In 2012, Electronic Arts published the first-person shooter Syndicate intended as a sort of
franchise reboot of the 1993 title of the same name. Developed by Starbreeze
Studios, the game shares many mechanical similarities with their prior efforts,
chiefly The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape
From Butcher Bay.
The story was written by Richard Morgan, perhaps best known
as the author of Altered Carbon, a
futuristic cyberpunk-ian tale where human consciousness is stored on a stack
and the surrounding body is often regarded as only so much "meat". So
devalued is human life (at least the aspects of life not contained on a chip)
in the novel that murder not damaging the stacks of the victims is referred to
as "organic damage".
The world of Syndicate
is a cyberpunk dystopia where multinational mega-corporations (the so-called
Syndicates), unfettered by such pesky considerations as anti-trust laws come to
dominate and carve up the globe, becoming in effect new breeds of empires,
complete with their own military might and consumer bases. Into this world
Morgan seems a natural fit, but ultimately the story of Syndicate doesn't quite work, and I will attempt to articulate why.
The acknowledgement that the player is evil and is aligned
with evil, complements the game-play, which emphasizes gunplay and gore. In
fact in the early-going it is a refreshing change of pace from the bulk of
first-person shooters. The genre is littered with game-play that consistently
devalues human life, that speaks of nihilism and that rewards the player for
satisfying his or her most base instincts. Often games will delight in the gore
and mayhem spewed forth from the player's weapon, as if the body parts and
debris were part of some macabre circus act. But grafted on top of that game-play
is often a narrative justification for the carnage, an assurance that the
player is the "Good Guy", and a glossing over of the real
consequences of the player's actions that crosses over the insincere and
borders on sinister. In Syndicate there
is no pretense, what the player is doing is evil, is meant to be understood as
evil, and yet... it doesn't want you to stop playing.
The game is broken up into chapters referred to as
milestones. At the end of each milestone you are treated to a summary of your
performance. "Are you meeting your targets?" the cold white text asks
against the stark background while statistics for accuracy, number of
headshots, and time taken for completion are assembled with the same clinical
presentation we expect from a company's quarterly report. Perfect.
But then the game throws this all away - a bold move - and
it doesn't quite pay off. Kilo switches sides and decides to take on his
corporate overlords. For me this change doesn't work because so little time is
invested in establishing Kilo as a character - he is an empty shell, a perfect
vessel for nihilistic aggression but hardly for making moralistic judgments -
and because the shift occurs so abruptly and is dealt with so quickly. Further
it is undermined by the fact that the game-play remains unchanged after the
switch, the only difference being the colour of the uniforms of your enemies.
The narrative seems to want you to think that you are now working for the
"Good Guys" and here it falls into the same trap of so many other
first-person games, offering up weak justification for ostensibly evil acts.
Kilo is provided little in the way of motivation. He discovers that he was
abducted by EuroCorp when he was only eighteen months old, his parents
murdered, and trained and indoctrinated to become an agent. While some measure
of hatred against EuroCorp is understandable, ultimately, what else does Kilo
have? He never knew his family, has no family, and what's done is done. Kilo is
a killer through and through, and from the world set up in Syndicate, it's not a terrible position to be in, it certainly
seems preferable to being an aimless consumer in a society that regards them as
little more than cattle. This revelation seems insufficient to turn Kilo. It's
perhaps hinted that Dr. Lily Drawl, the EuroCorp scientist who is instrumental
in turning Kilo, may have implanted some modifications into Kilo to facilitate
his switch, in which case his changing sides isn't really of his own volition,
but this is not given space to make it a clear justification.
Games can be a tricky medium for expressing a story.
Disconnect can occur wherever there is disagreement between the game that is
being played and the story that is being told. Problems are mitigated when the
story is kept simple. In most games the player starts at some condition and
gradually grows in competence, ascending a sort of hierarchy within the initial
framework. The initial condition is the one for which there is the most leeway,
since it serves as a filter. If someone is willing to play your game, chances are
they are willing to accept the premise with which the game starts. From a
narrative perspective, this makes "turns" difficult. In Syndicate, the player starts as an agent
for an evil corporation. But then in Syndicate
all corporations are evil, so what alternative is there? The player acquires
skill and proficiency in the game's systems, taking on increasingly challenging
threats, "ascending" through the ranks of EuroCorp. But then the
player switches sides. Why? The system was working for us. The picture of a
dystopia painted by the game may impress upon the player of the need for
change, but does it make an impression on Kilo? Having been raised in this
world, it's unclear that Kilo should react to the status quo with any sort of
revulsion, and with every game-play interaction he and the player reinforce
acceptance of that status. OK, then,
says the player, I'm a bad guy and
evidently I'm OK with that. When Kilo switches sides it seems borne of a
strange narrative necessity rather than any internal conflict building within
him. Changing sides changes the game. Except the game doesn't change.
Syndicate
struggles with its desire to ultimately be optimistic, to have a positive
outcome (or rather the possibility of one) within the confines of its dystopia.
If the player was situated as a member of the resistance from the start then
the game would maintain more narrative consistency, but this would feel
decidedly un-Syndicate like as the
original game had you playing as a syndicate executive sending agents out on
missions. The game could have maintained the protagonists role as villain and
continued to ask the player to reflect on the world as he or she participated
in it. Perhaps there was a fear that this would be seen as an endorsement of
the status quo as portrayed in Syndicate?
This could be bluntly addressed by having the player lose in the end, driving
home the point that you were playing as the villain all along. More subtle
options would also be possible, although their effectiveness would naturally
depend upon their execution. Then there is the path chosen by the game, whereby
the main character switches sides. This isn't an inherently bad tack to take,
but it is a difficult one to get right. The game is relentlessly focused on
action and the moments of a slower pace and of exposition are brief. There is
little in the way of game-play outside of the core combat loop. This leads to
the narrative development needed to properly sell "the turn" not
taking place - the game demands action. More exposition could help the
narrative, but since Syndicate's
narrative bites are bereft of game-play this would doubtless have been poorly
received.
Around the time Kilo turns, Dr. Drawl explains that she
developed the DART-6 chip in an attempt to make the Syndicates more human. She
then admits that she was mistaken. This could have been leveraged as a way to
help sell Kilo's turn. Throughout the game it is established that the chip is
powered by adrenaline. Periodic "empathy spikes" or a similar device
could have been deployed along the missions to communicate to the player the
idea that Kilo is maybe not entirely OK with doing his job. Dr. Drawl's
statement would then shed light on Kilo's turn, letting the player know that
his use of this new experimental chip has been working to establish some
humanity in him. Kilo could be aware of this, but rather than resent the fact
that he was manipulated, he might indeed appreciate his newfound humanity, and
so Kilo and the player could once again be in sync.
There is one moment where Kilo is given the barest hint of a
character. Near the end, before confronting top executive Jack Denham, Kilo
must take on Agent Merit, his former mentor and companion throughout much of
the early game. As he beats Merit to a pulp with his fists, the camera jumps
out of first-person and becomes third-person for the first time in the game*,
representing this passionate loss of control. Kilo stops, blood pooling at the
base of Merit's lifeless skull, and holds his hands up to cover his face,
remorseful for what he has done. So Kilo does feel something! He can feel
something! Keep in mind that throughout the game Kilo has been voiceless, and
until this point never seen. Therefore what we know of his personality can only
be inferred through his actions. His actions are limited by the game-play to
killing. To be fair to the game this isn't entirely true. Between certain
milestones the game presents a few single sentence phrases intended to be in
Kilo's voice. These provide a very small window into his thinking. As well,
during the chapter select screen the description for each milestone is written
in Kilo's voice, so again some personality can perhaps be inferred. The chapter
select screen is not at all necessary though in a regular linear campaign
play-through and so it is a simple affair to miss this light exposition
entirely. But this small amount of self-reflection is not enough to
retroactively provide context for the rest of Kilo's story. In fact to some
extent it further confuses Kilo's motivation. Kilo takes on his own mentor at
an emotional cost to himself on behalf of the little people who we are not sure
why he has decided to side with.
*Actually the game switches to a third-person point-of-view
earlier in the game for the introduction of the first boss. However, Kilo is
never seen in this perspective, it is used to show what is occurring beyond
Kilo's field of vision and is not repeated for future boss encounters, making
it feel like a remnant from an earlier revision of the game. The game also
exits Kilo's point-of-view again, going to the first-person perspective of an
unnamed Agent (possibly Merit but it isn't said) to re-enact a memory of Kilo's
parents being murdered and him being taken as a child.
There is perhaps a more complex and possibly more charitable
reading of Syndicate's story, one that is less rote. Here Dr. Drawl is
understood as the villain, someone seeking to destroy order. She manipulates
Kilo, through the use of an implant that she designed with possible
undocumented side-effects, through a revenge motivation with a fabricated
memory of Denham having his parents killed and taking him as a child, and
through sexual enticement via the nebulous but ever-present implicit
possibility dangled between them. At the end Dr. Drawl admits that even after
he was on her side she was lying to Kilo in order to motivate him to go after
Denham. Ultimately she hands Kilo a gun and asks what he'll do now that he is
free. However, earlier in the game the player's attempt to execute Drawl is met
with a counter-attack by the DART subsystem owing to safety protocols. Dr.
Drawl is not seen to put herself needlessly in danger, so even as she hands
Kilo a gun we have no reason to think that she is not still in control. The
player cannot control Kilo to aim the gun at Drawl, it seems the thought does
not even occur to him, cannot occur to him, so complete is her control over his
psyche. In this view Kilo's actions become explicable. He has not been granted
more humanity and come to side with the "Good Guys", he is simply
being manipulated against his will. That he is blind to this manipulation only
speaks to its completeness. Then Kilo's sudden turn is also more
understandable, the revenge plot coupled with the unstated promise of sex in
combination with unseen cybernetic machinations is enough to flip the switch in
Kilo's brain. And it really is just that - a switch. He swaps from being a
slave of the EuroCorp Syndicate to being a slave of Dr. Drawl. Kilo's murder of
his former mentor now takes on an extra dimension of sadness, since truly Kilo
has no internal reason for his actions. He betrays the only family he has ever
known, simply because he is a puppet and cannot do anything else. In the end
the Cayman Global Syndicate has gone to war with EuroCorp, orchestrated by misinformation
by Drawl and her associates. The Spire, EuroCorp's once proud towering
proclamation of their might is burning, and Kilo? Just another tool to be
called upon and then disposed of by the nefarious Dr. Drawl.
Shortly after being freed from captivity by Kilo, Drawl says
to him: "Denham took your life once. Are you going to let him take it again? It's him or US?" Us? What 'us' is she talking about? Her
resistance movement? But how could that yet include Kilo, who moments before
she was unsure of whether he was going to help her or kill her? Again, the
implied sex, the carrot of possible sexual union dangled over Kilo. Dr. Drawl's
teasing of a potential relationship is continual. In Kilo's twisted psyche he
may even see this as reasonable, having just removed the nearest obstacle in
such a relationship by murdering (or rather precipitating the suicide of) her
ex-boyfriend Kris aka the terrorist "Logos".
At the end of the first mission, Lily Drawl initiates and
completes a chip-to-chip transfer to Kilo. It's not clear what exactly this
means, but it is obviously something that she doesn't want anyone to know
about, as she dismisses her subordinates in order to do it and is caught off
guard when Jack Denham and Agent
Merit arrive suddenly on the scene.
It's worth pointing out that within the story the player
starts on the same page as Kilo. The first mission is Kilo's first real
mission, as Agent Merit informs
Kilo how things will be different from training. He also notes that civilians
are expendable, something that presumably would not be worth noting if Kilo
were previously acquainted with it. As such, when the player sees Agent Merit
ruthlessly murdering civilians, this is the first time Kilo has seen such
atrocities committed as well. So rather than being able to justify such actions
based on past experience, Kilo presumably relies on some chip conditioning from
his DART-6 implant. That the conditioning does not go exactly as EuroCorp might
expect may be due to the chip-to-chip transfer that Dr. Drawl initiates.
Near the end of the game Denham asks Kilo why he has turned
against EuroCorp. He asks if it was for Lily Drawl and refers to her as a
"DownZone whore". The language is harsh and seems unwarranted, as if
it serves only to crystallize in our minds the villainy of Jack Denham. But
perhaps the accusation is not without merit. Drawl uses the promise of sex to
entice and manipulate, just the sort of behaviour one expects from a whore.
More importantly, she violates her business contract with EuroCorp, in the
world of Syndicate, a crime
equivalent to the violation of a social contract. She fraternizes with Gary
Chang, her counterpart at a rival syndicate - sleeping with the enemy - she
subverts EuroCorp by compromising its asset (Kilo) with an unsanctioned
chip-to-chip transfer - breach of trust - and she uses that asset against
EuroCorp through manipulation without emotion or hesitation. But a whore is
different from a backstabbing traitor, a whore sells her own body, a kind of
self-betrayal. To Denham, Lily's self is tied up with the syndicate, so the
pejorative appears to apply.
It might be tempting to criticize Syndicate for putting too much of the story at its margins.
Information about the world and subsequently the plot is relayed through
business cards (essentially emails) that must be picked up throughout levels as
a collectible, propaganda (again sought out as collectibles) and through
information drops received over the course of the game. This information must
be read in the game's menu, taking one away from the action and the immediacy
of "the game". One might even try to say that these additional pieces
of information should be unnecessary for an understanding of the narrative. But
Syndicate is a piece of cyberpunk
fiction, a key component of which is of an ugly sometimes hidden reality, where
finding the truth requires careful scrutiny and searching to see through the
lies and misinformation. A plot that is delivered in part in an interactive
way, requiring the active seeking out by the user, one that exists "on the
margins" feeds into Syndicate's
cyberpunk sleeve. As such, every piece of propaganda, every email, every
incidental environmental detail should be considered in an analysis of Syndicate's narrative. No element should
be dismissed as too obscure for inclusion. It follows also that a proper
appreciation for the narrative can only be discerned when all elements are
included in the analysis - a straightforward analysis will lead to
unsatisfactory answers.
Kilo's Own Words:
I am a weapon, command me.
Evaluate, adapt, destroy.
You are in my way.
Don't lose her.
Why did she help me?
Why do they keep fighting?
I am not a machine.
I am the future.
I am a weapon, command me.
Evaluate, adapt, destroy.
You are in my way.
Don't lose her.
Why did she help me?
Why do they keep fighting?
I am not a machine.
I am the future.
Addenda
Agitprop
It's worth noting that throughout the game Kilo can find and identify pieces of Syndicate propaganda. Looking at this propaganda through the DART-6 overlay will reveal some anti-Syndicate message but also pro-Syndicate corporate BS. It could be reasoned that the anti-Syndicate messaging influences Kilo's thinking and is part of the machinery used to cause him to turn. It's worth noting however that this propaganda must be sought out by the player and can be completely avoided during a playthrough. In my first playthrough of the game I identified a paltry 4 out of 60 pieces of propaganda, so it hardly registered in my mind as helping to justify Kilo's change of heart. The bulk of the propaganda is pro-Syndicate as well, so why Kilo would be more heavily influenced by the anti-Syndicate propaganda is not clear.
Question
What exactly is Jack Denham doing in the Downzone at the end of the first mission? For that matter, what is Dr. Drawl doing there? This is a dangerous area and in extremely close proximity to non-EuroCorp territory given the firefights Kilo just encounters. While a nearby extraction point makes sense, it also makes sense that Kilo would be taken to a safer area for a mission debriefing. A high-level executive descending to a hotly contested Downzone area simply to check up on one of his agents (regardless of how promising) seems needlessly reckless. This seems to be a concession made to keep the pace up, without due consideration for logistics. Alternatively, one could argue that it demonstrates how Denham is not afraid to get his hands dirty and the urgency of Kilo's next mission. There seems to be no armed EuroCorp presence protecting this location, so again it seems reckless.
Voice-acting
While Rosario Dawson delivers the voice-over equivalent of a resting bitch face as Dr. Lily Drawl, Brian Cox and Michael Wincott slide naturally into their characters, who while remaining flat also convey an easy believability within the fiction. Overall the performances are good, and the voice-work is supplemented by animations that while somewhat stilted help to sell things through a combination of gestures and subtle ticks. But the real star here is Kath Soucie, who voices the DART-6 chip, the voice in Kilo's head. In concert with some voice manipulation, the DART-6 manages to come across alternately as considerate and sinister, and entirely corporate. By contrast the voice-acting in the co-op portion of the game falls into the nails on a chalkboard category. One of the playable characters, Akuma, has a voice that seems to be an amateur cross between Batman The Animated Series' Harley Quinn and The Simpsons' Lunch Lady Doris. The lines that the characters spout are no better. I can't recall such bad voice-work in a AAA multi-player first-person shooter since Unreal Tournament III <shudders>.
Voiceless protagonist
Despite not imbuing Kilo with a voice, the game manages to convey a certain personality simply through the character animations as viewed through the first-person. Kilo never seems in a hurry, his movements are slow and deliberate. Chain-locks over fences are torn apart by a swift yank from a single hand. Melee takedowns are brutal and precise. While it takes some adjustment to be comfortable with Kilo's slowness especially in comparison to the skittishness of the enemies (a disparity that seems more pronounced on the HARD difficulty), it ends up speaking to his power. Kilo is an agent, the hand of the syndicate, the 'Man', he moves with cruel efficiency and merciless purpose. The impression is built up of a programmed killer, an instrument to be wielded. Kilo says as much, as one of the early inter-mission interior dialogues says: "I am a weapon, command me." Unfortunately, while this type of characterization works so well for selling the image of a brutal psychopath, it works against the idea of Kilo choosing to switch sides.
Feel of Evil
Syndicate does a great job of making you feel like a cyborg. The heads-up display is a clinical UI (albeit a little too large on screen) that communicates a believable amount of information. Environmental information is overlaid within the space in an augmented reality setup. Floating tags identify weapons that can be picked up, others advertise ammunition for weapons that Kilo is carrying, while magazine and overall ammo counts for firearms appear floating over the weapons themselves when wielded. It's all explicable within the fiction of the game. You feel like Robocop, Agent Smith, Darth Vader.
References
Starbreeze Studios (2012). Syndicate [Video game]. Electronic Arts.
Bullfrog Productions and Ocean Software (1993). Syndicate [Video game]. Electronic Arts.
Starbreeze Studios and Tigon Studios (2004). The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from
Butcher Bay [Video game]. Vivendi Universal Games.
Morgan, Richard K. (2002) Altered Carbon. London, UK: Victor Gollancz Ltd.
The Matrix. (1999)
Directed by the Wachowskis [Film]. Burbank, Calif: Warner Bros. Pictures.
