I Hope You Get To Live Your Entire Life As A Human Being
I thought this was going to be a review of my time with Santa Ragione's Horses, the controversial art game recently banned from Steam and the Epic Store. To some extent, this will be that but after playing the game I think the game itself is maybe not too interesting when compared to the situation surrounding it.
which is to say that a game about pressures of authoritarianism is fine but watching forces outside of the right align with captial and champion the decision to ban it from storefronts is perhaps even more telling than anything in the game. nominally lefitist gamers or vaguely progressive academics have found ways to decide that this game is simply something that should be dismissed. in doing so they align with the forces of mass capital and censorship, painting a picture of How This So Of Thing Is Allowed To Happen.
Horses is a violent game. it is a game about participating in torture and slavery. it is a game that deploys sexual violence with mixed clarity. but I think it deserves to exist and so watching as certain voices have emerged to contend that worthiness has been frustrating. so I played it and we're gonna talk about it.
but we're also gonna talk about how we talk about games...
In Horses, players control Anselmo. He is a young man working on a farm for two weeks who discovers early on that the horses on the farm are actually person who have been captured and forced to wear horse masks. They are, according to the farmer, mostly people caught having sex in the woods of his property and throughout the game Anselmo (and therefore the player) will not only tend to regular farm tasks but also the discipline of these horses.
This involves a variety of situations. In some cases, the farmer flogs the horses and asks you to clean their wounds. After one horses is found fornicating with another, in what's perhaps the game's mode defining scene of violence, Anselmo must hold the offending horse's legs open while the farmer castrates him. Afterwards, the player must quickly stitch the wound. Later, this horse refuses to work in the field and while you can try offering carrots to help them move, you are eventually forced to strike them with a club.
this is not every day. some days you wake up, set wood on a stump and chop some logs for the fire. maybe you prepare some food for the dog. functionally, which is to say in the act of play, Horses is a sort of first-person adventure game mixed with a farm sim. click item, click on thing to use itself with. sometimes this is normal, in other moments this mundane user experience is used to enact violence on the horses.
Beyond these acts that the player participates in, there's a variety of sexual violences that are implied. A sick female horse is tended to by a doctor who eventually takes her into a shed where he seems to rape her to death. this is not a kind game but the violence is at lest deployed with some kind of purpose. as players gain familiarity with the routine on the farm, learning the layout and how to do tasks, they similarly acclimate to the presence of extreme violence.
some critics, like megan farokhmanesh at Wired, have questioned if this violence (particularly the gendered sexual violence) is worth having. others have adopted a different approach; this is a game that invites comparison to a work like Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom and so the comparison goes "Well, there was worse in that movie" or perhaps even "there's worse stuff in many films" and so this violence, while not glossed over, is placed into a wider art context. many mediums have works more gratuitous that Horses! and the presentation of the violence, while gross, is not as explicit.
where you fall on the spectrum here is a personal decision. farokhmanesh is correct to say that much of Horses violence is deployed casually and perhaps without care. on the other hand, that casual nature is arguably the point. this is a story about slavery and sex and denigration. it is about the ways in which powerful people turn their enemies into something other than human beings.
does it all work? I'm unsure. the violence is neither explicit enough to truly shock and the content so broadly metaphorical that Horses message about authoritarian powers and how they cow us into accepting their grosses decisions is perhaps so wide reaching that it lacks a certain bite. regardless, this is a game which has been banned from many store fronts that contain games which often render up scenes of violence that are more detailed, more graphically raw than anything that exists in Horses. is it good? bad? that might not matter considering what else you can find on Steam with a cursory glance.
and yet, the conversation about the game is revealing. many people who are not of the right wing have found ways to decide that yes this game is somehow EXCEPTIONAL to all the other violent stories our medium has and contrived many ways to justify aligning with storefronts in their decision making. and this, I think is maybe more interesting that Horses itself as the game is a rather flat work.
One scene at the center of the discussion is one that Santa Ragione themselves calls attention to in explaining why they think Steam initially turned down the game. A few days into the story, after we've had time to be around the horses and understand the situation, a businessman and his daughter arrive at the farm.
the horses are stood before the pair, auction-like, and the daugther chooses one to ride. the player guides the horse (holding it by the reins) around a corral as the daughter rides upon its back. in the original version of the game, the daughter was supposedly a child. this has been changed in the final release where she is an adult.
but (i think correctly) Santa Ragione identified this scene as one that drew the ire of Valve. even now, as a scene that doesn't exist it seems to be used by some folks to justify Horses removal from the store. through a game of telephone, the story has spread that this is a game of pornography and perhaps even one with an underage character in a scene. this is not the truth but it has led some folks, even some who previously rallied to defend "problematic" games during their struggles with payment processors like Visa, which led to a decision at the time to delist NSFW content. in that case, itchio was out of line but here? well, maybe Valve's in the right! Or so the thinking goes.
and yet, I think this scene is perhaps the most important in the entire game insofar as what is happening in the text. The daughter terlls Anselmo that she KNOWS these horses are people. this is not merely some avant-garde absurdist twist; it is textual that the horses are human beings. they are slaves. she knows this. her father knows it. the priest that visits the farm knows. but it's okay.
you see, these people are degenerates! and maybe even if they don't don't deserve this treatment, they have dangerous ideas. we're never told why those ideas are but it doesn't matter. they are different, they are "others" and because of that... because of the implied deviancy... it is okay for them to be mistreated. likewise, although games are art... because Horses has become to some folks an example of some kind of degenerate art... we shouldn't worry about the storefront bans.
"I hope you get to live your entire live as a human being!" the daughter says. It is chilling, a threat without even meaning it to be one. For the moment, Anselmo is a "human being" in the eyes of the farmer but there is a suggestion that this could change. For whatever reason, he could become something else. Not a human being. And therefore subject to the same violence as all the other horses.
for many of us, this is threat we live with. to be trans in america is to constantly skirt the line between "human being" and something else, for instance. many people in my life still see my humanity but there's always the threat that could stop. that the propaganda will take hold and I will not get to live my life as a human being. so it goes to people of color, people with mental health issues. and more.
you are not always assured of your status as a human being. and in a less drastic example of this arbitrariness... you are not always assured that the thing you create, the art you make will be seen as art.
for many people, Horses is not art. and the discussions about its worthiness have, in some ways, the same tone as the discussions about the worthiness of someone's status as "human being." and it is in this that I think Horses has proved interesting. more so than anything that happens inside the game.
A curious blip in this conversation was the re-emergence of a voice whose weight in game's related discussions had certainly waned over the last decade: Ian Bogost. Known best for making Cow Clicker and embodying the kind of presence one might expect from someone wrapped in the warm cloak of academia, Bogost popped his head up first to debate market factors surrounding Horses ban before falling back to one of his tried and true lines of inquiry. that the game was, unlike games he made and he liked, not a serious work.
"Q-Up and Candy Crush, say, are more serious works of game than Horses (which seems fine and even innocuous!) or whatever embarrassing anime RPG trash is on Steam or Nintendo EShop," he said, referencing the clever competitive coin-flipping game
Many of us rolled our eyes but I am going to talk about it briefly because in relation to Horses I do think Bogost's bait is worth taking for what it reveals about the situation surrounding the game. First, I'm gonna do a very briefly history lesson. In the 2010s, there was a growing emergence of alt games and particularly queer games that heralded the growth of alternate critics.
I was one of them so I feel qualified to talk about this but we're talking writers like Lana Polanksy, Stephen Beirne, and in more mainstreams spaces this is where someone like Austin Walker emerges as well. It was a varied coalition of writers who had a holistic and emotionally-driven approach to their criticism. games as experiences synthesized by players living in a context similarly made by people living in their own circumstances.
In response to this, Bogost and some other tenured sorts start to write op-ed pieces extolling the power of games systems. Games, to people like Bogost and New York University Game Center's Frank Lantz, are only valuable for the systems they contain and the results of those systems. They embark in their writings to dismiss "childish make-believe, imaginary dragons, badly written dialogue." They stress games as *processes* and the only valuable narratives that emerge come from the collision of these processes. you don't need characters, you need mechanisms.
note that in the context of the 2010s what Bogost was doing and to some extent Lantz was doing was slipping briefly out of comfortable tenured spaces to essentially deride games made by marginalized creators and criticism made by women, blacks, and queers. we pushed back because why the hell wouldn't we?
This leads to what some people call "The Debate That Never Took Place" wherein many of those young alt-writers formulate writing in opposition to what's being written ultimately by comfortable white men with good jobs. Not all this writing exists but it is where terms like "ludocentrism" and "ludofundamentalism" are coined. Ways of describing a mode of thinking, born primarily from academia, which the opposition bloc finds too narrow to describe what games are doing and, importantly, why audiences enjoy them.
All this fades away as a gaming is eaten by things like Roblox completely rebuilds the landscape but Bogost seems to have held onto that position and I think it's interesting to consider and talk about re: Horses because something we failed to grapple with at the time of The Debate That Never Happened" was how ludocentrism is a chiefly neoliberal idea. one which easily aligns with censorship.
It's not a big leap to go from "games are only systems" to "markets will fix all of society's problems." We all understood this maybe but didn't quite attack for the foolishness it is. Because this urge, this impulse ironically aligns Bogost (a neoliberal professor) with forces of censorship and to some extent fascism. funny how that works.
Time and time again over the years when formalists talk about their derision towards games stories, this comes hand in hand with what is frankly a kind of racism. this is particularly true with Bogost, who often slips into orientalist jabs.
Bogost cannot help, for instance, tossing a jab at JRPGs often and I think it's important to identify that for what it is. Bogost doesn't simply believe that only certain kinds of games are games; he also believes that only certain kinds of developers can make those games.
there are people and there are fuckin' horses, y 'know?
developers are people like him or Lantz. They are men, they are white, and they are American. This makes them better designers, smart people, and therefore The Only Real Designers. Atlantic writers and such.
(the difference here BTW is that Lantz at least makes good games.)
understanding his opposition to Horses becomes an easier task viewed in this light. He's not still simply opposed to story in games; he fundamentally believes on some innate level that the artists at Santa Ragione are not worth the default kind of respect that he gives to certain peers and implicitly deserved to have their game banned.
They made the wrong kind of game! is it even a game? This emotional garbage? Couldn't this have been a spreadsheet?
Perhaps it could have but I think that playing Horses also reveals the ways in which that could have hobbled the story. You could totally make a suitable fascistic exercise in Excel but this does remove you from certain pressures that make Horses effective. proximity to the violence being done, proximity to potential danger that the farmer might enact on Anselmo. sound, music, movement. the theater of it all, that mix of sickening shock and comedy. breath in your ears.
the undeniable complicity of holding someone down as they are tortured. holding the button, waiting for your accomplice to bring the sheers close. close enough to cut it's coming soon just hold the button don't let him squirm at least make it clean. that's not easily turned into an abstract system. to hold a button in order to hold a prisoner down creates a more active and unambiguous participation in Horses' violence which serves the text.
and so in discounting these things —for instance, our multi-day bonding time with Linda the Horse (a character in a story!) shifting as we are forced to assist in violence against her—Bogost's neoliberalism sees him easily align with storefronts over artists. he aligns himself with capital over labor. and he deploys formalist language to the same end as he always has: to police creatives who are not "like him." he doesn't resent the market forces that led to Horses lack of support because he mostly agrees with it.
This is a key factor to discuss with Horses because there's a lot of people out there who are not devilishly right wing that are nevertheless finding ways to contort themselves into positions that defend this game's banning from storefronts.
the people who railed against itchio's payment processors missteps a while back seem fine with Valve axing Horses because it at one point contained something they maybe thought was icky which doesn't even exist in the text anymore. a former games writer defends to the death the decision simply because stores have the right (they're not doing anything illegal maaaan!) to remove whatever they want from shelves. a university professor aligns because this is happening not to people like him but people he doesn't respect. these are not villainous or "bad" people but they all reached the same bad conclusion
and suddenly, this game about fascism and complicity is interesting not for the violence or sexual content but because it provided a case study for how a range of people—nominally online young progressives, academics, others—will find ways to say "oh, well it's okay this time." when it comes to censorship.
Thinking about this helps underscore why I think Horses biggest stumbles come when trying to explain why the farmer is doing what he is doing to these people. We are told that this is an inherited violence; he is doing to his horses what his own father made him do to a family dog. He is pressured by forces of religion and sexual repression. some nights, he puts on a mask of his own and hovers around, particularly observing the sexual violence his dog Fido commits. her leers, chastity belt snug and secure.
I think Horses isn't terribly interesting when it comes to trying to track down where this cycle began and how much a victim the farmer could be in his own right. and I think the stumbling is interesting to consider when viewed side by side with the variety of ways in which certain people have decided to acquiesce to Vale and Epic. they don't need much reason! sometimes the reason for their support is as simple as "well, they're allowed!"
There doesn't need to be much of a reason for anyone to blindly align with power or else participate in violence. Many people who think themselves fundamentally decent will find all kinds of way to justify their behaviors. In Horses, this can be as simple as finding an excuse to lie when a priest asks if you believe in god. The priest clearly holds sway and is an ally of the farmer; if you say you don't believe will that change how they think of you? Will it make them turn on you?
Horses is full of these little justifications. I'm just lying to keep safe. I'm just playing along until the moment where I can do something else. I don't believe in this stuff but I don't wanna end up like one of *those* people. And in the discussion around the game, we see small versions of these arguments and justifications.
They technically have the authority to ban this game. Well, geez I heard from a friend online that there's some secret pedo shit in their. Oh, that's not true. Okay but there's still a reference to a blowjob and that's icky so I'm glad we banned it. Hmm, actually this game is not as worthy of consideration as the mobile powerhouses that steal money from children and grandparents alike. Why? Well, you see it simply is. I know because I'm a professor of this stuff!
The truth, the content doesn't matter. There's just a powerful market force and the many ways we decide to justify the decisions it makes. Be it casual moral judgements, legal technicality whataboutism, or anything else. People don't really need much reason at all. They'll invent any of several! and if they're doing this about a mid-quality art game, you have to ask... what else will they do it for?
and it's through *this* arrangement of circumstances that Horses becomes something else, something more interesting and more potent. life around the game imitates the absurdity within. oh, we put those people in masks because they were fuckin' freaks anyway. oh, it's fine to ban this game because it made me uncomfortable somehow. so it goes for art and beyond. and it's not just the fascists who will do it but the liberals and even some leftists too.
and more than anything, as I watch them align themselves in the way they have...
I hope these people get to live their entire lives as human beings.
me: uh oh! if i fail to block any more of these spells, the evil wizard will take over my mind and make me suck him off!!! i need to be careful, i can feel it working already...
the evil wizard trying to blow my head off with lightning bolts: that's not what I'm trying to do
A good thing you can do with an ulcer or other painful sore inside your mouth is to keep pressing your tongue against it to make it hurt more, or even bother it with your teeth for some reason. You can do a similar thing with bad memories!
Honestly I think it might be bad for him but who am I to tell him what to do. He likes what he likes. I don’t care if he is gay. There’s no telling whether it is really bad for him or not because there is no research on this. Maybe it is making him stronger
remember that tinned fish reverses the cancer causing properties of cigarettes, cigarettes cure the mental illnesses that drinking produces and drinking flushes the excess salts tinned fish causes to build up in your body. this is the food pyramid.
remember when steve from blues clues was upset that people thought he died in a car crash, not because people thought he was dead but because they said he was driving a dodge charger and "that's a cop car"
had a dream I went to a hozier concert and mr. hozier stopped singing and pointed to me in the crowd and asked me to go get him some extra crispy tofu and a blueberry shake for after the show and then the crowd passed his debit card to me and when I got it I could see his real legal name was Horace Bob-omb
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