Ghost Recon: Wildlands gameifies building the United States’ empire
Guest Contribution
There’s an incredible conversation in Ghost Recon Wildlands between your player character and Karen Bowman, the CIA agent posing as a charity worker in Wildlands’ coke-fueled, coke-obsessed vision of rural Bolivia:
Bowman: “Are you afraid the Socialists are going to get too big for their britches? You’re such a Cold War antique”
Player character: “Says the CIA spook in Latin America”
At first, this seems in character for Ghost Recon and the Tom Clancy brand in general. Clancy himself traded on quasi-realism for decades, using the uncertainty and paranoia of the late Cold War to animate his airport thrillers to lucrative effect. His work rarely criticised the actions of the US abroad, partly because they were consistent with his vocal Republicanism and partly because references to those events lent his work the verisimilitude that made it sell.
But Ubisoft, the owners of the Clancy brand, are not above a nod and a wink. This conversation, and many others throughout Wildlands, shows that Ubi is in on the whole thing. They can’t be glorifying the very real and very illegal process by which the US destabilises countries to serve its own interests if they acknowledge what they’re doing right? Self-awareness it appears, is still putting in work making excuses for everyone’s bad ideas.
Ghost Recon: Wildlands provides us a gorgeous Bolivian landscape to roll around in with up to three buddies as they tear down this “Narco State.” We’ve been here before. And that doesn’t just apply to Wildlands’ shared DNA with every Ubisoft game since Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood. The US has been here before, in Bolivia, in Colombia, in Venezuela. It was recently revealed that the US has deployed small teams much like the one you play as in Wildlands to 50 of the 54 countries of Africa. And like those operatives, in Wildlands you’re tasked with systematically undermining the cartel/terrorists/incumbent government by whatever means necessary. It systemises through play what America is doing in multiple countries as we speak.
Except, a Ubisoft executive might argue, you’re actually taking over Bolivia. Bolivia in Wildlands is merely playing host to everyone’s favourite right-wing dogwhistle: Mexican Cartels. Sure, you may get into a few scuffles with the government but you’re there to dismantle a budding Narco State whose operatives tortured and killed a CIA agent. It’s revenge. It’s personal. And your team of “ghosts” fresh from starting a populist coup in Russia is there to get the job done. With the help of those aforementioned socialists, you’ll tear down the “Narcos” and “Sicarios” to get to the big man himself: El Sueno. It doesn’t more apolitical than that.
Writing a game about fighting the War on Drugs does not however mean your game isn’t about empire. Mass market products that aren’t openly in favour of US imperialism labour under the delusion that the war on drugs doesn’t see colour or money. The main drug El Sueno is shifting is cocaine, which unless you’re particularly prudish, isn’t something parents have nightmares about. It’s less addictive than sugar and so prohibitively expensive that it’s synonymous with the excesses of the upper class. Black-tar heroine it is not.
However, it makes a lot of money and any country with access to coca plants and the means with which to produce cocaine has the potential to be an economic force to be reckoned with, or fund a sub-state actor’s capacity to pose a direct military threat to the US’ ever-expanding sphere of influence. One whose wealth cannot feasibly be controlled by economic or diplomatic action on the part of the US or its allies. The drugs trade, like the oil trade and the gas trade offers countries a source of income that has the potential to threaten the United States’ global hegemony, which is why there is a The War on Drugs at all. It’s a policy of protectionism, attempting to regulate demand for the extremely expensive products of its rivals and in so doing, smoothing over another roadblock to US power.
Back in the 70s and 80s, the US was conducting these operations in Latin America to prevent the spread of communism, which directly threatened its power and as your character acknowledges, little has changed. The US is back in Latin America. It probably never left. The last time it was in Bolivia, it was attempting to assassinate Che Guevara. There’s a new war, but the tactics remain the same. In a decade, the next generation of Ghosts may be sent back into Bolivia to unseat your rebel allies for being too damn socialist. This much, the game understands.
Wildlands knows enough to comment on the history of covert US operations, to acknowledge that they happened and that their justifications were morally dubious at best, but doesn’t take the vital next step to connect these decisions to a pattern of behaviour. That was the Cold War. This is the War on Drugs. Wildlands recognises the difference in the same way Clancy did. Same shit, different day. There’s always going to be another bad guy, and rest assured, they are always Very Bad. What matters in that they are the new bad guys doing new and different bad things and the fact that the US responds the same way every time is further proof of its moral quality.
When, in Wildlands, I found my character “Nomad” stepping on the fingers of a cartel playboy, the victim offered me half million dollars to go away. Nomad responds:
“I don’t need your money. I work for the US government. We spend billions of dollars on hand sanitizer alone.”
This is delivered as if it’s a badass point of pride and not the funniest thing anyone has said ever. And it’s also wrong, based on everything you’ve done in the game up until that point. In Wildlands, you upgrade Nomad’s abilities and equipment by stealing resources from the cartel and finding equipment in the field. The “tier one operator” explanation for this is obviously these are deniable operatives who can be disavowed at any time. They’re self-sufficient. They’re expendable. They’re elite. But in practice, you’re roughing up cartel lieutenants to get the locations of a 30-round clip for your AK-12. Elite survivialism is boiled down to a mildly tedious fetch-quest. The first thing you do when you enter a new region is gather information on where all the weapon parts are. It’s a better carrot than killing or kidnapping whichever drug lord with a memorable gimmick that happens to be working that patch of land.
Though not intentional, this is the one cogent point the game makes about the current state of the US empire. Even though the US military is funded to the tune of $780 billion, it will always be overstretched and under-resourced. It has military bases in 70 of the world’s countries, the only functioning aircraft carriers in active service, several thousand nuclear weapons and is fighting both sides of the Syrian civil war by proxy as we speak. During the Iraq invasion, US troops scavenged weapons and bought their own gear online to supplement the shortfall in supplies provided by the most powerful and well-funded military in the world. The US has the most of everything, and it will always need more.
What makes the Ghosts team in Wildlands so elite, so valuable, is that they’re cheap. In the opening scene each member describes how they each made their own way to Bolivia, and bar a helicopter ride, the operational support of a lone CIA agent and a handful of guns, the bill the US will be footing for Wildlands’ hijinks will probably be lower than the State Department’s stationary budget. Nomad can’t “level up” without delivering supplies to the rebels, the proxies who secure the territory that the Ghosts destablise. New guns are found in enemy encampments. In a war on the production of goods that challenge America’s ability to control the global market for everything, its troops still need to steal basic armaments from the enemy in order to do their jobs. This is why the Ghosts are characterised as the best of the best. You’ve done what they do in Wildlands in several of Ubi’s other games, but they’re doing it on a national scale on the US government’s payroll. Every red-dot sight scavenged is a dollar saved and a resource denied to the enemy. It lends a comic subtext to “black ops.” Wetwork without a trace, and under budget.
Careening around in a hatchback you stole from a poor person may at first blush seem antithetical to the US of Wildlands that spend billions on soap. It’s not. It’s consistent with how the US military trains its personnel to be resourceful and adaptable, with situational disregard for the lives and property of the world’s most vulnerable people.
Ubisoft Paris’ decision to take late-era Clancy’s politics at face value has resulted in a game that cannot simply be dismissed as weird propaganda. The developers at Ubisoft Paris are certainly capable of the same imperialist impulses as an American studio. But the recent Clancy games seem to me to be less of an expression of the developer or the corporation’s own politics and more of a direct adaptation of the hyper-masculine, realpolitik principles held by the American military and intelligence communities. As such, it can’t be completely condemned. We may never know the extent to which the military industrial complex has funded and invested in military-themed games, although the degree to which they directly benefit from their popularity is something they’ll happily tell you themselves.
Ghost Recon: Wildlands undeniably functions as another offshoot of US imperialism, selling the violence done to the world’s poorest people back to us as disposable entertainment. But it’s also so pure, so honest about depicting the pernicious assumptions about violence as a solution to the issues created in part by the US itself, about how the US’ many wars against abstract concepts are ultimately justifiable and how it thinks all this and more is marketable.
Wildlands was a smash hit for Ubisoft, and it would be disingenuous to put this success down to the ugliest shades of its character. The core demographic for Wildlands is not the “Build the Wall” contingent of the market. It is a product marketed globally and it saw success on that scale because the vast majority of its audience accepts America’s state of permanent war as vector for content. The assumptions and principles it embodies are easily and readily ignored. Wildlands is about having military-themed fun in an open world. Who cares where it takes place or who the enemy is? All that matters is that it’s believable, that it’s consistent with the vaguely realistic qualities of the Tom Clancy brand.
The fact that it satisfies all of these criteria says more about the US empire than it does about the game itself.
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