X-Com: The War You Lost

Back in 1996, when I was an innocent child, I was shopping in an outlet mall and purchased a floppy disk of demos that included X-COM: UFO Defense. I managed to get it working on our IBM 486 (with a math coprocessor my dad proudly pointed out), and I fell into a new world.

Story

Aliens have landed, and they are probably up to no good. It's time to defend Earth. While they are far too technically advanced for us, Earth has a couple of advantages. First, it's big. The Aliens seemingly don’t have the military to commence an outright assault, so they have to get the nations of the world to capitulate instead. Secondly, the aliens are having difficulty adapting their ships to our atmosphere, which makes them easier to shoot down. Third, the governments of the Earth are willing to join and fund an anti-UFO team.

Enter XCOM: A secret organization funded by the world’s governments to work together and kill aliens.

This all feels very 1999. Francis Fukuyama has penned the End of History, and the US has a budget surplus. The USSR collapsed almost a decade ago. Everyone was going to be a rich liberal democracy that could easily fund a secret organization to fly around the world and fight aliens.

You’re in charge. Good luck, Commander.

Note: The game originally came out in 1994, but was (fairly) faithfully remade in 2012. They are close enough that I refer to game play in both. My only real complaint about the remake is that your hardy soldiers have higher survival rates, dampening the fear aspect.

Gameplay.

XCOM is broken down into two gameplay loops. The First is the tactical phase, where you control your group of soldiers and fight aliens on the ground. The Second is a strategic phase where you build your base, order supplies, research weapons, and stamp forms. They mesh well. When your scientists research a new weapon, you can build and then deploy it in your next fight. 

The tactical portion is scary. Throughout the game, the aliens have better weapons than you and often can see further than you, which creates kill boxes for your hapless soldiers. Earth’s advantage (especially in the original) is numbers. Soldiers are cheap. While your beginning team uses the best assault rifles and ceramic body armor the Earth has to offer, it makes no difference to a plasma round. There will be casualties. Taking down aliens is a war of attrition. While getting your men and women killed on the front lines is bad (and costs approval), your job is to complete objectives, not come home bloodless. Everyone is expendable.

Yes, your real job is to keep your funding nations happy. Convince them you are a good little secret organization and they will reward you with cash, continuously screw up, and eventually nations will sign a treaty with the enemy, cutting off your funding, and dooming the Earth. The true way to lose is to run out of cash. There is also this idea (in both the original and the remake) that you don’t know who you are working for, precisely. The faces of those who give you orders are obscured by shadow as if they are the smoking man from the X-Files. However, the cash they offer spends, so…

The metanarrative: How far you go.

Ethical choices are the most interesting part of the game. XCOM is brutally hard and presents the player with a series of tough decisions that appear organically. Part of the overall arc is how far you would go to save humanity. A lot of these choices are optional, and not necessarily presented by the game as a “choice”. For example:

Do you sacrifice a rookie? New soldiers are cheap fodder. Experienced soldiers, mission objectives, or a well-placed grenade are often worth more than the team’s new guy.

Do you sacrifice poorer parts of the world so you can focus on the richer areas? Setting up shop in Europe or the United States protects vital income streams you can use to fight the alien menace. Building your initial base in Africa limits your ability to protect those high-income streams.

How about enhanced interrogation techniques? When you capture live aliens, you can interrogate the invaders in ways that would make Donald Rumsfeld blush. Every time you interrogate an alien, you are rewarded with a free corpse, which tells you all you need to know. Interrogating them provides valuable (but generally not required) research bonuses. Is it worth the bonus?

What about your humanity? In the remake version, the DLC allows you to genetically modify or cybernetically enhance your soldiers. When you genetically modify them, you inject alien DNA to improve their combat performance. When you cybernetically enhance your soldiers, their limbs are removed and replaced with enhanced prosthetics to improve their combat performance. Your soldiers don’t get a choice in the matter, by the way, their bodies are yours to command.

Need quick cash? You can sell off any of the interesting tech and alien bits to the highest bidder. Nothing like flooding the market with the bodies of Sectoids, alien starship fuel, and laser cannons. Hopefully, they fall into the “right” hands, as the technology you develop and sell is devastatingly powerful.

Of course, this is a (secret) war for the planet, so all bets are off. The game doesn’t judge your choices. They are just there, like the pins of grenades, ready to be pulled.

The kicker is, you find, through your research, that the aliens you are fighting are also genetically and/or cybernetically modified. With each step you take, you become more like the enemy, as bits of your soldier's humanity are stripped away for higher combat potential. If I remember correctly, if you win, the final alien’s monologue notes that they came to conquer humanity to prepare everyone for the vague, yet menacing “what lies ahead”. The creature does not explain further and then politely dies.

The End?

The game itself is incredibly fun, and at the time, was innovative in what a computer game could be. Its DNA is everywhere in the strategy genre and beyond. The meta-ethical layer on top makes it transcendent. It is a piece of media that, when viewed with a critical eye, becomes something more than “just a game.” Your choices can tell you something about yourself.

When the developers made the remake-sequel XCOM2, the story assumes that the original XCOM lost the war, and the aliens conquered Earth. Furthering the “it's time to have conversations about your ethical behavior” narrative. The resistance (remnants of the original XCOM) engage in terrorist operations against the new alien-world government. To stop their plans of opening gene clinics around the world and defeating cancer (while also doing some legitimately evil things).

Even if you had “won” the original game, you probably reached a level ethical compromise where you genetically, cybernetically, and psychically altered soldiers and then released these technologies into the world for cash. Everything is different now: The old world XCOM fought to preserve is gone. Even if you win, you lose.