BIG QUEER WAR MACHINE

Over the first few quiet weeks of summer, I sank a lot of time into BattleTech. I painted models of mechs while the sunlight held and then fought digital ones late into the night. I even matched the color scheme of my in game arsenal to the one slowly filling my shelves. It was a nice enough way to pass the time, but at the end of the game's campaign I was left feeling strangely hollow.

BattleTech (Harebrained Schemes, 2018) is one of several big mech games to come out in the late 2010's and leans hard into mechanical minutia. Each machine I field has fully customizable weapons, armor, and systems that tie into a strict in-game economy. The coolest move in the game, a jet-powered jump attack that harms my mech's legs, is all the more impactful for that mechanical cost. It’s a compelling gameplay loop of weighing short term impact against long term resource management. What left me feeling hollow, though, was the way those mechanics translate to BattleTech's flesh and blood pilots.

A mech is no good without someone to pilot it, so I'm encouraged to invest in my roster. Despite only allowing four pilots on any mission, a fully upgraded ship can keep up to 24 on the payroll. As injuries and deaths mount I hurry to hire on extra help. Before long, the portraits and callsigns blur together and by the end the only face I recognize is the one I made during character creation.

This dissonance between the pilots and the mechs comes to a head in the campaign's final mission. It isn’t an effort to liberate an occupied planet but a duel to the death, a showdown against an already dethroned antagonist to save the life of one man. He’s a voiced character with a painted face, unlike my roster of random character assets and audio barks. Someone the game's fiction has given enough humanity to be deemed worth saving. Where was this rescue for my pilots? By BattleTech's end, the horrific weight of the game's economy had turned them into something not unlike a mech: hollow objects ready to perform the violence of someone else's story.

BattleTech isn’t trying to be a horror game though, and the interactive fiction elements more often than not paint over the game's tensions instead of deepening them. I can choose to fight for honor, duty, or a paycheck, but recognizing the horror of mech warfare would risk making the core strategy gameplay uncomfortable. This is where that hollowness emerges from. By avoiding the dehumanizing anxiety that swirls around the heart of the genre, BattleTech falls flat, failing to scratch the same itch left by shows like Gundam, Evangelion, or even Pacific Rim.

There are, however, a lot of games that do lean into the mech genre's horror. In particular, there has been a wave of queer designers using the genre as a space to explore bodies as sites of conflict. These small and independent games rarely have the mechanical complexity of something like BattleTech's intricate economy, but make up for it in their exploration of agency and mechanical bodies so fundamental to mech fiction.

Can Androids Pray

Can Androids Pray (Xalavier Nelson Jr and Natalie Clayton, 2019) is a game where two angry femmes spend their final hours texting while stuck in their otherwise incapacitated mechs. When the sun rises a fuel leak will detonate and both pilots will die. There is no avoiding that outcome, my only choice is how my pilot, Courtney, takes the news of their imminent end.

From its very first moments, Can Androids Pray begins to draw connections between the bodies of its pilots and the mechs that house them. The camera lingers on dark splatters through the intro, and by the time I see the wreckage of a mech understand it to be blood. That blood might be made of oil or fuel or some other more fantastical substance but that doesn’t change the weight with which I view it.

One of the first lines I can select is a cry of panic after Courtney is told by the other pilot, Beatrice, that the fuel line is cut.

"F#CK MY GIANT METAL BODY"

I know the blood on the ground is from a mech, but this line, even if left unspoken, makes it clear it is also Courtney's. It doesn’t matter where it came from, life is flowing out of them. This link between mech and pilot is reinforced over and over right down to the story's grammar. The mechs hosting the pilots are almost never spoken about in the third person. So thorough is the psychological impact of war that the violence done to a mech and the violence done to a pilot are indistinguishable, even to the people being harmed.

This melding of mech and pilot terrifies Beatrice. They find it so horrific that they are willing to open the airlock to a toxic atmosphere just to find out if their human body is real. To be sure they are not just an artificial intelligence bulking out the front line with a battery of false memories. It is only at this point, moments before the sun rises and blows them up anyway, that I'm finally given a chance to relieve the mounting tension. The music cuts out and I have to choose if Courtney follows Beatrice and opens the airlock.

By this point it's already clear they're just a tool, regardless of their true form. Human soldiers are no more precious than AI. Both are used by an uncaring command to fight arbitrary wars that have left the entirety of earth a desolate wasteland. Even if I open the airlock and lungs do fill with poison, Courtney will be no less an object. They will still be the puppet of something; a programmer, a god, the player. No matter what I pick, that tension can't be resolved. It’s a horror I have to live with.

THE EMBRACE

Much like Can Androids Pray, Grim Baccaris's THE EMBRACE (2019) leans hard into the connection between mech and pilot. In its short runtime it outlines a world where bodies are intimately engineered machines of war. Vague green fluids leak from devastated consoles. Groping suckers latch onto pilots' eyes. Replacement arms are grown in vats and it's unclear if those replacements are for the mech, its pilot, or both.

On the surface, this fleshy bond is the principal horror of THE EMBRACE. It sets out to tell a short, visceral story and succeeds marvellously. Perhaps the one and only complaint I have is that the final snippet of text is a little too hard to read, sliding off the screen before I can finish reading. Fortunately, the game automatically loops . All I need to do is quickly flick through its pages to get another look.

Nothing changes on the second playthrough. Not a single thing. This is not a branching narrative, it's a flash of pain. A moment of sympathy. I don’t have agency over these moments, the only thing I decide is if they will repeat; if that flash of pain is worth reliving to better understand exactly what is going on.

Words spark new meaning on the second read. A harsh retort directed at the commander feels more personal, like it's being directed outwards from the screen. I begin to wonder just how many times this conversation has repeated. How many times the pilot's body has been replaced just to live out the same gory end at the whims of some power greater than themselves.

I wonder what sort of power could possibly do this to a person. Then, enthralled by the violence and terror of the game, I start the loop again.

Concluding vibes

These games create much of their horror by limiting player agency. The pilots no longer have a choice over their bodies, and the player is denied the agency typically expected from games. This loss of agency is in many ways the emotional core of the mech genre. We wouldn’t question why a tank is used for war but when the machine looks like a person suddenly we begin to have doubts. Mechs are not practical tools of war. It seems silly to point this out but there is a reason they look so much like people. They are extensions of our humanity. A humanity that longs to sing, dance, explore, know, love, and break beyond its own limits. The tragedy of mechs is that these colossal people are made to live as a site of conflict; that they are born to die rather than experience every glorious moment in-between.

It's not hard then to understand why queer folk might delve deep into the genre. A queer body is also a constant site of conflict, pulled apart by a thousand forces so large that no one individual could ever fully confront them. A mech is big enough though. It's like a pair of six inch platform boots made of solid iron, and when you pilot one you pour all your alienation into its frame and for one glorious fictional moment are big enough to fight back. You take what comfort you can from bloodying their noses even if needing to fight is exactly the horror you want to escape.

The moment a pilot launches their mech into battle is a deeply sad one. It is the point at which all the agency that body affords is taken away. If a narrative doesn’t treat that agency with weight then those pilots become just as hollow as their mechs.

This is even more important in the context of interactive fiction, a medium entirely defined by the ways it gives a reader agency. Stories like THE EMBRACE and Can Androids Pray understand this. They don’t give the player total freedom but what they do give is impactful. Then, when that agency is inevitably taken away, the horror is all the more powerful. They show us the heart of the machine, relentlessly pumping, desperately alive. Then they send them to die.

Cynan-Juniper Orton (they/her) creates zines, interactive fiction, and games criticism about tragic satellites and vicious geese. You can find them on itch and on Twitter @CynanOrton.

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