Nobody would have imagined that the sequel to a relatively unknown ‘twin-stick shooter’ released more than eight years ago was going to become an audience phenomenon and an early contender for the title of ‘game of the year’ in 2024. This It’s not just a normal game. It is an excellent cooperative action game with very fun mechanics and many surprises. But what really makes special Helldivers 2 It is his identity, which he forged through elegant political satire.
Despite the weeks that have passed since the game’s release, We continue to see comments and messages from players who insist that “Helldivers 2 It has no political message.”. Worse yet, some take their fascist aesthetic completely seriously. We need to have a serious discussion about media literacy in the gaming community, but in order to get there we have to be clear about what this game is talking about.
Part of me just wants to say “how can anyone not understand the political satire of Helldivers 2 after seeing trailers like that?”, but that would be ignoring the problem. There are people who simply do not see beyond what a work—be it a video game, comic, movie, etc.—shows them superficially and it is not because of ignorance, but because they never learned about narrative elements such as subtext, metaphor and symbolism.
Or because they don’t care and don’t want to see it.
Super-Earth and “managed democracy”
The members of the Helldivers Military Force, the characters we control in the game, do not fight in the name of boring old Earth. Their world – which is our own planet – is called, without any irony, ‘Super Earth’.
What makes it ‘super’? That is the point. That name implies that it is “better”, “more powerful”. When we see her, she looks like a clean, bright planet, full of smiling people. Supposedly it became this way thanks to a new system of government: managed democracy.
According to the game, “the inhabitants of Super-Earth use an algorithm that chooses the ‘right candidate’ for each one. “This removes the uncertainty of the old system where people didn’t really know what they were voting for.”
During the game, we never visit Super-Earth, we only see it through propaganda videos and the Strohmann News broadcasts. In these we see clean, bright places full of happy people. For their part, the Helldivers are presented as heroic men, women and even children with the noble mission of bringing successful managed democracy to other planets.
It all sounds like a utopia. It is not like this?
What the game shows us and what is actually happening within its fiction are two very different things. The Super-Earth Federation is actually a tyrannical and authoritarian government that uses so-called managed democracy to stay in power. Meanwhile, he uses the Helldivers as disposable tools to enrich himself. Nothing in the game directly tells or shows us this, but the narrative it gives us through details and the gameplay itself is very clear.
Although visually the Helldivers are presented as heroic warriors who even wear capes, they are simple soldiers who can easily fall dead both from enemy attacks and from the incompetence of their own companions… or from their own incompetence.
When death causes laughter
There are not a few who have described Helldivers 2 as “a comedy game.” It’s not that the dialogues or games have jokes, but that the gameplay lends itself to absurd and very funny moments. Games in which we accidentally shoot down a teammate or are crushed by a reinforcement capsule are common.
These situations are funny in and of themselves, but they are even more funny—a funny thing that points to black humor—if we take into account that the characters who are “dying” are soldiers who believe they are immortal heroes, fanatical followers of a government that is literally sending them to be slaughtered.
In Helldivers 2, characters do not respawn when they die. The action of reviving a fallen comrade is “calling for reinforcements” and this calls a character with the same armor and controlled by the same player, but it is not the same soldier and we can tell this because his voice will always be different . This means that, within the game’s fiction, each mission involves the death of dozens of soldiers.
These same soldiers who are heading towards inevitable death are the ones who They shout phrases like That’s one more victory for the right side of history! o What do you think of the taste of freedom? in the middle of the shootings and who exclaim: My leg! For the love of freedom, my leg! when they are hurt. It’s supposed to be funny to hear them say such things, it’s absurd that they are so fanatical about their ideology in moments of life or death… Right?
Soldiers don’t say these things jokingly. They say it with the certainty of a protagonist in an American action movie from the 1980s. Likewise, the propaganda videos we see between missions are shown without a hint of comedy, but it’s all funny. But why is it funny?
If we start to question ourselves about it – and if we take the ‘lore’ of the game seriously – we discover that there is no reason to laugh. There is no reason for soldiers to be there. What use does democracy have for giant insects or robots? It is clear that this ideology is only the excuse through which they convince us—convince our characters—to risk their lives. Does the fact that Terminid blood serves as fuel have anything to do with it? Did you know ‘managed democracy’ is something that exists in real life?
Let’s talk about satire
Satirical works reflect, usually with humor, an element of reality. Unlike parody, which simply seeks mockery or exaggeration, satire aims to criticize what it represents.. Some of the best examples of satire are the novel Rebelion on the farm (George Orwell, 1945), which satirizes the way the Bolshevik revolution fell into the hands of tyrants; and the television series The Simpsonwhich criticizes numerous aspects of American culture while making fun of it.
Helldivers 2 It is also a political satire and mocks and criticizes a hypothetical United States that has completely fallen into fascism.. The aesthetic of Super-Earth, the propaganda it uses, the way it excuses war against its enemies is exaggerated iconography of the northern country to represent the ugly jingoism of it.
This is not the first work of fiction to do exactly this. Helldivers y Helldivers 2 They are heavily inspired by the movie space troops (Paul Verhoeven, 1997). That film also has a group of soldiers fighting a war against giant insects on another planet on behalf of an authoritarian government.
This is where things get complicated. As an old internet proverb says, “Satire requires clarity in its purpose or it will be confused with what it seeks to criticize.”. Achieving this is more difficult than it seems and although someone can clearly see the critical intention of a work, others are not so clear.
When space troops was released, many film critics rated it negatively, declaring that it was nothing more than militaristic propaganda. For its part, a large part of the audience simply considered it an entertaining action movie without any depth.
Today, in the post-Iraq war world, it is difficult not to see how space troops It is not intended to glorify the military, but to mock the absurd way in which they follow orders without reflecting on them and how easy it is to manipulate the public into supporting military action. How could we not understand that in 1997 when we saw one of the “good” characters literally dressed as a Nazi officer?
The same thing is happening now with the political issue of Helldivers 2.
¡Helldivers 2 It’s apolitical!
There are groups within the gaming community that refuse to accept that video games can have “political messages.”. By this they do not mean anything related to elections or anything like that, but rather that they can “demonstrate an ideology” or topics on complex issues about society, religion, government, human condition, etc.
This class of players alleges that “video games were better before when they didn’t have political themes”—something demonstrably false, since games have always reflected the beliefs of their creators or their times—and they regret that today “they try to force politics and inclusion in their games.” Although some sincerely believe this, it is an argument usually used by racist or sexist people who want to keep those who are “different from them” away from their hobby.
To return to the main topic, This kind of thinking was brilliantly lampooned in a recent article on the Hard Drive website. who uses as an example, precisely, Helldivers 2.
It’s okay to enjoy a game without having to touch on its themes. I, personally, can enjoy some campaigns Call of Duty even though I find their policies terribly problematic. However, just because I don’t see them or share them doesn’t mean I should deny that they are there.
Recently, in the midst of the absurd controversy in which they involved the consulting firm Sweet Baby Inc., those groups of ‘gamers’ took Helldivers 2 as an example of “a game in which there were no political themes.” This took by surprise the players who do understand the satire that takes place in its plot.
This is not the first time this has happened. In fact, it’s all too common. A few years ago there was the case of players of Warhammer 40K that they were treating the fascist Empire of Mankind as something aspirational. The situation got so out of control that the Games Workshop company had to issue a statement explaining that “the Empire were not the good guys” and? this is a hobby for everyone.
We have also seen small controversies on Twitter when someone decides to declare that “there are no political issues in Robocop” and there are works permanently misinterpreted as The fight Club y Breaking Badwhose followers ignorant of their themes treat their protagonists as role models.
In case of Helldivers 2 can have a happy ending. While writing this article I discovered that some of the worst groups that misunderstood the game They began to discover that the creators of the game are not apolitical entities that they they believed they were. The game’s official accounts, perhaps in response to these confusions, they are making the satire less subtle.
Spreading democracy
It’s difficult to create effective satire. Even the best-thought-out satires are not understood by everyone who consumes them, but that does not mean they stop being useful and interesting. Not all players Helldivers 2 They will understand that the game has a critical policy of fascism, but those who do will better understand the horrors of this form of government and could be more prepared against it if it ever rears its ugly head in their country.
And if that doesn’t happen, at least we enjoy a very fun game.
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