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Could You Rob And Steal From Innocent Women And Children? The Castle Doctrine Thinks You Can

Jason Rohrer’s new title pits you as hero and bad guy in a massively-multiplayer game about home defense.

If you’ve ever sat forlornly at home staring at your Xbox and thinking “Now when is someone going to bring out a massively-multiplayer game about burglary and home defense?”—then today is your lucky day. Because that someone is Jason Rohrer, the leftfield video game designer who’s previously made games about the creative process, consciousness, and gardening.

His latest title called The Castle Doctrine is launched today and is set in the nineties with a plot that sounds like Assault on Precinct 13 but transposed to your home. “It’s 1991, and things are bad.” says the description. “You’re a guy with a wife, two kids, and a house. You’re nearly broke, but you know that they’ll be coming soon for what you’ve got left, hundreds of them.”

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So it goes. As well as defending your house from oncoming invaders by laying traps and through cunning design you must also wander around your neighborhood and turn into a burglar yourself—prowling through vacant homes like the opportunist you might well become should the apocalypse one day come to destroy the world, in an attempt to rack up the dollars and get to the top of the leaderboard.

It’s not the sort of video game you can play just for mindless escapism, not without reflecting on the horrors you’ve committed to those poor, innocent pixels. In part one of his review Alec Meer, from Rock, Paper, Shotgun, says about the game’s setup of defend and steal: “It is cold, so cold.” Going on to say “And yet, wordlessly, I felt the pull to protect the three randomly-named, distinguishing feature-free family members (one wife, two children) I was assigned.” Part of that pull, he says, is the vulnerability of the little pixelated people that Rohrer presents to you. People that begin the game living in nothing but an empty grey box with just a vault, and it’s your job to design it into the Fort Knox of suburbia to stave off the marauding hordes.

Rather than just pitting you as the hero, out to protect the world from the thieving masses, the game mires you in moral ambiguity—you’re aren’t just a protector of your family, but a thief too. From another player’s perspective you’re to be feared, out to rob as much money as you can, killing other players’ families and destroying their property to get what you want which perpetuates a cycle of revenge. Meer calls it a horror game where the player is “both victim and monster” and it’s this duality that makes the game so subversive.

Images via Rock, Paper, Shotgun

@stewart23rd