Thread by @AlexandraErin

So I started playing Control after watching the first of @JuliaLepetit's recent VODs. I'm not super far into it so please no spoilers, but I find that it's a game with a lot to say and I think by the time I'm done I'll have a lot to say about it.

It's fun to watch Julia play it because as a visual artist she keeps stopping to point out things that I would never notice, in particular how the game designers achieve the difficult trick of staging the big areas so that when you enter them you get a striking visual.

Which, you're probably thinking that's not a hard trick, games do it all the time, but I'm not talking about a micro-cutscene with strategic camera focusing and panning. What's trickier is doing it in free-roaming mode with the camera following the player's shoulder.

And again and again, they manage to create visual introductions to new rooms that look like framed paintings, that could be freeze framed and assembled into an alien tarot deck.

All of which would be completely lost on me without someone pointing it out.

I'm not a visual thinker. While I'm struck by these when I notice them, I can't conjure a picture of any up into my head and I don't know that I could even say I remember any of them, as I didn't stop to put what I was seeing into words.

I think in terms of words and stories.

And the story this game is telling has a lot to say about labor. I feel like the actual strongest moral of the game, if it has one, is that it's those who put in the support work, who stock the supply closets and clean the spills and flush the pipes, who keep the world turning.

I mean, this is potentially a bit of a spoiler but it's speculative for me and it's based on very early game content, but if there was a markerboard somewhere at Remedy where somebody wrote the words "God is a Janitor" and underlined it several times, I would not be surprised?

You've got a seemingly all-powerful (but what, if anything, can/do they actually do?) yet unfathomably remote Board which presumes to select (but can really only seem to test) a Director for the Bureau. And the Directors seem to have a habit of going evil and/or self-destructing.

And then there's a janitor. Not apparently appointed by the board. Not apparently selected by anyone. Nobody asked him to show up. Nobody asked him to mop the floors. Nobody asked him to fight a never-ending battle against apparently sapient, malevolent [redacted].

And while the Board thinks that you/Jesse are there to be the next Director (again, that's an early game spoiler), the janitor who lets you in with an insouciant and easily missed flex of control over a building the Bureau of Control can only ever coexist with...

...confidently asserts that Jesse/you are there to be the assistant janitor, because he needs an assistant. And Jesse repeatedly tells herself/you/Polaris that she's way more comfortable with that job title than director.

And while it's easily explained as a matter of there being an ongoing crisis that demands your full attention and also prevents any bureaucracy from happening... your Directorship in the game does consist of schlepping all over the place, cleaning up messes and doing maintenance.

(With guns and superpowers, I should specify, just so nobody gets the wrong idea about what kind of game this is. While it has a lot to say about labor and uses a custodian vs. director metaphor, this is a shooty-shooty-boom game.)

Honestly, I landed on "custodian vs. director" by happenstance, I think that's really it, what the game says about relationships to power. Jesse is a custodian for the power she receives. She's a steward. A servant. A caretaker.

...I said I would have a lot to say later but apparently later is now.

I also think it's deliberate that Emily Pope (who is also my wife whom I love and am married to), a non-executive researcher (not sure where she fell in the org chart before the disaster exactly except not being the top tier) sets up her disaster command post in "The Board Room".

I don't know what The Board Room was even used for before, as the the actual Board exists unbounded by conference rooms and tables and chairs. Possibly the Bureau used it for cosplay when they needed to LARP normality for someone temporarily in their custody for evaluation.

But Emily Pope, in her capacity as one of the people who sits down and gets to work when work needs doing, sits herself down in a chair in the board room and gets to work.

I feel like a lot of people telling this kind of story would have the protagonist/viewpoint character giving the janitor a token protest before going along with him because it's easier and making a show of "not being too proud" to be sent to fix some pipes.

But this game instead tells us that Jesse has worked all kinds of jobs in her life on the run/prowl, and that she likes the kinds of jobs where you get to work with your hands alone/ignored.

And of course this game came out a couple years ago, but it feels very timely in an age when prominent politicians are making disparaging comparisons of what they term "low-skill workers" vs. the people with the corner offices.

(Of course, in the Oldest House, all offices are corner offices. All offices. All corners.

...if you have ever wanted to play Half-Life 1 slammed together with SCP and Welcome to Nightvale, this might be the game for you?)

(And also it might be a stealth midquel/gaiden-game to the Alan Wake series, which I haven't played, so I can't say much about how it compares.)

To be clear, I wouldn't go so far as to say any of this is "the meaning" in the game. Just things I think it is saying. They might be unrelated to or even at odds with an intended overall message, if there is one.

https://twitter.com/Fromage10x/status/1479553990912364546