How do you find joy in crime during times like these?
This post discusses the Nick Bounty series of video games, including their plots. I highly recommend you play them or watch a playthrough, if only for the ridiculously drawn-out dad jokes. The first two are free!
Links (PC/Mac): Nick Bounty 1 | Nick Bounty 2 | Nick Bounty 3
I hestitate to say it, but I think 2020 will change us fundamentally as a species.
What gave it away? Perhaps the fact more than 18 million people are infected with a disease we still barely know anything about? Was it record unemployment numbers worldwide, threatening the collapse of entire industries? Or maybe what’s forecast to be the worst global recession since WWII?
Personally, I think it’s the rash of people cultivating sourdough starters and watching mediocre shows on Netflix. Even as we’re told to change our habits to prevent the spread of disease, we’ve changed our habits elsewhere. We’re doing things differently to stay sane.
The escapist entertainment we turn to during times of duress reveals a lot about our psyche. Looking for an escape, metaphorically curling up, as the world around us teeters out of control — it’s something all of us have done during this hellscape of a year. And whether or not we realize it, that desire for an outlet reflects on us more than we’d like.
How is entertainment during a global pandemic supposed to be a reckoning for humanity, I hear you cry? I could merely point you to the art and culture that came out of previous pandemics. But the moment we’re living in isn’t just defined by the plague, or what comes out of it.
‘Escapism’ itself means we can escape at all. Are we not threatened with eviction, losing our job, or imminent infection? Are we safe enough, and free enough, in our home environments to find the time to disappear into another world?
Above all else, are we free to live a life without being falsely accused of a crime and executed by an uncaring state? This isn’t just a problem for those living in the West, but around the world.
That is why the question of escapism should be our central moment of reckoning right now. Your musings about the latest ill-considered reality show signifies something far more than an appetite for trashy television.
Reflecting on your media consumption during a global pandemic, and a worldwide uprising against police brutality and income inequality, can be as revealing about yourself as any other form of self-reflection. A meditation on mundanity, even amongst the madness.
Like, why are so many people (including me) playing a game where you direct plagues during a global pandemic?! That’s a fascinating quirk of human psyche that I think we should examine. And frankly, it’s something I think more people should be doing in this moment — to all the pieces of media they’re consuming.
Much like most of my recommendations, however, I doubt this one will catch on. Arguing for media literacy is far too common-sense for people to take it up widely. But I nonetheless took it upon myself and decided to reflect on one of my longest-held interests: crime fiction and media.
What better time to do so than now, when the role of policing is under more scrutiny than ever? Most of us privileged enough to not face daily interaction with an oppressive state have (some reluctantly, if you can believe) had to reassess what policing and incarceration do to our society.
There have been some short-term changes out of this reassessment, though: Cops and Live PD have been cancelled, for a start, and some cities have moved to change their relationships with their enforcers of state power. Whether this will lead to any long-term justice, I remain skeptical.
(As an aside: my favourite consequence of the Black Lives Matter movement has been an Indian ‘skin whitening’ cream changing its name. Totally the point of the protests, why not!)
Advocating for long-term justice, or even examining the socioeconomic causes of wrongdoing, is something you often don’t come across in popular crime fiction. And as someone who has almost been raised on it (hell, I even used to watch Cops as a teenager!) I knew I wanted to examine why that is, and what my love of crime fiction says about me.
In typical fashion, I decided to do that using a tiny comedy detective game.
Where’s the context, pal?
Why do we love crime so much? I’m not the only one to ponder this question. Of course, the most fundamental reason is the one underpinning escapism in general — transporting you into another world. But why go to a world filled with bloodshed and dread at all?
There are all sorts of hypotheses. Voyeurism, and the sick thrill of seeing bad things done to others. Revelling in violence, that most primal of human instincts. Identifying with the humanity, fictional or not, that leads another to bend the rules of law.
I can only speak for myself. What appealed to me the most, raised as I was on detective fiction, was the simplicity and resolution. All the threads neatly tied up, the bad guy out of the picture, the good guy explaining why it happened. No before, no after — just a snapshot of a situation getting itself resolved.
When I say raised on detective fiction, I mean it. My parents are both obsessives of the genre — my mother loves Agatha Christie (she pronounces the last name with a soft ‘t’ sound, for some reason) and my father loves Erle Stanley Gardner and his Perry Mason series. There was always a crime show on TV. It was almost a family gene.
My drug of choice was Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s Feluda series, which were novelettas compiled into two giant omnibuses that I used to read obsessively. There was something appealing to me even back then about shorter, one-shot stories. I liked Doyle and Christie better when they wrote shorter stories (I’ve yet to get to The Hound of the Baskervilles, as scandalous as that may sound!), I liked procedural police shows better than tightly plotted long-term dramas, and films that weren’t part of huge series. The Feluda series filled this need expertly when I was growing up.
As books themselves, I think the Feluda books make for great crime fiction, especially if you’re bored of the Western canon. For someone from India, it was heartening even then to see settings familiar to me depicted so beautifully. There are some great mysteries in those short novels.
But, of course, real life isn’t so simple. There is a before and an after to each story, including the criminals we read about every day. Criminals don’t commit crime (whether it be drugs, murder, or robbery) because they’re uniquely bad people with a grudge, but usually because of social circumstances and hardship. And when they’re caught, it never ends well, trapped as they are in a circle of criminality. Let alone the fact that many laws, including those prohibiting drugs, are often not based in what is just or correct.
Whether in India or in the West, incarceration and policing always has a detrimental effect on minority communities most of all. Working in tandem with states that need to create deprivation to justify their existence, crime and justice are often absent of what we would term morality. Where’s the justice in that?
Crime media never tends to recognize this reality. The most visible style of crime media recently has to be the true crime podcast, which is uniquely geared to provide these lurid anecdotes devoid of context or consequence. Even more ‘scientific’ cop shows, seemingly acknowledging the institutional failings of regular policing, end up being nothing more than propaganda.
There is often a tacit understanding in most popular crime media that the system is broken (see the numerous stories centered around police corruption and the ‘bad cop’ archetype), but never an endorsement of what must come next, and the popular struggle that must inevitably ensue. Indeed, how much of Doyle, Christie, or even Ray acknowledged the circumstances of the eras they were written in, and the massive social upheaval that was happening then?
This, of course, is a very broad brush to paint with. Not every story has to shoot for the stars. An exploration of human emotion centered around crime is sometimes as valuable as a broad scope examining institutions. Nonetheless, the idea of enjoying crime–the aesthetics, the stories, whatever–takes on a completely different connotation when you realize what crime and justice really mean in real life.
But, for me, the realization that I loved the binary morality of crime media helped me reflect upon a related obsession — that medium so intrinsically tied to the binary, ones and zeros: video games.
Exaggeration and deconstruction
If binary morality (good/bad) is all too common in crime media, the fabric of video games is almost composed of it. The stereotypical video game is one where you, the hero, defeat a villain by jumping on their head, after all. (An aside: the fact video game villains are called ‘bosses’ has much revolutionary potential.) The very nature of programming, code composed of bits and bytes, means it’s far too easy to make things black-and-white.
As Imran Khan notes in Kotaku, video games’ depiction of police suffers because of this. If a destructive status quo is served by most crime media’s inability to directly confront carceral states, video games are most guilty of openly uplifting this status quo, considering how they’re marketed and made.
Detective and mystery video games, a subset of this, occupy a weird niche. I’m as obsessed with them as I am with other crime media. I’ve played some of the classics: Gabriel Knight, Phoenix Wright, Danganronpa. Recently, two of the games that have stuck with me are mystery games: Return of the Obra Dinn and Hypnospace Outlaw. I grew up playing Eagle Eye Mysteries and the fantastic indie series Ben Jordan: Paranormal Investigator. (Seriously, I’ve played far too many of these things…)
As detective puzzles go, though, they’re pretty awful. Mark Brown has a great video about this, but detective games tend to solve themselves, leaving not too much deduction up to the player. There are more inventive ones, like Obra Dinn and the upcoming Paradise Killer, that are trying to change that. By and large, though, detective games are little more than stories that play themselves out with the prodding of the player.
So what do these stories say? Do any of them manage to address the larger institutions of incarceration and justice? Most of the high-budget efforts, such as LA Noire and the Sherlock Holmes games, either directly uplift the status quo or refuse to address it at all. A few manage to critique these constructs— Ace Attorney and bird-tastic homage Aviary Attorney both have extended meditations on justice and morality, all the more surprising given how goofy they otherwise are.
That’s a common theme with games in general. The genre’s roots play into fantasy and exaggeration. Most highly-regarded detective games (such as Gabriel Knight or LA Noire) revel in excess. The first Gabriel Knight has you fighting a voodoo cult in New Orleans, with Mark Hamill playing a fat detective, for crying out loud! (I love it, please give me more)
It’s fair to say that the bar for video games, thematically, is far lower than any other form of media generally, but especially so when it comes to something as overbearing as the justice system. Expecting larger examination of institutions in games, especially mainstream ones, is a very far-fetched idea even for this indie aficionado.
And that brings me to the game that brought about my reckoning with my love for crime fiction. I bought it one month after #BlackLivesMatter protests erupted in the United States (reminder: they still continue amid constant police brutality) and spread to the rest of the world: Nick Bounty and the Dame with the Blue Chewed Shoe, by Mark Darin and Pinhead Games.
It’s the latest in the Nick Bounty series of comedy games, Kickstarted after Darin was laid off from Telltale Games. I played the first two growing up. Buying the third during this current moment was very odd.
Now, I’m not about to place the huge baggage of expectations I just laid on crime fiction onto this game. It would be a disservice to what it seeks to achieve, which is to be a charming weird game revelling in noir tropes. It’s very much in the old adventure game tradition, tongue being stuck firmly in cheek and puzzles that are logical only in video-game-land. It’s also another mystery game that solves itself (Nick Bounty even has an amazing mail-order crime lab to help him analyze evidence, which really hammers the nail on the head), so it’s not particularly complicated either.
But I thought about the tropes the game so revels in. In addition to trying to tackle the tough detective game mantle, Nick Bounty 3 also tries to be a comedy game, another ever-poisoned chalice. Jeff Gerstmann of Giant Bomb explains why that is when he talks about the Saints Row series of action games — it’s so difficult to get comic timing right in an interactive medium, let alone stand out in this regard within games at large, exaggerated as they are by default. Most comedy games tend to fall flat on their face as a result.
Can you exaggerate even the most set-in of detective story tropes? Playing Nick Bounty during this current time, where I began to question the legitimacy of crime media in general (as I so exhaustively laid out), I began to wonder. There are so many tropes in detective media, especially noir, I needn’t even mention: the femme fatale, the brooding detective violent for the sake of violence, and the corrupt cops doing their duty as normal. I’m not one to deride tropes in general (I’m no CinemaSins), fully aware they need to be understood in context. And indeed, noir is perhaps the one subgenre of detective fiction most aware of the time it was written in. But making fun of them is another thing, especially in a game.
But I think Nick Bounty 3 does that because it specifically doesn’t have lofty goals, ironically enough. You don’t have to play by the rules of parody when your boundaries are in another solar system. Bounty is, much like a lot of adventure game protagonists, a complete tool. He isn’t even a Private I — rather, he’s a ‘Public M’ class detective whose two previous cases involved counterfeit crabs and a fake ceramic goat. When even the most basic cornerstones of the genre, such as the ‘private eye’ pun, are mocked, you know the games certainly don’t leave anything to chance.
In this third game, he’s trying to tackle a ‘real’ case: a murder of a woman in a playground, which the in-game police somehow deem a suicide despite her being completely naked and with no marks on her. Now that’s some satire.
I’ll highlight one character to demonstrate the game’s irreverence more than anything: Emily Blackwater, a tough as nails ex-cop who doesn’t follow the rules and only works alone.
Blackwater is one of your three choices for a partner in this game. If you’re immediately questioning how someone who only works alone is seeking to be a partner for a bad detective, as I was, her explanation is decidedly curt. She says she doesn’t owe Bounty an explanation, because he isn’t her ‘good-for-nothing desk jockey of a captain’. I mean, fair enough.
Throughout the various ups and downs of this game (such as going to a dog food company where the victim worked, where one of her human co-workers is a dog food taster), Blackwater continously takes phone calls and doesn’t pay attention to the case. Bounty routinely debases himself, not picking up that ‘Max Fakename’ is a fake name, for instance (he pronounces it Fah-kay-nam-ay), while this tough ex-cop stands in the background. It’s quite comical. The other possible companions, a slovenly old man called Walter Walterman and a wisecracking psychic called Zachary Forsythe, also complement Bounty in many ways.
Towards the end, after many twists and turns, the pressure ramps up. The ultimate villain, Max, has Bounty’s partner hostage in a James-Bond-style laser trap. After he goes there and the inevitable confrontation occurs (I won’t spoil too much, but the denouement was so ridiculous I was left open-mouthed), Bounty is left to rescue his partner.
Proper tense stuff, right? He finds a control panel, arcane and without any references to help him. Desparate, he calls the conveniently located support number to find…
…that Emily Blackwater is moonlighting as a technical support agent, explaining her numerous absences throughout the bulk of the game. Eventually, she helps herself out of her absurd predicament by directing Bounty through disarming the laser (not after some more twists, though), and then Bounty manages to chase the villain and catch him.
I found this plot device genius, as stupid as it is on its face. The ‘rogue cop’ stereotype is one that’s eerily placed right now, living in a reality where police brutality is beamed to our faces each and every day. To make this rogue cop fallible in this most human of ways not only trips up the stereotype, it also singlehandedly exposes how the importance of ‘the job’ for cops is but a self-serving myth. It reiterated something to me that many are only realizing now, that police are intrinsically linked to a system of destructive power whatever altruistic goals they claim they aspire to. Mocking them in this absurd way is really the only way you could do it. There are some other great bits of satire in the game, too, which I’ll leave for you to enjoy.
That’s not to say the games are perfect. In the second game, the femme fatale trope is taken to a ridiculous extent — the villain of the game is a crazy ‘feminist’ who wishes to kill all men using poisoned salt for…reasons? Even in the third game, some of the language Blackwater uses (such as ‘We need to hit the streets for suspects!’) made me cringe given the loaded nature of such terms. The sexist nature of noir fiction also comes through with some typically macho language towards the ‘broads’ and ‘dames’ of Bounty’s world, along with some classic Orientalism in the second game: a Chinese-looking shopkeeper with a long ‘deadly’ moustache. They can’t all be hits, even though the intense exaggeration means these jokes aren’t taken seriously even in-game.
The games’ creators, and most of the audience, would argue that the games aren’t meant for such deep analysis, and are merely comedic distractions. I’d disagree, for the same reasons I mentioned at the top of this piece: critiquing and examining the art we consume says a lot about us and the world around us. I love the Nick Bounty games, because they’re comedic distractions! But to pretend that they’re infallible would be to pretend that there are only good and bad things in this world, and no in-betweens.
And such oversimplification only leads to the world we see around us, where people refuse to engage with the sources of power in a deeply unequal society. Playing The Dame with the Blue Chewed Shoe reiterated this for me, even though there is a clear-cut villain (whose motivations I will only say are related to jealousy of pets. Yes, really). Engaging with tropes and stereotypes in detective fiction, through this tiny game, helped me contextualize our current moment more than anything else instead of serving as a welcome distraction. I doubt most popular crime media will be that for me anymore, which I welcome.
Life in noir is black-and-white, real life isn’t. The moment we’re in, as I spoke about on CiTR 101.9 FM, is showing us what’s possible in this world, as everything teeters on an edge. We should aspire for one where racial and social justice comes to those who are most affected by deprivation, deprivation enforced by those who claim to enforce ‘justice’ right now. And the art we make should fight for that future.
