80 Days of queerness, class tension, and decolonization
- melkagen
- Jun 12, 2017
- 3 min read
In 80 Days, the wildly acclaimed interactive narrative game from Inkle Studios, you play a greatly expanded form of Jules Verne's classic novel, trying to circumnavigate the globe in 80 game days by balancing 19th century delays, money troubles, your master's health and happiness, and your own yearning to explore the world. You play as Passepartout, Phineas Fogg's eager, Parisian "gentleman's gentleman," a design choice that feels completely natural—who else would be making travel arrangements and buying warm clothes than the valet?—and utterly subversive—Phineas Fogg, adventurer extraordinaire, barely seems to participate in his own adventures, leaving all the exciting choices and conundrums to his servant. Passepartout, which is to say you the player, either succeeds in propelling them around the world in 80 days or he doesn't; Fogg registers as little more than an open wallet and a cantankerous weakling, muttering things like "My, this journey is more tiring than I expected" on their more perilous crossings.
The game's developers (particularly lead writer Meg Jayanth) are vocal about the kind of casual (and explicit) decolonization that their mechanics propagate. Their steampunk world is filled with fantastical automata, massive birds half alive and half clockwork, and brave anti-colonialist revolutionaries encounterable everywhere from India to Haiti. Female adventurers and inventors pop up worldwide as well, helping and thwarting our stoic heroes in delightfully complex ways. It's like a modern liberal's fiction of the way the world could have been rather than the way it really was. Which is really fun. Science fiction is a genre that all too often hews primly to dusty social norms under the guise of pedantic realism in everything but scientific advancement; how lovely to have both wacky airships made by a worldwide Artificer's Guild, and *also* badass female submariner pirates and male ex-slaves that dress up as Death and seduce you in New Orleans bars.
That queerness, too, is an utterly delightful, casual, and surprising aspect of 80 Days. Passepartout, depending on how you play him in various situations, can be gay, bi, or straight. The night in New Orleans, if you flirt back, can end with a kiss between Passepartout and the former slave Octave, building from a glance between sweeping lashes that Passepartout can choose to acknowledge or not. Another possible love story, between Passepartout and handsome airship captain Vitti Jokinen, can actually end with the valet abandoning his master for Vitti before the return to London. This choice adds a more conclusive symbolism to the tension bubbling between Fogg and Passepartout throughout—if you choose Vitti, you give up on pleasing the capricious whims of a master who often seems an object of your unrequited love. I, along with much of the internet apparently, was shipping them early and often, and not just in airships. *pauses for laughter*
No two treks are the same, and the world's rich diversity contributes to an addictive replayability. You want to visit the other cities, meet all the characters you missed, but (the first few times at least) you're more inclined to meet the 80 day deadline than risk dallying. This creates a really interesting tension between your gamer self and your reader self: the former only wants to understand the story well enough to manipulate a faster route, the reader wants to engage with the 150,000 words worth of intricate plot and character development hidden around the globe. Mental colonization plays a role here as well, built as it is into the game's mechanic; since the fastest way goes straight east across Russia, across the Pacific to San Francisco, and back to London from New York, playing the game purely as a game greatly privileges the northern hemisphere, rarely encouraging treks through South America, Africa, or Australia. I'd love to be able to pick the starting/ending city and see what new routes showed up. Vast as the possibilities are, having to start and end in London gets, as Fogg would say, a bit wearisome.
Of course, you can go south, but you only want to once you stop caring about getting around the world in 80 days. Another score for intentional misplay and meaningful mental decolonization—in order to get to a lot of world's best content, you have to stop defining winning in the straightest way and begin appreciating all the different kinds of winning possible in a game like this.
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