Dune: Awakening, Dune, and the Fremen
So, I am still playing a ton of Dune: Awakening.
In the last newsletter I briefly mentioned the game (and really, the Dune fictional universe) has this slightly weird relationship to Middle Eastern Islamic/nomadic culture. I described it as a variant of "the odd, quasi-Islamic desert people spirituality stuff that you find in the original novels".
Herbert's original novel does an incredible job of conceptualizing historical process; at first glance this future time seems stuck in an anachronistic feudal space society full of scheming noble houses. And... well, it is that I suppose. But this fictional world exists because of specific events, not least of which is the Butlerian Jihad, which left humanity with the technology to travel through space using specific workarounds, as what we would consider standard computing is absolutely forbidden following a war against ChatGPT "thinking machines".
Prescience is also a major element in Herbert's Dune novels, the ability to see through time. To effectively historicize the future. I don't want to give too much away, because the Dune novels are worth a read if you haven't got to them, but the idea of how to avoid a specific path of events from taking shape becomes central to the books. The very real possibility that structural forces might make avoiding catastrophe impossible also looms - in effect Herbert meditates quite extensively on the interactions between individual action and broader structural context. Which is what modern historians do.
The feudal society of Dune's space future is more than window dressing, but it certainly brings flavor to the novels as well. What, then, of the Fremen, who live in the desert, not savage but certainly not of the court and kanly world of the Harkonnen and Atreides? Who live amidst the land, as barren and arid as it is?
So yes, there is more than a little mid-twentieth century style idealization of people outside the apparently anemic luxury of modern urban life, which does not really leave the Fremen, or the Arabs after whom they are pretty directly based upon, with a lot to be beyond something from the Western imagination. Herbert mostly gets around this, I think (it's open to debate) in a couple of ways. First, he effectively makes the Fremen the "good guys", though this emerges over time. Paul Atreides joins them as a teenager seeking refuge, and as he becomes a man has internalized some of Fremen culture. For that to work, Fremen culture has to be interesting, and self-sustaining. The Fremen work not because they are strange desert people but because their culture makes sense in the context of the world Herbert created.
Secondly, and now I am going a little bit spoilery - though it's not a twist or anything - the elements of Fremen religion most clearly convenient or most egregiously exotic are there because they were put there by the Bene Gesserit as part of their own forward-looking historical experiments. So you get to have your cake and eat it too, to a certain extent. You could roll your eyes at the idea of simple but determined and dangerous desert people accepting the fair-skinned boy as their messiah, but they do this because their ancestors were manipulated into integrating these ideas into their religious culture.
By making Fremen religion just another cultural system, and one that has been manipulated, Herbert I think mostly dodged the potential ick of having quasi-Bedouin driving the narrative by doing Islamic desert nomad-y things. Mostly. In the Dune films Villeneuve does some interesting things to get to some of these concepts with his more limited time with the audience. Chani, along with her more secular wing of Fremen society, appears more aware of the Bene Gesserit manipulations and calls out the more pious among them. The tension between interpretations of fantastic events of the novels is replicated in the films: in a world without coincidence was this the product of millennia of planning or is there an invisible hand at work?
Dune: Awakening... is not doing a lot of that. To be fair, I'm not sure how it could. Despite being an astonishingly solo-friendly MMO, an MMO it remains, so story is always going to be a challenge. I like what the game is doing story-wise, and in its own way it also sidesteps potential weirdness. In Dune: Awakening's alternate timeline the Fremen are absent, the result of a particularly entitled and vulgar genocide. The story leads the player to unpack not so much the intricacies of Fremen culture so much as their apparent origins as interstellar refugees centuries before.
As a result the game's historical themes are more tied to the contrasts between a ravaging, mercantilist empire that enables and emboldens individual entities - that is you, the player; a fitting theme to a survival/crafting game - to take from Arrakis's resources so long as central imperial authority is not questioned. The Fremen represent a type of humanism vanquished by the technological mercantilism and greed of modern forms of state power. All these themes are in the books too, but like Villeneuve's approach Dune: Awakening picks its battles.
I think it's a success overall. How much you would actually like Dune: Awakening depends on the extent to which you're a weird sicko like me who will happily spend quite a lot of time harvesting enough of a particular resource to build a better sandbike. But it's yet another evidence marker that games are at the point now where, whether via developer intent or not, mature and interesting takes on existing historical dynamics are ever more common, and dangerously close to becoming the norm.