An Actually Existing Dystopia: Othering Eastern Europe and the Lived Experience of an Authoritarian Regime in Black: The Fall

Abstract

Sand Sailor Studio, a small Romanian indie game developer company launched a Kickstarter project to fund the development of their game Black: The Fall in 2014. After having more than 1,600 people backing their pitch, they could finish their 2.5D puzzle-platformer set in a bleak dystopic past/future and published it in 2017, receiving mostly positive reviews. The paper argues that Black: The Fall inscribes a more general Orwellian dystopia into a dystopified version of Romania’s socialist past in order to present it as a commodity for Western audiences, leveraging on the perceived uniqueness of Romanian history and hence reinforcing the image of Eastern Europe as an ‘other at hand?’. While the visuals support what we can call a mediatised experience of the late Ceausescu-era, the game mechanic and affective qualities of playing may be capable of offering a more nuanced impression of the 1980s in Romania as a lived experience.

Keywords:

• Video games
• Black: The Fall
• dystopia
• communism
• immersive fantasy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 As Sand Sailor Studio defines the game in their Kickstarter campaign (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/503519380/black-the-fall),

2 Mainstream video games with a large budget for both development and advertising, which, in return, are expected to generate immense revenue.

3 Casual games are more often characterised by the so-called „freemium” business model. See for example Evans 2016.

4 A phenomenon that speaks directly to the post-crisis individualism of the 21st century subject. For further inquiries into the crisis of Western subjectivity, see for example Kalmár 2020.

5 Something similar happened in the film adaptation of György Dragomán’s The White King. The novel takes place in a vaguely described world that still resembles very much the 1980s of Transylvania. The film adaptation, however, in contrast, which was originally intended for a Western international audience, transferred the plot into a more technically advanced, also surveillance-based authoritarian regime, hence shifting the genre from historical/magical realist fiction and approximating it to dystopian world-building.

6 Naturally, there are exceptions or more complicated cases: the aforementioned Assassin’s Creed franchise, for instance, with the inclusion of the Animus, a diegetic interface that links together the various quests and eras, is better suited into the category of portal-quest fantasy. Maybe a more unexpected example could be any battle royale game such as Player Unkown’s Battleground or Fortnite, where the player’s avatar has to physically travel into the gameworld for each gameplay. Similarly, many survival/horror and alien invasion themed games (certainly not all) can be grouped under Mendlesohn’s term ‘intrusion fantasy’, where intrusion “ruptures normality” (Mendlesohn 2014, 96) and is followed by intense emotions. Mendlesohn’s fourth category, the Protean liminal fantasy, however, would be practically impossible to map in video games as it is primarily structured as a matter-of-fact-like attitude towards the fantastic and as such it is clearly written medium-specific.

7 This is a perspective from where the backwards written letters also make sense.

8 The name Sentinel is never used in the game, but this is how they are referenced in the Kickstarter pitch.

9 Using Maya Nadkarni’s appropriation of the bonmot from Péter Bacsó’s film A tanú [The Witness], this nostalgia is certainly „a bit yellow, a bit sour, but it’s [theirs]” – referring to the possibility of feeling nostalgic about a past that was otherwise portrayed as clearly dystopic. (See Nadkarni 2010, 190).

10 All this was also aided by the 1977 earthquake, that damaged many of the already existing buildings in the capital, and even though reparations would have been possible, Ceausescu opted for the costlier project of rebuilding the centre anew (O’Neill 2009, 96).

11 As opposed to the portraits of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, which are recurring motifs of the game, the suburban statue seems strangely vague, giving just a more general Eastern European feeling to the cityscape.