One Hour Game Crit: The Map is not the Territory
XCOM 2 is harder than XCOM: Enemy Unknown, or even Enemy Within, because there are more variables. It turns out that enemies are not what we should be scared of but progression, in fact progress itself. The titular enemies of the first of the next-gen XCOM games and its expansion, both external and internal, are easy to predict. The maps in which they live are knowable and unchanging. A cartographers’ rigid dream. A western landscape across which it is your squads’ manifest destiny to progress; because you are a god unto them and you know the landscape as if it was one that you placed yourself.
My therapist has asked me to write again — I haven’t written really for a while and I can feel it aching. Like a loss. She asked me to write free association but I can’t. I need structure. A landscape to explore. So this is the compromise; writing about writing about playing about being. Playing XCOM is like writing. Ironman, where there is no safety net of a save file, is free association. Every word that tumbles out, every syllable that your fingers trace across the keyboard a no-take-backs risk that could invite disaster, destruction, the end of everything that has been wrought to date.
XCOM 2 introduces squad concealment at the beginning of each mission. It is a period of freedom, of safety, before the world is wrenched back to its reality of violence and death and pain. It seems like this should make the game easier, but it doesn’t. It allows the game to be harder, more brutal, less forgiving. Squander the safety of concealment, emerge from your cover too soon and unprepared, and the reprisal will be swift and it will be unforgiving.
Where the placement of enemies in XCOM enemy Unknown was always known, where the triggering of them inadvertently was usually survivable, in XCOM 2 they are as hidden as you are. They move about the map as you do; they are inserted at whim. The map has become a territory, that which you can never truly know. Every movement you make into its depths could be the mistake that precipitates a total party kill. Each caress of fingers across the keyboard a no-take-backs risk that could invite disaster, destruction, the end of everything that has been wrought to date.
In Ironman games there is no going back. There is only forward. I switched off Vahlen and her monstrous operating table but I still can’t win. There is already too much pain in my past to run from, the spectre of Nazism and the atrocities it performed in the name of keeping those it deemed worthy alive, and I don’t need her to remind me. The operation that saved my father was pioneered on bloodied tables in secret camps. But for XCOM 2 this is just a game, a safe space to explore revulsion at what humans do in the name of survival of the chosen.
XCOM 2 takes as its starting point the idea that the player lost XCOM Enemy Unknown. The justification is that Enemy Unknown is too difficult, but that does not cover it. The process of winning Enemy Unknown is one of losing humanity — the victory is Vahlen’s alone. The player has to lose for there to be a humanity worth saving in the sequel. Progress as an end is what corrupts the player in Enemy Unknown, and it is what Advent finally and fully represents in XCOM 2. Vahlen’s alien rulers and Shen’s rogue AI are echoes of failure from the original game, they show us how much worse the world would have been had we won.
And so we go only forward; planning out each move in advance, weighing every risk, trying not to let it crumble. Because the past is cut off. There is no going back, no reworking what we did before. There is no road behind to look back on, because when you look back it telescopes into nothing. Probability tells us that we must disregard patterns, economics that we must ignore sunk costs.
Every head I threw up until now doesn’t make it more likely that the next throw will be a tail. That I cared about something before doesn’t make it worth caring about in the future. Each dead soldier is an investment, not a loss. It is the process that is important, not the start or the end. We come from nothing, and are heading towards nothing, but we exist in the world. The territory is what makes it real. XCOM 2 knows this. It starts with failure, ends with the petulant, paranoid destruction of a world and offers nothing substantial to take its place. It encapsulates progress for the sake only of progress; tech trees and research paths and enhancements and maps. Filled out, completed, cast aside for the next.
It is running scared. As am I.
