Fight the Power – #1: Examining id Software’s RAGE and Its Flawed Rebellious Narrative

It is a well-established fact that conflict is central to every story.

Goals, factions and obstacles are the ingredients from which characters, drama and plot unfold. This conflict need not be one of violence and combat, but in the world of video games it often is. Video games in particular lend themselves well to portrayal and exploration of combat and armed conflict due to their unique ability to immerse the audience through interactivity, enhancing investment beyond passive viewing and fulfilling the gameplay side of things through shooting, strategy, tactics and other aspects of warfare simulated through gameplay mechanics.

One of the most popular scenarios for telling a story about war and combat is the rebellion, or the “resistance,” with a more powerful force fighting against a numerically and logistically inferior insurgency. In this series of articles, I will examine a select few games that choose to tell these types of stories, to varying degrees of effectiveness, and provide my own opinions and suggestions for how these stories could be better utilized.

Pop culture and real-life history is full of rousing, compelling tales of scrappy underdogs conducting guerrilla warfare against a more powerful force that is often characterized as the “villain.” The most readily available historical example is that of the various resistance forces in Europe who fought the occupying army of Nazi Germany in the Second World War, most often seen in pop culture through the lens of the French resistance. Video game employment of this conflict type often works along these lines, with an obvious bad guy whom the player must align with the token good-guy resistance against. These villainous factions are more often than not the “authority” figures and are portrayed in an often-cartoonish manner, something I feel sometimes does a disservice to these stories by creating dissonant tonal shifts that break immersion and derail the narrative.

Nazi Germany in particular is to thank for the gluttony of quasi-fascist regimes and militaries seen in pop culture as a whole. Star Wars’ Galactic Empire for example calls its foot soldiers Stormtroopers, and has their officers dress in garb reminiscent of the uniforms of the Wehrmacht, Gestapo and SS. Nazi influence can be almost guaranteed whenever a piece of literature, film or gaming needs to quickly establish why its bad guys are bad. Our subject for today, id Software’s 2011 FPS RAGE, is guilty of this easy-way-out style of writing villains, among several other narrative missteps. It will be our baseline, our standard example of a lazy implementation of the “Resistance vs Authority” story, to which we will compare all other subsequent games spotlighted in this series.

Rage (sorry but I’m not capitalizing it every time) is played through the shoes of the “Ark Survivor,” a man frozen in one of many subterranean cryochambers with the objective of rebuilding human civilization after the impact of a massive incoming asteroid. Through supplemental materials (chiefly the novelization of the game), we learn that the player character is a former U.S. Marine, explaining his combat skills. Through the game itself we learn that the nanites injected into him as part of the Ark project have given him enhanced abilities, explaining in-game abilities such as healing, reviving oneself after falling in battle and other abilities that make him especially suited to survival in the wasteland.

Our protagonist awakens to find their Ark damaged and that they are the sole survivor. Upon exiting into the wasteland, he is attacked by humanoid mutants but is saved by a local, with whom he travels to a nearby settlement and begins the game proper with the expected combat tutorial and introductory mission. From here the game opens up into an enjoyable but derivative open world action romp, with most missions finding the player driving to the lair of one of the many bandit clans or mutant hordes.

Throughout the first half of the game there are references to two nebulous factions, oh-so creatively named “The Authority” and “The Resistance.” Civilians occasionally mention the Authority in passing, treating them as a powerful, terrifying boogeyman. Their recon drones populate the overworld, usually just as targets for you to hit in the stunt jumps. Aside from these tell-don’t-show elements, the game makes no effort to show the Authority as an antagonistic organization for much of the story. Their soldiers and vehicles never accost you, at no point are they shown mistreating the populace or committing atrocities; in fact, they are never shown at all until the mission where you are sent to raid a facility of theirs and rescue the Resistance commander, Marshall.

Now, from a game design standpoint, the reason for withholding the Authority as enemies in the gameplay makes sense; they are the “escalation,” the tougher foes who get brought in to raise the challenge and the stakes. This is fine, in theory, but it fails on two counts. The first is what I’ve been leading up to in talking about their portrayal in the story; we’re told over and over about them, but never are we shown their capabilities and actions. Dr. Kvasir, an ally of the Resistance and former Authority scientist, tells us that they are responsible for the creation of the mutants through inhumane experiments, and Marshall later reveals that he, like the player, is an Ark survivor, and that the Authority originated from the Ark project. A general went rogue just prior to the asteroid impact and sabotaged the program so that only those loyal to him would survive. Again, we don’t learn any of this through our own discoveries, or from a villainous monologue or through a demonstration; it is told to us by characters we are forced to trust, and in fact there are no real “villains” in this story, which we’ll come back to shortly.

The second reason is related both to the story and the gameplay. See, when you do finally fight them, the Authority are…actually not that tough. They wear more armor than most enemies and have more advanced weapons and equipment, sure, but fighting them never comes close to the sometimes-desperate scrambles against hordes of mutants in the Dead City, or getting boxed into a corner by the special heavy units of the game’s more colorful bandit factions. This lack of credible threat has a twofold effect; it calls into question how and why the Authority is so feared and competent according to the exposition, but are such pushovers when it comes to combat, and it makes for unsatisfying gameplay when the new, big threat is actually lesser than what has been fought to this point. Since this series is going to be more concerned with story and setting than gameplay, I won’t go further into the mechanics of fighting them other than to say that they aren’t terrible opponents; they just don’t stack up.

Story-wise, your character is of course justified in being such a competent combatant; he is an USMC special operator and has the benefit of enhanced…everything I guess, due to the nanites given to him from the Ark project. But remember what Marshall said? That the Authority is derived from the descendants of those Ark personnel who sided with the rogue general? This means that EVERY member of the Authority had nanites. With access to that technology for so long, how are they not way more powerful than just a bunch of Stormtroopers in heavy armor? These guys should be terrifyingly durable, able to revive in combat like the player can and just generally be so much more dangerous and intelligent foes than they are. When the player is in Authority territory, they should feel like the hunted, not the hunter. Not only is this feeling not present here, it’s barely present anywhere except maybe in the Dead City, with the aforementioned mutant encounters.

Aiding this feeling of anticlimax and hollowness when confronting the villains is…the lack of villains. Let’s go back to Star Wars and the Nazis; Star Wars features the armies of faceless goons in white armor, the Stormtroopers who within the first act of the film have murdered a whole group of Jawas and our protagonist’s family, in addition to openly policing and patrolling the protagonist’s home planet. Already we have much more success establishing their dominance and threat level, but then we get characters like Darth Vader and Grand Moff Tarkin. History of course has the likes of Adolf Hitler himself, Goebbels, Mengele, Himmler and the rest of the gang you’ll see anytime you turn on the History Channel. These names and faces, both real and fictional, give us something focus on and point to when we need to demonstrate why an organization or movement is the villain.

Yet Rage provides nothing. There is not a single villainous character from the Authority that is named and given a story or motivation. At no point is there any catharsis at having bested some smarmy military officer or political official, no villainous monologue or rant to establish someone to hate. No recurring rival who bests you or destroys a town or murders some folk to keep that fire burning inside you until you grin as you finally put a round through his head or blow his car to smithereens. Just an army of faceless goons to shoot. This, of course, is Rage’s primary purpose for existence. Being a game from id Software, it’s supposed to be a good shooter, and it is, but the inclusion of a more elaborate story than usual and all of this effort put into the lore and backstory causes the flaws to be all the more egregious.

There is one faction that has several names and faces to it; the Resistance. And do you know what? I hate them. Every single one of them. Let’s make one thing clear here; I know the Authority are the “bad guys,” and am not trying to argue for them being misunderstood (primarily because there is so little to understand in the first place). What I am saying is that as I was playing this game, I didn’t see a good guy anywhere. For you see, from the moment the player meets them, the Resistance does nothing but use them.

At no point are any other fighters or field personnel seen assisting or just doing their own thing. The Resistance characters exist solely as exposition mouth pieces to get the player from mission to mission, and it irks me. The cherry on top of all of this, however, is their plan. Their ultimate plan is to get the player into the Authority central command facility and activate the remaining Arks so that they can use the Ark survivors as their own personal army. You know, exactly what the Authority did. Now, this could be seen as a clever twist, good storytelling that deals with the grey nature of conflict and warfare, but this game is not nearly that clever, and this plan is only known in the closing few hours of the game, so no time is devoted to exploring these themes. So the player just does everything that everyone tells him to do without question; ironically the only faction that never exerts authority over the player has the word in their name.

A much more interesting story would have seen a main villain, perhaps the rogue general who has prolonged his life using nanite technology, with some underling as a rival for the player, trying to recruit the Ark Survivor once the general realizes he has awakened and pulls up his background. This would give multiple opportunities for the Authority to show up, tracking the player to the various peaceful settlements they go to and, as the story goes on, begin using as bargaining chips for the player’s cooperation. Just when it seems like the player has to give in and work for the bad guys, the Resistance shows up, kicking off the main struggle and the remainder of the game. I’m not asking for a branching story where the morals of each faction must be weighed for a player choice; just some better idea of who is who and why, and what the player’s place is in all of it.

Another variant of this could see the player character actually feeling duty-bound to join the Authority, out of a sense of military and patriotic necessity or just confusion after waking up in such an alien world, compelled to rejoin with whatever remains of his government and military. Perhaps they even come across as not so bad from the start, instead of being blatantly evil. Pull the wool over our eyes, make us think “huh, maybe these guys aren’t going to be fascist assholes.” Either way you go from there is going to be at least somewhat compelling; they either turn out to be dicks after all in which case the player feels betrayed and ashamed for their part in it, or they actually are genuinely trying to help rebuild, painting the Resistance in a poor light instead.

The point is, there are plenty of ways to tell this story that are more satisfying and engrossing while still allowing for id’s special brand of gameplay. Last year’s DOOM is an indication that they have learned from their mistakes, with fantastic storytelling that is surprisingly subtle at times while never getting in the way of what many (including us here at Cultured Vultures) consider to be one of the greatest games of 2016, and certainly one of the best shooters in years.

That’s all there is to say about Rage, really. I do applaud id for trying something new, and I would love to see a continuation of the franchise to expand on the gameplay and world. How do you feel about how the story is handled? Got any ideas about what it could have been? Feel free to share in the comments, I’d love to see what people have to say, and keep an eye out for the second installment in this series, where I’ll be examining a more recent and beloved title that told this type of story just a little bit better.