Like many right-thinking entertainment enthusiasts, a large chunk of my mental bandwidth has been dedicated recently to Red Faction. Ironically, actually playing the game takes very little brainpower but I nonetheless find myself thinking about it a great deal when I’m stuck with more mundane (and typically income-generating) tasks.
The game can adequately be described as Total Recall meets Grand Theft Auto meets Rampage. You drive around an alien sandbox picking up missions as you see fit, doing your best to help the struggling miners of Mars out from under the oppressive thumb of the Generic Military-Industrial Corporation. Fortunately, it turns out that all of the means by which you remove a hostile military group from your planet involve the wanton destruction of damn near every building in sight, and that is a service that I completely willing to provide. For the good of the people, mind you.
Many of the structures in the game are marked red on your map indicating that they are owned by the GMIC, and which you may destroy any time it suits you. Roadside billboards? That’s enemy propaganda, and it’s got to go. Windmills or storage crates? Providing fuel and supplies to the enemy! Then there’s a nearly limitless number of nondescript, unmarked buildings… just assume they’re barracks, or something. You get the idea. The game does discourage you from killing any colonists, but the penalty is incredibly slight. I’m very busy making a Free Mars omelet, and a couple of innocent eggs are going to get broken along the way. Everyone seems to understand.
The strange juxtaposition of my crazed orgies of destruction compared to the enthusiastic support I get from even passers by does make me sometimes wonder what sort of role I’d actually be filling in a world with more realistic, nuanced social structure. What sort of figure do I represent to the common man trying to make a decent living in this place? The character as I play him is tirelessly canvassing the land without pattern, driving cars through buildings, detonating fuel tanks and murdering soldiers by the dozen. There is sometimes friendly fire incidents, but I do not demonstrate remorse. I return to base only long enough to lose anyone following me, to resupply my weapons, and to grab a new vehicle that I will surely destroy. I level apartment buildings with a comically powerful hammer. If the Joker happened to bemiraculously helping people during his crime sprees, this is probably what it would look like.
Ultimately I am provided with the simple, aggressive pleasure you probably experienced as a child crashing your Tonka truck into a Lego house over and over but without the tedium of rebuilding that house at the end. A level designer somewhere giveth, and my job is only to taketh away. I can do no wrong and I am relieved to not be unduly burdened by these troublesome moral quandaries.
