Quick Thoughts on 12 Minutes

12 Minutes is a new time-loop thriller point-and-click adventure game by the A24 of video games, Annapurna Interactive. Annapurna’s biggest success is probably The Outer Wilds, another timeloop game which deftly avoids the absolute worst part of timeloop stories—having to explain to people you’re in a timeloop over and over again—by letting the player character jump into a rocket ship and blast off into space.

Now, I’m all for new ways to tell stories in video games but the stories have to be worth telling.

The concept is ambitious, sure, but every element of its execution is poor. Right out of the gate, the decision to have McAvoy and Ridley, two actors from the UK, speak in American accents is baffling. There is no reason this game can’t be set in London or have the protagonists be English expats. The writing is stilted, awkward, and peppered with terms of endearment like "babe" instead of actual character connections and histories. There seems to have been close to zero voice direction: Ridley and McAvoy are fine actors, and there are multiple takes where their line reads are just plain wrong, something even an amateur director should have corrected.

You’re supposed to have a voyeuristic connection to these characters, but the animations are laughably stilted and awkward, the models frequently clip through each other, and the models themselves are mannequin-like and Ridley’s character (named simply "Wife" which is a whole other thing) has a distractingly perfect ass. Maybe that’s part of the point, maybe this is supposed to be some commentary on the objectification of women & voyeurism, but the writing is so bad it’s not worth investing in.

There is a moment during a rainstorm where you can look out a window. McAvoy exclaims "Heavy rain" and my god if that’s a David Cage reference, well, it tells you all you need to know about the quality of the storytelling here.

Amazon's removal of Indigenous people from New World is genocide

This is an expansion of a comment thread I wrote on Polygon. The comments of the person I was responding to have been removed for the sake of their privacy and my writing has been adjusted because of this.

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New World is an upcoming MMO (think World of Warcraft) by Amazon Game Studios. Due to the cancellation of two other projects, it will be the first title the studio releases.

Yes, that Amazon.

According to the game’s webpage, in New World players will:

“Explore a thrilling, open-world MMO filled with danger and opportunity where you’ll forge a new destiny for yourself as an adventurer shipwrecked on the supernatural island of Aeternum. Endless opportunities to fight, forage, and forge await you among the island’s wilderness and ruins. Channel supernatural forces or wield deadly weapons in a classless, real-time combat system, and fight alone, with a small team, or in massed armies for PvE and PvP battles—the choices are all yours.”

— Amazon Game Studios

Pretty standard MMO-stuff, nothing to see here. But here’s how the game looks:

Do these outfits and setting remind you of a particular time in history?
Do you notice something missing from an image of people in wide brimmed hats, steel armor, and feathers battling in front of a wooden pallisade in a verdant green field, in a game called New World?

From Colin Campbell of Polygon’s initial preview of the title in 2019:

“There are no indigenous peoples. And according to developer Amazon Game Studios, it’s not really about invasion or America.

Except ... except there are human-like creatures on this Atlantic shoreline. They are shuffling zombies, variously called “Corrupted,” or “Withered.” They don’t have identifiable cultures, but they are extremely hostile to settlers. They aren’t portrayed like, say, the Wampanoag peoples that the Pilgrims encountered, or the Algonquian-speaking civilizations of pre-invasion Virginia.

The game’s lore says they are “former settlers,” who have been corrupted by the island.”

— Colin Campbell, Polygon

I have major issues with games celebrating the "Age of Exploration" from a purely European perspective, as much as I enjoy the visual aesthetic and storytelling potential of the era.

The erasure of Indigenous peoples from history and in pop culture is genocide. I don’t care that New World is set on "a magical island with no native life" if the people exploring that magical island look, dress, act, and use the weaponry of the soldiers who systematically murdered, displaced, and conquered the original peoples of the Americas and Caribbean. You’re still putting on the historical costume of a conqueror and by removing any mention of indigenous people, players get to experience the power fantasy of a conquerer without that darned colonial guilt.

The fact that the player is battling "unholy, corrupted" settlers doesn’t make it better: I’m sure the Catholic Church and other organizations used similar terminology to describe European settlers who attempted to co-exist with Indigenous peoples.

My comments were met with the expected dismissals: that I was taking things too seriously, that I must be someone who looks for things to be offended by, that no, actually, this isn’t literally genocide because this game isn’t literally murdering someone.

Now, If you are really interested in a discussion of modern cultural genocide, this is a good place to start.

I’m not saying Amazon, or the developers of this video game, are committing genocide themselves, but they are participating in cultural and historical erasure which is a continuation of the colonial genocide perpetrated by European settlers on Native Americans and Indigenous Canadians which exists today through systemic racism and the discovery of mass graves on the site of former Canadian residential school grounds among many other examples.

I remember seeing an argument when Greedfall came out: “The combat is fun, so who cares about the rest?” Greedfall a French-developed RPG where the player takes control of a colonialist settler whose job is to balance the needs of multiple factions in colonizing a New World which did have Indigenous peoples, they were just based on the Celtic colonization by the British, even though the settlers themselves were clearly modelled after the English, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, and Catholic Church. Greedfall does attempt some nuance and makes an admirable attempt at creating a mid-period BioWare RPG (Like Mass Effect or Dragon Age) in a very compelling setting, but the role of the main character leaves a bad taste in the mouth unlike the one left by Commander Shepard or Hawke.

You don’t have to care about this if you don’t want to. But I do. My intention isn’t to make you feel bad or to say the people who worked on this video game are bad people who don’t deserve their jobs or for their work to be appreciated by the people who will buy it.

As I said above, someone suggested I was someone who “looks for things to be offended by” and… they’re kinda right. I do look for ways to examine the things I take for granted and I do question my assumptions about history, culture, and the imagery I absorbed through my education. I’m not offended by New World—I think the last five years of public discourse have eradicated the meaning of that word—but, as I said above, I personally have a problem with using only three of the four pillars of the Age of Exploration: early gunpowder and single-edged steel weapons, multiple-mast sailing ships, and fabulous coats paired with funny mustaches, while completely ignoring the fourth pillar of that setting: the subjugation, eradication, and assimilation of Indigenous peoples.

Should our education be separate from our entertainment? I don’t think it should. A common argument is “We can’t have games about periods in history without mentioning the bad parts of those periods” and we mostly don’t! WW2 games and modern warfare games have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to address civilian deaths and the often manufactured or fraudulent reasons for war. And there has been an examination of a game called "Civilization" being solely about a race to settling cities and building roads.

If you only wish to engage with games as escapist entertainment, that’s fine. You can watchBand of Brothers just for the fight scenes. But I can’t just consume media without considering the consequences anymore.