The Broken Promises at the Heart of Robocop: Rogue City
There's more than one way to promise ("I promise to...", "I'm saying the truth, I promise", etc.), but at the heart of every promise is an rejoinder to trust a statement: that it is true and that despite the passage of time, its strength will perdure. It's important to distinguish this trust from another type of mental surety: faith.
You see, faith deals in securities outside of itself: it doesn't ask us so much to trust in itself as a statement, but rather to believe the existence of that which the statement is pointing to, and PRECISELY despite any (absence of) proof (to the contrary). Come to think of it, it's a bit like gaslighting.
Pencil Provision: Gaslighting is different from genuine relationship disagreement, which is both common and important in relationships. Gaslighting is distinct in that: 1) one partner is consistently listening and considering the other partner's perspective; 2) one partner is consistently negating the other's perception, insisting that they are wrong, or telling them that their emotional reaction is irrational or dysfunctional. (Wikipedia.)
On the other hand, a promise asks us to believe in ITSELF as a statement regardless of content. Faith is asking someone to believe in God; a promise is asking someone to believe in itself the promise, the man-made self-surety. Is this not striking, how a promise comes to be as a self-created guarantor of itself? It's not WHAT I'm promising which really matters when I promise; what really matters is that my word, the promise itself, is the sole guarantor of its reality.
And the reality of a promise can only be a mutualized, collective affair: even if you promise something to yourself, it requires a certain degree of schizophrenia for a person to accept their own promise like they would the promise of another individual. Because promises, like gifts, cannot just be given: they must also be taken. I have to "accept" your offer of a promise; and I have to accept that while you may be trustworthy to some degree or other, the promise itself could not be purer. In this sense, it is less you that I trust, but YOUR WORD.
Isn't it peculiar, that a word should come to such a degree of power? Sure, it comes coming from the relationship between (at least) two individuals, so it's a collective source of power. Still, here you are with a word that acquires a life of its own: people will point to it and direct their behavior in accordance with it. A promise thus isn't just a question of trust: it's a question of PUBLIC trust, in the social game between the source of the promise and its legitimizer.
Robocop, Servitor of the Public Trust?
While playing Robocop: Rogue City, I got hooked on the concept of his three prime directives: protect the innocent, uphold the law, and serve the public trust. Serve the public trust. It was interesting to me that, while a promise might be the progenitor of public trust, there might also be a third party involved: the one(s) who would, so to speak, enable the execution of the promise, safeguard its provisions, optimize the obligations to be exchanged. Courts already play a big role in the protection of contractual obligations, but even more interesting is the case of the "trustees" in the particular kind of contracts which are simply called "trusts".
Pencil provision: In the English common law tradition, the party who entrusts the property is known as the "settlor", the party to whom the property is entrusted is known as the "trustee", the party for whose benefit the property is entrusted is known as the "beneficiary", and the entrusted property itself is known as the "corpus" or "trust property". [...] Trusts have existed since Roman times and have become one of the most important innovations in property law. [...] An owner placing property into trust turns over part of their bundle of rights to the trustee, separating the property's legal ownership and control from its equitable ownership and benefits. This may be done for tax reasons or to control the property and its benefits if the settlor is absent, incapacitated, or deceased. Testamentary trusts may be created in wills, defining how money and property will be handled for children or other beneficiaries. (Wikipedia.)
The problems/challenges of trusts are very much in-theme with the problems and challenges of any promise: loyalty, impartiality, transparency, staying accountable. Biggest problem of all, which the Robocop game desperately tries to weave into (we'll come back to this later): conflict of interest. As mentioned before, it's up to the trustee, the one who's been given control of the "thing", to meet the standards imposed by a properly created and executed promise. This is where Robocop as a character and Robocop as a game share a lot of the same qualities and faults.
The interesting thing about Robocop as a character and as a computer game is that, while his directive to protect the innocent is relatively straightforward (and so is the fundamental gameplay loop of "shooting baddies"), his two other directives butt heads with each other and introduce all kinds of complications which ultimately hearken back to the very real-life problems between what is legal, and what is good: in one instance, you catch a graffiti artist red-handed and have to decide whether to issue him a hefty fine (in the context of an extremely impoverished, corporate-dominated Detroit) or let him off with a stern warning. If you opt for the fine, the game informs that you have "upheld the law"; if you let him go with a warning, the game rather suggests that you have "served the public trust".
You could stop here, stay at an instinctual understanding along the lines of "more or less severe enforcement of the law" and continue with your day. But I can't. Why is there an opposition between the law and the public trust? Why does upholding the law not serve the public trust and, conversely, why would serving the public trust ignore or, worse, break the law? There is a simple answer, and it goes along the lines of "OCP-owned Detroit (OCP is the mega-corporation of that setting) has changed the laws so that they benefit themselves at the expense of everybody else". Boom, problem solved, we can move on. But, actually, we can't, because the equally simple objection to this answer, which renders it entirely unsatisfying is: "what's stopping us from saying that the laws benefiting OCP at the expense of everybody else are good, just, equitable and indeed an expression of the public trust&good?"
And it JUST SO HAPPENS that this is at the heart of every important debate in the dominant public discourse of our 21st century: there's always a side arguing strongly that lower taxation, less regulation and more power to corporations and private property is actually the good thing to do. It's been coming up in intellectual discourse since at least the advent of the Industrial Revolution, and its most simple expression, going back to the beginning of human societies, is the argument that some people should eat what other people produce, for an infinite myriad of reasons ranging from religion to slavery.
In this sense, there is a strong tension between the law and the public trust that can’t be taken for granted: it ISN’T obvious that the law and the public trust are simple complimentary aspects of the same thing. It CAN be interpreted like this, BUT it also can and is interpreted in a different way: that the law is a kind of necessary evil to keep the peace, but that the public trust, the real good, is what human beings actually strive towards without having the tools, knowledge or wisdom to always achieve it, hence why the law is necessary. THIS is what Robocop and the game are shipping as their interpretation, and it oozes through the numerous instances where the game hints at the conflict of interest and the very detrimental effects of having a police department owned by a corporation.
Despite all the shortcoming which we'll shortly be getting at, this is what makes Robocop as a game so interesting: you're not only a cop supposed to serve everyone despite being part of a department legally owned by a cutthroat corporation, you're also a super-cop that has over-the-top abilities of crime-fighting, AND you're a flawed amalgamation of robot and human; in short, a perfect plot device for ambiguous stories concerning what makes humans what they are, how far they can go without losing that humanity, and what it might mean to uphold the law in a world where it is increasingly obvious how it goes against the public trust of a society: that all should benefit to some extent from the social contract of living together and obeying rules. In terms of game design, you have so many degrees of liberty not only in the situations you can present to a player, but also in the choices the player can and has to make to advance the story you're telling.
The game leans into that in some respects, but it falls short of actually capitalizing on its fundamental game design tenet to the degree to which, ultimately, you are doing the same thing for 10+ hours. Structurally, it's a gory corridor shooter with a few, granted, fun enemy types and weapons; it's then dressed up in the Robocop clothes, progressing inside a story loosely involving the themes of a near-future corporate dystopia; and even though the story and writing don't actually have much to say except some well-timed jokes and quips, the game then grafts upon all of this the smorgasbord of the "standard" features expected in a 2023 game, such as the RPG elements of side quests, dialogue options, character skill and weapon customizations. But these are nothing more than decorations serving to distract from being a pretty, and pretty poor, DOOM clone, in gameplay terms.
Falling Short of Getting Real
Rogue City is a very pretty game indeed, to the degree to which you can actually run its very intensive graphical rendering: sporting brand-spanking-new Unreal 5 engine features, such as new ways to reflect light (lumen) and construct geometry (nanite), it makes for a very pleasing visual proposition. But I can't help but think of Radiohead's Fake Plastic Trees song:
She looks like the real thing
She tastes like the real thing
My fake plastic love
But I can't help the feeling
I could blow through the ceiling
If I just turn and run
The game abounds in the superficial appearance of depth and polish:
- While the rendering pipeline is very impressive, the audio mixing and spatial sound is very poorly executed, such as grenades being barely audible if you step through an open doorway to another room, even though you seem to be just one meter away from it.
- The story never goes anywhere with the premise of a flawed, confused and malfunction-prone Robocop, suffering from remembrance episodes or weaknesses "inherent to human nature". How come he never doubts himself as to what is the right thing to do (is he immune to ideology because material interests don't apply to him insofar as he has become physically almost indestructible or what)? Is he rather completely blinded by a different ideology and rather incapable of seizing the subtleties between rightful ownership and abuse of power? the game never goes as far these questions, because the instances that could prop up such discussions are not there for themselves, as a promise might be *wink wink*, but rather as dressing for the actual experience of shooting baddies).
- The shooting itself isn't that fleshed out, with specific instances of destructible environments such as stone pillars which don't make sense if wooden crates are invincible props.
Which is a real shame, because the game has moments of design brilliance that flash during one-time instances of what are almost mini-games:
- In one instance, the city atmosphere of night-time Detroit is a brilliant contrast between the old industrial heritage (the waterfront, industrial buildings, pretty little parks) and the filth and decrepitude of the humans that inhabit it and the institutions that have infiltrated it (arcades selling drugs on the side, movie sets involving prostitution, and a few others).
- Roleplaying as a real cop at the precinct public desk, receiving complaints, choosing to give fines or allow minor crimes, accepting to look into disappearances, etc.
- The prominence of drugs and gun violence around crime, and its links with class violence.
- The relationship between regular cops and Robocop, including his partner, and how they negotiate the differences that separate them (most are admiring, but some are envious or skeptical).
These are all one-time instances that come and go, and they happen especially during the first half of the game, while the latter half rather introduces new enemy types and some minor shooting gallery mechanics. In fact, the shooting range mini-game is the only one that you actually partake in multiple times, and although the pretexts for that mostly make sense, they mar the novelty by the fact of only repeating this particular instance. It's not repetition per se which is bad, and live service games are omnipresent to remind you of that, but some variety goes a long way in making it tolerable or fun. "Variety is the spice of life", they say…
In this sense, and in conclusion, Rogue City is a game of broken promises. Although it hints at the experience and complexity of a game that renders the fantasy of being Robocop in all of his complexity, and of tackling the question of why law and public interest can oppose each other so strongly, most of the work actually went into designing enough levels for its corridor-shooter structure, while trying to make it look as good as possible. Nowhere is this more apparent than in my experience of actually going through the motions of this game: the game makes you choose often and all of these choices promise to lead somewhere, to a payoff where you see the more or less proximate consequences of those choices, not just their immediate reaction, but the promise never pays off; I stopped playing after the Bank level, because I had become convinced I wasn't going to be shown anything else, except some other environment in which to mow down criminals with my overpowered gun. In my eyes, Rogue City chose to uphold the law of the current video game market, rather than serve the public trust of its audience.
Beyond the Horizon of Rogue City
For the next few write-ups, I want to explore one of the tenets of the current laws of modern game design: the open world. Rogue City does indeed have some areas which incorporate elements of "the open world", such as side quests, hidden locations and collectibles. And most games today seem obliged to cram as many open-world design elements as their budget allows, for whatever reason (such as player expectations, risk-averse profit strategies, etc.). But I also think the open world is EXACTLY the kind of game design which stimulates the imagination and brings a certain promise of enjoyment that everybody can understand: to explore, to face ever greater challenges, to leave your mark, to lose yourself in the details you can interface with; it's certainly neither chance nor coincidence that open worlds as game paradigms have had critical and commercial success, no matter how superficial or not their execution might prove to be, individually.
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