The Modern Mechanism

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs

The Chinese Room, 2013

In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool, in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labour proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machines that he must follow. In manufacture the workmen are parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes a mere living appendage.Karl Marx, Capital

As early as 1867 Karl Marx understood how technology was giving birth to modern humanity, the union of man and machine that is the consequence of an industrial society. In a world which grows more and more mechanized, a growing percentage of people - if they are to remain productive - must be acclimated to regular interaction with machines, almost to the point of physically incorporating them. The automatic loom, the mechanized thresher, the assembly-line - all are massive mechanisms, all require their workers to function less as skilled individuals and more as component parts of the larger apparatus.A certain mechanic hybridity is thus the mark of any modern society, more so today than ever: witness the ubiquity of handheld computing in the developed world; we are almost never not plugged in. The steampunk genre, a literary setting which itself mixes fin de siècle theories of science with cyberpunk sensibilities, is premised on just such a technological continuity between the dawning age of industry and our own information era.It should come as no surprise, then, that steampunk has become a popular setting within video games, a medium that is itself a prime example of the human/machine interface. From the recently-released Dishonored to the classic Thief series to the baroque Arcanum of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, we find numerous examples of the anxiety surrounding the changes wrought by technology, not just on the social body and the body politic, but on the body of the individual and the natural world, an anxiety which compels us to look back to the presumed point of origin: the birth of industrial society itself.Fear and ambivalence aroused by the effects of technology are common in these depictions, which often adopt elements of the horror narrative. Indeed, the horror genre as we understand it today emerged from the 18th and 19th centuries, precisely the era of industry’s birth and widespread establishment, and the historical context of the genre cannot be overstated. Critics have argued for a reading of Shelley’s Frankenstein in which the monster embodies fears of the rise of the proletariat: a hybrid creature, a creation of science imbued with artificial life, a source of powerful rebellious potential, an object both of humanitarian sympathy and reactionary fear.This feeling of horror - its connection to the birth of modernity and the hybrids that result - is the topic of the lately-released Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, a game thick with atmosphere, lush with visual design and sporting strong steampunk influences. Published by Frictional Games and developed by The Chinese Room, Machine for Pigs is the putative sequel to Amnesia: The Dark Descent, but, while Machine for Pigs takes pains to place itself within the universe established in the first game, it stands on its own merit, distinct in its thematic focus and the richness of its writing.

The first Amnesia game - The Dark Descent - is widely credited for restoring the founding features of survival horror - fragility, helplessness and atmospheric dread - in the face of the guns-blazing, shock-and-splatter trend established in latter-day survival horror releases like the most recent Resident Evil and Dead Space games. Rather than provide the player with an arsenal of weaponry with which to confront and overcome their fears, Dark Descent offers no means of self defense beyond speed and stealth. Indeed, as well as a physical health mechanic, which determines how many injuries the player character can suffer before dying, Dark Descent also includes a metric for mental health or ‘sanity’, which begins to deplete when a player lingers in darkness, witnesses a supernatural event, or - in a particularly wicked twist - looks directly at enemies. Gameplay in Dark Descent is thus a furtive, tense activity where threats are to be avoided at all costs and sources of light - in the form of tinderboxes, candles and an oil lantern - must be carefully conserved and judiciously deployed.Machine for Pigs retains these core sensibilities, providing no means of direct defense against its dangers, creating a space in which fear is always the appropriate reaction, irresolvable through any act of cathartic violence. However, it dispenses with the sanity meter and the limitations on light sources, replacing the inefficient oil lantern with a inexhaustible electric alternative. Whereas the sanity-and-darkness mechanic of Dark Descent discourages a player from lingering too long in any one place, and makes one hesitant to expend precious illumination, Machine for Pigs fosters a relationship to its environment that is less frantic, rewarding well-paced exploration.These are not idle choices. Not only are Machine for Pigs’ environments more elaborate, the change in pace also allows for a greater focus on the game’s underlying narrative, a gruesome fable about family, tragedy and the birth of the 20th Century. Both Amnesia games are appropriately titled. In both cases the player’s character awakes from a fugue state, making the game’s journey one of retracing of steps, a discovery of events that have already transpired but the consequences of which are still playing out. Both games tell their story primarily through found documents, fragmented memories and auditory hallucinations. However, from a literary perspective Machine for Pigs is considerably more invested in the power of its themes, most centrally those outlined in its title: the chattel beast and the industrial mechanism.At this point, be warned: spoilers await!The story of the game takes place on New Years Eve in the smog-thick London of 1899, within the townhouse and industrial facilities of wealthy British industrialist Oswald Mandus, a man whose fortune was made bringing the wonders of mechanization to the slaughterhouse. Mandus, head spinning with fever, awakes to the sound of children’s voices - those of his twin sons, Edwin and Enoch. Galvanized by paternal concern, Mandus drags himself out of his bed - a lavish piece of furniture that is, ominously, ringed with metal bars and secured by a gate - and gives chase. Weaving unsteadily through the dimly lit interior of his estate, careening down hallways and parlors, past walls covered in oil paintings and rooms full of taxidermic trophies, Mandus is led by glimpses of his children and urged on by a mysterious voice on the telephone. All the while, the ground beneath his feet shakes as some infernal engine spins slowly into action.The story that unfolds has all the nightmarish double-logic of a fever dream. No one familiar with modern horror tropes can doubt that the twin sons are phantoms, already dead - this has been an unshakeable code at least since The Shining - but Mandus is not a genre-savvy gentleman; he seems to genuinely believe he can find and protect his children by pursuing them deeper and deeper into the vast subterranean complex he built but the purpose of which he no longer remembers. The structure of an Amnesia narrative always depends on the main character realizing he is in some great part the author of his own horror story, a tale of the detective learning that he is, himself, the criminal. As such the player will likely suss out the truth long before amnesiac Oswald does - that Mandus is damned as a filicide, and that guilt motivates his ill-conceived pursuit.While the story of Edwin and Enoch is central, the ghostly children themselves are perhaps the most disappointing component of an otherwise novel game. As a horror device, creepy children - twins in particular - embody a trope so thoroughly tried that it’s lost much of its power. That Mandus murders his own children is only to be expected; it’s why he does it that bears investigation.The family drama begins with the loss of Lilibeth, Mandus’ beloved wife, who dies while giving birth to Edwin and Enoch. This fills Mandus with a deep ambivalence towards his progeny: he loves them as all that remains of Lilibeth, but loathes them for having taken her away. While they are still ‘babes-in-arms,’ Mandus keeps Edwin and Enoch in his attic ‘between the bedroom and the study’ so he can always keep them close. But, as poor Bertha Mason can tell you, attics are second only to cellars when it comes to Victorian spaces of imprisonment and disavowal.This feeling of paternal ambivalence comes to a head when Mandus brings his sons on an expedition to Mexico. Amidst the crumbling ruins of the Aztecs’ sacrificial empire, Mandus discovers a mystical stone orb - a transdimensional object of great power, as established in Dark Descent. The orb shatters, granting Mandus a vision of the century to come: a vision dominated by the image of his sons dying on the banks of the River Somme, riddled with shrapnel and drowning in mud. Overcome with sorrow, and finally able to justify his repressed vengeful impulses, Mandus murders his sons under the pretense of mercy, plucking out their hearts, Aztec-style. The haunted and sickly Mandus then returns to England, dedicating himself to further averting the dire prophecy offered by the orb, his own mind split much as the orb is split.This internal division plays out in the two facets of Mandus’ industrial project. Above ground Mandus is a philanthropist in the gospel of wealth mode, whose charity work is widely known and well regarded and whose industrial innovations provide food for London’s limitless disenfranchised. In the bowels of the complex, however, a different side of the modern project elaborates itself, taking the form of the enormous, subtitular Machine for Pigs. Much is made of industry’s depredations, true horror stories founded in all-too substantial fact, tales of child workers mangled by machinery and boiled alive by noxious fumes, nameless and innumerable analogs for Edwin and Enoch.Yet there is a third set of children whose suffering we can credit to Mandus. When the voice on the phone first promises to help Mandus ‘free his children’, the naive protagonist believes it refers to his murdered sons. In truth, the voice - which is the voice of Mandus’ other half, the machine-monster he has constructed under the facade of his philanthropy - is referring to Mandus’ bastard children: the frightening, misshapen man-pigs that lurk in the darkness beneath London. Ill-formed assemblies of human and swine, the man-pigs serve as the game’s primary danger, one of the few active threats in an otherwise wholly atmospheric experience of fear. Their creation is a process hinted at, but never satisfactorily confirmed: are they pigs ascended to rudimentary intelligence a la H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, or are they lobotomized humans subjected to a monstrous transformation, as Wells’ protagonist first suspects? They are definitively both and neither, quintessential patchworks in the Frankensteinian mode, mingling human with animal, machine with flesh, lifeless matter with vital essence, the most obscure magic with the most advanced science.This kind of ambiguous admixture is the stock and trade of the horror genre, which thrives on the union of seeming opposites, the confusion of living and dead, subject and object. But what, to the modern mind, is so particularly horrifying about hybrids? Philosopher Bruno Latour provides an explanation: they are precisely our own bastard children. Latour proposes that all of modernity’s great achievements come from parallel yet contradictory claims. Nature and culture, non-humans and humans, are separated into two distinct domains by means of purification, permitting the physical scientist to deal with one while the social scientist deals with the other, without each getting in the other’s way. For the physical scientist, the domain of nature/non-human is mechanistic, ruled by clear natural laws which are immutable and capable of cultural description. For the social scientist, on the other hand, nature/non-humans are radically free, immanent beings for whom anything is possible, while their object of investigation - humans - are seen as hemmed in by social bonds, determined by transcendent social forms which - thanks to their distinction from the immanent mess of nature - can also be described scientifically and universally.Hybrids result from these twin contradictions. Latour’s chief examples are Boyle’s air pump and Hobbes’ Leviathan. The first is an ‘artificial construction’ purposefully designed to produce the conditions of a universal natural law, that of air pressure, which itself ‘escape[s] all human fabrication’. We have a wholly natural process which is revealed only through the most artificial of contrivances, a Natural law that is simultaneously fabricated in the laboratory, the only place where that law can be conclusively witnessed. The second is a political entity, a structure of presumably voluntary relations, which nevertheless ‘infinitely surpasses the humans who created it’, and calls into action ‘countless goods and objects.’ This seemingly solid social structure, one which has manifest effects beyond some mere illusion, is simultaneously composed - at root - of putatively free individuals, bound to no natural law. Both the pump and the Leviathan are hybrids, neither wholly natural objects nor wholly social subjects, defying the very distinctions they rely upon for their effectiveness.Not least of these hybrids is the human creature itself, which is stuck trying to play two roles at once, particularly as technology - itself a hybrid agent, a social contrivance harnessing and revealing natural forces - more thoroughly implicates itself in day to day life. Naturally free animals trapped by political and social codes on one hand, politically free humans trapped in natural animal bodies on the other and reassembled much as the man-pigs are, through the torturous intervention of hybrid apparatus. The confusion about the man-pigs’ origin maps directly onto the confusion about our own, the question as to on which side of the modern division humans necessarily fall.For that is the one statement Machine for Pigs makes without ambiguity: We are the pig. We are all the pig. Beyond demonstrating the narrowly Marxist claim that the worker is dehumanized by industry, an appendage to a larger machine, the game’s machine represents the contradictions within the modern mentality. At once an entirely technological object, a vast industrial complex fashioned by men, the machine is also a mystical entity, a madness, a disease, something beyond human control or comprehension. Its enormous power can shape the world above, can feed thousands and bring light to the crowded streets, but only as it produces yet more hybrid monsters, creatures that can never be permitted to step into the light.Upon coming to consciousness, the machine recognizes the destiny of which it is a part and rejects it absolutely, just as Mandus rejects the vision of his sons’ deaths. Its solution is similarly extreme: to unleash the hidden hybrids from its depths, and smash the modern mechanism before it enters its final stages. The repressed returns with a vengeance, with the monsters flooding the streets, driving Mandus to shut down his own machine before London’s streets run with blood. You may hate me Mandus, the machine wails as the game approaches its own end, but I have seen the future, your twentieth century, and let me tell you this: a far greater slaughter awaits you there.When Mandus’ work is done - or rather, when it is undone - the city stirs from an unquiet sleep as the sun rises upon the new century; it was all just a bad dream. The brief respite is bought with an act of sacrifice. Mandus subjects himself to his own machine, embracing his hybrid nature and fusing himself with the process that he’d willfully forgotten. No longer exempt, nor external to his own machinations, Mandus’ final act is one of resolute acceptance. He becomes the pig - as ever he was, as all of us are - so as to avert our mutual slaughter. The horror of the present moment is averted. Yet we know there are horrors to come, lingering in the unresolved tensions and unplumbed depths of the modern mechanism.____Phillip A. Lobo is a freelance writer based in Austin, Texas. His previous video game reviews for Open Letters can be found here.