by Nico Dicecco
Can we call a game like Saints Row the Third a satire? Okay, we can call it whatever we want. We can call it left-nippled frozen burrito slosh. Let me rephrase my point: is it critically useful to call Saints Row the Third a satire? I suppose this raises two entangled questions. First, what is a satire? And second, what do we have to gain by using the term to refer to a specific kind of game?
Satire has a really long history that I promise I won’t go into—except to say that three main traditions start in ancient Greece and Rome: the Horation, the Juvenalian, and the Menippean. There are important differences between them, but they all share a few characteristics. They all find a balance between humour and abuse. The Horation stuff sides a little more towards humour, the Juvenalian a little more towards abuse. And Menippean satire differs primarily in that its objects of attack are more profuse; both “the funny” and “the fierce” get pointed towards a full cast of idiots and villains. Finally, all of these legacies share an interest in exposing vice and folly—that is, in revealing certain instances of human behavior as being either truly awful or merely stupid, and occasionally both. And in doing so, they articulate a position of moral superiority.
The problem with satire is that it doesn’t always work. And there are two big reasons why. Since the point of a satiric work is to expose vice and folly, there has to be a consensus between the author and the audience on what exactly is vicious or stupid, and what is morally proper. That said, not everyone has to agree. One of the great things about Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” is that some people read it and think that he actually wants us to eat babies. What matters is that some of the readership can identify the irony, get in on the joke, and side with the author in ridiculing the dunderheads who take the piece at face value. But it isn’t the gullible readership that Swift has in his rhetorical cross-hairs. He has the much loftier goal of exposing the viciousness underpinning 18 th Century political culture (*guffaw guffaw*).
That’s actually the second big reason satire can fail: it doesn’t make sense if you don’t know the context. I don’t know about you, but I’m a little rusty on my 18 th Century political history. And, sure, infanticidal cannibalism is funny in its own right, but Swift has a bigger point to make. He’s drawing attention to specific instances of hypocrisy tied up with British class divides, the mistreatment of the Irish, and the economics of the slave trade. Those are the vices he wants to attack, and he is staking a moral high ground by opposing them… I think. The specificity of the attack is not nearly as clear for the average reader today than it would have been for the highly educated and politically informed reader of the 18 th Century. To that reader, the moral norm—the values that the satire affirms—would be relatively clear. Without knowledge of the context, however, you can of course still chuckle about baby sandwiches, but the bigger picture is lost.
That’s actually a good segue to Saints Row . While there aren’t any infant sandwiches per se , it’s not a long walk from Murderbrawl XXXI to bread, butter, and babymeat. SRTT (ugh, I can’t keep writing the full title of the game) has all the hallmarks of Menippean satire: it’s a topsy-turvy world of excess and morally bankrupt behavior, showcasing an array of vile and vacuous character types. But what is the moral norm? And, perhaps more crucially, does interactivity change the way that irony functions?
The fact that SRTT is aiming at irony would be pretty tough to miss (but then again, some people miss the irony of Swift’s baby-brunch). Take for example “Professor Genki’s Super Ethical Reality Climax,” which is a game-show that feels a bit like a cross between and Running . The words “super ethical” stand in such obvious opposition to the activities of the murderous rat race that we should know from the get-go that irony is afoot. But is it militant irony? I get the strong sense that something is being ridiculed here, but what? It’s all so excessive that it’s hard to point to a specific target. Of course, that’s sort of what I earlier suggested characterized Menippean satire, so maybe I should be looking less for clearly defined targets than for intellectual categories.
Perhaps excess as such is the category under scrutiny in SRTT . This is fairly clear early on when the main cast goes to an ATM, but is upset when they can’t withdraw $10 million. Or, better yet, in the line spoken by the main character just before s/he jumps out of a plane—sans parachute—for a second time. Another character (Viola) says, “There’s probably an easier way to do this,” to which our protagonist responds, “No doubt,” and tumbles out the cargo bay. Of course there could be an easier way—but SRTT is only interested in the most spectacular approach, the most indulgent and satisfying. And if I’m being honest, I’m just having so much fun shooting my way through Prof. Genki’s maze and diving out of planes that what I really care about while I’m playing isn’t the satiric impulse but the way that the acoustic impulse of the sonic boom gun .
And that’s the problem. If excess is itself the object of attack, what does it mean for me to indulge in the fantasy of excess that the game provides? What does the game identify as the moral high-ground, and can I get there using the tools offered to me by the game itself? Perhaps this is the way that SRTT slides from satire into parody. Whereas satire establishes a moral norm from which to launch its attack, parody uses mimicry to lovingly affirm even while it subverts its target. In other words, unlike satire, parody is double-edged, always complicit in the thing it ridicules.
As I write this, I can’t help thinking about one particular moment in the game that has been bugging me. During the mission “Nyte Blayde’s Return,” your ally Viola is convinced to dress up like a “slutty nun,” who is, ostensibly, a character in the Nyte Blade franchise. In one respect, this parodies the excesses of superhero costumes, which have a terrible record of portraying women’s bodies as hyper-sexualized. At the same time, however, as Viola emerges in costume, she says, “I didn’t get a masters in economics to look like a slut.” So, we are asked to think of Viola as an educated woman who feels degraded by this objectifying costume—which tells us that the creators of the game know that it is an objectifying costume. On the one hand, Viola gets to join a very limited club of female video game characters with graduate degrees (perhaps a club of one?). On the other hand, the game nonetheless still depicts her in a skin-tight onesie that opens down the middle from clavicle to bellybutton, exposing oh-so-much-inner-side-boob. Even if the game designers know they’re doing it, and they tell us that they know they’re doing it, they’re still doing it. Self-reflexivity doesn’t necessarily give you a pass, does it?
And here we come to the second question I identified at the start of this article: what do we have to gain by discussing SRTT in terms of satire or parody? Well, for one, it gives us something to discuss and some critical tools to help us along—and in a lot of ways that’s the point of Medium Difficulty. So rather than posit an answer, I’m going to prod you to take up the question in the comments. And to further stoke the fires, especially with respect to the Viola issue, have a peek at response to Rush Limbaugh’s recent dumbassery. Now that’s satire!
