This article contains spoilers for Horizon Forbidden West and Control.
Suddenly game heroine Aloy was face-to-face with a Vermeer. In the game Horizon Forbidden West (2022), from the Amsterdam game studio Guerrilla, spent hours solving problems with bows and arrows. But towards the end of the game, she suddenly wakes up in a dark cellar full of Dutch art treasures and enters into conversation with Tilda van der Meer, a Dutch art collector with a deep love for the Dutch masters.
Not only Aloy, but gamers worldwide were suddenly confronted with Dutch art history in March. Horizon Forbidden West is a blockbuster game, a hugely expensive action game comparable in style and scope to a major Marvel movie. Made and built in the Netherlands, yes, but the story, like many blockbusters, takes place in the United States, with American actors and an American-style science fiction story.
The Vermeer scene instantly made the game the most outspoken expression of Dutch culture in a blockbuster game. American Ben McCaw, story director of Horizon Forbidden West, must smile now. “The management of our studio, all Dutch, is so sober about these kinds of things. They immediately said: we just want to make a good sci-fi action game, it doesn’t have to be about Dutch heritage.”
The international writing team behind the game, to which McCaw belongs, thought differently: “We thought it would be very interesting to do more with Dutch culture.” In conversation with the Rijksmuseum, the idea arose to turn Tilda into a Dutch art lover. The museum was happy to cooperate. After seeing the effect, the rest of the studio was also gone. “It’s my favorite part of the game.”
Cultural fingerprint
American culture is dominant in the game industry. Major game makers can be found worldwide, not just in the American and Japanese metropolises where gaming originated in the 1960s and 1970s. But studios often focus on an American audience, which means that many games still have a very ‘American’ feel. Is there a place for a ‘cultural fingerprint’ in the blockbuster genre?
“Yes, you just have to know how to look sometimes,” says Egyptian-Dutch game maker Rami Ismail. He has been traveling the world for years to advise smaller game makers. “Games have their own language. The original expectations for the medium stem from a melting pot of work from different countries, but the focus has long been in the US and Japan,” he says. “I don’t think an American studio would make a heroine like Aloy. She is a doer. She is very compassionate, but she is not an easy person. She’s the hero, but she doesn’t want that part at all.” That sobriety, Ismail thinks, is thoroughly Dutch.
Who is the hero? That is the key question. Violent US shooting games often portray American ideals. “You have to win, because then you become bigger and stronger and a hero. The worst thing that can happen to an American war game hero is not to come home.” In the Polish war game This War of Mine (2014) the hero is a mere survivor, trying to keep friends and family alive in destroyed houses. „And from Germany comes a game like Spec Ops: The Line (2012). The worst thing that can happen to the main character in it is for you to continue playing. The more you play this raw war game, the more war crimes he commits, and the worse it all ends up for everyone.”
During his travels, Ismail sees that studios, thanks to earlier success, are increasingly daring to propagate their own culture. “In South-East Asia, for example, there is increasing self-confidence to make games about their own culture,” he says. The first hit from the Indonesian Toge Productions was about making coffee in Seattle. “But they do put drinks from Indonesia in it.” He also likes that large studios dare to be more explicit. “Now even more games in non-US cities.”
Finnish tango at American gala
The shift was noticeable in 2019 at the Game Awards, an annual awards gala for the game industry held in the US. Traditionally, the nominees for the biggest award, Game of the Year, are announced through a medley featuring music from all the nominated games. Between the orchestral performances of music from two major Japanese games, a man in a suit with flowing blond hair stepped onto the stage. He sang for half a minute a Finnish tango oil for the audience of the American Bombastic gala.
“That was a wonderful and surreal experience for us,” e-mails Sinikka Annala, writer for the Finnish game studio Remedy. “Our own melancholic form of tango is the landscape of the Finnish soul.”
This music was a good fit the character Ahtia quirky Finnish cleaner who plays an important role in Remedy’s game Control (2019). The game takes place in a very American setting: a secretive agency within the walls of a huge office building in New York. But the enigmatic Ahti, speaking in broken translations of Finnish proverbs, is a first sign that this isn’t an American thriller – Control is laced with a uniquely Finnish stark absurdity, a “Nordic strangeness,” as Annala calls it.
But how, and how much? This was discussed internally. “I think that every non-American creator has to choose whether to use the references and conventions of American media or go back to their own culture with a new project. At the same time, I want to tell stories that are universal.”
Marcin Blancha, head of the story team at major Polish game maker CD Projekt Red, agrees. He made The Witcher a worldwide phenomenon by ‘gaming’ the original Polish fantasy book series – years later a popular Netflix series followed. “While The Witcher carries a strong Slavic feel and folklore, the stories are about universal emotions and problems,” he writes. “And the characters are archetypes that people in the West also know well.”
American story conventions are a “shared language,” according to Annala. “You can then explore that familiar theme from your own perspective. We want to continue to raise questions and twist those American traditions into something that either amuses or upsets you.” That Finnish look turns a standard thriller story into a humiliating, oppressive game.
At the start of the game, her heroine Jesse appropriates a futuristic pistol that gives her power over a secretive government organization. It was such a clear summary of America’s tendency to think of weapons as power that it could have come only from an outsider, it said online. And game maker Rami Ismail saw something else: “It ends with a stalemate.” A history-loving player might draw comparisons to the Winter War of 1939, in which the Finns kept the Soviets at bay for 108 days. The Soviet soldiers left, but not without a piece of territory.
Go to the square!
In Finland, games like Control and receive the Finnish Ahti with “a typically Finnish sense of surprised enthusiasm, and very cautious, modest pride,” concludes Annala. “We have a saying for when we suddenly stand out internationally – Torilla tavataan (hop, to the square [om feest te vieren]†
Blancha of CD Projekt is not so modest: “I feel like a fan of a football team that I followed when it played on the sports field in the village, but which is now in the Champions League final,” he says of the Netflix series . “Writer Andrzej Sapkowski is particularly popular in Poland. When we got the contract for the Witcher games 20 years ago, everyone in the studio knew what that meant: great characters, an interesting world, but also an Eastern European feel that is unique to the fantasy genre.”
The sense of history behind The Witcher is very Polish, he says: “We Poles love to recount the worst moments of our past.” In book, game and series rulers try to tame the people by force. The people do not trust the rulers, friendship gets more done than the state. “The link between history and the present is quickly established.”
However, his most recent project is not from Poland, but from the United States. Cyberpunk 2077 is a sci-fi board game transformed into an action game. A genre that, Blancha immediately admits, is grafted onto American society. It was born from the work of writers who gloomily philosophized about a bleak capitalist future under conservative President Ronald Reagan. Still, Cyberpunk 2077 looks like The Witcher, he says. “The game is about violent rulers and special individuals who don’t trust the system and fight together, preferring anarchy to discipline…”
He jokes: “One person’s dystopian vision of the future is another’s hidden treasure.”
Also read: Dutch game developer Guerrilla: ‘Games of this level are very difficult to develop, but it is also very cool’
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