This review contains spoilers
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It is six o’clock, and I am picking my father up from the airport. I’m inching through the parking lot, flanked on both sides by an unrelenting phalanx of cars. I am beset with a singular dread. “This is hell,” I say to myself. Because there’s nothing I can do other than move slowly through this corridor, hoping to find an empty space. Claustrophobia, nowhere to run, just walls of cars. As the feeling closes in on me, I check my phone. My clock is right, but the day is wrong; his flight is tomorrow. I’ve driven all the way out here essentially for nothing. This means that, for a brief moment, the only thing I can do in this parking lot is, well, be. The parking lot’s sole purpose is to house cars, and I’m not a car. This means the simple act of existing, in a parking lot, is hostile. “This is hell,” I say to myself again.
I escaped the parking lot, and driving home, I found myself acutely aware of just how uninhabitable places I moved through were. Built for cars, but not built for people. The highways, a flat vascular system without flora or fauna. The underpass, an incidental sukkah with no kindness and no nourishment. The industrial part of town, with wide, long roads and warehouses, dead grass in the gaps of concrete. There is a violence to it: the possibility of a human life is rejected. I try to imagine anyone living in these places. Anyone living a life. And I can’t.
As I played Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, I kept thinking about that parking lot. How unnatural it felt to be in such a place. How impossible human life felt. How unforgiving it was to bodies.
There’s this adage in some circles (or the ones I am adjacent to) that mech fiction is, fundamentally, about bodies. I grimace when I hear this, not because there isn’t truth to it, but because I feel it’s a bit myopic and jealous. Mech fiction is about a lot more than just bodies, and to reduce a genre to some core theme is obviously absurd. But as I play Armored Core VI, I cannot stop thinking about bodies. Not because of any bodies in view. Rather, their absence haunts Rubicon.
You never see any human beings in Armored Core VI. You see sketches of them, drawn an unknowable time ago, but every voice you hear on the comms, every pilot who threatens your life, they’re disembodied and faceless. In Can Androids Pray?, two pilots have to interrogate the possibility that they’ve never had a body, that their consciousness exists solely within the mech that lies broken in the sand. A part of me wonders why no one asks this question on Rubicon. Going through this game’s world, I struggle to imagine how anyone could live here. I challenged myself, constantly, to imagine life here. But I couldn’t.
Armored Core VI is a level-based game, which is a rarity these days. Some AAA releases still hold on, like Monster Hunter, which I couldn’t help but think about. Levels increase a sense of artificiality to a space; the pretense that these are real places in a real world melts away. They cannot exist in a contiguous map, because they don’t exist in a world. In Monster Hunter, these spaces feel like safari enclosures: brimming with life, but ultimately an artificial. And in a lot of games (especially the more amateur ones) there can be these wide open spaces that call to mind a Chirico painting: great, empty piazzas, flat spaces of architectural form, punctuated with surreal substance. But on Rubicon, rather than the quaint Italian architecture, these tableaus are dominated by the industrial, the mechanical, the brutal.
Your mech stands over a massive mining pit. Machinery hangs over it like a mobile. Ayre says to you, “Even the Rubiconians have forsaken this lifeless place.” This puzzles me. What does she mean “this lifeless place”? This place is just as lifeless as anywhere on Rubicon, anywhere I’ve been. The Rubiconians want to live on Rubicon, make a life here. I’m not sure such a thing is even possible.
As I look at these battlefields, I see a sort of primordial brutalism assault me. You stomp through Xylem, the one of the closest things the entire game has to a liveable place, and it feels so wrong. These squat skyscrapers and massive intersections freckling the playspace. It feels like a massive folly city. All artifice. Then I think of Babbdi, an independent game set in the eponymous city, which sees you attempt to leave a brutalist city. It’s largely empty, and difficult to navigate without the aid of various tools. The people who live here are strange and sad. I’m filled with unease as I look up in awe at the columns of concrete and grids of rebar. Now, I think there is a charm to brutalism; it’s unpretentious and simple, as easy to contemplate as it is to ignore. But in these places, I have to ask myself why it feels so wrong to wonder through them. Why, when addressing brutalism in these ways, does it feel so horrible? Paul Virilio, in Bunker Archaeology, considers brutalism as a style of war, that brutalism has rendered the urban an ugly reflection of the bunker.
“Slowed down in his physical activity but attentive, anxious over the catastrophic probabilities of his environment, the visitor in this perilous place is beset with a singular heaviness; in fact he is already in the grips of that cadaveric rigidity from which the shelter was designed to protect him.”
If brutalism is as Virilio says, and adopts the architectural language of the bunker, and thus the reproduction of war, then brutalism is the core language of most video games. And look closely, and you can see it everywhere. These are worlds designed for violence, as Jacob Geller puts it, and it shows. Open up any number of games, and you can find it. You can see the spirit of brutalism possessing all the vertices of Quake II, see it in the industrial dystopias of Half Life 2, see it in the sprawling slaughterscapes of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and PUBG. The architecture of these games is brutalism just as Virilio describes: the mirror image of the battlefield in the urban.
But typically, as you skulk through a dilapidated factory, you can imagine what someone could do there. You can envision someone walking through these spaces, going to work, walking home. And you see people, NPCs or enemies or corpses, around here. The city of Babbdi, despite its imposing height, does have citizens, living their little lifes, dying their little deaths. Life is possible here, abject or not. Grass poking through gaps in the sidewalk. Meanwhile, Umurangi Generation rages, joyously and passionately, against the hostility of brutalism. It’s perhaps the most scalding rejection of the naked brutalism of video games. The spires of concrete are painted with graffiti of all colors. People eat, mourn, dance. The place is undeniably alive. In spite of the very real gnawing forces of capital and empire, found manifest in the stark walls of the city, people never stop being people, they never stop living.
But when I look at the spaces of Rubicon, I cannot imagine a human even existing in these places. The spaces of Armored Core VI are often called post-apocalyptic, but that implies any society ever existed here. As I look around, I can’t see these places as even ruins. I see ladders, I see walkways, I see cars. But when I close my eyes and try to envision it, I cannot see people. As I blast my way through Grid 086, I cannot even imagine the utility of this place. What are these buildings for? What is even done here? Not just life, but labor and war, typically the last resorts of human activity that industrial capitalism permits, they both seem impossible here. No, every last vestige of the human body is invisible here. At one point, you cram your mech inside a container that’s launched across an ocean. “Cinder” Carla explains that this isn’t really built for an AC. Even the mech, an ersatz body that serves as your surrogate on this lifeless planet, is forced to bend to the hostility of this place. This planet of warehouses and parking lots.
Xylem, this floating city, is revealed to be a massive ship. The facade gives way. It unfolds like a flower and takes to the sky. Of course it’s not a city, not really. Nobody could ever really live here. How could they? What’s revealed is that Ayre, your Rubiconian ally, literally does not have a body at all. She’s a disembodied consciousness, alive in the coral. The only way to live on Rubicon is to cast off the body, imagine life as an amorphous pulse buried deep in the crust of the planet. The glimpses of organic life on Rubicon feel wrong. The trees crumple like paper when you touch them. The strange coral worms you stumble into seem like cartoons. And coral, while apparently alive, is totally amorphous and formless; it doesn’t have an anatomy. It can live here, because it doesn’t have a body. And coral flows like sand, not destructive, not creative, but a constant flux. There are no homes here, not that I can see. All I can see here is warehouses and parking lots. Stone. Rebar. Rails. Hyperbrutalism. Perhaps it’s fitting that parts of Rubicon are named anatomically and biologically: Xylem, worm robots, Ibis, “Vascular” structures. Bodies implied, but never found. After all, the only body that could live on Rubicon would be made of concrete and steel.
It is six o’clock, and I am picking my father up from the airport. I’m inching through the parking lot, flanked on both sides by an unrelenting phalanx of cars. I am beset with a singular dread. “This is hell,” I say to myself. Because there’s nothing I can do other than move slowly through this corridor, hoping to find an empty space. Claustrophobia, nowhere to run, just walls of cars. As the feeling closes in on me, I check my phone. My clock is right, but the day is wrong; his flight is tomorrow. I’ve driven all the way out here essentially for nothing. This means that, for a brief moment, the only thing I can do in this parking lot is, well, be. The parking lot’s sole purpose is to house cars, and I’m not a car. This means the simple act of existing, in a parking lot, is hostile. “This is hell,” I say to myself again.
I escaped the parking lot, and driving home, I found myself acutely aware of just how uninhabitable places I moved through were. Built for cars, but not built for people. The highways, a flat vascular system without flora or fauna. The underpass, an incidental sukkah with no kindness and no nourishment. The industrial part of town, with wide, long roads and warehouses, dead grass in the gaps of concrete. There is a violence to it: the possibility of a human life is rejected. I try to imagine anyone living in these places. Anyone living a life. And I can’t.
As I played Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, I kept thinking about that parking lot. How unnatural it felt to be in such a place. How impossible human life felt. How unforgiving it was to bodies.
There’s this adage in some circles (or the ones I am adjacent to) that mech fiction is, fundamentally, about bodies. I grimace when I hear this, not because there isn’t truth to it, but because I feel it’s a bit myopic and jealous. Mech fiction is about a lot more than just bodies, and to reduce a genre to some core theme is obviously absurd. But as I play Armored Core VI, I cannot stop thinking about bodies. Not because of any bodies in view. Rather, their absence haunts Rubicon.
You never see any human beings in Armored Core VI. You see sketches of them, drawn an unknowable time ago, but every voice you hear on the comms, every pilot who threatens your life, they’re disembodied and faceless. In Can Androids Pray?, two pilots have to interrogate the possibility that they’ve never had a body, that their consciousness exists solely within the mech that lies broken in the sand. A part of me wonders why no one asks this question on Rubicon. Going through this game’s world, I struggle to imagine how anyone could live here. I challenged myself, constantly, to imagine life here. But I couldn’t.
Armored Core VI is a level-based game, which is a rarity these days. Some AAA releases still hold on, like Monster Hunter, which I couldn’t help but think about. Levels increase a sense of artificiality to a space; the pretense that these are real places in a real world melts away. They cannot exist in a contiguous map, because they don’t exist in a world. In Monster Hunter, these spaces feel like safari enclosures: brimming with life, but ultimately an artificial. And in a lot of games (especially the more amateur ones) there can be these wide open spaces that call to mind a Chirico painting: great, empty piazzas, flat spaces of architectural form, punctuated with surreal substance. But on Rubicon, rather than the quaint Italian architecture, these tableaus are dominated by the industrial, the mechanical, the brutal.
Your mech stands over a massive mining pit. Machinery hangs over it like a mobile. Ayre says to you, “Even the Rubiconians have forsaken this lifeless place.” This puzzles me. What does she mean “this lifeless place”? This place is just as lifeless as anywhere on Rubicon, anywhere I’ve been. The Rubiconians want to live on Rubicon, make a life here. I’m not sure such a thing is even possible.
As I look at these battlefields, I see a sort of primordial brutalism assault me. You stomp through Xylem, the one of the closest things the entire game has to a liveable place, and it feels so wrong. These squat skyscrapers and massive intersections freckling the playspace. It feels like a massive folly city. All artifice. Then I think of Babbdi, an independent game set in the eponymous city, which sees you attempt to leave a brutalist city. It’s largely empty, and difficult to navigate without the aid of various tools. The people who live here are strange and sad. I’m filled with unease as I look up in awe at the columns of concrete and grids of rebar. Now, I think there is a charm to brutalism; it’s unpretentious and simple, as easy to contemplate as it is to ignore. But in these places, I have to ask myself why it feels so wrong to wonder through them. Why, when addressing brutalism in these ways, does it feel so horrible? Paul Virilio, in Bunker Archaeology, considers brutalism as a style of war, that brutalism has rendered the urban an ugly reflection of the bunker.
“Slowed down in his physical activity but attentive, anxious over the catastrophic probabilities of his environment, the visitor in this perilous place is beset with a singular heaviness; in fact he is already in the grips of that cadaveric rigidity from which the shelter was designed to protect him.”
If brutalism is as Virilio says, and adopts the architectural language of the bunker, and thus the reproduction of war, then brutalism is the core language of most video games. And look closely, and you can see it everywhere. These are worlds designed for violence, as Jacob Geller puts it, and it shows. Open up any number of games, and you can find it. You can see the spirit of brutalism possessing all the vertices of Quake II, see it in the industrial dystopias of Half Life 2, see it in the sprawling slaughterscapes of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and PUBG. The architecture of these games is brutalism just as Virilio describes: the mirror image of the battlefield in the urban.
But typically, as you skulk through a dilapidated factory, you can imagine what someone could do there. You can envision someone walking through these spaces, going to work, walking home. And you see people, NPCs or enemies or corpses, around here. The city of Babbdi, despite its imposing height, does have citizens, living their little lifes, dying their little deaths. Life is possible here, abject or not. Grass poking through gaps in the sidewalk. Meanwhile, Umurangi Generation rages, joyously and passionately, against the hostility of brutalism. It’s perhaps the most scalding rejection of the naked brutalism of video games. The spires of concrete are painted with graffiti of all colors. People eat, mourn, dance. The place is undeniably alive. In spite of the very real gnawing forces of capital and empire, found manifest in the stark walls of the city, people never stop being people, they never stop living.
But when I look at the spaces of Rubicon, I cannot imagine a human even existing in these places. The spaces of Armored Core VI are often called post-apocalyptic, but that implies any society ever existed here. As I look around, I can’t see these places as even ruins. I see ladders, I see walkways, I see cars. But when I close my eyes and try to envision it, I cannot see people. As I blast my way through Grid 086, I cannot even imagine the utility of this place. What are these buildings for? What is even done here? Not just life, but labor and war, typically the last resorts of human activity that industrial capitalism permits, they both seem impossible here. No, every last vestige of the human body is invisible here. At one point, you cram your mech inside a container that’s launched across an ocean. “Cinder” Carla explains that this isn’t really built for an AC. Even the mech, an ersatz body that serves as your surrogate on this lifeless planet, is forced to bend to the hostility of this place. This planet of warehouses and parking lots.
Xylem, this floating city, is revealed to be a massive ship. The facade gives way. It unfolds like a flower and takes to the sky. Of course it’s not a city, not really. Nobody could ever really live here. How could they? What’s revealed is that Ayre, your Rubiconian ally, literally does not have a body at all. She’s a disembodied consciousness, alive in the coral. The only way to live on Rubicon is to cast off the body, imagine life as an amorphous pulse buried deep in the crust of the planet. The glimpses of organic life on Rubicon feel wrong. The trees crumple like paper when you touch them. The strange coral worms you stumble into seem like cartoons. And coral, while apparently alive, is totally amorphous and formless; it doesn’t have an anatomy. It can live here, because it doesn’t have a body. And coral flows like sand, not destructive, not creative, but a constant flux. There are no homes here, not that I can see. All I can see here is warehouses and parking lots. Stone. Rebar. Rails. Hyperbrutalism. Perhaps it’s fitting that parts of Rubicon are named anatomically and biologically: Xylem, worm robots, Ibis, “Vascular” structures. Bodies implied, but never found. After all, the only body that could live on Rubicon would be made of concrete and steel.