Midnight Suns (again) and thinking about history
Lore, or...
I got a pretty bad dose of the flue last week and, when possible, recuperated by continuing life as normally as I could. That is to say, I continued to play a proverbial buttload of Midnight Suns. None of the things I like about the game have faded as I make my way through the final act. The card strategy element still works, the deck building never becomes overwhelming, and the superheroes are all learning that friendship might just be enough to save the world. I am exaggerating, but not by much - this game is big on the cosy vibes of supportive, empowering friendship. Lots of chosen family vibes.
Be aware there are some (very) light spoilers in this post. For Midnight Suns. And for Fallout: New Vegas, kind of? More of that in a while.
One thing Midnight Suns has, and it’s a little funny I didn’t bring this up when I wrote on it last time, is a very very clear sense indeed of its own fiction and its place in-universe. That is to say, the game exists in a fully fleshed out fictional world and relies on knowledge of that world to fully make sense. In the immediate, this means plenty of fan service or Easter eggs. You will visit the birthplace of the Hulk, you will delve quite deeply into Magik’s backstory, and you will work through story beats that rest on existing history between different Ghost Riders.
This is, in short… history. This is how history works. Amassed, sedimented events and dynamics from which the historian extracts some form of intelligible structure and meaning. In Midnight Suns, Wolverine is suddenly throwing stories about Charles Xavier at you that kind of introduce that character but basically rely on a knowledge of who the X-Men are. Or you can just move on. Like when I assign my students a chapter on the Thirty Years’ War and tell them not to get bogged down if they can’t keep track of all the European monarchs the author assumes you learned about in school.
I have been fascinated for years about the ways to think about the histories that games create and perpetuate within themselves. On the one hand this practice is inherently, avowedly ahistorical. At least if one takes the position, as many have and do, that because games demand the player alter the conditions of the setting/story then a game cannot reproduce history. If one has decided historical means “accurate”, in other words. But of course historical entails a lot more than that. What Midnight Suns is doing is very much directly historical: both (overtly) using historical settings or historically influenced settings, and employing the tools of history. The characters in-game record events, construct narratives; and from that extract political power.
Politics is rife in Midnight Suns, and like a lot of things in the game plays out on a micro, largely personal level. The Avengers, the Suns, and a couple of X-Men need to get along. The story is cosmic, and the stakes obvious, but the reality of interaction depends on these histories. More than one character is heavily motivated by an entire life history the player seems expected to know.
A lot of this knowledge comes from comic books, but if you’re well versed in Marvel movies I think you’ll get by just fine. Midnight Suns is able to rely on a spectacular array of historical knowledge out there, in which the game’s fiction lives and swims. The game needs the comic books and to a certain extent the movies to make sense at all. It’s the historical context. Because history is not just stuff that happens, it’s how that stuff fits together.
The other game I have been playing as I slowly try to envisage a digital life beyond hanging out with Magik and Captain America is Obsidian’s Avowed. It’s taking me a while, because I’m beginning to get the sense that Avowed expects a real commitment. Which shouldn’t be shocking: it’s that kind of game. But somewhere on the nexus point between the two I started thinking about this whole internal game history thing more consciously, and I think Avowed got me there.
It’s something I always wanted to dig into more with History Respawned, but never quite cracked. I could never decide how to approach it. What do we think of the internal world built by an Avowed, or an Elder Scrolls, or a Dragon Age? All that lore hanging around the place in journals and notes left out to be collected by eager wanderers? All three of these game series offer generous geopolitical visions: not just of kingdoms and empires but the wars between them and the legacies that follow. Avowed does a very classic fantasy series thing, in taking us to a part of the fictional world that exists - via conversations - in the context of the worlds we have already visited. It is new and old - a trick Elder Scrolls has pulled with each game but probably most famously Skyrim. With Avowed we have an extra layer of fun because some of us have been to this world before in an entirely different player context: the traditional CRPG, with it’s angled view from above and its many many menus and items.
A lot like with Dragon Age: The Veilguard recently, I was pleasantly surprised by how much of the world context I remembered. The Avowed/Pillars of Eternity world is one full of interventionist Gods, and the populace is used to it. Works around it, sometimes. Video game players are conditioned to think of what I just called context as “lore”. Lore certainly works, esepically in games with leather armor and spellbooks (sorry, grimoires). It reeks of fantasy and fiction. But increasingly I think of it simply as history.
Yes, it’s all made up. But nations emerge and fall, cultural movements swell and ebb, and though the player often inhabits a character of implausibly dramatic import they are caught up in bigger events. We are used to talking, in games and in cinema, about physical or sensory experiences that exist within or without the fictional world: diegetic and non-diegetic sound for example. Diegetic being the sounds the character can hear in-world and non-diegetic the sounds we the audience can hear. So, think “Ride of the Valkyries” in Apocalypse Now versus “Layla” in Goodfellas.
So what about history, that although perhaps indebted to real world histories, lives in the world where characters interact with it? Sharing the same mixture of folklore and fantastic tales and privileged texts and canons that we do? How would one begin to differentiate between the two ideas, which for the sake of brevity I’ll label lore and history. Not that I’m wed to it. For me personally, I think so far it comes down to what breaks through, and how it does that. When playing Fallout: New Vegas for example and finally meeting the titular head of Caesar’s Legion and discovering that, yes, they and their men do in fact dress like centurions - or at least what they think centurions dressed like - you are being confronted pretty directly with some honest to God history. Hey, here is some history. We put it in our game, take it.
There are layers beyond it. Is it a critique of Roman dictatorship as opposed to a more pure or acceptable republicanism? Maybe, though that’s not quite what the game is going for. New Vegas wants to expose in-game Caesar’s cruelty and ignorance. You need an existing knowledge of the history - broad, popular conceptions will do just fine - for that to fully work.
Avowed, I would argue, does it differently. The game and its prequels has a well fleshed out cosmology, with gods playing important narrative roles both in absentia and in person. Central to the religious universe in this game is the concept of The Wheel, a broad idea that shows up in lots of human spirituality, arguably most explicitly Buddhism. But Avowed is not trying to make you think of nor is it directly referencing the real-world human religious practice of Buddhism the way New Vegas wants you to refer to an internal reference of a broader sense of Rome. Nor can the game deny you noticing that our characters are now trading in Buddhist-infused topics. So is it lore, or history?
You see, I was right not to fall too in love with the distinction wasn’t I? But although it’s not a great idea to try and draw a hard line - when IS that a good idea? - I feel like a distinction can be made. Something in the neighborhood of diegetic and non-diegetic. But something pretty different too.
More to come, I promise. Hopefully you’ll take that as a good thing and not a threat. Also I want to finally play some Space Trucker.
One last note: I’m probably switching this newsletter to Buttondown soon. Apologies if you use Substack as a reading ecosystem. I don’t personally, I take my newsletters in as emails. I’ve been thinking of this change for some time and for all the good that Substack does I just don’t think I want to support them as a company, in my own small way, anymore. I am told migration is simple so hopefully you won’t even notice.