There was a good deal of weather around La Crosse, Wisconsin while I was there. We had several tornado sirens and a couple of touchdowns in neighboring counties. The street I was staying on flooded a few times, and a couple drivers got their cars stuck in the water. People from the neighborhood came out to try to warn passing cars against trying to cross the water, or to point and laugh when they did it anyways. Sometimes both. There are floods in Texas lately, and there’s been plenty of pretty cruel shit said online at the expense of the victims of a red state catastrophe. I think schadenfreude tends to be an expression of the anxiety and profound grief that comes with feeling powerless to help anyone else, and damn near as powerless to stop trying. One soft and slow rule at Defector, I think a good one, is Do not command the audience to do anything. People do not like being commanded. However helpful you think you are being, you aren’t. You cannot liberate anyone else for them, nor even gently deviate them from the paths they have chosen: They will get bangs, buy the Jaguars hat, join an obvious cult, get back with their shitty ex, or drive their bimmer full speed straight the fuck into that lake in the middle of the street, and cuss you out afterwards for trying to talk them out of it. I know this because I have watched them, and myself, my whole life, make these mistakes against the advice of everyone who cares about us. Yet here I am, knowing full well it is likely pointless, trying to liberate you from the life you have chosen without NORCO in it.
If at any point you feel like you would like to play NORCO, please exit the blog and do so immediately.
NORCO, a point-and-click adventure game from 2022, is one of the most evocative pieces of art I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing. It is an articulation of life in a world and a moment that is at once poisonous and sublime, familiar yet alienating. Game critics compare it to Disco Elysium and Kentucky Route Zero, not terrible comparisons for helping gamers understand how cool this is, but I’m here to help non-gamers understand. NORCO is not like video games (yuck). It’s sort of like if Season 1 of True Detective were as leftist as you, a Defector reader, wish it could have been. Where True Detective spins a story about evil and rot and good police doing their best to overcome a corrupt system, NORCO (correctly) understands that as a fantasy. There are no good police, and corruption is a misnomer. A system is what it does, and the state apparatus actually works pretty well as systems go. NORCO doesn’t explain this much, it basically assumes you already know. It is here to paint a world, tell a story, and make you feel some shit. I would worry more about spoiling it for you if I thought I really had the capability of doing so. It does have a plot, a great one, that I could spoil, but the story is about something you either have experienced or will experience in real life. The story for me is one of grief. NORCO is the most fun I have ever had grieving.
NORCO is set in and very much about Norco, Louisiana. It is the real company town of a Shell oil refinery in St. Charles Parish, smack in the center of a zone so filled with various horrific industrial plants that it is known as “Cancer Alley.” The EPA at one point opened civil rights investigations into Louisiana’s decision to allow the construction of polluting chemical plants in the already polluted black communities. In response, Louisiana’s Attorney General sued the US government for too zealously looking after the residents he was theoretically supposed to be looking after, with the suit being dropped after Trump was elected the second time. That AG’s name was Jeff Landry. Every story about him is the most embarassing story about him. It didn’t matter, and he is now the governor of Louisiana. NORCO doesn’t mention him, nor use the real names of any of the companies and powerbrokers that have built and then backed people into this particular corner of the world, but it definitely grapples with ecological collapse, the working classes’ reliance on industry, environmental racism, and the particular brand of horse/shit trading that makes sure everyone important gets their bread buttered in Louisiana.
The past few years have been a golden age for games with really ambitious narratives. Stuff like Disco, Baldur’s Gate 3, 1000x Resist, and the like have found real mainstream success by having a lot of capital-dub Writing in them, and basically trusting players to keep up. In the very old days of gaming, this was the domain of adventure games. While sparse on stuff like mechanical depth, the adventure genre could pull off narratives that no other genre could, simply by having the main form of storytelling be Talking To People or Thinking To Yourself, which is a lot like books. The peak of the genre was in the late ’80s-’90’s, when Hideo Kojima was making Snatcher and Policenauts, and Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream was adapted as a point and click with Ellison himself voicing AM. It absolutely rips if you can get past the jank. If you are a youth and are going “dude what are you even talking about,” you may recall Telltale Games winning every award circa 2012-14 for The Walking Unalive and The Wolf Amogus. These days, players do not need to choose between something mechanically deep and something well written. Baldur’s Gate 3 has more gameplay mechanics than anything I’ve ever played, and it also has 1.3 million lines of dialogue, most of them excellent.
I am not writing this for people who remember who won awards. I am writing this for non-gamers because no game makes me wish so badly that people did not self-identify as non-gamers and go through life accordingly. The medium has stuff to offer you, and sometimes it is this cool! It has some gamey shit, but its okay if you have to look up the answer to a puzzle or something. I do that too with some games. It is not cheating, it does not make you a loser. It means you want to stick with the thing you are experiencing. The creators would be stoked on your persistence.
NORCO is available on Steam. There is a free demo, and if you just wanna buy it and find out, Steam offers no questions asked refunds for all games, provided you play less than two hours.
Back in midsummer 2020, I remember taking an afternoon walk a few blocks to the Grocery Outlet near my house. The sky was black. Fire season. When I got to the grossout, I found out that they had lost power to all their refrigerators. The ice cream was melted, the meat was rotten in the humid, smoky air. People shuffled around wearing face masks and paint respirators, both to combat the virus and the oppressive cinders. I saw a guy with a gas mask in the chip aisle. The PA proclaimed something to the effect of “GET READY FOR SUMMER FUN WITH POOL FLOATS AND COOLERS IN AISLE ONE!” I snickered, then scowled, realizing I wouldn’t be able to pick up milk.
NORCO keeps coming up in my mind, because I keep finding myself in situations like this. I am mourning a world that is killing itself, that I will not inhabit long enough to help, that seems hell bent on punishing me for even wanting to. It’s tough to enjoy, and when I do I still feel a little fucked for being able to. I find myself sitting there on the sidewalk, wondering who is craziest: me or everyone else?
The world imagined in NORCO is insane and unsubtle and quite loudly stupid and much of what makes it so grounded is that it is a wind tunnel of absurdity. In this way, every game that imagines a ‘normaler’ world feels less grounded. NORCO has a grizzled, noir-ish private detective character that is a juggalo, and it doesn’t feel out of place. There is a shitty gig economy app called Quackjob run by an AI network of computers called Superduck based off the uploaded consciousness of a character that shares a name with a ballplayer. It pays out in a highly unstable cryptocurrency called Quackcoin. Is this stupid? Yes. Have you seen something stupider in real life this week? I know I have.
Jacob Geller made an excellent video about how seemingly bizarre it is that Indiana Jones never seems to have his understanding of religion truly shaken by having many undeniably religious experiences. NORCO‘s point seems to be that we have near-infinite capacity for adapting to a new reality. Indy wouldn’t immediately become an evangelical Christian, because almost no experience transcends reality. It just gets absorbed. The Nazis’ faces melting is probably affecting, but probably no more affecting than your mom dying.
I read a bunch of other people’s essays on this game in the course of writing my own, worried that I would end up being terribly unoriginal in what I had to say. To my delight, everyone seemed to connect with different things than I did, though never any less deeply. To me, this story is about the loss of a parent, about the guilt that comes with abandoning someone who is dying and the loneliness of not spending time with people, even if they treat you badly. To others, it was about religious faith, or about coming home to a place you hate, or the concept of memory and record and mapping itself. The game only takes about six hours to play, but it packs in enough soul that connecting with it like this isn’t too hard.
When I was interviewing for this job, Alex asked what I thought I would be doing in five years. I said that I wasn’t sure that we would recognize that world at all. These days, I am certain we won’t, and I sometimes have to wonder if we have already missed whatever offramp we had to make it even habitable. In these moments, I will often put on the NORCO soundtrack to remind myself of the fact that I am not alone in my insanity—that others have found beauty in this madness, though few have distilled it like NORCO. NORCO finds the sublime at the heart of the perverse. It seems to suggest that setting your sanity adrift is the only way to float. Where the game offers redemption, it is at a smaller scale. You cannot save everyone, but with perspective, you can save yourself, and with hard work, you might be able to help someone else out, too. If that isn’t your vibe, well, it’s also a riot.