Little Big Empire
The first sign of trouble in Little Big Planet is the narrator, and his British accent.
Set aside for the moment the fact that Little Big Planet sounds British because it’s made by a British developer. Even if it came out of Idaho, it would likely use that melliflous, Royal Shakespeare Company tone which has so long connoted an endearing fantasy: rolling green hills and small rustics with hairy feet and museums stocked with the wonders of the world. That voice, Stephen Fry’s, graced the similarly charing Fable II. It sounds like the start of every bedtime story every made. Who doesn’t love it?
Well - I don’t. Because it reminds me of something else: the British Empire.
Quick recap. Once upon a time, the British almost ruled the world. They conquered territories and covered a quarter of the globe. The Empire reached so far that the sun never set on its soil.
Here’s a handy timeline:
What you don’t see on this timeline are the atrocities. The slave trade, the gunboats, the opium trade were just some of the highlights. A quick Google turns up even worse: “It invaded countries and completely changed most of their original cultures and it let its people urinate and do other stuff in its water supply.” And after the empire crumbled and it was time to carve new nations out of the wreckage? Ask Pakistan how well that’s worked out.
Of course, most of this is ancient history. But everything about Little Big Planet evokes that history, from the title on down.
To play the game, you traipse across the globe, dominating country after country. One of your chief goals is the acquisition of local treasures that you can bring back and enjoy on your home turf - in the levels you build with the stuff you stole. Your user-generated content becomes your personal British Museum, and the special zebra costume is the spiritual successor to Egypt’s Rosetta stone, lying exposed to the grubby fingerprints of generations of surly schoolkids. Those song lyrics from the Koran were exaggerated as a sacrelige, but spot-on as evidence of Little Big Planet’s carefree exoticism and cultural kleptomania.
And don’t make me take the next step into the analogy: which non-white hero gets to venture out and do all the hard work? Who’s decked out in ridiculous costumes like a post-modern minstrel show? Who’s alternately ridiculed and threatened every step of the way? That’s right. Sackboy. Little Big Planet might be our dreamscape, but it was all built on his back. And thanks to his labor, it just keeps growing, and growing, and growing.
That’s why the rum syrup-y accented tones of the narrator’s voice send a chill down my spine every time I hear them. They don’t make me think of A. A. Milne handing me an India rubber ball; instead, I picture a withered, gnarled old Briton, sitting in his study with an incontinent bulldog, the hair in his ears as thick as his handlebar moustache, his left foot idly plopped in a plate of toad in the hole. There can be a proper Empire again, he thinks, a new England, a day when we take it all back and set the world right again - even if it’s just in our dreams.
… Ahhh, I’m just foolin’ ya. Little Big Planet is a very sweet, harmless game. Really. I just wish they’d fix the jump button.
(This post dedicated to Michael Abbott, who asked for more LBP discussion, and to that British kid at Snappy Gamer who said we all think too much. We really beat on you the other day, didn’t we?)
04/12/2008 at 10:00 am Permalink
You certainly showed me. You and your posse. How old are you?
04/12/2008 at 10:15 am Permalink
Wow, you’re fast! And I’m 27.
Sorry, that sounded like gloating. I actually felt a kind of wonder about that thread - how one tossed-off post could draw almost every great writer in the gaming blogosphere into your comments area. And the shame is that you’re not totally wrong. The brainy game blogosphere could use an editor. But that wasn’t the best way to make the point.
04/12/2008 at 10:27 am Permalink
Also, I changed my shoutout so it wouldn’t sound like I thought “we won.” Nobody won that thread.
04/12/2008 at 11:58 am Permalink
Didn’t the dutch start the slave trade? I think they also sabotaged the jump button.
04/12/2008 at 12:09 pm Permalink
Gads, looking at that graph makes me wonder how much the U.S. is going to reflect the exact same thing in a couple more years.
04/12/2008 at 12:51 pm Permalink
You mean like the UN declaring Courtney Love as a WMD and instituting sanctions upon the country?
04/12/2008 at 5:55 pm Permalink
Hmm… what the hell does one say to a post like this? I know you were only half serious, but it’s an interesting analysis of LBP. I guess we take the good with the bad, eh? There were some good things the British took with them too… like… erm…
Damn, and now I can’t think of anything… (That crazy snappygamer guy is a bit creepy showing up just like that, eh!?)
04/12/2008 at 8:44 pm Permalink
@L.B. - You’re the corporate expert, but I’d say the US is juuuuuust to the left of the big red bar on that chart.
@Ben - I tagged this as satire, but the more I wrote, the more I suspected I’m on to something. That said: the British were good for plenty of things. (Truth be told, I’m a red-blooded Anglophile at heart. The music, the Docs, the beer, and yes, the accents … )
04/12/2008 at 10:06 pm Permalink
Well, I did ask for more critical conversation, didn’t I? Heck, I’ll even take more satirical conversation.
Sackboy as victim of imperialism, eh? I think I just hit my own jump button.
05/12/2008 at 7:55 am Permalink
I always need more reasons not to buy a PS3 and this game. I can’t believe those evil British people are moving their imperialist ways into the digital world. Thanks, PixelVixen!
05/12/2008 at 2:22 pm Permalink
wow! that was smart as shit. where do you get off?? haven’t you ever read a game blog? you are required to recycle the same metaphors over-and-over until people start plucking out their own eyes oedipus style. and you certainly aren’t allowed to use $5 words like mellifluous.
06/12/2008 at 12:20 am Permalink
@_caustic
No, No, you’re only thinking of bloggers that are black, like N’Gai. Apparently they’re not allowed to rise above the level of discourse as set by Soulja Boy…. /angry sarcasm
07/12/2008 at 10:50 pm Permalink
America is simply too young to have had a chance to perform atrocities old school style.
Oh.. and you really do love Stephen Fry right?
08/12/2008 at 10:17 am Permalink
@_caustic - Ha, WordPress comes with a word count but not a reading level score. Please fix and I will comply. (No, I won’t.)
@dartmerc - Must I backtrack on everything? I love the concept of Stephen Fry but I’m reaching for the name of a film that he made or broke for me. Net net, I’d rather have breakfast with Laurie.
11/12/2008 at 9:27 am Permalink
We recently had a discussion at Gamers With Jobs on the frequency of games being compared to World of Warcraft. You can read my comments there if you’d like, but my main contention is that, while it may be fun to find parallels, that’s just the first step in a good comparison. Seeing similarities lays the foundation for exploring further similarities and differences, which leads to a better understanding of both the source and the parallel.
You’ve found a number of ways in which LBP coincides with the oppression, &c. of the British Empire. Would you care to take it a step further? In what ways dot he stories play out differently? If your example holds, then LBP shows that there is a context in which it’s fun to be Gunga Din (see also the original Kipling poem). Is it important that SackBoy is better treated by a player than Gunga Din was? Does this comparison reveal anything about players who act sadistically towards game protagonists?
21/12/2008 at 5:43 pm Permalink
I always find it amusing to listen to how a little island off the coast of France decided that being invade every week by hmm the likes of the Romans, the French etc wasn’t much fun & then decided to make a fight of things.
Sadly enough the US have tried to emulate this in recent years, only to come away with more egg on their faces than even 2 generations of Bush presidents could muster.
LBP has some things going for it but it’s 20% game, 80% meh.