Infrastructure is grown. Human hands place bricks and design machinery. They need dead plants and animals to work. But even earth and stone are close to organic life. Death is a long game. Oil is the remnant of decay, of life long dead now rendered into flame. Cold matter, too, forms from death, from dying stars. Planets form from collision, continents from rupture, islands from explosions, mountains and rivers from glaciers cutting the body of the earth. When that flesh settles into hard matter, human beings mine it, reform it into structures for living. The lives of the anthropocene are enabled with the sludge of the undead, the bodies of trees, and the flesh and bones of the earth itself. Life from death from life again.
Scorn surfaces this kind of exploitative, violent logic by making all of its world a decaying body. While there is some wilderness in Scorn, the vast majority of its run time is set within constraining, spinal corridors, with only the barest hint of an outside. Playing Scorn means exploring a vast machine that seems a whole world unto itself. Unlike Giger or Beksiński’s singular, abstracted images, the game's clear aesthetic inspirations, Scorn attempts to gesture at the concrete mechanisms of an industrial society. Though these gestures towards realism are filtered by the inevitable abstraction of the videogame puzzle, the emphasis on rote mechanical engagement is key to Scorn’s industrial logic.
Fittingly, then, Scorn feels stretched out. Its first major puzzle involves an assembly line set along one wall of a vast dome. You run machines that were likely operated by multiple people, but you are alone. Scorn is slow, but it is that slowness that grants it vivid scale.
The difference between Scorn and walking an abandoned factory floor is its poetry, the way that it blurs the line between different industrial, and ideological, processes.+ Key to global capitalism, and hand in hand with worker alienation, is the obscuration of where material comes from. Even if something is made locally, the material often comes from all over the world. Scorn condenses that process into a knife's edge. Just as there is no outside to Scorn's failed civilization, the flesh that constructs the corridors, switches, and temples of the world does not come from somewhere else. It's all grown right here. There are no white sepulchers, all the death that enables the world is on the surface. The flesh and labor of the workers that enable empire is grafted into the walls.
That surfacing enables an interconnection between self and system. The buildings, the creatures, and Scorn's protagonist are all made of the same meaty material. Though they occupy different roles, those differences are from the disciplining effect of power. The aforementioned first puzzle is a process of mining and refining. But instead of extracting metal, you extract a body. It's one like your own, with arms and legs, but it's wrapped in a cocoon. When that shell is cut, the body within screams. In the end, you use its body to open a door. Though you can solve the puzzle by killing or enslaving this harvested worker, there is not much difference in tone or effect. The body is used and then discarded. The walls are lined with similar, dead cocoons, creatures that were literally born to die, whose death can make life for some other "more human" being++. The line between the body that "mines" and the body that "is mined" is so thin as to not exist. Especially since both are housed in a building that is made of flesh like theirs.
This belies a simple truth though. The empire that built Scorn’s industrial corpus is dead. The machinery still works, but most of the intelligence that made it is gone. Though the protagonist could just abandon that ancient world, he never does. He never uses the machinery against its intended purpose. Sometimes, things break down, but that is not because he wishes it to. Rather, these are just old and failing things. The life that has grown in the absence of these structures' original inhabitants are the primary obstacles and antagonists. In other words, Scorn's protagonist uses the machinery of the world as it was meant to be used. But why? What claim does this world's violence hold over him still?
Scorn has no dialogue and it has no real characters. The suggestion is, though, that this world is a monument, that these ruins mean something to the character who explores them. Indeed, the final flicker of the outside world seen in the game's ending implies some hope of ascension. The protagonist is, after all, trying to get somewhere. Beyond that simple motivation, though, we cannot know what the protagonist wants except that we know this world made him. In the first act and throughout the game, there are strange artificial wombs, both wired and flowering. After an accident at the end of Act 1, the protagonist emerges from one such womb. He then wanders a scant wilderness before returning to empire. The "flesh" of the structures carves the flesh of his bodies. It does this even though these buildings no longer function as industries, but as monuments. What we mourn, or believe to be worth mourning, tells as much about us as what we are allowed to kill+++.
Monuments, signals of the world before, play a key role in science fiction generally, and post-apocalyptic science fiction specifically. Often, science fiction is an extrapolation of current problems, so it is contradictorily rooted in history. Science fiction itself is a monument for future generations to mark.
In Stephen Vincent Benét's classic story "By The Waters of Babylon," the son of a priest explores the ruins of New York City, eventually realizing that the metropolis’ inhabitants were not gods (like the tenets of his religion would hold), but men. He swears to learn from the mistakes of the old world, but also to rebuild. The story is a product of nuclear anxiety, but is simultaneously rooted in a kind of imperial logic. The priest's culture is coded with indigeneity, implying that there are primitive cultures that must be ascended beyond as part of rebuilding. The then-contemporary USA's hastiness is condemned, but not its cultural domination.
In this story, the monuments are aspirational, but they are also cautionary. New York's ruins warn against the destruction of war, the violence that could take shape from technology, but also represent the glory of New York's splendor. Scorn, in contrast, offers no path toward reconstruction. Its protagonist is uninterested in rebuilding, and merely uses the monuments as a means of travel, not of learning.
The big difference between Scorn's protagonist and "Babylon's" narrator is that the son of a priest is part of a culture and a community. In the story there are people to rebuild the world with, but in Scorn there is almost no one but yourself. However, besides the bodies meant to be used or killed, there is a parasite. Partway through Act II, it latches its body onto the protagonist's, digs its hands into his stomach. As the game progresses, its control becomes more visible. Yet, the relationship is not entirely antagonistic. Its hands hold your inventory and while it attempts to gain control, it does not stop you from going where you will for the most part. Some goals are shared; it just wants the body, please.
Both the parasite and the host are citizens of this same world and seem to share some objectives. Nevertheless, they do not have kinship, but are enemies. In the Star Trek episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," the Enterprise encounters two aliens, both with faces with black and white halves, albeit on opposite sides. One, Lokai, is a revolutionary attempting to free his people from political oppression. The other, Bele, is a cop who has pursued Lokai across the stars. After both parties plead their case to the Enterprise crew, and after a fair amount of drama, they make their way to Lokai and Bele's homeworld. There, they find the world destroyed with no life left. Bele's pursuit of Lokai has outlasted their own society.
This episode is pat and frivolous, a toothless example of Star Trek's "aw shucks can't we just get along" liberalism. It has equal words of condemnation for both Bele and Lokai and attributes their conflict to simple prejudice, skipping over the material conditions that allow one group to oppress another. But it does have one pretty good image. When Lokai and Bele discover their world is dead, they pace the length of the Enterprise. Burning buildings and flying bombs are superimposed over them. Then, they teleport to the planet below, unable to do anything but live out the violence they were born to.
This episode's moral message is that hate dooms us, that the oppressed must forgive their oppressors for the good of a higher civilizational order. We know better. Hate doesn't kill as much as structure does. Every handcuff, every faulty tenement, every cultivated field murders far more efficiently than mere hate. The higher orders of reason are in fact quite good at killing, and we even harm ourselves according to their rigid metric. Lokai dies not because he cannot let go of hate, but because he now knows his oppressor won, completely. That those cruel men and the systems they made also died in the process is cold comfort.
Scorn, too, takes places in a ruined world, where individuals are left to make meaning from the monuments of empire. The difference here is that the protagonist and the parasite have no shared history, no reason to hate each other. The parasite is spontaneous, it doesn't resemble any other creatures you encounter, except, of course, yourself. It remains unstated, but the parasite is Scorn's protagonist from the first act. In Act II, the protagonist's emergence from the artificial womb is not a resurrection, but just another birth. These two creatures once shared the same subject position, but now wish to kill each other.
Playing Scorn, I assumed that the beings whose bodies I inhabited knew more about the world than me. Perhaps that isn't true. Perhaps there is nothing else to do than tinker with the machinery, to eventually use it as intended. Though the protagonist is full-grown, there's no reason to assume that his birth at the beginning of Act II is not just that. Even newborn, he knows where to go, knows what we must do, as naïve and knowing as the player. He was born into a ritual that he does not understand but is nevertheless drawn to. Though born into death, he can only live that death out again.
Though monuments can mark death, they tend to be thought of as ways that life continues. We remember the fallen or the outcast because there is this remnant of them. We lament the bulldozing of old family homes or classic buildings because those things represent something. Getting rid of monuments is death more than inoccupancy alone. In Robyn and Rökysopp's song "Monument," also a science fiction consideration of bodies and ruins, Robyn slowly sings "this will be a beacon when I'm gone. So that when the moment comes, I can say I did it all with love." A beacon implies a place to move towards. The pop epic is both solemn and sincere, a death that means something that can help others live.
In the totalizing halls of this dead empire, there is no real way out. Scorn's final act is ritualistic and sanctimonious. After purging the parasite in a Prometheus-esque surgery sequence, the protagonist enlists the help of a different surgery machine to weave his brain into a massive hive mind. By tracing control through the hive mind, the protagonist’s will or takes control of a living(?), pregnant statue. That statue helps the protagonist’s original body out. The game's ending turns his body into a Pietà. He both carries and is carried. He reaches a staircase, lined sculptors pointing upwards. After the protagonist returns to his original mind, the parasite emerges again. This time, rather than simple possession, the parasite holds the protagonist and grows around him. The final shot of the game shows the monument the parasite made, a repulsive mimic of the statues around it.
Though they both wanted the same thing at the start, neither of them actually ascended to the place beyond these spinal hallways. Rather, one assaults the other, in essentially every sense the word implies. That assault advances nothing, it leaves them among the monuments that both motivated them and that they attempted to transcend. Scorn's silent absence of psychology leaves only systems with which to understand this final decision. Perhaps for the parasite, it's easier to be here, where my flesh is empire, where I am not guilty because the whole world is made of violent things like me.
The fleshy quality of Scorn's infrastructure makes its world almost seem inevitable, evolved and grown, rather than built. In this end, empire is inarguable; one being is doomed to dominate another. That domination will bloom into a monument of its own. Scorn’s logic of matter, where all things are flesh, leads to this kind of conclusion. It's far from the spiritual life of christianity or the material glory of Carl Sagan's "star stuff." Still, even the promise of "star stuff" ties you to gunpowder as much as rocket fuel.
The difference is in how our bodies are imagined. Scorn's twin protagonists imagine themselves as continuous with this ancient empire, just as fascists imagine themselves as inheritors of Rome. Scorn's flesh world imagines all restructuring of the world as violent. In that logic, it is hard to believe in something beyond violence, in any ends at all beyond the means.
But, there is another way. Beyond the simple urge to rebuild, the liberal smugness of being beyond prejudice but employing massive guns to secure mining rights. Closer perhaps, to a beacon, to believing that life will see what we've made after we've gone. Seeing death as continuous with life, essential to it, not to be disrespected or exploited, but given proper space and time. Scorn gives such a world no recourse++++.
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+ In this way, the game is apiece with A Good Gardener, a game about growing plants as a prisoner of war in an unnamed conflict.
++ This is necropolitics, a term coined by Achille Mbembe. (https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/postgraduate/masters/modules/theoryfromthemargins/mbembe_22necropolitics22.pdf)
+++ Consider for example ruins as a site of latent potential or of truth waiting to be uncovered vis a vis this analysis of Freud (https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-psychoanalysis-of-ruins/)
++++ This piece only gestures at climate change, which is a worthy lens to consider Scorn with. Especially considering that the game was delayed to catch up with escalating graphical expectations. (https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/xl598y/comment/iphi5jh/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
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Grace is a freelance writer, a contributor at Paste Magazine, Gamespot, and Uppercut. You can find her and her work on Twitter @grace_machine and on her blog https://graceinthemachine.com/.