise’s mission would change accordingly towards reclaiming what was lost, or surveying the damage.
Mal Reynolds and his oddball bunch are all refugees or outsiders to the dominant, victorious Union of Allied Planets. We don’t really visit there much in the series or the film because it’s not interesting. It’s not where the stories are. The stories are in the thinly-disguised “wild West” beyond the Union’s direct control. That informs everything they do—including trying to escape the Union’s hegemony after losing directly to them in war. Starfield’s factions don’t have that kind of narrative tangibility. Their conflict has no genre edge to it. No matter how hard you try to inhabit it, you can’t.
It’s a setting recovering from a devastating war, from the humiliating abandonment of thousands of settlements, but there’s neither awe nor fear nor sadness to be found in that metanarrative. It’s a setting crawling with pirates who are sometimes just a few thousand feet away from major settlements but who seem content to just stay in their refineries and laboratories and, I don’t know, refine? In the far reaches of Settled Space, you may encounter pirates or you may encounter a nice lady called “Grandma” who will cook you a meal, or a ship piloted by a missionary taking tourists on a cruise to see the spiritual glories of space. That sounds nice except that Grandma and the spiritual leader seem completely unfazed by the prospect of being ambushed by a fleet of outer space bandits and the game in a sense verifies that. You’ll never find pirates actually pirating. There is an alien life form that briefly feels like a real menace to what’s left of human civilization (it’s basically a cross between a muppet and the Xenomorphs of the Aliens franchise) but you can wrap that up pretty neatly and only see that as a danger on a few occasions.
The quirks and oddities of the world have all the edges filed off. The backstory of the world doesn’t really call the genre it wants to identify with into effective play. The tropes are neither clever allusions nor original twists.
So what you’re left with, or least I am, are familiar and attractive game mechanics that are shorn of an involving narratological or thematic pull to a degree that I think can’t be easily fixed through expansions or modifications. It is in a funny way a test of the old, not-very-satisfying argument between “ludology” and “narratology” in a game: is it just structures of play that matter or do the story, the aesthetics, the genre matter more?
Yes is the answer to both. The structures of play are enough to get me and keep me, but they aren’t enough to make me happy. To make me think, “Well, that was so fun.”