Rainbow Six Siege’s Military Fetishization and Violence
First I would like to say some warnings about the content in this article, there will be images that may be disturbing and feature Gun Violence, Police Violence, and Military Violence as well as terrorists attacks from Rainbow Six Siege.
Some have asked me if Rainbow Six Siege even has a story. With a focus on multiplayer pvp in the game people can go through hundreds of hours of game time without ever really having to examine or think about what exactly this Tom Clancy game is saying.
Your first mission, or rather situation, is to go to a training base for the SAS where criminals and military POW’s of unknown enemies are armed. They have been given these weapons by Team Rainbow so that they can serve as live targets and practice for their newest operators in training. There is no subtlety to Rainbow Six Siege, a core theme of the game is the idea that extreme measures need to be taken to deal with uprising terrorist threats in the world.
One thing I will give the game is that while it evokes a lot of stereotypes of terrorists and is quite fear mongering they don’t go for racial, religious, or otherwise persecuted or wrongly maligned groups. These terrorists are nebulous cultists, people who want to see the world destroyed for an unknown reason. There are a lot of ways they could have handled suicide bombers for instance poorly but managed to resist said negative stereotyping.
The story of the game culminates in a terrorist attack on American soil, at Bartlett University located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We get glimpses of the university just prior to the attack. This mission is called Article 5
The terrorists have released deadly chemicals on the university grounds and begin to open fire on students. You watch as their bodies begin to crumple to the ground, dying either from the deadly chemicals or to the gunfire of the terrorists who are mowing them down.
We see and are told about the first responders who arrive with handguns who are unable to do anything to stop this horrid event. A bloody police badge is focused on in one shot as lifeless bodies of officers and students litter the grounds. This is when Team Rainbow is called in to take action with Article 5 of NATO. Members of special forces groups throughout NATO who are in Team Rainbow are brought to stop the terrorist threat at Bartlett U.
This is the darkest moment in the game, as a player you’re forced to walk over the corpses of teenagers and young adults. You must stop the bombs from exploding and destroying the University’s central building and eliminate the enemies, but it’s already too late to really save anyone. This is a common feeling in Siege, that things are hopeless and that your exact reasons can be very flimsy.
For much of Siege a player is doing multiplayer without any real story to it. Rather than counter-terrorists versus terrorists it is members of Team Rainbow going head to head battling over objectives. Why are Team Rainbows planting bombs, holding hostages, and butchering each other? It’s not really something that’s supposed to be examined as it is simply the multiplayer mode. At the same time it can be off putting to some who feel uncomfortable with how loose the game plays with its themes in multiplayer.
Despite all my criticisms in my examination of the game’s politics, I quite enjoy Rainbow Six Siege. It is fantastic fun, but there’s always that darker side to it. It’s glorification of State Violence and the idea that to fight evil one must be willing to do evil themself. Let’s not forget these aren’t made up factions of the military, these are all real military groups with histories of real violence even against their own people.
To get into some of the operators themselves one place to start is with the Operator Videos designed to show off each character. These are designed to be a mixture of fun, disturbing, and somewhat baffling in tone. Things will go from Bandit talking about dealing drugs to Blitz executing enemies with literal dubstep in the background. Each one really has no connection to the other and together it can come off as confusing as to what emotions and thoughts they’re trying to evoke.
This is Smoke, one of the operators that came with the game. He’s highly useful and is a member of the SAS. Yet when you examine what he brings to the table you have to ask, why do the SAS need someone who releases toxic gas upon their targets? In his Operator Video it is hinted it may even be chlorine gas.
Ash for instance was a demolitions expert who worked for the Israeli Defense Force. Now with the FBI, she has taken her skills learned in Israel and brought them to the FBI to engineer further weapons for breaching surfaces. Most of our operators are not good people and come from police states and regimes that enforce through terror of their own making.
When you dig into their backstories there is far more commentary about the world that the game takes place in, which is our world. Where real living people are butchered and oppressed. The FBI, IDF, Spetsnaz, BOPE, and more, have so much blood on their hands and a history of crushing the downtrodden.
How could they not be seen as terrifying given the tools at their disposal. Perhaps the most horrifying to me is Vigil who cannot be caught on any form of digital recording. In a country such as the USA where the police regularly murder their own people, especially black and disabled people, the idea that they would be like ghosts when recorded is horrifying.
Dokkaebi, another Korean operator, can hack into and control security cameras as well as cell phones. Others like the mentioned Bandit use batteries to electrocute and kill. C4 explosives, frag grenades, specialized scopes and weapons, devices that can track footprints, drones with tasers, advanced riot shields, heartbeat trackers, the horror that could be unleashed on a population with such devices and weapons would be catastrophic. Yet in game they are treated more like interesting toys.
Like in many games there’s customization. There are ones intended to keep with the realism of the game while there are many that are designed to be fun and campy. Skeleton masks, clown noses, luchador masks, there’s a lot of ways to play with a goofy loadout of skins and gear. This can add to the enjoyment of the game and be a reminder that it is just a game. But it can also be said the game fetishizes gun violence to a great degree with its treatments and tactical attachments for every gun that lets you personalize how you’ll be killing in game.
Team Rainbow exist outside of the law, with much information about them redacted and kept a secret. Their tools and weapons far exceed what any police force should have, while the world is a dark place full of strife lines should be drawn and Team Rainbow clearly cross those lines. The game’s world is a reactionary’s wet dream yet so much of the actual gameplay experience is heavily divorced from that.
It’s a game with a thriving community, so there are quite a lot of memes and bits of artwork. These take what would be dark subjects figures and make them into jokes and even adorable cats. This disconnect can be eerie and is not exclusive to Rainbow Six fans as this can be common with fans of many pieces of media with dark themes.
For a game with as troubling of topics and views as this I can’t help but enjoy it. Siege is a very solid shooter and is one of the best I’ve ever played. It is even a game that is quite diverse. We see characters from Brazil, China, Korea, Japan, Poland, Italy, Spain, Germany, and more. But is that always a good thing, should it be lauded when the subject material and individuals in question are very questionable? It reminds me of liberalism and democratic ideas of that having women as generals would just solve all problems of the military.
In short I’m not sure if Rainbow Six Siege really tells the story it means to tell, and what story it does show us is a fetishistic and fascist view of the world. With that in mind most of it is completely avoidable and Siege otherwise is a fantastic FPS game where many people can see themselves represented as a character in game. Siege is something uneasy.
