A Future So White, There’s Only One Shade (of Skin)

A digital simulacrum of Mark Hamill stars in Squadron 42

Like many nerds who grew up in the 1990s playing the Wing Commander and X-Wing games, I backed infamous forever-in-development space sim boondoggle Star Citizen ages ago, and I keep up with its development. The rumor mill has it that this October—mere weeks from now!—will bring momentous news about the project, perhaps even a release date for Squadron 42, its single-player component. What better time to check in and see how the multiplayer side of the game’s coming along? My decrepit old potato of a PC can barely run it anymore, but it’s a pretty enough slideshow, and I can tootle around in my ship (and in my ship), marvel at the sights, and daydream about what might someday be. And I can reflect on all that’s gone wrong.

If you’ve never played Star Citizen, you might know it—if you know it at all—as vaporware, a scam, a crowdfunding horror story. It is, in fact, neither vaporware nor an outright scam, but it is an incredible monument to poor planning and mismanagement, and a warning about what can happen when you give a couple of dreamy visionaries a billion dollars with no deadlines or guardrails. The whole thing is like a giant game of exquisite corpse; not only does the left hand not know what the right is doing, neither of them knows where the feet are or whether the kidneys are functioning. Even as the developers strip entire mature systems out of the game to replace them with more sophisticated, more complex iterations, they keep adding new material that’s obsolete on arrival: spaceships that don’t support the new resource-management system, static environments that don’t use the destructible terrain or physicalized scenery they’ve so exhaustively developed, mission content that doesn’t make use of the dynamic simulated economy they’ve been promising for a decade now.

This haphazardness is nowhere more evident than in the writing. The basic premise of the setting is a fun kind of Silver Age science fiction throwback, with human civilization representing, in Asimovian fashion, the Roman Empire in space, and various alien species standing in for the Celts, the Germans, the Arabs, and the Persians. It’s inherently mildly racist, of course, and a bit on the nose besides—the Germanic aliens are literally called the Vanduul, and the plot arc that will see them driven ahead of some as-yet-unrevealed space Huns to sack space Rome (Earth), upon which event the center of human civilization will move to space Byzantium (the confusingly named Terra), has been telegraphed from light-years away—but it’s not a bad setup. They haven’t ever done much with the Roman theme, though, because two stronger influences have strangled it.

One is simple nostalgia for the SF films and shows of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. Rather than on-theme sites and institutions drawn from Roman culture and history, most of what we’ve got so far is pure cinematic pastiche. There’s off-brand Coruscant and off-brand Cloud City, a Tatooine and a Hoth, an entire Blade Runner planet, ships modeled heavily on Alien’s Nostromo and its sequel’s dropship, and so forth. And hey, fair enough. People love nostalgia, and they love pastiche. The other influence, though, is the lede I buried all the way down here under four paragraphs of faff.

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Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are the brainchildren of brothers Chris and Erin Roberts, games industry veterans who started out at Origin Systems, where they created the Wing Commander games—a series of story-driven space combat simulators, heavily influenced by Star Wars, and a number of spinoffs, including Wing Commander: Privateer and Privater 2: The Darkening, which brought open-world gameplay to the Wing Commander setting. Electronic Arts purchased Origin, and the brothers Roberts left, with much of their staff, to found a new studio, Digital Anvil, with backing from Microsoft. There, they created the spiritual predecessors of Squadron 42 and Star Citizen: Starlancer and Freelancer, respectively a story-driven space combat simulator in the vein of Wing Commander and a wildly ambitious Privateer-like open-world game set in the same universe. (When Freelancer inevitably went way over budget and way past its due date, Microsoft intervened, slashed the most ambitious elements, and shoved a pared-down but functional game out the door as soon as they could. No such luck, for better and worse, for Star Citizen.)

Starlancer was a prequel to Freelancer, relating how the setting of the latter came to be. It began in the 22nd century, with two Earth-based superpowers struggling for control of the solar system. It was literally East vs. West: the Western Alliance (the United States, Japan, and Western Europe) against the Eastern Coalition (China, the former Soviet Union, and the Arab states). It’s a latter-day Cold War scenario concocted by a bunch of guys who grew up on Red Scare propaganda and Ronald Reagan speeches, so of course the perfidious Easterners kick off the action by launching a brutal surprise attack on the West, obliterating France and Italy. A jolly little space war ensues, but despite the player’s best efforts, the West eventually loses. In defeat, they launch five interstellar colony ships—one American, one Japanese, one British, one German, and one Spanish—on a centuries-long journey to settle the star systems that will become the setting of Freelancer.

Freelancer, then, is a far-future setting in which basically everybody is of American, British, German, or Japanese descent (the Spanish colony ship malfunctions; they end up as a mysterious, piratical minor faction). It’s a little weird, and, again, ever so mildly racist, but the game’s backstory justifies it effectively, and it has some advantages in scene-setting and storytelling. Where it doesn’t work so well is in Star Citizen.

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You see, despite not having a naively reactionary World War Three background to explain away the nonexistence in the setting of much of humanity (although I don’t believe Starlancer or Freelancer ever considered the existence of India, Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, or Latin America in the first place), Star Citizen and Squadron 42 pick up right where Freelancer left off. In what’s likely meant to be an homage to those older games, American, British, German, and Japanese proper nouns dominate the setting. In-game brands are occasionally Japanese (Musashi, Sakura), occasionally German (Behring, Kruger), and otherwise almost universally Anglo-American. Named historical figures are likewise: Croshaw, Messer, Bishop, Hurston. The cast of Squadron 42? Gillian Anderson, Mark Hamill, Gary Oldman, Mark Strong, Ben Mendelsohn, Liam Cunningham, John Rhys-Davies—obviously a star-studded gesture of affection for the genre movies and shows the developers love, but equally obviously lily-white (and overwhelmingly male). Everybody in this universe speaks English; everybody has an American or British accent.

It’s a microcosm of the whole directionless design process. There’s no overall plan, there’s no vision, there’s no explanation of how anything got anywhere. There have been a whole lot of choices made in isolation: let’s cast this guy we love, let’s have a throwback to Freelancer here, let’s name a character after somebody’s mother-in-law or God knows what. No individual choice is terrible, but a thousand of them add up to something unsettling—a future for humanity in which early 21st-century Anglo-American culture remains hegemonic, in which nearly every person of any importance or consequence is white, in which vast swathes of humanity have apparently vanished without a trace. (And the stand-ins for non-white, non-Anglophone people are literally aliens.)

It’s easy to get lost in the weeds of obsessive, encyclopedic “worldbuilding,” but there’s something to be said for having a thoroughly, holistically developed setting for fiction like this. Star Citizen is by no means alone in fumbling its way to an accidentally white-supremacist future (its sometime rival Elite: Dangerous is much the same, as of course are most of the classic genre films and television shows these games draw from); it’s what happens when a bunch of British and American (and German and Canadian, in Star Citizen’s case) creators, drawing on their own milieu and their favorite media, develop a setting piecemeal without considering the big picture. But a few weeks from now—we can dream!—Squadron 42 might have an official release date, and this wildly ambitious game, which for all its faults features some extraordinary technology and gorgeous art, might be one step closer to reality. A lot of eyes will be on the United Empire of Earth; it’s a shame they won’t be seeing something more thoughtfully imagined and representative of humanity’s rich real-life diversity.