Tag: Joseph Conrad

Conrad’s Defeat – Victory

Back in the days when critics still puzzled over such questions, there was some debate over whether Victory was Joseph Conrad’s first bad novel or his last great novel. To me the matter is clear: Victory is a failure. Some of the problems with it are simple, but the more interesting issues with it lie within its overall thematic approach and are worth elaborating to understand how to avoid them. Since Victory is still a work by a talented writer, it’s hard to cut off those pieces of the novel that make it not work because they are all interconnected. The themes are embedded in the characters and embedded further in the structure and in the prose itself. Still, broadly speaking, my problems with it concern the narration, the characters peopling the story, and the treatment of the ideas within it.

The Story, approximately

Victory takes place in Southeast Asia, a region that the Joseph Conrad knew well from his time serving on ships there, and sits alongside his other works set in the region, in particular Lord Jim, which even shares with Victory the character of the hotel keeper Schomberg. Today’s novel primarily concerns a gentleman Swede, Axel Heyst, who is a drifter out of personal philosophical convictions handed down from his father, a professional philosopher. Specifically, Heyst drifts as his “defence against life.” Scorning attachment, he wanders inoffensively around the islands of Southeast Asia, before helping an down-and-out acquaintance with some money to get him out of a tight spot and causing thereby the bother that sets the novel going.

To repay the kindness, the friend sets Heyst up to manage a coal mining operation on a small island. The friend then dies away in England and the operation fails to generate the required returns, with the result that Heyst is left alone with great stores of food and a single Chinese servant. It would seem he never has to return to society except occasionally to pick up some hard currency, but he does at one point end up at a dodgy hotel owned by one Schomberg, coincidentally at a time when there are some female musicians visiting. Heyst finds out that a young English girl is among them and on seeing her tormented, rescues her and takes her to his island. Schomberg, who has also fallen in love with the girl, named alternately Alma or Lena, later has two rather sinister guests, Ricardo and Mr Jones, whom he convinces to pay Heyst a visit and rob him, telling them tall tales of Heyst’s vast riches. The criminals arrive, and eventually there is a confrontation and a tragedy.

In terms of theme, really there are two points of interest. The first is the treatment of illusions and deception, and the second is the nature of Heyst himself. While he may not have given his work its title, as did Nostromo or Lord Jim in their works, Victory is very much about Heyst’s psychology. So it is perhaps here that it makes sense to begin.

Heyst and the treatment of mystery in character

Conrad is known for his formal experimentation, where chronology is jumbled and narrators are there beside us framing events. This is an approach that is brilliantly suited to character studies because layering perspectives and confusing chronologies force readers to think their own way through biases to any facts they can find underneath. The former in particular also adds a brilliant reality to Conrad’s work. Heart of Darkness or Lord Jim are literally Marlow telling a story, with us a listener on the boat or at the club, and with his uncertainties and discoveries mirroring our own. Kurtz in the former work is mysterious not only because he only skulks onto the scene for a few pages, but because we hear him first through people Marlow meets on his way up the Congo river, then through Marlow himself. Like Marlow, we need to work out what meaning lurks behind appearances.

Of Heart of Darkness we could state simply that Kurtz is a colonial administrator who went mad and lost his “civilization” from being too long in Central Africa, but this is brutal. It leaves the reader uninvolved, because the story comes straight to her, and because there is no mystery left after it is spelled out thus. Even to enter Kurtz’s consciousness for an extended period would destroy the work. What little we hear from him, (“exterminate all the brutes”), gains its power by its isolation, like flashes in the dark. Too much light and we would not care.

Even without actually considering Heyst’s personality, Victory ruins the mystery. What’s upsetting is the novel has a strong beginning section, adopting a similar approach to many of Conrad’s other works. We have a narrator, living in the area the novel describes, who hears of Heyst through other people, such as the sailor Davidson and Schomberg. “I met a man once… to whom Heyst exclaimed” is a common construction in his telling and a thing of joy to me as a lover of Conrad. We build up Heyst from without, not within. Each thing he says, each thing that is said about him, deepens the mystery, because there is contradiction piled upon contradiction, yet without there ever being the suggestion that Heyst is not a real person underneath the crust of others’ comments. As with Kurtz, we try to find Heyst, deduce him from limited evidence, scraps of phrases. It’s exciting.

But as soon as we finish the first part of the novel, the narrator changes. We have omniscience, inhabiting the consciousness of the various characters, Heyst included. Mysteries disappear or at least fade when we see the ambiguities of character from within as conflict, rather than from without as evidence of complexity. If Heyst’s mysterious personality is the sustaining question of the book, this shift in narrative destroys things.

There are arguments against this. We might say that there are scenes that cannot be witnessed but must be reported, but this is a weak argument. Literature has always found tolerable workarounds, such as the obsession with timely eavesdropping in the early 19th century. Lord Jim, for another example, has quite a significant narrative shift once Jim settles on dry land upriver and Marlow no longer witnesses everything first hand, and while I preferred the first part of the book, Conrad lets Marlow retain a privileged narrative position as the person all information passes through before reaching the reader, even if he no longer sees as much with his own eyes.

Another argument is that such reporting does not sustain a long book – the listeners would have fallen asleep before Marlow got out of the jungle in Heart of Darkness, to say nothing of Lord Jim’s length. My answer here is that Victory is far too long to begin with. It would have worked much better as the short story it began its life as, where mysteries remained rather than being bleached by overexposure to the light of the page. But this is also because I did not find the ideas worth 300+ pages either.

Sad Ideas – Pessimism

That Conrad himself was a pessimist I know from his letters and the accumulation of impressions from his other works, but you’d be hard pressed to miss this fact in Victory either. Heyst comments that “the world is a bad dog”, considers “the illusion of human fellowship on earth”, and contemplates how he is “hurt by the sight of his own life.” A few pages later he notes that “if you begin to think you will be unhappy.” A little after that he notes that “Man on this earth is an unforeseen accident which does not stand close investigation”. I will not give further quotes, but there are plenty. Some of them are quite memorable, but the important thing is that Heyst is Schopenhauer’s representative on earth.

Never has the fatality of Conrad’s work been so obvious; never has it also been so unearned. Heyst’s father was a moody philosopher, so Heyst is a moody person. That’s it. The book, except for its ending, provides no arguments for its pessimism within itself, which turns Heyst’s pronouncements into mere preaching. The pessimism is delivered in phrases rather than in the brute facts of narrative, facts which are always more philosophically convincing than the words of prominent characters. There is a moment when Heyst literally reads his own father’s philosophical works and all I could think as a reader was how unbearably self-indulgent this was. And I say this as someone inclined to pessimistic utterances and self-indulgent writings myself.

So what if one person is pessimistic, or indeed the narrative overall, we might say. Well, when Heyst’s only company for most of the book is an ill-educated girl, there can be no reasonable argument articulated against his views. His voice dominates. This both destroys the mystery (see the section above) but also destroys the curiosity of his ideas, which are never challenged or refined by the work because ultimately Conrad more or less agrees with them.

Bad Ideas – Delusions and Scepticism

Related to the problem of pessimism is that of scepticism and illusion. As with the treatment of pessimism, this is altogether too direct. Every single character is laughably deluded. Lena lives in romantic delusions. Ricardo and Mr Jones think there is silver on the island when there is nothing. Schomberg refuses to realise that he has lost Lena and is in the depths of middle age rather than a strapping young man. Heyst believes he can live without a connection with the world – “he who forms a tie is lost”. Around Heyst there are many rumours, which would have made him more interesting if it were not too obvious, because of the narration, what was true and what false about them. When Ricardo and Mr Jones arrive at the island, Ricardo has to mislead Mr Jones about the presence of Lena, because the other man is terrified of women. And so on. Nobody has a clue about anything whatsoever.

We can say that illusions lead to the novel’s tragedy, which is true. But the problem is that the illusions are relentless, like the pessimism. Conrad seems to say that everyone is a fool, and there’s no hope for any of us. To say all are deluded is also not a thematically rich idea. Nobody really progresses into knowledge, which means that this sense of mistakenness is constant throughout the work, and the work seems ultimately flat. Again, this is not suitable for such a long work. If all illusions lead to tragedy, there’s no weighing up, for example, of different kind of illusions, of the sort which might be more interesting. Is Heyst’s illusion that he should live alone any more harmful that Lena’s illusion that life is a romance novel? Conrad really doesn’t have an answer, only a shrug.

In this way, the two central ideas of the novel – that things are bad, and everyone is deluded, are all too simple and quickly grow stale. There’s neither challenge nor depth to them, and that won’t do.

Other Characters, Other Problems

Of course, the novel does more than this, but not as much more as I think we would wish. Ricardo and Mr Jones are described in Conrad’s typical way for hellish apparitions, with words like “phosphorescent” linking them to that Other Place, and they function as a kind of example of fate. We could conceivably get some paragraphs out of comparing Mr Jones, an exiled gentleman wandering the world and committing crimes, with Heyst, another wanderer but for different reasons. But Jones barely speaks, and because he is not central, any mystery we might build with him along the lines we do with Kurtz is lost from this lack of focus. He remains too fuzzy. Ricardo, on the other hand, speaks too much. He immediately admits to the vaguely respectable hotel owner Schomberg that he and Jones are criminals and gives a long speech about their motivations – something I found hard to believe and all too convenient from a plot perspective.

Wang, the Chinese servant, speaks broken English and his only personality is to be able to “materialize” in various places. Ricardo and Jones also have a servant, Pedro, who is a feral beast because he’s from South America. Both these characterisations I also did not like – not only because they are racist, but because there’s no depth to them, nor any coherence or complexity, especially in Pedro’s case. Pedro joined Ricardo and Jones because… they murdered his brother? Come on.

Conclusions

The problem is that Victory has all the ingredients for a great work. If it were a third of the length and followed a similar formal approach to Heart of Darkness throughout, it would lose nothing in depth, and gain infinitely in effectiveness. Instead, Conrad’s musings on philosophy are boring without action to body them, action which this novel has precious little of. His villains stretch credulity and the overwhelming sense that everyone is deluded is too simple and too dreary to hold our attention for long. It’s a shame, but at least I can say I’m glad I read Victory because I can now better see the achievements in characterisation and form that Conrad achieved elsewhere.

Joseph Conrad’s anti-Russian novel: Under Western Eyes

Under Western Eyes was written by Joseph Conrad in 1911, after one unsuccessful revolution in Russia and before the rather more successful ones of 1917. It is a political novel, exploring the fates of revolutionaries abroad, while also displaying Conrad’s characteristic preoccupations with the conflicts of the human soul. When I read it for the first time, about four years ago, I did not like it. Its descriptions of Saint Petersburg were unrecognisable to anyone who had been there, but worse was Conrad’s virulent hatred of the Russian people and state, which in spite of assertions to the contrary in his author’s note, are neither well hidden nor very fair.

On a second reading, I now feel a little more understanding towards Conrad’s hate. I also have met various people whom we could call the Russian revolutionaries of our own day, including one friend who after a campaign against him involving physical beatings and bricks through windows was given 24 hours by the police to leave Russia or else his entire family would be charged with fabricated crimes. My personal experiences have also made me a little more sympathetic, including an incident one morning where the secret services raided my flat, throwing me against the wall and pinning me while masked men with machineguns and balaclavas conducted a search for something that wasn’t there and never had been (stolen cash).

Conrad’s novel talks a lot about the impulses we have to mysticise Russia: “that propensity of lifting every problem from the plane of the understandable by means of some sort of mystic expression is very Russian.” The problem is that the novel itself serves this mysticising impulse. Ultimately, Russia is not a special country. It is just a country with shoddy institutions and a consolidated media landscape which allowed autocratic rule to flourish in the early 21st century and reach a point where it was unchallengeable, even though the man in charge has lost his mind. Russia has sufficient democratic traditions to build upon, as some of the revolutionaries of the 19th century such as Alexander Herzen knew, but the informational control effected by the ruling powers has emphasised the more idiotic parts of Russia’s history – its sense of a special path, its victimisation and difference from everyone else. The result is that it is now indeed doing something unthinkable, insane, and uniquely awful in our day.

The story of Under Western Eyes concerns one Razumov (his name comes from the Russian for “reason”). An average student with no family, he dreams of winning a silver medal and establishing himself in a world where connections are everything. One evening, after the assassination of a member of Russia’s autocratic state apparatus, Razumov discovers in his rooms one Victor Haldin, who confesses to the murder. He asks for Razumov’s help in escaping the authorities and leaving Russia to join his family in Switzerland. Razumov, who has no revolutionary sympathies, first attempts to save Haldin, and then decides to betray him.

We next encounter Razumov in Geneva, where he meets Haldin’s sister Nathalie, and her mother. We also meet several other revolutionaries, encamped nearby, and the teacher of languages who narrates our story. To them, Razumov appears as Haldin’s successful accomplice, and he is welcomed in spite of his taciturnity and occasional outbursts of anger. In a letter to Nathalie Victor had described Razumov as one of those “unstained, lofty, and solitary existences.” He is the only friend he had ever mentioned, and this allows Nathalie to create a Razumov that blinds her to the real one.

But she is not the only one. Under Western Eyes is fundamentally about seeing – it’s in the title, after all – and what we cannot see. The characters are constantly making miscalculations and misjudgements. The first is Victor Haldin himself. He comes to Razumov, having come to believe that the latter’s quiet nature indicates his revolutionary sympathies – “There is a solidity about your character which cannot exist without courage.” It is not so. Razumov himself, like certain people I know in Russia, had believed that he could exist under autocracy without picking a side. That he could pursue his silver medal in peace. But as soon as Haldin enters his door, Razumov is forced to decide what he stands for. His illusions of the way his world is run are immediately knocked down.

When Razumov arrives in Geneva, Nathalie mentions her brother’s name to him and sees how “this distressed him. He was quite overcome.” She assumes it is affection for her brother and has no idea that it is rather guilt at being his Judas. When talking with Sophie Antonovna, another revolutionary, Razumov once again reveals something of his internal conflicts, to which she asks: “What is it? Self-reproach, or what? It’s absurd. You couldn’t have gone and given yourself up because your comrade was taken.”

Razumov himself notes that he has “the gift of inspiring confidence.” But of course, he too works at creating himself and cultivating these mistakes in others. While dealing with one revolutionary we read how “he remembered another detail and dropped it before her.” He uses what others know – the newspaper details of the crime, and secret letters that have reached the others, to tell them what they want to hear, while keeping himself from lying outright. They all believe him, some willingly, some after a little persuasion, but all do in the end.

The overall effect of this is to make an argument about the revolutionaries themselves – namely, that they are a bunch of incompetents. Conrad fits neatly into the tradition crafted by Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev, which deals with revolutionaries, and he lies on the more cynical, dismissive end. His conservatism is similar to that of Dostoevsky in particular, which is funny because Conrad couldn’t stand the Russian. Peter Ivanovitch is a noted “feminist” whom Conrad demonises by showing how mean he is to a female servant. Various others are ridiculed by showing how dependent they are on money siphoned from the owner of the chateau where they all meet.

This is not new to us. Such irony we have encountered many times before, most obviously in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. The key revolutionary there, Bazarov, says one thing and eventually, after he falls in love, does another. At first, he demands the negation of emotions and the total reliance upon rationality and logic, and then he starts throwing around such ridiculous words as “feelings”. This irony was Turgenev’s secret weapon. It allowed him to create a novel which, when it came out, divided both conservative and liberal Russians – with both accusing him of being too soft towards the “other side”.

Conrad’s has two main problems in Under Western Eyes, at least when we look at it against the backdrop of its Russian forebears. The first is that it could never divide opinion in the way that Turgenev’s novel does. This book is obviously anti-Russian. The revolutionaries and the state are both stupid, mean, and petty. Or, as Conrad writes in the author’s note, Russian history is just a cycle of “senseless desperation provoked by senseless tyranny.” There are no sympathetic characters, except perhaps Nathalie Haldin. Even she appears out-of-touch and naïve. Razumov himself reads like a thing that an algorithm would churn out after having been forced to read Dostoevsky, over and over. He says cynical, spiteful, angry things without any real interest in them.

Sympathy is by common consent the thing that makes Russian literature most special. Conrad has no sympathy. He does not like his characters. He does not have any time for their views. And that leads to the novel’s second big artistic weakness – it really has very little to do with ideas. Nobody actually shares any interesting views on the rights of women or the future organisation of Russia. People are happy enough to advocate for a life of action and revolt over passivity, but that’s as far as we go. There are no debates, there is no passion. The only idea that really gets any airing is that Russia is a poisoned land, “where virtues themselves fester into crimes in the cynicism of oppression and revolt” and that autocracy is bad.

The attack on autocracy is made with some effectiveness. When at the end of the novel’s first part Councillor Mikulin, Razumov’s point of contact among the elite, asks Razumov where he will go next – “where to?” – it is positively chilling. We all know at this point that even though he has done something that benefits the state, he has also given up what little freedom he has had. Such relative subtleties are more effective than the constant complaints about autocracy, which quite frankly we do not need. Russian autocracy is/was awful – we do not need convincing. But learning about the way that it exerts its hold upon an individual is much more interesting for those of us with “Western Eyes.”

Razumov goes to Geneva as a servant of his state, and there his life unravels. The stories he is forced to tell about himself are insufficient to solidify his identity. In the end, it all collapses. To see the revolution from the side of an informer was new to me, and that is perhaps the most interesting thing about the novel. But the novel’s complex structure, namely a dramatization of Razumov’s journal by the teacher of languages, means that much of his soul is hidden from us. When we catch glimpses of it, it is suitably unattractive. “It was myself, after all, whom I have betrayed most badly.” Such words are ridiculous for a man whose actions lead to two deaths. So too are his excuses and justifications: “I was possessed!”

Taken as a whole, in its refusal to engage with the ideas of the revolutionaries, or even portray them, the novel comes across as somewhat empty. In some sense, amusingly, it conforms to its own ideas about how little those of the West can understand Russia. But this will not do. Russia is comprehensible, it just requires time and effort. It is not special, just extremely poorly run. An orientalising impulse serves no purpose other than to excuse and legitimise the actions of the people who control the place. And legitimisation is the last thing that these people deserve. All in all, the novel is just okay. In this at least in my opinion, four years later, has not changed.  

The Nihilistic Storytelling of Far Cry 2

Among other things, a good story is one that is effective. It aims at an effect and then employs various tools at its medium’s disposal to achieve it. I tend to see stories as reflecting a creator’s worldview, as making a certain argument about how we should see the world. I agree with the Soviet critic Mikhail Bakhtin, however, that there are certain times when a given work can reflect multiple worldviews, but these are rarer cases. Either way, a work is an argument about a worldview, whether with itself, or with the reader, or both. And a good work attempts to argue well.

Some stories are simply better told in certain mediums. Fiction has a great many limitations, just as much as do film or television, while also having its own advantages. The potential for videogames to tell good stories – and indeed, stories that can only be told well as videogames – has been overshadowed by the way that unfortunately most games don’t end up telling particularly impressive stories. Videogames are generally popular entertainment, and that’s absolutely fine. Like a good Marvel movie, there are a huge number of highly effective simple and fun games where committing acts of violence is pleasurable and “good” triumphs over “evil”. I enjoy playing those games as much as I enjoy watching Marvel’s offerings. And they sell like hotcakes.

But there are serious games – ones that strive for every bit as much moral complexity as do good works of literature, with every bit as much flair and depth. The best games combine an awareness of the medium’s limitations with a sense of its potential. Games suffer from an unavoidable problem – they have what is known as “gameplay”: the moments where the player is in control. The need to provide gameplay is generally what kills the effectiveness of a game’s story, rather than harmonising with it. This is particularly the case with shooting games.

“Ludonarrative dissonance” is the name that game designer Clint Hocking used to describe the problem. You play a game, with occasional cinematic intervals – cutscenes – where the story is expanded without player control. The dissonance that Hocking describes is when the impressions produced by the two parts – what the player controls as they play, and what they do not – contradict one another. In a shooting game one regularly massacres entire armies. At the end of a mission the game will then inject a little story, expecting us to care about some comrade who has fallen or some love interest we fight for. This really does not work. The character cannot be like that – not the one we have controlled thus far – they are coldblooded and soulless as we are while we control them. Their gameplay has ensured they must be like that. The cutscene feels like cheating, emotional manipulation. That’s because it generally is.

A similar problem exists in superhero movies – our heroes cannot feel okay from all that killing, not inside their heads at any rate. But the mental health effects of regularly murdering hundreds never crop up – in part, perhaps, because the heroes tend to kill aliens or other superpowered villains. When we do not kill a part of that whole to which we belong – humankind – there’s less possibility for reflection. In videogames these issues are harder to displace partly because of the obvious contradiction between what we do and what the game does for us (as cutscenes), partly because our enemies are people just as much as they are monsters, and partly because games have a particular talent at getting us to identify with and connect with our player characters. We control them, after all.

Games at their most interesting find a way of combining the stories they want to tell with the gameplay they use to tell it. And there is perhaps no better example of this than Ubisoft’s Far Cry 2.

Far Cry 2

As it happens, Clint Hocking was the creative director and scriptwriter for Far Cry 2, a videogame published by Ubisoft in 2008 and one which plays interestingly with these ideas of ludonarrative dissonance. Or rather, a game which refuses to play at all.

The game is set in Unnamed African Country, during a period of civil war sometime before the present day. The player is one of a selection of mercenaries from various countries with a history of armed conflict. Their goal is to hunt down the arms dealer known as The Jackal, whose guns have made the collapse of the country possible. Through working with the warlords of the two opposing factions, the player gradually accumulates titbits of information about The Jackal, until eventually they are in a position to locate him. On the side, the player interacts with other mercenaries, an underground movement attempting to help citizens escape the country, and a reporter trying to gather information on The Jackal for the world outside. There is nothing more to the story. Using an array of weapons, the player indiscriminately kills people to progress through the world.

Indeed, the plot is even more barebones than my description suggests. The supposed titbits about The Jackal which the player wants to get from the warlords never really materialise – instead, the player simply becomes a tool for their war against each other and, indirectly, the country itself. Whereas other games give missions with a sense of purpose, Far Cry 2 seems deliberately not to. We destroy oil pipelines, blow up bridges, cut off food and medical supplies to the vulnerable population. Most of the missions involve some sort of war crime. This is not standard territory for games – at least, they always try to gloss over the war crimes! Far Cry 2 doesn’t care – that’s what is so impressive. It doesn’t even condemn them – it’s less immoral than amoral. The feeling is less of a naughty pleasure in doing bad than a weary disappointment at the impossibility of doing good.

Progress for the player consists in unlocking new weapons. Since the plot doesn’t really go forward the only sense of change is the player’s increased ability to murder. We have to ask ourselves what the value of all this is. We follow the game’s suggestions, doing missions, expanding our arsenal. But instead of stopping the war, we only make it worse. The game’s second act finds us in a new province in the country, where a ceasefire has been agreed between the factions. Our first mission there consists of breaking down the ceasefire by ourselves bringing a new shipment of weapons into the province’s capital. We must become an arms dealer to kill an arms dealer – the logic somehow isn’t quite there.

The characters are empty too, amoral freaks. They are simply warlords and underlings. Overheard dialogue consists of characters planning their next murders and nothing besides. In addition to the arms deliveries, we help assassinate the warlords so that their deputies can take power. But there is nothing of consequence that comes from this except another mission to do, another hundred men to kill. We lose our hope in positive change. Our actions at every turn are denied value, significance, meaning. Our choices consist of determining the order we do missions, and our precise approach once the mission begins – do we light a fire with a flamethrower, use a sniper rifle from a distance, or go in on a truck, guns blazing? The game is mechanically sound – it’s a pleasure to engage in such destruction and we want more. The physics for fire in particular were well ahead of their time.

Our desire for killing is at least compensated in most games by a sense that we are doing the right thing. We are saving the world from aliens or fighting for those that we love. Far Cry 2 offers nothing of the sort. It offers only the possibility of sating our bloodlust without any kind of soothing of the pangs of conscience that same bloodlust might be connected to. Another brilliant game of that era, Spec Ops: The Line, problematizes the player’s desire for violence by having the main character become increasingly unhinged as the game progresses, visibly rejoicing in the killing of his enemies. Far Cry 2 is a first-person-shooter, so we see through our character’s eyes. We do not hear them – they do not speak. Silence – the eerie absence of any decent justification for our actions – is the tool by which the game works upon us.

Early on in the game’s second act, after we have restarted the civil war, we find ourselves in the mercenary bar outside of the city which serves as a kind of safe haven for the player. I left it and began walking towards my next mission location. As I did so, I noticed on my map markings suggesting nearby buildings. Outside of the cities, such markings indicate a guard outpost in Far Cry 2. By killing the men, I would gain data for my map about the local area, and possibly find some rough (blood) diamonds, which are used as the game’s currency. I approached over a hill, my assault rifle at the ready.

But there was nothing, nobody, there. Instead, there were rows and rows of graves. Fresh, hasty, wooden crosses marked the places where men and women were buried. I had arrived at a sacred place with the intent to kill and a weapon in my hand. I discovered that I was, to all intents and purposes, a monster. And the game in that moment forced me to confront that terrible fact. This is environmental storytelling at its very best – and environmental storytelling is what makes games very special as a medium for telling stories. I had stumbled upon this for myself – I was in control, and so I was responsible. Just as I had killed hundreds of people without thinking, now I was made to feel that. And all of this in complete silence.

The Jackal, our arms dealer, meets us occasionally, whenever we are otherwise incapacitated. He gives speeches and mocks us. He quotes Nietzsche, but unlike when angsty teens butcher the philosopher, The Jackal’s willingness to quote maxims about the world’s violence and valuelessness are far more poignant. The Jackal has power, and he has adopted a terrible worldview to justify using it in the most horrific ways. Never mind that Nietzsche spends most of his books specifically arguing against the suggestion that there is nothing in life beyond increasing one’s power in the sense of violence and control over others. What matters is that the game presents us with a character who believes something – with a voice, however horrific, that seems to have thought behind it. And a voice, well made, is a worldview and an argument for that worldview.

At the end of the game the player ends up working with The Jackal. The Jackal talks a lot about disease and contagion. He sees the violence his weapons have made possible as something inevitable in the world and not his responsibility. He thinks it is something that must be isolated and exterminated. Together with the player he works to get the last of the refugees out of the country, with both of player and Jackal dying in the process. With the refugees free, all that remains is for the soldiers left behind to shoot each other until nobody is left and peace can once again dawn.

Far Cry 2 presents The Jackal as an antagonist, but the game does nothing to challenge his worldview. Instead, it draws the player into it, making them complicit in the same acts of brutal and pointless violence that The Jackal is supposedly responsible for, and no different from all the soldiers and warlords supplied by him. We kill for little reason – there’s no reward except (blood) diamonds, which can only be exchanged for weapons. The Jackal’s own weapons. The missions neither bring us tangibly closer to stopping him, nor tangibly closer to resolving the civil war.

Occasionally, in a loading screen, we get a feel for what the character thinks – our only suggestion of any kind of interiority on their part. But what we read only reinforces the game’s suggestion about the world. Here’s an example: “It wasn’t so long ago that this was another one of those dirty little wars that barely rated a sidebar. There was an arms embargo in place, and everyone back home could just cluck their tongues and plan their next tax-deductible donation…” Instead of trying to give us a likeable player character, the game gives us a mercenary – in other words, someone who doesn’t care. And since the player’s character doesn’t care or find any value in the world, we – the player – cannot find that value either, try as we might.

There is no ludonarrative dissonance in Far Cry 2 because the meaningless violence of the player’s actions is the game’s argument about the world. The world (of this kind of civil war), it suggests, is valueless and brutal. There is nothing to hold on to. There is no good, and the only pleasure comes in destruction. It’s an argument that is compellingly made because the player feels it. For we only play the game because the destruction is good – the game strips away any other worthy motivations from us.

We may disagree with the picture of the world that the game proposes – I certainly would like to – but that is to miss the point. There are two reasons for thinking, as I have for so many years, about Far Cry 2 – the first is that it is a fascinating example of how games can harmonise the stories they want to tell along with the tools they employ to tell them. The other reason is that as I wrote at the beginning, any piece of art is an argument about the world, and I think a responsible human being should engage with as many well-put arguments as possible. Far Cry 2’s argument, like those we find in Joseph Conrad (a key influence on the game) or Cormac McCarthy, is disagreeable but it is not bad. Unfortunately, it often explains the world all too well…

Anyway, I finally finished the game earlier this year, after a great many failed attempts, and I thought it deserved the piece.