 Within seconds, you know that chaos beckons. Civilians straddle the side of the road, looking for refuge from the endless conflict. Burnt vestiges of vehicles at once were or dismissed as commonplace practice. And well, bribery is a thing, a behavior so banal that it is now routine. And of course, this is all a juxtapose against the beauty of the African savanna, as animals grey is oblivious to your psychological duress. Things are about to get worse though. Malaria, an impediment we cast as remote and foreign, starts to afflict you. A psychopathic gunrunner threatens you with the utterances of Nietzsche. And then of course, chaos breaks loose. You die, and Far Cry 2 begins. Jamming weapons, malaria, constantly responding checkpoints, Far Cry 2 is a burden to play, but it was all explicitly designed this way. Clint Hawking, the lead designer of the game, was aiming to create our mediums equivalent of Heart of Darkness, gaming's version of the quintessential inversion of moral categories. Heart of Darkness was a novel by Joseph Conrad that tells the story of Charles Marlowe as he travels up the Congo River into the heart of Africa. This of course frames a story of ethical subversion, where what is perceived to be the Dark Continent only reveals the parallels between civilization and the unknown. The Heart of Darkness is not out there in some forsaken land. It lies within. Literary critic Harold Bloom wrote that Heart of Darkness has been analyzed more than any other work of literature due to its unique propensity for ambiguity, but is ostensibly revered because it is about being self-aware, about examining one's own culpability in the creation and perpetuation of evil. The man being searched for in Heart of Darkness is Kurtz, but in Far Cry 2, we are hunting the Jackal, a dealer who enables the civil war to persist, but is somehow deeply reflective about it. However, in this instance, it is not through another that we see depravity and decay, but ostensibly from our own actions. How does this happen though? Well, you fight on both sides of a civil war, viewing violence as transactional and mundane. Us, in all our glory and desire for power fantasies, keep the conflict going and our pursuit to stop it, but this is all irrelevant. We are here for a good time, but the game seems insistent on preventing us from this. Prolonged drives are the wilderness, coupled with the threat of death at every turn, gives the game a sense of dread, and the diagetic map and affordances creates a powerful sense of immersion. You live in this world, and supposedly, become the character of Kurtz. Whether or not Far Cry 2 succeeded at its ambitions is a claim of much dispute. Far Cry 2 is what we can call a reference game, a game so polarizing and so heavily debated that the discussion surrounding it is almost as interesting as the game itself. Clint Hawking notes this fact, and on his blog, he listed some of the many pieces of criticism on the game, from academic journals to steamposts. There are articles on how the depiction of malaria in the game are rooted in existing prejudices about Africa, celebrations of the game as a transformative dynamic storytelling experience, and well, many who appreciate the game for what it was trying to accomplish, but suggest it fails all the same. The game is also criticized for having no civilians, not really having any dramatic impetus to fuel its narrative, and also by hiding any reference to real-world politics shielding itself from genuine discourse around imperialism. Tom Arbitrage argues Far Cry is literary because of its use of dynamic storytelling, like bars of the ancients. The real magic of novels is in the way they tell stories, and that's the same of Far Cry 2. Whilst its plot emerges through a series of key beats, it's the richness of the tales told in between the plot that helps fill out the emotional core of the game. The checkpoints serve an important role. They serve as a reminder of the more futile aspects of the war, constant, senseless violence conducted not by the indigenous people, but by foreign mercenaries in search of money. Then we have those who present a less optimistic tone. Justin Keever suggests Far Cry 2 had three projects, ludonarrative coherence, aestheticizing the unfun, and critiquing imperialism, and it failed at all three of them. He says, I found myself comforted by the familiarity of the gameplay, which doubled the violence's abusive quality and allowed the game to fall into the same breed of mundane pleasure that so many open-world action games seek to achieve. After 25 hours of drama-free slaughter, it became evident that Clint Hawking's solution to his imagined problem of ludonarrative dissonance is to simply remove the narrative. The end result is an intermittently interesting, yet monotonous, thematically shallow game that rode into the canon on the coattails of its ludological doctrine, yet it still fails to provide a system that is intellectually engaging or even totally coherent for the duration of the game's runtime. The search for the heart of darkness of video games might seem as absurd as asking where is our citizen cane, but clearly, something about this question resonates. The first to do this idea was Shadow of the Colossus, which took the symbolism of a boy killing monsters and inverted it. Far Cry 2 was next, and then of course, Spec Ops the line came out, with a more explicit rendition of Heart of Darkness and invoking metafictional devices to point the finger at us. You might notice a theme about the video game appropriation of this literary trope, audience complicity. The idea is that an interactive art form can make us make the choices that lead to ruin. After Spec Ops, the floodgates were seemingly open. Games like Papers, Please, and This War of Might aim to show how circumstance can lead you to doing perverse things. There are pressures one can't control that mediate our behavior, and now the trope is so commonplace, even games that Spec Ops was initially critiquing have subsumed some of this rhetoric. The Heart of Darkness moment in a medium is not just a medium accepting responsibility for itself, but it is a moment that it becomes self-referential. It is aware of itself as constructed text. Clint Hawking is a game designer, but he also thinks quite deeply about games. He coined the term ludonarrative dissonance in his critique of Bioshock's story and fiction, and this perhaps reveals some of his philosophy when designing games. He wants to integrate story and gameplay to express using interactivity. In an interview he gave to Tom Bissell in his book, Extra Lives, he confirms just that, as well as his ambition to find out what is possible in games as a storytelling medium. Hawking has also given talks where he speaks about his philosophy about games more explicitly. In his talk Dynamics, he starts by suggesting that games have yet to understand how they communicate meaning. He then proposes that games create meaning not through mechanics, as many think, not through its aesthetics, but through its dynamics, how we play. For example, Far Cry 2 was actually played differently by different people, including a famous perma-death walkthrough that was documented in painstaking detail. You can play Far Cry 2 as a crazy sandbox, but also ramp up the difficulty and feel the peril of the heart of darkness. Clint makes some other fascinating claims. He says it's not just the dynamics but the fictional context that can alter meanings and how multiplayer games tell a story of their own as a kind of dynamic philosophy between opposing sides. However, his enduring claims that we are all participants in the creation of meaning, a conclusion he came to in another talk of his, the art of games lies in us. However, in a forward he wrote for the book Shooter, he seemed to suggest a starker dividing line between the meaning of multiplayer and single-player games. He states, this framework suggests that all competitive shooters are about one universally important and fundamental thing, while each single-player shooter is about something different. In both sorts of games, we could say that the meaning comes from the gunplay, but in the case of the competitive shooter, it comes from the play, and in the case of the single-player shooter, it comes from the gun. Essentially, the fictional wrapping of a single-player shooter encodes different meanings, which is perhaps why he went to such lengths to simulate the experience of Far Cry 2. Why this insistence on understanding Hawking's philosophy on games? Well, perhaps in here lies a template for what the heart of darkness in games actually entails, and perhaps it comes not from dichotomizing single-player for multiplayer games. Narrative contextualization is important for single-player games, but so too are the dynamics of play, of action. Multiplayer games may be about a dialectic of competing philosophies, but there can also be a context to play, a fiction, if you will, that tells a story. However, the dynamics of single-player games are often ignored, and the fictional context of multiplayer games is less in the magic circle, but more outside of it. The drama is human. Pathologic 2 is a severely underrated game that explores how we are driven to desperation by circumstance. You play as a doctor returning to his hometown after a plague strikes it, and things go from bad to worse. You also have many survival needs to take care of, including hunger, thirst, fatigue, and infection, which can force you into perverse actions to survive. Also, as the days proceed, time keeps going without your say. It's an independent world, and then hyperinflation rears its ugly head. What starts out bad quickly gets worse, as your desperate need to survive can force you into killing people and making unconscionable choices. There are also, unlike Far Cry 2, an array of interesting characters, all with motivations, all of whom present different ambiguous moral conundrums for you. Self-interest, survival, and your values are put into sharp focus, and failure is inevitable. In Pathologic 2, we see a game more committed to its messages than Far Cry 2, and tells a story using systems, all while still having more explicit narrative cues. There is drama to get invested in, it's not just implied. Also, survival mechanics always bring out desperation in players, and where do we see survival mechanics thriving? Yes, multiplayer games. Anyone who has played a multiplayer game where you don't have to kill others knows that the prisoner's dilemma is real, people will shoot you on sight more times than not. And if they do have to kill you, well, they will do so emphatically. It is a war of all against all. Thomas Hobbes was right. Evenline is perhaps the perfect candidate to exemplify all this. It takes place in a persistent world where every resource's mind and real money is often at stake. And how do players behave? Any notions of an anarchic libertarian utopia is washed away. In a world of infinite freedom, people seemingly submit to rules voluntarily to save themselves from the depravity of humanity. This has generated some fascinating stories about theft and stress, and yes, our heart of darkness. Far Cry 2's version of Kurtz, The Jackal, turns out to be more insightful about the nature of evil than First of Glance. He thinks we should quarantine it like a disease and expunge it from this world. The end of the game, which is entitled The Heart of Darkness, requires you to choose one of two options, both of which lead to your death, both of which are about killing every side of the conflict you have been helping fuel thus far. A moment of redemption then, accepted as accomplished by bloodshed. Whatever action you commit to, nothing matters in the end. Violence will spring up again, and humans will keep being humans. That is, unless we design the context differently. I mean, the designers of Journey figured this out. People are basically children in games, and so what did they do? They cut out violence to get people to actually be nice to one another. We may think we need to create our version of The Heart of Darkness, but in fact, it has always existed in gaming. As Clint Hawking said about the art of games, it is in us. Well, the same may be true about The Heart of Darkness.