Anarcute, Tonight We Riot, and the Optics of Revolution

Listen to an audio version of this article by becoming a Patreon supporter.

Tonight We Riot is a crowd-based beat’em’up from Pixel Pushers Union 512 that released in May of 2020 as protests against police brutality were erupting around the world. I am not going to attempt to directly tie the game to the protests of this year (doing so feels gross and diminishing), but merely wish to point out the context that a game explicitly about violent, anti-capitalist revolution released in.

With so many games being conservative or loosely liberal, it's exciting to see one which openly embraces anarchist politics and centers around liberation from capitalist imperialism and the carceral state. So why, then, does the game itself feel tepid and predictable when its politics are so exciting?

Creating antagonistic art within traditional systems is inherently fraught. That is not to make the ignorant argument that nothing revolutionary can be made under capitalism, but just that doing so requires careful negotiation of the contradictions inherent to capitalism. As professors of criminology Simon Winlow and Steve Hall write, “contemporary capitalist ideology now allows, indeed encourages, working populations to poke fun at the system and to reflect on its activities in a critical manner.” (Winlow, Hall)

We all hate Mondays, our bosses, lack of healthcare, etc, etc. We all long for the weekend and our designated vacation time. We recognize the system is against us and laugh at it even as we continue to work the gears by which it moves. This is capitalism as intended. We are kept just angry enough to have a dozen divergent points of frustration, but never to the point we might catalyze that anger into a coherent reaction. “Consequently, the popular knowledge of capitalism’s dark side and the incessant critique of its activities are no longer threats; they act as the refinery to convert raw objectless anxiety into rich propulsive fuel.” (Winlow, Hall)

Creating anti-capitalist art, then, requires that we circumvent the expected points of satire and dig at something deeper. To be effective this art has to unsettle and provoke us past the point where we can continue living as if we had not seen the system lade bare and the bodies writhing within it.

Gene Ray, associate professor at the Geneva School of Art and Design, charts three methods by which art can do this, each at a greater degree of removal from the capitalist machine itself.

The first two models, Adorno’s dissonant modernism and Brecht’s re-functioning of institutions, operate within the existing art system. In different ways, both accept this dominated nexus of institution and tradition as a valid field for a practice that resists it. The third model, Debord’s Situationist intransigence, refuses to participate in the administered art system and takes up a position outside it.

These three models each involve a rejection of capitalist stability. First with Adorno’s dissonance between the audience and the uncomfortable reality of the work, then with Brecht’s targeting of the institutions surrounding that art (publishers, theaters, universities), and finally Debord’s rejection of the system altogether with alternative means of exposure and production. Video games, predominately, operate with Adorno’s model in attempting to speak directly to player realities, and arguably never reach the level of Debord because the technologies which make video games possible are intrinsically connected to capitalism.

This is not to get prescriptive about how these methods are applied, and to that point, Ray is also open about recognizing that “everything that contributes or can contribute to radical critique, debate, and practice is badly needed.” But it’s important to recognize how art attempts to undermine capitalism, especially when operating within existing structures.

In Tonight We Riot you take control of a group of workers fighting to liberate themselves from capitalist imperialism. The game opens by pointedly stating that the media and politicians are all owned by the rich, and it is only by overthrowing these institutions that we can ever be truly free. Levels then take place across industrial sites, offices, and the suburbs as you recruit more workers to your cause and beat back the police force protecting the upper class. The game concludes with a fight against the CEO of a megacorp, who being tossed off his building symbolically represents throwing off the yoke of capitalism. A cutscene plays showing people happily existing in a new socialist society, with the one ominous note that the wider world may attempt to re-establish the systems you destroyed.

As a work of political satire Tonight We Riot is not subtle but purposely calls out its targets and allows you to beat them to a pulp. It is cathartic to pelt riot cops with bricks and Molotov cocktails, to watch businessmen flee at your group's approach. But the group mechanics also cause the pain and death of actual revolution to be reduced to the simple necessity of one worker surviving to the end, thereby carrying the revolution forward. In doing so it becomes easy to throw your workers into the fray, to feed them into the path of munitions if it means at least some of them make it out the other side.

I don’t think Tonight We Riot intends to trivialize the sacrifices of freedom fighters, but its mechanics make it remarkably easy to ignore the physicality of those fighters and reduce them to a number at the bottom of the screen. To be sure, there is a great strength felt in a dozen arms hurling bricks at cops that is lost when the crowd shrinks, but it is more about the number present than the individuals choosing to show up. I don’t need each protestor to be given a name and backstory but when your game is about fighting against the dehumanizing nature of capitalist accumulation it’s important not to let the central mechanic of crowd control dissolve into a game of numbers.

This tension between Tonight We Riot’s political ambitions and the limited depth of its systems is a large part of why it feels paradoxically tame. It has taken the mechanics and structure of a traditional beat’em’up and attempted to map them to anti-capitalist revolution, but it hasn’t thoroughly interrogated how those existing mechanics are also a product of capitalism.

How does a three-star scale reflect the strength of my revolution? Why are upgrades gated based on how many survive a given level? There are ways these could have been subverted to reflect an anti-capitalist intent but they have merely been transported into Tonight We Riot whole cloth. Following Adorno’s model, antagonistic art’s “rebuke or moment of resistance is in part structural, inscribed categorically in the logic of art’s relative autonomy and specific difference from everyday life.” (Ray) Tonight We Riot fails in this way as it does not adequately expose and question the underlying framework of capitalism, instead operating at a surface level critique which is fun but shallow, serving those already aligned with its politics but doing little to energize outsiders or dismantle existing models of play into something more representational of post-capitalist thought.

Tonight We Riot follows a very similar trajectory to that of Anarcute (Anarteam, 2016), a game in which a crowd of cute animals overthrows an oppressive regime. Playing both games in succession, it was remarkable how similar they functioned both as games and critiques of capitalism. Anarcute also operates as a group beat’em’up, also grades you after each level, also gates unlockable to your performance as a rioter.

A notable difference is Anarcute’s theme, which contrasts the gritty industrialism of Tonight We Riot with soft cartoon animals holding signs with leaves and “love” drawn on them, even as military police fire live rounds into the crowd. Though not outwardly as confrontational as Tonight We Riot, Anarcute in some ways functions as a better rejection of capitalist thought through the heightened dissonance of its setting. The cuteness of its cast, the objective niceness of their existence contrasted against the soulless police force attacking them intensifies the violence and casts it as aggressively wrong on the part of the police.

Tonight We Riot’s violence is not sanitized by any stretch, but it feels natural for the style of game it is emulating and the aesthetics by which it chooses to present that violence. We have spent decades desensitizing ourselves to pixelated gore and often even at the hands of digital police. Anarcute’s subversion is not dissimilar to that of shock-disgust shows like Happy Tree Friends, but it is specifically targeted at rejecting violence as ordinary.

Animals frequently die in Anarcute, remaining on the ground in a pool of blood for the rest of the level. There is an unmistakable recognition of their death and disgust at its occurrence. Anarcute is careful not to delight in its violence, always presenting it cartoonishly in borderline slapstick fashion, but the death of these animals is unmistakable. It creates a great tension within the game between the silly fun of leading these animals to undermine the cops, and the brutal reality of actually engaging with attack helicopters and riot police. This tension is what allows the politics of the game – explicitly anti-capitalist and the ways capitalism coops revolution – to remain present in what is otherwise a fairly formulaic structure.

But Anarcute does eventually resolve this tension through, like Tonight We Riot, a final boss fight with a CEO in a mech. Once the boss is dead the animals disperse with an end credits dance and its as if the politics of the game disappeared along with the antagonist.

I don’t want to deny Tonight We Riot or Anarcute their happy ending. I think we need radical, optimistic art if we are to continue fighting. But in both instances, the final encounter leans heavily on the catharsis of victory at the expense of a deeper acknowledgment of capitalism as a system distinct from any singular person.

Liz Ryerson articulates the problems with symbolic victory as is currently happening around the removal of confederate statues:

Through the popular lens that we've come to view and understand much of history (often through historical documentaries that focus on particular iconic images of past struggle), the toppling of a statue is a shorthand for a regime or way of life that has fallen. But no such regime is anywhere close to falling, and we're very far from the actual mechanisms needed to reach that reality. Protesters become focused on the symbolic act of removing the statue as a pursuit unto itself, as a way of magically trying to shortcut the process and will that reality into existence.

In Tonight We Riot and Anarcute, the CEO is the statue that needs to fall. We have gathered a coalition of supporters and pushed back the police, so pushing the CEO off their pile of gold should logically be the last step to freedom from capitalism. But while the optics of this are enticing they ultimately paint a narrow view of capitalism, one which makes it very easy for capitalism to sidestep deletion and find new avenues to grow within the gap of an alternative worldview.

This is a deep contradiction propelling most video games: they at once want to be about heavy themes and of political significance, but cling to narratives and structures which allow only a narrow understanding of structures and history. These games are not empty of political intent – they explicitly target systems of oppression – but because we expect games to let us win they contrive a means by which a singular event can undo centuries of propaganda and institutionalized abuse.

Tonight We Riot and Anarcute do not need to have all the answers for how we might move forward from capitalism, but their symbolic victories simplify a greater recognition of the work that will need to be done. Protesting is part of that work. It is not all of it, and a game about political revolution doesn’t need to model every aspect of how we arrive in a post-capitalist future.

If games are to operate as pieces of anti-capitalist art they need to free themselves from the narratives constructed by and under capitalism. This will mean messier endings, untraditional mechanics, and structures that are not necessarily individually satisfying in the way we are used to. Part of moving past capitalism is realizing there are things we will have to sacrifice. Art is just a small aspect of this but an important one for continuing to broaden the political imagination and disrupt existing institutions. Games have great potential as a form of revolutionary art, but will only achieve it if they can disentangle themselves from the same systems they mean to critique.

And to be entirely fair, this does exist in Tonight We Riot. After beating the game a new mode is unlocked called Endless Revolution. Theoretically it is a wave based version of the fights from the main game, but after a few rounds it reveals itself as a developer commentary. As textboxes pop up explaining some of the ideas behind the game the developers begin to throw random chaos onto the screen, either because it is fun to spawn 50 antifa pups, or to intentionally crash the game. It is the only point where the game embraces an alternative structure which reinforces its themes.

This mode is broken, chaotic, and unwinnable. You can play it as many times as you like and it will track your progress, but there is no true endpoint, it just keeps progressing until you fall. It is a more pessimistic view of revolution but in play feels more accurate to the repetition and eventual monotony of protest. The need to keep showing up, of getting hit with the same tactics, of wild shit happening and then starting all over again. It’s not a sprint to unseat a CEO, it’s a marathon against forces that are bigger and better armed than you.

There is far less gleeful victory in this mode but I found myself connecting much more to my character’s struggles knowing I couldn’t just hold out for the end flag. Getting out from under capitalism won’t come easy or quickly. It’s the process of continuing to show up again and again, being loud, staying vigilant. Tonight We Riot almost gets there and is a compelling model of how subverting genre expectations can emphasize this message.

We need more games like Tonight We Riot and Anarcute, and more which go beyond what either of these is capable of saying. No individual piece of art or action will save us, but in the words of organizer Starhawk, “our purpose is to undercut [the system's] legitimacy, to point a spotlight at their programs and policies, and to raise the social costs of their existence until they become unsupportable.” (Juris)

Sources

Juris, Jeffrey S. “Performing Politics: Image, Embodiment, and Affective Solidarity during Anti-Corporate Globalization Protests.” Ethnography, vol. 9, no. 1, 2008, pp. 61–97., doi:10.1177/1466138108088949.
Ray, Gene. “Adorno, Brecht and Debord: Three Models for Resisting the Capitalist Art System.” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 23, no. 44-45, 2014, doi:10.7146/nja.v23i44-45.8182.
Ryerson, Liz. “Getting High Off Your Own Supply.” ...........//*, 24 July 2020, ellaguro.blogspot.com/2020/07/getting-high-off-your-own-supply.html.
Thompson, A. K. Black Bloc, White Riot: Anti-Globalization and the Genealogy of Dissent. AK Press, 2010.
Wight, Colin. “Riot, Why Wouldn't You?” Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, no. 5, 2012, pp. 161–166.
Winlow, S., and S. Hall. “A Predictably Obedient Riot: Postpolitics, Consumer Culture, and the English Riots of 2011.” Cultural Politics an International Journal*, vol. 8, no. 3, 2012, pp. 465–488., doi:10.1215/17432197-1722163.

This essay was made possible through the support of my wonderful Patreon supporters. If you enjoyed this post it would mean a ton if you shared it with a friend and considered becoming a supporter yourself.