Throwing Bricks at Cops is a Good Idea -- Tonight We Riot

 Tonight We Riot is a retro-style brawler in which the player is the leader of a revolutionary anti-capitalist movement which must fight its way through the city block by block, liberating the oppressed workers of a futuristic dystopia and breaking through waves of violent riot police on their way to ridding their society of bourgeois parasites and creating a classless utopia. You play not just as one character, but as a mob of radicalized proletariat; as leader, you take the vanguard and direct your comrades in battle, but if one leader falls, another automatically takes their place. As you rampage through the city, picking up bricks and Molotov cocktails (the weapons of the people) and gaining numbers by organizing workplaces, you will be faced with gradually more and more deadly police violence, starting with "nonlethal" truncheons, water cannons, and rubber bullets and proceeding to more naked displays of deadly force and futuristic weapons of mass slaughter, until at the end of each stage you send the capitalist pigs packing and claim a new part of the city for the worker's paradise.

These piles of bricks conveniently left lying around bring to mind recent accusations that police have done exactly this during BLM protests to encourage violent riots which they will then have an excuse to crack down on.

Tonight We Riot wears its ideological commitments on its sleeve. It is a full-throated exhortation not just to revolution, but to violent insurrection. As we have seen before, to make an engaging game, some aspects of reality must be left out; the nuts and bolts of organizing a revolutionary coalition capable of amassing sufficient force to challenge the institutionalized violence of the state is left in the background, and so is the broader picture of what the revolution means for society in general, to focus on the immediate process of direct action in the streets. But the game also implicitly forecloses the possibility of change through anything but violent overthrow of bourgeois democracy. Every organ of society is turned against you, from the capitalist economic system itself, to the militarized police who defend it, to the popular press who manufacture the consent of the populace, to the electoral machine that puts only corrupt corporatist stooges in power. In the tradition of Marx, the democratic process is seen not necessarily as suppressed, or even fixed, so much as simply ineffectual. There are no reformists or incrementalists or social democracies in this world, just the cold reality of naked state brutality and the call to arms of the people to struggle and fight for their freedom.

At the end of each stage, you get a score based on how many comrades you managed to not get killed. A grim reminder that the revolution cannot be without martyrs.

Obviously, I am writing this against the background of the recent and ongoing mass protests against police brutality occurring in the US, and the attendant response that has seen police become even more brutal and repressive, defending the state's monopoly on violence in a way that only further demonstrates the merits of the protesters' assertion that the institution's monopoly on violence is fundamentally illegitimate. Though they started with riots, looting, and the burning of a police station, the protesters have been forthright about the need to remain peaceful and nonviolent in their methods, even as the chattering classes fixate on the comparatively minor incidence of rioting, the police interpret any resistance whatsoever to their war crimes as rebellion, openly fascist paramilitaries engage in their own intimidation and murder, and random people get dragged off the street into unmarked vans by anonymous individuals without uniforms or badges. And for a while, it seemed as if the protests were beginning to accomplish their goals, with multiple jurisdictions promising reform and even one city council voting to dissolve the police department altogether, but such gains have disappeared like the tide as the fickle media and public have moved on to fresher, shinier controversies. Too, this article will be posted in the lead-up to one of the most consequential elections in US history, with one side openly attempting to suppress the vote, and the other seemingly unable to make a convincing case for why they should be the ones elected; a culmination of decades of reactionary neoliberalism and expansion of government power during which the left have failed miserably to build a coalition that can enact meaningful change through the ballot box while the extreme right does unrelenting violence to democratic norms. And with all that taken into account, it feels hard sometimes to believe that the advocates of revolution doesn't have it right.

Darkly sarcastic headlines between each stage indicate the public reaction to your revolutionary crusade. Not promising, is it?

I can't help but admit that Tonight We Riot paints an appealing picture. There is a visceral happiness to seeing the downtrodden just uncompromisingly win for once. Anyone who has been the target of police harassment (as I and a lot of people I know have) can understand the joy in the idea of smashing a pig's face in with a brick, of blowing up a car just for the sake of showing them that you won't be crushed under the iron heel, of breaking out the guillotines and sending those suit-wearing, briefcase-carrying crypto-fascists fleeing for their lives. Of course, not to be all "you participate in society, gotcha", but the great irony is that this piece of what can only reasonably be described as anti-capitalist propaganda in game form makes huge corporations money every time it is downloaded. After all, the good comrades at Pixel Pushers Union 512 still gotta eat. And so the machine continues to churn, grinding up every rebellious urge of the population and spitting it out as more product to consume. However, the most subversive message of Tonight We Riot is not just that violent revolution is an option that is on the table, but that it is possible to win such a revolution. And hey, it's not like it hasn't been done before, and it's not beyond the realm of possibility that it can be done again. But there is something about the vision of those little pixelated figures, revolutionaries and cops alike, smeared across the screen in a gush of cartoon blood that is deeply unsettling. And what scares me the most is not the prospect of such a violent uprising as a legitimate means of social change, but that maybe it is the only possible means.