Summary
Many of us are not quite satisfied with the way the world is. Hunger and homelessness, war and bloodshed, all upheld in the service of someone else’s growing offshore bank account. It can be hard to direct that rage. That’s where counter-culture was born.
Counter-culture is all about the opposition to the status quo, making your very existence oppositional to the ideals currently governing the world. It doesn’t always need to have an eng goal other than upsetting those that rule over you, and these games hold a little bit of that spark in them.
When many of us are young, it can feel so hard to be expressive. Any deviations are strictly punished by parents. ‘Just be normal’ they say, justifying it as a means of giving you an easy life. Sometimes, it can feel like your parents are theh ardest thing to handle in your life.
Much of that is what defines Chloe Price in Life Is Strang: Before The Storm. An authoritarian step-dad, a school that punishes her for expressing her emotions, and a girl that shows her that breaking the status quo is just the first step to living a free life.
Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland
Growing up in the 90s, skateboarding became the face of counter-culture. It was a means of transport that relied so much of using the world around you, rather than using custom-built areas. Skateboards could be an expression of yourself, the rage and passion associated with the act of skateboarding.
The Tony Hawk games brought that sensation into video games, and that peaked with American Wasteland. You didn’t just skate, you used graffiti. You defaced public property, you used public infrastructure as part of your skating. Because it was fun, and the police really hated it.
Many works of counter-culture like to set themselves in contemporary times, showing how you can oppose the powers that oppress you right now. But sometimes, that force puts you under so much pressure that,for a little while, it wins.
That’s what Mirror’s Edge depicts. Colour is drained from the world, towers scale to the clouds, and everything is sharp, defined, clean. No ambiguity, nowhere to hide. Faith is the only person with colour, and the very parkour she performs features more expression than the entire city. Her very existence runs counter to the world she lives in.
When Hi-Fi Rush was announced, it came as something of a shock. Famed horror developers diving into a bombastic, colourfulcharacter-action gameseems like a far cry. But horror games thrive on depicting our fears, the oppression of others. That’s a medium very easily converted into an opposition to that oppression.
Chai is an experiment gone wrong, and discarded by the company that made him as a defect. But he doesn’t accept that, oh no. Instead, Chai bands up with plenty of others who have suffered in this world, and takes them down with the power of music and community. Nothing hurts a faceless corporation more than individuality.
There’s no one angle to tackle Disco Elysium from. Even calling it counter-culture is hard because you can very much be a protector of the oppressive culture that destroyed Revachol. What makes Disco Elysium inherently counter-culture, even if Harry is not, is the honesty with which it depicts it all.
Harry is just a cop. No matter how much he calls himself a world-ruling fascist, or a self-avowed communist who will rewrite the world, he is just a cop. No one respects him. He’s just another cog in the machine. It’s coming to that awareness that highlights the counter-culture of everyone else in Revachol, and how difficult it can be to actually fight back.
Why those who rule are so hard to defeat is because nothing is ever simple. No evil in the world starts at a single point, but is the result of years, generations, and eons of shifting borders that create a world so entangled in itself thatknowing right from wrongis so hard to define.
1000xResist showcases this world, where the way things are are simply assumed. Until you see the reality of what built this world and even then, you’re able to’t pinpoint one singular point at which things went wrong. It’s too entwined. But things must change. There is no silver bullet that fixes everything, but you have to try. Anything new is better.
There’s something to be said for a cyberpunk setting that is developed by a billionaire, but that then becomes a part of the meta-critique, doesn’t it? Making a game that criticises the world circumstances in which is was built.
Those circumstances will always colour the politics of Cyberpunk 2077, with it’s oddly cop-friendly demeanour. But that doesn’t remove the work of everyone else. The smaller parts of the game that show those living under the rule of corporations, and the proud ways in which they utilise the very systems of those rulers to fight back against them.
When it comes to the purest expression of counter-culture, it always comes back to two things - fashion and transport. No one will bat an eye an another person wearing the typical outfits advertised to you on mannequins, or those of us that drive our bland cars to work day-in and day-out.
The scale at which counterculture is portrayed is almost always directly proportional to your welath and place in the world. The rich, even when progressive, will not resort to graffiti and outlandish clothing to battle these systems. Umurangi Generation shows the reality of how the lowest in society have to act to exist in a world that doesn’t want them.
You’re a photographer at the end of the world. You still need to eat, you still need to pay rent. But at least you can shine a light on the issues plaguing the world. You go through neglected slums, military checkpoints, and even protests for the rights of Aotearoa. You’re in the face of it, just you and your camera. And a few friends.
