Imperialism as a Grey Area in Avowed
I have, as implied a few posts ago, been playing Avowed. This is a good game and you should seriously consider playing Avowed! I'm a scholar-wizard who will sometimes switch to an axe that freezes up the bad guys. Said bad guys are currently little mushroom dudes, which I can't say I saw coming, but is working out just fine.
It is a straightforward game, something I've seen people cite both to laud it and complain about it. You have plenty of options in dialogue, but so far at least I do a lot of quest-fulfilling. There are some interesting plot trails lying around, and as the game goes on my party companions are getting more interesting.
Last time I wrote about the game I talked about how pleasantly surprised I was by how much of the Pillars of Eternity lore has stuck with me, and as I move further into the game setting, I am really enjoying where the narrative is going. I'm currently in the game's second main area and - so far - the two areas have different politics and over-arching concerns. There is however hovering over the entire island the problem of the Aedyran Empire, an aggressive imperialist entity that the player-character nominally represents.
The Aedyrans are concerned at the lack of civilization in the Living Lands, and see themselves as the obvious remedy. Within this broad imperialist faction there are a few different approaches. The ambassador, a political animal, is convinced in his beliefs that he holds the lantern in a wild land; representing the other approach is Lodwyn, clearly setting up as the game's main antagonist, effectively the chief of a secret police deployed to this island on the outskirts of empire. As the player character you can in dialogue choose how to align yourself: as a somewhat naive believer in Aedyran goodwill, a condescending supporter of civilized ideas, or a dissenter to your own society.
Overall I think the game handles imperialism rather well: it is mundane, of the world; and it presents an existential threat to an entire group of people. It is both of these things at once. The inquisitor will glower and the ambassador will sigh, united in their exasperation at the unwillingness of the locals to accept colonization as an inevitable reality. The fact that the existing population of the Living Lands is effectively a collection of immigrants bound more by their rejection of a united ethos than anything else muddies the water further. Aedyran claims to bring civilization are strengthened by rational argument, while resistance coils itself around a strong emotional and moral core.
As we are - somehow - discovering all over again, this is often how imperialism works. Yes, the nineteenth century was a special thing and yes, the White Man's Burden was an incredible display of pompousness, entitlement and racism. But today as the Russians kill and kidnap children in Ukraine, Gaza clings to life, and an American president talks about annexing Canada we can see imperialism can be a lot of things at once. It seems counter-intuitive to see a model of military, political and cultural expansion as formidable and preposterous at the same time, but here we are.
In Avowed this all takes place against the background of the little understood threat of the "Dreamscourge", an explicitly magical phenomenon with fairly clear climate crisis undertones. The second area, where I am now, is a place where the flora literally reclaims the land around the fauna. And, of course, mushroom people run wild.
The wrinkles, I think, add greatly to what the game is doing. The people of the Living Lands don't have much of a cultural identity to compare with the Aedyrans according to the Aedyrans, anyway. But they were there, more or less minding their own business until the empire showed up with promises of law and order. Modern nationalist movements and imperial clashes have often been at least this messy. Irish nationalism, forged into a singular ideology in the middle of the nineteenth century, focused on a "Celtic" identity that was real enough, but skipped over a few things. Taiwanese nationalism is centered almost entirely on ethnic Chinese people who migrated to the island in the sixteenth century, but for a host of complicated political reasons struggles to assert much of an independent identity at all.
This is an appealing thing for me in Avowed, where the subjects of the latest Aedyran civilizing mission seem united mostly by a desire to just be left alone. That should be enough. Sure, you can play your character as a confident pioneer of colonization, but even apart from the politics of it you come across as a bit of a jerk. For a game that has been roundly described, either in criticism or admiration, as something far from ground-breaking (PC Gamer described the game as "a little old fashioned") I think we've ended up with something quietly rather interesting. Perhaps it's a sign of how far games are coming. Attempts to make political statements in games can be terribly clumsy. Avowed has a few rather blatant points to make of its own. But I think that when a game built on the idea of a comprehensive and deep backstory delivers on that with a lack of clarity as to exactly what imperialism looks like and what its effects might be, then we are getting somewhere interesting.
Plenty of work remains of course, for the medium as a whole. As I mentioned, although you can roleplay as a steadfast defender of Aedyran interests, the game doesn't really want you to do that and it plays against the usual protagonist hero journey stuff that games struggle to evade. So we are not getting any particularly deep, introspective examinations of what it means to be on the wrong side of history despite having all the money and power. A lot of the best storytelling is being done in the background, with plenty of space in which characters can operate.
I do think that it is largely a good thing. I should point out that the explicit story, and its side quests, have been very good so far. But I've been very pleasantly surprised by how deep Avowed sometimes feels, even as its greatest appeal remains its relatively focused and simple path from start to finish.