games

Games that warped my young mind: Tiberian Sun (1: Setting and Story)

When I was 11 or 12 – or maybe it was some older and more embarrassing age – there was a field near my house that me and my friend called the Tiberium Field. You had to dash across it in twenty seconds flat, otherwise Tiberium poisoning would kill you and turn your body into a visceroid, an aggressive and indestructible blob of human tissues. In our heads, we were in Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun.

So far, so nostalgic. This is a post where I talk about a 1999 strategy game, maybe to recapture the remembered leisure and innocence of the childhood that surrounded it.

But I never got past a few missions of Tiberian Sun, never owned my own copy, and I like it a lot more now than I did back then. If we’re talking nostalgia, I was always more of a Red Alert guy (who could have guessed?). At the time I thought Tiberian Sun was, in comparison to Red Alert 2, drab and self-serious, with a clumsy interface and confusing missions. Earlier this year when I bought the whole Command and Conquer back catalogue for a tenner, I didn’t expect that this would be the game I spent the most time on, the one where I actually finished both campaigns, the one that would haunt my imagination.

So this is not all nostalgia. Something else is going on here, and I’m going to try and find out what. And even within the nostaglia, there’s the question of how this game worked its way into my imagination in such a way as to turn the grass of that neighbourhood field into an expanse of deadly and valuable green crystals.

So how did this game warp my young (and not-so-young) mind?

*This screenshot is from the expansion pack, Firestorm*

The Tiberium-haunted world

The first point in favour of Tiberian Sun (henceforth TS) is its setting. The world of the original Command and Conquer was sort of improvised. The developers said, let’s have something like the spice from Dune 2 – it works so well as a resource-gathering feature – but transplanted to another setting. The result is Tiberium, a strange green crystal native to some alien world which has begun to spread over Earth’s surface. There are two factions: the Global Defence Initiative (GDI), a one-world military defending the status quo, and the Brotherhood of Nod, which is part-Tesla, part-ISIS, part Comintern, and obsessed with using the Tiberium for obscure ends. My impression, having played only a little of the original C&C, is that whatever worldbuilding there is starts to peter out around there. The setting is just an excuse to have a war game on the Dune 2 formula. (I’ve talked about the Red Alert spin-off elsewhere.)

Tiberian Sun takes the worldbuilding more seriously. A couple of decades after the first game, the Tiberium infestation has advanced, and Planet Earth is now terminally sick. GDI and Nod are still fighting over ruined cities and land choked with alien crystals and alien weeds, skies torn by ion storms, poisoned air, mutated genetics. For more on the setting and its applicability as a prophecy for our times, I recommend this article from Eurogamer by Robert Whitaker.

Tiberian Sun captured that late-1990s sense of some vague impending doom. But in 2024 it offers a strange kind of relief. You can retreat into the barren comfort of a world that is already destroyed, where there is little to save. There are unexpected inheritances from Dune: like in Herbert’s book, the ground beneath your feet is more than a setting, it’s an actor with powers of life and death over the fragile humans and machines crawling on its surface.

The applicability to climate change and global warming (which we all absolutely knew about in the 1990s even though those in power did nothing) are obvious. It’s a metaphor for our times in another way too. GDI are coded as “good” but we never see them actually doing, or even promising, anything good. They never help anybody or change anything, until the Forgotten twist their arms. We side with GDI only because Nod are obviously and extravagantly worse. Yes, GDI is Harris and Nod is Trump. Neither side offers a way out of war and ecological destruction. But Nod at least offers its supporters the shallow pantomime of its rituals and chanting and bloody spectacles.

*Mutants, ruins and the glow of Tiberium. It’s a vibe*

The setting itself tells a story: when we move our little men across the map, we see ruined high-rise buildings, contrasted with space-age-looking new settlements with solar panels and bunkers and greenhouses: the civilian world has retrenched into smaller and more resilient communities. Meanwhile war has advanced as a science. It’s all laser guns and visored helmets, giant walking battle mechs, cyborgs, explosive throwing discs, orbiting battle stations. Humanity is spending and innovating to fight more effectively, even as we have less and less to fight for. While the Red Alert setting just pits an evil faction against a good faction, Tiberian Sun (TS) takes place in a world that is messier and more ambiguous. In Red Alert, we don’t know why the Soviets are attacking the status quo. In TS, we don’t know why GDI are defending it.

Videogames then were violent, militaristic, imperialist – not in a the conscious and blatant way that Call of Duty is now, but as it were by default, by reflex. C&C is no exception. The GDI versus Nod struggle is at base the same old Imperialism versus Third World struggle, with the legitimate struggles of the global majority (“disenfranchised nations” seduced by Nod) packaged as evil fanaticism. In TS it is less explicit, filtered through layers of deniability in the worldbuilding, but we get signals, such as that the villains in Tiberian Sun have names that are Arabic, Latin and Slavic (he’s literally called ‘Slavik’). The Latino baddie is a drug smuggler who menaces the southwestern United States, playing into racist tropes. We see one South Asian guy in the ‘Global’ Defence Initiative, but the rest of the goodies are Americans.

The Forgotten

The music is not as conspicuously brilliant as that of Red Alert 2 but it has a greater range. There are moments of foreboding (‘Valves’) and loss (‘Approach’). If Red Alert 2 is a violent cartoon, Tib is a 1980s-90s action sci-fi movie – the vibe, to me, is sort of like Terminator 2, Aliens and Paul Verhoeven.

The melancholy themes probably belong to the third faction in Tib – unplayable and lightly sketched, but essential to the story (I suppose if GDI is Harris and Nod is Trump, they are Jill Stein or Cornel West). This is a loose confederation of clans who call themselves The Forgotten. They are people mutated by Tiberium exposure – insulted and belittled as ‘shiners’ by GDI and Nod alike, distrustful of GDI due to past atrocities, persecuted and imprisoned by Nod. They are few but they are pretty lethal in a fight.

The Forgotten are the conscience of this story. In the GDI campaign, it is only by overcoming prejudices and working with the mutants that GDI can defeat Nod. In the Nod campaign, you prevent any possibility of an alliance between GDI and mutants through a nasty trick. There’s more going on here than is usually the case in this series.

Tiberium Wars

In Part Two of this review I’m going to be looking at two other strengths of Tiberian Sun – the cutscenes (you heard me) and the gameplay. But before I move on I want to comment on the 2007 sequel, Tiberium Wars and its expansion Kane’s Wrath (I haven’t played Tiberium Twilight). What I have to say about Tiberium Wars (TW) underlines what I’ve just said about TS.

I’ve played a lot of TW and enjoyed it, but it doesn’t have the same grip on me as its 1999 predecessor. And I don’t think it’s just nostalgia.

The graphics and the smoother interface are a huge upgrade on TS, marking a rapid development in just 8 years. The story is solid, far less silly, and it’s all in all a lot of fun to play. But the setting doesn’t feel as real to me, and I think I know why.

Tiberium Wars leans with dispiriting heaviness into a ‘Global War on Terror’ framing. Magazine ads for the game talked about fighting terrorism. Technologically, GDI has been downgraded – no more stomping robots. This is explained in-game as being due to budget cutbacks, but the effect of it (and probably the intention) is to make everything look a few-score degrees more like Iraq or Afghanistan, or some near-future 9/11. The expansion Kane’s Wrath thankfully leans back the other way, and was clearly crafted by people who loved TS.

*From a 2013 EA press conference about a new C&C title. If you have eyes, you can see the vibe they’re going for. And it’s not ‘morally dubious 1990s action sci-fi movie’*

TW’s setting is retconned so that the Tiberium-infested world is divided up into uninhabitable Red Zones, Yellow Zones which are in a state of social collapse, and Blue Zones which are stable and prosperous. This is a marked contrast to Tiberian Sun, in which everywhere – Egypt, the USA, Norway, Germany, Britain, Mexico – was one of two things: a Yellow Zone or a snowy Yellow Zone. In TW, the Blue Zones we see are all either in the USA or in Germany. We always see them menaced and under assault. The first few missions are a bizarrely close remake of Red Alert 2, with the baddies invading hallowed American landmarks like the White House and the Pentagon (No! Please don’t destroy the White House or the Pentagon! Anything but them!). The Imperialism vs Third World framing is much more obvious and open. It’s no accident that the Forgotten are left out of the story of TW – they appear only as an Easter egg and they talk like super mutants from Fallout.

At base the reasons I don’t like it as much are political; I think it’s a shitty way to portray the majority of the human race, as if they have nothing better to be doing than besieging and menacing whatever dull place you live. But you don’t have to agree with that to see that these are two very different types of story and setting. Tiberium Wars is the same old C&C story about protecting the status quo. Tiberian Sun has more depth and ambition.

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Games that warped my young mind: Age of Empires 2

Click here for my previous entry in ‘Games that warped my young mind,’ discussing Red Alert 2.

Around the start of this millennium, the adults were worried about how Grand Theft Auto would turn my generation into serial killers. The ultra-violence of GTA was probably too outrageous and obvious to have much effect. Meanwhile, far less controversial games were warping the way we thought about the world. Today I’m going to take a critical look at a classic that is still widely-played today: Age of Empires 2. AoE2 is a strategy game from 1999 that purports to be set in the Middle Ages. But it gives a totally wrong impression of how the Middle Ages worked.

What’s my angle here? Do I think Age of Empires and Command and Conquer should have been banned? No, the world would be a less fun place without them. But all the ink spilled condemning GTA would have been better spent making an informed, sympathetic criticism of a game like AoE2. People who liked and enjoyed the game, but also had read a few books about the actual Middle Ages, should have had a platform to tell us what it got wrong.

Strengths

First, the strengths of AoE2. You don’t need me to tell you it’s a satisfying and addictive game. Take that as read. As for how it depicts the Middle Ages, there are good points. The campaigns strike a balance between compelling narrative, satisfying challenges and historical fidelity. The William Wallace campaign is a perfectly-ramped-up tutorial with a good story, and to this day ‘Falkirk’ and ‘Stirling’ are taking up space in my memory banks. Also, there are paragraphs of proper historical information on offer, if you care to pause the game and do some reading.

The gameplay itself has its strengths. It conveys one important lesson about history: before you can put armies in the field, you need to have a lot of people working hard producing stuff. And unlike in C&C where there’s one all-purpose resource (ore or tiberium), AoE and AOE2 demand that you build a relatively complex and diverse economy. Twenty minutes into a game, you have built a busy little town: your villagers are mining, farming, hunting and gathering, slaughtering sheep, cutting down trees; little boats are bringing in nets full of fish to your docks; little carts and trade cogs are moving between settlements. It’s diverse and interdependent, and as you play, human activity gradually consumes the forests and the wildlife, and the grass is turned into neat rows of crops. It’s not just satisfying to play and nice to look at; this basic rhythm of gameplay is authentic.

Genocide

So here are my criticisms of AoE2 from a historical perspective. I’m not going to talk about how the Elite Long Swordsman has the wrong type of sword or the Frankish blacksmith model is inaccurate. I am going to talk about its overall concept of society and warfare in the Middle Ages, and how it gave a whole generation fundamentally the wrong idea.

AoE2 still depends on the C&C formula in its basic structure: build a base, build an army, destroy the enemy. That’s OK in a game where you play as a military commander and your task is to destroy a military base. But in the AoE variant, you are not destroying a military base. You are destroying a whole society. You have to exterminate the ‘enemy.’ You have to level his city and his infrastructure. Not take it over – demolish it.

I won’t labour this point as it was expressed well in this post from acoup.blog. But while the grown-ups were worried about us jacking a car and doing hit and runs, we were meanwhile playing a supposedly more wholesome and educational game, in which we were required to do genocide. And 100% anachronistic and unnecessary genocide, at that. The fact that so many who grew up playing AoE have stood by while their countries killed vast numbers of people with bombs and guns has broader roots than one videogame, of course. But games like this are part of the tapestry.

The intro video is clever. The game of chess is a nod to the fact that we are playing a game. Blunting the edge of many of the criticisms I will make here, the video suggests that like chess, the game you are about to play is only supposed to be an approximation of real life.

Society

Let’s return to that pretty medieval town you have built. How many farms have you got? Five, six, seven? And how many other buildings have you got – a monastery, a barracks, a castle, a market, a blacksmith, a stable, an archery range, a town centre…? You’ve got at least as many other building types as you have farms. You might easily have twice as many.

Throughout most of human history, and certainly in the Middle Ages in Europe, the overwhelming mass of the population worked in agriculture. In AoE2, the heavy toil which defined the lives of 95% of the population is represented by five villagers hoeing little plots of land. The farms, little patches on the margins of the base, are like gardening allotments on the edge of a housing estate.

Why does this matter? Because a lot of guys are walking around out there with the vague idea that if they had lived back in the middle ages they would have been knights. White people are actually the worst offenders with the ‘We used to be kings’ meme. In reality, most of us don’t have to go back as far as the Middle Ages to discover that our direct ancestors were super-exploited peasants with no freedom. It took the labour of a whole village to arm and mount a single knight. Again, AoE2 is only one artefact of the culture that produces these wrong ideas, but it is under-examined.

Sometimes you can see how shallowly the C&C formula is buried. Your attractive medieval settlement can stand in for a military camp, a city or an entire civilisation, depending on the scenario. But it is what it is: a base. Likewise the game treats the player as a commander in a modern military, with life-and-death control over the entire faction.

As soon as you read any real medieval history, it becomes clear how absurd this is. Medieval history is mostly about the church revolting against the king and/or the secular nobles, the nobles revolting against the king or feuding with one another, the peasants revolting against the nobility, and the town people revolting against all of the above. AoE2 is about players (human or AI) who have absolute control over an entire society, waging war on another equally monolithic society.

A real medieval polity was not united but feudal. A king had to negotiate through layers of autonomous lords and knights to get anything done. Its settlement pattern was very much dispersed, not nucleated like the AoE/C&C base. A ‘knight’ was not just a cavalry fighter who was good against archers and weak against pikes. For your medieval ancestor, the knight was the equivalent of your mayor, your boss in work, a military officer, and a made guy in the mafia.

There is a ‘Feudal Age’ in AoE2. But the game does not simulate feudalism – it simulates a caricature of a totalitarian communist state.

For those who haven’t played it, this is what actual gameplay looks like.

Ages

Speaking of ‘ages’ – in AoE2, the player progresses through four: the Dark Age, the Feudal Age, the Castle Age and the Imperial Age. Each age unlocks new buildings, units, technologies, etc. But these ages do not correspond to anything in real life. In the first AoE they roughly did. But not here. The game covers the period from around 500CE to around 1500CE. The ‘Dark Age’ does not correspond even roughly to 500-750, nor the ‘Feudal Age’ to 750-1000, etc. There is too little in the early ages by way of buildings, tech and unit types, then all of a sudden too much in the later ages. No, the Catholic church was not ‘unlocked’ a hundred or two hundred years after the First Crusade. Stuff from the ‘Castle Age’ was 100% around throughout this whole millennium.

All in all, the game does a particularly poor job of depicting the early Middle Ages. A battle in the ‘Dark Age’ is limited to guys with clubs hitting each other. But there was a bit more than that going on during the age of Al-Andalus, the Merovingians and the Tang Dynasty.

In the real middle ages, The Catholic Church pretty much had a monopoly on literacy, education, social services and bureaucracy across most of Europe for most of a millennium. In AoE2, the clergy don’t show up until the third ‘age’ of four.

The Marxist idea of a mode of production offers a better template for social development than the idea of a linear progression of ‘ages.’ (Here, I went off on a tangent proposing how this could actually work in a game, but to spare the reader I have moved it to an appendix which I will post next week.)

All I’ll say now is, instead of different ages, I wish we could see different social orders. Returning to the Marxist criterion: sure, the mercantilist and feudal social orders have a greater productivity of labour than the nomadic society or the trans-egalitarian clan society. But depending on the situation, the former were still capable of losing wars to the latter.

Factions

In a way, there’s a refreshing universality in AoE2, an ethos of common humanity. Beneath the different models, every faction is essentially the same (barring a special unit which is often only unlocked late in the game – the Vikings only get Berserkers after, historically, the Norse and Danes had long since settled down and ceased to Vike). It is really laudable, too, that AoE2 even before the recent DLCs had a more diverse roster of factions and cultures than most of the Total War series. This balance and symmetry is also good for playability.

It’s certainly less problematic than the approach of Rise of Nations (2004), which presented a roster of ‘Nations’ such as the British, the Japanese and the Bantu, each of which had the same essential features from the Stone Age right through to the Information Age (‘The Russians have the power of the motherland, giving them plus 3 attrition damage…’) Though I should mention that I’ve spent many enjoyable hours on Rise of Nations, including recently.

The Middle Ages saw clashes not just of class or religion or people, but of different types of society, as we can see when the Anglo-Normans confronted the Irish (check out my series Celtic Communism), or when the Norse and the Danes came to Britain.

Warfare

This brings us to the nature of warfare in the Middle Ages. Here AoE2 not only does a bad job of being historically accurate – it’s an area which I’ve always found weak in terms of gameplay.

Consider the historical battles which occur in the campaigns – the aforementioned Falkirk and Stirling, or the Battle of Hastings in the expansion pack. In real life, these were distinct battles that happened in specific places. In AoE2, they are about building a base, gradually wearing down the enemy bases, then finally destroying them. Actual battles rarely happen in AoE2. Every war is a war of attrition.

Here’s something I noticed at the moment I decided to abandon the hitherto-promising Bari campaign in one of the recent DLCs: AoE2 is supposed to be set in the Middle Ages, but actually what it simulates is closer to 20^th Century warfare. In some scenarios you have limited forces and have to use them cleverly; that’s both better fun and more accurate. But in most scenarios, and in the vanilla game, your task is to churn out soldiers and rush them to the front, where each wave will gain a little ground before its complete destruction. Tactics are rudimentary.

That is why a scenario like Vinlandsaga works so well: AoE2 is better at simulating a drawn-out process of development, exploration, conquest and settlement than at simulating an individual battle. But even in Vinlandsaga, you somehow find yourself besieging and demolishing stone castles in the early Middle Ages in Greenland.

The violent part of the game is actually not much fun. Since tactics barely matter and there are no set-piece field battles, winning a war is reduced to producing soldiers in greater diversity and quantity than the enemy. You spend a fortune on them only to watch them, usually, die for minimal gains. It’s not very satisfying.

Conclusion

Like a lot of people, there are large chunks of human history that first entered my ken through the medium of videogames. This stuff is really influential on how millions of people think about the past. So there needs to be a culture of friendly historical critiques. I’ll still play a historically inaccurate but fun game over one that’s more accurate but less fun – I’ve spent a lot more time playing Creative Assembly games than Paradox games. Fair enough if developers generally allow gameplay to trump authenticity. But let’s be aware of the choices they have made.

Instead of such a culture of friendly criticism, I think strategy videogames have functioned as a transmission belt for a mechanistic and essentialist understanding of societies, nations and conflict. For example, I once came across a Youtube video which justified the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas with reference to their ‘spawn points’ and ‘tech tree’ – evidently a conscious shorthand, but un-ironic. The idea of societies composed of antagonistic classes is quite incomprehensible to people brought up to assume that each given faction or nation was a monolithic and totalitarian entity.

I’ve read more than one recent novel with a pre-modern setting in which the characters use terms like ‘subconscious’ (coined by Freud in the 1890s, right?) ‘genocide’, (coined in 1947) and ‘the military.’ It’s that last one that concerns us here. AoE2 is part of a culture that reifies the state, that tells us that the standing army and the modern nation have always existed. But the real Middle Ages were much stranger and much more interesting.

Games that warped my young mind: Red Alert 2

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Appendix: Ages and Ages

What I’m playing at: Disco Elysium

Disco Elysium is a point-and-click RPG which is at once easy to fall into and unlike anything I’ve played before. I heard about it on Chapo Trap House a few years back and saw it in a sale, so I bought it and now I’m 8 hours into it, according to Steam.

The game starts with the player character in a booze coma, in a dialogue with his Limbic System and his Ancient Reptile Brain – ie with aspects of himself. The player’s first task is to summon up the will to awaken.

You wake up in a hotel room you don’t remember trashing last night. The world is strange. It’s modern times, but where are we? Haiti? Finland? It emerges that the game is set not only in a fictional country but in a fictional world, brilliantly realised and compelling.

All screenshots are from https://discoelysium.com/

The player character is a bumbling fuck-up with something desperate and sad under the surface, and possibly a ‘vast soul’ under that again. Characters give you pretty normal RPG quests: Solve the murder; convince X person to let you into Y location; etc. But your own internal voices give you strange quests which emanate from inscrutable inner drives: ‘Find some alcohol and drink it,’ or ‘Sing karaoke.’ You spend as much time in dialogue with your gut feelings and intellect as you do with the characters. These internal dialogues have real consequences for your character’s skills, politics, etc. With names like Empathy, Volition, Inland Empire, Shivers and Half-Light, the internal voices interject, inform and misinform, help and sabotage. They provide dialogue options such as bumming a cigarette, asking for money or blurting out something ridiculous.

At times, they describe a breath of wind, a bleak vista or a distant sound. In these moments, you feel what the character feels. I know nothing about the development team but I can tell it includes poets and novelists.

So far the game has been completely non-violent for me, though I’m aware there are combat dynamics. I did punch a door one time. For some reason I am surprised that a game can be non-violent but still so compelling. I found a ghostly voice trapped on an apartment building intercom and the experience was haunting. It made me entertain the theory that my character was in purgatory, or some such thing, a theory I later rejected.

The game is very funny. More often than not, you are the butt of the joke. It’s a bleak world, lived-in and tired. Every other RPG I’ve ever played has a world from which the class struggle has been mysteriously exorcised. But in Disco Elysium, the politics are right there in front of you, and you can delve deep if you wish.

The graphics are beautiful, but not technically advanced by today’s standards. I’ve been thinking along these lines for a while, that more games need to make this trade-off: invest in good writing and clever mechanics, not in making a game so graphically and technically advanced that it will force me to buy a new machine. If we’re going to talk about graphics, let’s talk about more about art and style, less about a mad quest for photorealism and textures and lighting and crashing my laptop. Disco Elysium is a positive example of what I’m talking about.

So eight hours in, I’m still in a starting area called Martinaise and have not found my missing gun, much less solved the murder. It’s not an easy game, but I feel it half-expects me to be as incompetent as I am, and forgives me with a shrug of the shoulders. And I have a lot of time for a game that rewards me for investing skill points in Empathy.