Conan: Exiles — Slavery, ‘Dancing’ Girls, and Religious Intolerance
A gameplay trailer was recently released for Conan: Exiles. It is quite beautiful; you should take a minute and watch it and listen to the developers’ pitch, then you will know as much as I or anyone other than the developers knows about the game now.
I have a long relationship with the game company making Exiles, having played every game they have produced over more than a decade. I have interacted with and observed community interactions with the developers over that whole time. I have a lot of respect for the intelligence and integrity of those developers. So I am always excited when they announce a new game. After watching the the trailer, though, I had some questions about elements in the game that might be problematic.
- Slavery as a core mechanic.
- Body politics of ‘dancing’ as a slave.
- Violence. Lots of brutal unrelenting violence.
- Conflict driven by religious intolerance.
I’m going to work my way up that list from the bottom.
So, is forcing players into a religion to compete against others that have different religions meaningful? The religions are fictitious, and gods have manifest power. Maybe that’s not a big problem. I’m sure the very pious in the real world might be offended, but that’s not my issue. What it does do is model religious intolerance as a basis for conflict. Perhaps that’s good if people see that it’s a flimsy excuse to inflict suffering on others, or perhaps it solidifies their real world intolerances. It’s hard to say and I don’t make any claims, but it’s something I would be thinking about if I were a developer and I was going to base the violent conflict in my game on religion. Please note that I am not saying that games should not include religion, or even that they should not use it as the basis for conflict in their game. I am just saying that designers should think carefully about what they are saying in their specific game with their specific fiction and mechanics when they do it. Since the final release of Conan: Exiles is at least months away, it’s hard to say if the developers at FunCom are making a complex meaningful statement, or if they have just used the obvious hook of the religions of the Conan universe to hang conflict on in their game without considering the statement they are making by doing so.
Then there is the use of Violence. Violence? Really? I mean this is Conan for Crom’s sake! How can violence be bad? Well I’m not sure that it is, but that won’t stop me from asking about it or questioning it. We have a TON of violence in our games, and largely I’m content with it. I like shooting demons in Doom, or zombies in Left 4 Dead… even psychotic cultists in Tomb Raider, or Nazis - killing Nazis is always a guilt free good time. Of course the more human and less demonstrably evil something is, the less fun I find killing it. And then there is the level of the violence. The tone of the death in Doom is not the same as the tone in The Last of Us, or even something like The Wolf Among Us. So when it comes to violence I guess my bar for wanting it justified is higher the more I can empathize with the victim. If Conan: Exiles is going to have unrelenting brutal violence against people who are just like me except for their fictional religion, I think I will need the violence to be very well justified before I can enjoy it.
Ok, that brings us to ‘dancing’. The quotes aren’t to imply that there is any sex in the game that I am calling dancing, but that in a setting that involves taking slaves, torturing them and breaking them to your will but doesn’t have an explicit sexual component, dancing seems like it’s a coded euphemistic representation of sex. The implication is not that your slave girls are dancing for you to ease your troubled mind, it’s that you are raping them. Dancing could be just dancing if the people were there of their own accord, and some pretense could be made about the players trying to nurture some refinement and beauty in a harsh world, but that is not the case. Your dancers are slaves that you have tortured. You are not helping them find artistic expression, you are forcing them to give you pleasure.
So what about the big one. Slavery. The fact that the game promotional materials refer to your slaves as ‘thralls’ hints that even the developers are not oblivious to the nastiness that making slavery a core mechanic implies. In the Conan canon slavery is not lauded, or considered a great thing. The iconic opening scenes of the movies involve Conan being taken as a slave, tortured, and eventually escaping to become a hero. It’s not core to the fiction or the iconic characters; where it exists it largely is a sign of cruelty and evil. As a game mechanic it makes a lot of sense, it works well! But it’s a choice and not one that is driven or ‘necessitated’ by the fiction. I don’t have any sense that the developers have included it out of any kind of ill intent. It just feels like lazy design combined with a little bit of sensationalism. That and possibly it was seen as something that would cater to the emotional tenor of the kind of gamers who gravitate to the survival genre. Now, that last is a gross generalization and not something that I can state strongly, as I have only dabbled around the edges of the multi player survival games.
So what am I getting at here? Survival games are sandboxes. Places where we can tell our own stories. What kind of stories we tell and experience there are going to be strongly influenced by the mechanics that drive the game. It seems like a significant number of the mechanics that Conan: Exiles is built on will give rise to some pretty unpleasant stories. Not stories that are difficult but reveal some hard won truth, but stories that would leave me feeling a little sick at the things I was spending time doing in the name of fun.
Edit: I participated in a Q&A session on the Conan:Exiles official page, where the lead developer answered questions from the community. He answered the first 75 or so questions, except for mine which was in the first dozen. The question text follows:
First I want to say that I am a big fan of your work and FunCom games in general. I’ve been playing them since The Longest Journey. I ran events as an ARK in AO, completed Tokyo in TSW and loved The Park.
I understand the world of Conan. I am a fan of the Robert E. Howard stories and like what was done with the reimagining of the world for the MMO and new novels. The fiction is problematic in a lot of PC ways, but largely in an interesting way, and the issues it is concerned with are important.
So I ask these questions from that perspective and not trying to be a troll…
How do you justify the misogyny of having enslaved women to dance for you as a mechanic for psyche recovery? (The fact that you can enslave men to dance isn’t a good enough answer, though it helps a little.)
How do you justify slavery as a mechanic for resource gathering, base defense and perhaps most on the nose as the way that you appropriate other cultures, making their people slaves to advance your tech tree?
Given the current environment in the US with a president elect who has made many racist and misogynistic statements and has espoused a agenda of nationalism, sexism and intolerance causing many vulnerable groups to be afraid for their safety and lifestyle; what do you expect the response to those themes in your game to be?
What is your marketing plan to deal with backlash from people offended by those aspects of the game?
While the developers did not respond, the other players did, saying that my questions made them consider suicide, that I should ‘fuck off’, etc. I think that the developers’ lack of comment and the vitriol of the community’s response is interesting in terms of the kind of community that the design choices of the developers are attracting.
