God of War
This review contains spoilers
The Ghost of Sparta and the Wages of Empire: On God of War (2005)
Look closely at Kratos before you swing the blades. Look at the chalk-white skin, that pallor borrowed from the ashes of a wife and daughter he butchered under divine instruction. Look at the chains seared into his forearms—gifts from a god, fused to bone, impossible to remove. Look at the contract: serve Olympus for ten years and we _might_ lift the burden you carry. This is not the iconography of a hero. This is the iconography of a man whose body has been written upon by power, whose violence belongs to someone else, whose freedom is always one more errand away. Before God of War is a power fantasy, it is a portrait of the colonized.
The colonial world, we have long been taught, is a Manichaean world: a place divided absolutely, where the masters live in the bright marble city on the hill and everything outside is monstrous, miasmic, ripe for slaughter. God of War renders this geography with almost embarrassing literalism. Olympus gleams; everything below it crawls. Athena, sleek and luminous, dispatches her instrument into the fetid underworlds, the deserts, the labyrinthine non-places where the Hydra and the Cyclops and the Medusa-coded feminine wait to be unmade. Notice that the game never asks whether these creatures have interiority, whether they suffer, whether their territory was theirs first. They are obstacles, surfaces, kill prompts. They are what the colonial gaze produces when it looks at anything outside its own marble: a writhing mass of teeth that exists only to be cut down so that the chosen subject may ascend.
And Kratos does ascend, in the most degraded sense of that word. His rage—and it is real rage, the rage of a man whose family was destroyed by the very system that now employs him—gets channeled, harnessed, made productive. This is the trick the colonial order plays on its most dangerous subjects: it does not extinguish their fury, it hires it. The native who ought to march on the palace is sent instead to butcher other natives in the palace's name. Every monster Kratos kills is a monster Olympus would have had to kill itself, or, more honestly, did not need to kill at all, but was happy to see dead. The gods watch from their balconies and clap. They have found the rare instrument that detests them and works for them anyway, because they have arranged the world so that working for them is the only available shape his hatred can take.
The game wants you to read this as tragedy and also as fun, and the contradiction is the whole point. Pull off a brutal finisher on a minotaur and the screen rewards you with red orbs—a literal currency extracted from the corpse, used to upgrade the very weapons the gods welded to your arms. Violence in God of War is never wasted, never excessive, never the wild cleansing thing Fanon imagined revolutionary violence might be. It is metabolized. It feeds back into the system that demanded it. Kratos cannot kill his way to freedom because every kill makes him a more efficient servant. The chains get longer; they do not break. This is not a bug in the design. This is the design telling the truth about what happens to anti-colonial fury when it has nowhere to go but through the channels the colonizer has dug for it.
Then there is the body itself. The Ghost of Sparta is the marked man par excellence, his skin a permanent record of the crime his masters tricked him into committing. He cannot pass. He cannot forget. He cannot walk into a temple and be received as a citizen because the evidence of his usefulness to power is written all over him in the ashes of the people he loved. Read this through the long tradition of writing on the colonized body—the brand, the tribal scar reinterpreted as savagery, the dark skin made into a uniform one cannot remove—and Kratos's pallor stops being a cool art-direction choice and starts being something more honest. He has been made hideous so that he will keep working. His shame is the leash. The promise that the gods will lift the curse if he just completes one more impossible task is the same promise empire has always made to its useful natives: assimilate harder, fight better, kill more of your cousins, and one day we will let you in. The day never comes. In the game's climax, when the gods do technically hold up their end, they refuse him the one thing he actually wanted—forgetting—and he is left a god himself, throne-bound, more chained than ever. The reward for perfect service is promotion into the machinery.
What is the player doing during all of this? This is the question the game's reception in 2005 mostly declined to ask. The player is being trained. Trained in the rhythm of conquest, in the satisfaction of clearing a space of its inhabitants, in the moral arithmetic by which a beautiful body in pain (Kratos's) justifies any number of grotesque bodies in pieces (everyone else's). This is not incidental to the medium; it is the pedagogy of a particular kind of game made at a particular moment. God of War arrives in the second full year of the Iraq occupation, into an American culture marinating in its own wounded machismo, hungry for protagonists who could be victims and avengers at once, who could bomb a civilization flat and still be understood as the ones who had suffered. Kratos is the perfect avatar for this structure of feeling. He is sympathetic because he has lost everything; he is permitted any atrocity because of that loss; and the world he moves through has been pre-sorted into things that deserve to die. The player learns, controller in hand, the basic grammar of imperial self-pity.
None of this is to say the game is stupid. It is, in fact, smart enough to know what it is doing, which is part of why it stings. The series will spend the next two decades trying to redeem Kratos, dragging him north, giving him a son, teaching him to whisper instead of roar—a long, sincere effort to detoxify a character who was, in his original form, a fairly precise diagnosis of what empire does to the men it uses up. But the 2005 game remains the honest one. It shows you the bargain in its naked form: the colonized subject offered the tools of his masters, told that mastery itself is the cure for his wound, and discovering at the end of the climb that the throne was just a heavier chain. The tragedy is not that Kratos fails. The tragedy is that within the world the gods have built, his definition of success was already their victory.
Real liberation, if we are being serious, would require Kratos to do the one thing the game cannot let him do: stop. Lay down the blades. Refuse the errand. Walk out of the Manichaean map entirely and into some other geography where his rage might find a target worth the name. That game has not been made. Perhaps it cannot be made, not in this medium, not yet, because the pleasures of the form are too entangled with the pleasures of conquest. But it is worth saying clearly, while we still can, that what God of War offers is not catharsis. It is the most beautifully animated treadmill in the history of the console—a treadmill on which a furious, grieving man runs himself into godhood and never once gets closer to home.
Look closely at Kratos before you swing the blades. Look at the chalk-white skin, that pallor borrowed from the ashes of a wife and daughter he butchered under divine instruction. Look at the chains seared into his forearms—gifts from a god, fused to bone, impossible to remove. Look at the contract: serve Olympus for ten years and we _might_ lift the burden you carry. This is not the iconography of a hero. This is the iconography of a man whose body has been written upon by power, whose violence belongs to someone else, whose freedom is always one more errand away. Before God of War is a power fantasy, it is a portrait of the colonized.
The colonial world, we have long been taught, is a Manichaean world: a place divided absolutely, where the masters live in the bright marble city on the hill and everything outside is monstrous, miasmic, ripe for slaughter. God of War renders this geography with almost embarrassing literalism. Olympus gleams; everything below it crawls. Athena, sleek and luminous, dispatches her instrument into the fetid underworlds, the deserts, the labyrinthine non-places where the Hydra and the Cyclops and the Medusa-coded feminine wait to be unmade. Notice that the game never asks whether these creatures have interiority, whether they suffer, whether their territory was theirs first. They are obstacles, surfaces, kill prompts. They are what the colonial gaze produces when it looks at anything outside its own marble: a writhing mass of teeth that exists only to be cut down so that the chosen subject may ascend.
And Kratos does ascend, in the most degraded sense of that word. His rage—and it is real rage, the rage of a man whose family was destroyed by the very system that now employs him—gets channeled, harnessed, made productive. This is the trick the colonial order plays on its most dangerous subjects: it does not extinguish their fury, it hires it. The native who ought to march on the palace is sent instead to butcher other natives in the palace's name. Every monster Kratos kills is a monster Olympus would have had to kill itself, or, more honestly, did not need to kill at all, but was happy to see dead. The gods watch from their balconies and clap. They have found the rare instrument that detests them and works for them anyway, because they have arranged the world so that working for them is the only available shape his hatred can take.
The game wants you to read this as tragedy and also as fun, and the contradiction is the whole point. Pull off a brutal finisher on a minotaur and the screen rewards you with red orbs—a literal currency extracted from the corpse, used to upgrade the very weapons the gods welded to your arms. Violence in God of War is never wasted, never excessive, never the wild cleansing thing Fanon imagined revolutionary violence might be. It is metabolized. It feeds back into the system that demanded it. Kratos cannot kill his way to freedom because every kill makes him a more efficient servant. The chains get longer; they do not break. This is not a bug in the design. This is the design telling the truth about what happens to anti-colonial fury when it has nowhere to go but through the channels the colonizer has dug for it.
Then there is the body itself. The Ghost of Sparta is the marked man par excellence, his skin a permanent record of the crime his masters tricked him into committing. He cannot pass. He cannot forget. He cannot walk into a temple and be received as a citizen because the evidence of his usefulness to power is written all over him in the ashes of the people he loved. Read this through the long tradition of writing on the colonized body—the brand, the tribal scar reinterpreted as savagery, the dark skin made into a uniform one cannot remove—and Kratos's pallor stops being a cool art-direction choice and starts being something more honest. He has been made hideous so that he will keep working. His shame is the leash. The promise that the gods will lift the curse if he just completes one more impossible task is the same promise empire has always made to its useful natives: assimilate harder, fight better, kill more of your cousins, and one day we will let you in. The day never comes. In the game's climax, when the gods do technically hold up their end, they refuse him the one thing he actually wanted—forgetting—and he is left a god himself, throne-bound, more chained than ever. The reward for perfect service is promotion into the machinery.
What is the player doing during all of this? This is the question the game's reception in 2005 mostly declined to ask. The player is being trained. Trained in the rhythm of conquest, in the satisfaction of clearing a space of its inhabitants, in the moral arithmetic by which a beautiful body in pain (Kratos's) justifies any number of grotesque bodies in pieces (everyone else's). This is not incidental to the medium; it is the pedagogy of a particular kind of game made at a particular moment. God of War arrives in the second full year of the Iraq occupation, into an American culture marinating in its own wounded machismo, hungry for protagonists who could be victims and avengers at once, who could bomb a civilization flat and still be understood as the ones who had suffered. Kratos is the perfect avatar for this structure of feeling. He is sympathetic because he has lost everything; he is permitted any atrocity because of that loss; and the world he moves through has been pre-sorted into things that deserve to die. The player learns, controller in hand, the basic grammar of imperial self-pity.
None of this is to say the game is stupid. It is, in fact, smart enough to know what it is doing, which is part of why it stings. The series will spend the next two decades trying to redeem Kratos, dragging him north, giving him a son, teaching him to whisper instead of roar—a long, sincere effort to detoxify a character who was, in his original form, a fairly precise diagnosis of what empire does to the men it uses up. But the 2005 game remains the honest one. It shows you the bargain in its naked form: the colonized subject offered the tools of his masters, told that mastery itself is the cure for his wound, and discovering at the end of the climb that the throne was just a heavier chain. The tragedy is not that Kratos fails. The tragedy is that within the world the gods have built, his definition of success was already their victory.
Real liberation, if we are being serious, would require Kratos to do the one thing the game cannot let him do: stop. Lay down the blades. Refuse the errand. Walk out of the Manichaean map entirely and into some other geography where his rage might find a target worth the name. That game has not been made. Perhaps it cannot be made, not in this medium, not yet, because the pleasures of the form are too entangled with the pleasures of conquest. But it is worth saying clearly, while we still can, that what God of War offers is not catharsis. It is the most beautifully animated treadmill in the history of the console—a treadmill on which a furious, grieving man runs himself into godhood and never once gets closer to home.
Mini Review: Before God of War (2005) is a power fantasy, it is a portrait of the colonized. Look at Kratos: skin stained by tragic ashes, chains fused to his bones. He is a man whose violence belongs to his masters. Olympus points, and he butchers the monsters of the periphery for a vague promise of relief. The tragedy is woven into the gameplay itself: extracting red orbs to upgrade the very chains that bind him. Violence doesn't liberate him; it only makes him a better servant of empire.
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