Ready Or Not and the Myth of Ecoterrorism

It's 8:30 in the morning. An armed group of eco-terrorists from a movement called the United Planet Front have boarded an oil rig off the coast of California and taken its workers hostage with the intention of shutting down the operation. 18 months prior members of the same movement were involved in a home invasion where an oil industry lobbyist and his family were also taken hostage, leading to a gunfight between the police and the suspects. Now after failed negotiations, the terrorists livestream the hanging of several workers as a message, and a squad of SWAT officers are sent to the oil rig to take the gunmen down, rescue the hostages and bring order to chaos. 

This is the narrative setup for a mission in the game Ready Or Not (2021) by VOID Interactive called "Leviathan", arguably the big centerpiece of its sea-themed DLC Dark Waters. As a setting the oil rig is an interesting deviation from the game's usual urban environments of the fictional city of Los Sueños, a sort of grim dark take on modern Los Angeles. The rig's catwalks and industrial interiors are almost labyrinthian in nature, and the whole time as you try to carefully navigate them, you are whipped by howling storm winds and surrounded by massive waves crashing into the foundations holding the structure up.

In isolation Leviathan is an engaging and memorable gameplay experience thanks to its rather unique setting. There is a real sense of danger to the environment itself, even if you cannot actually fall off the rig, but the illusion is enough. However, the excellence of the mission's level design is at least to me marred by its exaggerated depiction of gun-toting eco-terrorists, which I find unfortunately bothersome. 

But for those who are unfamiliar with the game in question, let me first give you a brief overview: Ready Or Not is a tactical and "hardcore" first-person shooter in which you complete missions as a squad of SWAT officers, either in co-op with four other players or in singleplayer leading AI controlled teammates. In one mission you might be interrupting a gas station robbery gone wrong and then in another stopping an active shooter threat at a night club. While every situation can easily turn into a series of lethal and dangerous gunfights, they can also be cleared without killing a single suspect, if approached smartly. 

On a gameplay level I tend to have a pretty good time with Ready Or Not, as despite my fairly strong anti-gun and anti-war beliefs I have always enjoyed all kinds of tactical shooters and military simulators for their intense gunplay. Because as much as I hate to admit it, in games it is often simply fun to shoot guns, especially when they sound good like they do in Ready Or Not. I also tend to be drawn to the slower pace of tactical games compared to the constant fast high-octane action of something like Call of Duty, as my reaction speeds and aiming just aren't the best. But with this game I also specifically enjoy the challenge of trying to complete the missions with as few kills as possible. There is simply something incredibly satisfying about getting a perfect score by non-lethally clearing a house full of armed men that could shoot you dead in seconds if you are not careful. It's a high risk playstyle that rewards thinking and a careful approach above pure mechanical skill. 

And yet on a narrative level there are certain aspects of the game's story that I chafe against, and one of them is how the game touches on environmental activism in two of its DLC missions, Lawmaker and the previously mentioned Leviathan. 

The first mission called Lawmaker was released as part of the game's first DLC Home Invasion. In it a rich politician's large mansion is raided by members of UPF, a fictional movement that according to the lore operated as your typical youth activist group until it was only very recently radicalized and turned violent by an extremist called Tobias Gibson. Their target is an oil industry lobbyist named Sven Anderson-Lincoln, and the activists vandalize his mansion by destroying furniture, throwing paint and spraying their logos on the walls. Sven's family and servants are also present and are either in hiding or taken hostage by the masked intruders armed with assault rifles and submachine guns. 

Spray-painted UPF logos are all around the vandalized mansion.  It has a fairly clear resemblance to the real life Extinction Rebellion’s logo with an X inside of a circle, but no doubt that's a coincidence.

As the excellent critique about Ready Or Not by Face Full Of Eyes points out, the game's atmosphere and style is that of "gritty realism" that often veers into rather tasteless, exaggerated shock horror for the sake of darkness, or "darksploitation" as he calls it: A predatory porn mogul has a massive collage of pictures in his basement forming a fractured image of his underage daughter with "DADDY'S GOOD LITTLE PRINCESS" painted next to it in massive letters, drug dens are filled with horror imagery in graffiti and creepy dolls scattered around, and many suspects wear weird BDSM-style masks more fit for slasher movie monsters than actual criminals. It is a sort of hyperrealist take on the darkest parts of the modern world with little to no subtlety, where everything is taken to the extreme. 

In contrast, the initial depiction of the UPF members in the mission Lawmaker seems perhaps a bit more "grounded" or even tame at first glance: Although they wield guns, excluding the leader Gibson and his right-hand man Mark Cross, the other members mostly seem like young radicals way over their heads that begin firing back at the SWAT officers out of fear and self-preservation rather than malice. Based on the fact that there is no sign of them killing or hurting anyone in the mansion, it gives the impression that their goal was mainly intimidation and making a statement by vandalizing the luxurious estate with paint and destruction of property. Although, there is a rare chance in the mission for a suspect to take a civilian hostage and threaten to kill them, which is obviously heinous.  

Yet when the movement appears again in Leviathan, the depiction of UPF becomes completely detached from any reality and stretches the limits of believability to a breaking point. The armed eco-terrorists who went out of their way to avoid killing the rich oil lobbyist are now wantonly hanging random oil rig workers as a message and live streaming it, all the while their leader calls 911 to spout nonsense from a frankly ridiculous manifesto that begins with some believable sounding arguments like "the endless campaign of consumption and disruption of the planet and its ecosystem must be stopped" to drivel such as "uncomfortable steps are now needed to reduce the human population" and "the parasite of the collective mind will be purged". Not only does the rhetoric suddenly sound more fit for a supervillain in a comic book story or a Mission: Impossible film than anything a real environmental activist would say, but a lot of it is also oddly unrelated to the terrorists' current goals in the mission. They are shutting down a single oil rig, not committing a massacre. If reducing the human population was their goal, at least have the guts to make them go full supervillain by breaking into some sort of biolab to steal a virus or contaminating a water reserve to poison a city. What the whole speech sounds like to me is a writer too lazy to do research into actual talking points from real activists and instead relying on fictional and cartoony depictions of villains like the film version of Thanos in Marvel’s Infinity War or Samuel L. Jackson's character in Kingsmen: The Secret Service. Both have stated goals of saving the world but attempt to do so by essentially committing mass murder on a global (or even galactic) scale, but neither are anywhere near realistic depictions of "ecoterrorists." The difference between those examples and Ready Or Not is that the films are over-the-top blockbuster action movies based on comic books, while the game has the surface level aesthetic of "realism." 

"Profit Today, Judgement Tomorrow" the banner says, while corpses of oil rig workers hang above the cold and dark waters. 

It's difficult to get a picture of the suspects unless they are arrested, since they usually shoot at you on sight.

At this point you might be asking "so what? It's a game, it's fiction. It's supposed to be harmless fun, not a documentary. If all the other real life problems depicted in Ready Or Not are exaggerated, what unique harm is there to take this concept to a more extreme direction?" 

What it comes down to is that even if their portrayal in-game might have their own issues, the other crimes and topics the game tackles such as human trafficking, CP, political corruption, drug cartels and right-wing terrorism are very real and serious problems that do cause harm to countless people worldwide, but violent anti-human eco-terrorism that targets people is not a real phenomenon and feels out of place among the others. Historically there are almost no cases I could find of this sort of violence used by environmentalists, and a research paper published in 2024 by Cambridge University supports this, making the case that "environmentalists rarely, if ever, use lethal violence." Regardless of that fact, environmental activists of all kinds are often talked about as eco-terrorists or dangerous criminals by right-leaning influencers, politicians and even the current U.S. administration in a deliberate attempt to vilify and discredit them. For example, in 2022 there was a debate within the French government about the term when its Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin used it to describe demonstrators protesting the building of a water basin. In response, a former Green presidential candidate Noël Mamère wrote an op-ed where he stated that Darmanin's use of the term bordered "on political obscenity" and came across as "a clear declaration of war against environmentalists." He went on to write: 

    "For those who are interested in the history of environmental movements, which does not seem to be the case for Mr. Darmanin, "eco-terrorism" was invented within conservative circles. The expression, as stigmatizing as it is revolting for the confusion to which it gives rise, comes from lobbyists that are victims of environmental activists who call themselves "ecowarriors," mainly in English-speaking countries, and who resort to actions that do not exclude environmental sabotage by attacking material property."

The key words being used in this quote are "material property." The real life movements that the game's United Planet Front is clearly inspired by are groups like the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and Extinction Rebellion (XR), even down to blatantly mimicking the latter’s logo but with a Z instead of an X. ELF is the more extreme of these two as it has committed acts of what might be called "monkeywrenching" or "ecotage", meaning the destruction of property in order to hinder or stop operations deemed harmful for the environment or people. And while there are disagreements even within environmentalist circles about their use of these tactics, and I am not personally condoning them, I think it is important to know that their line is always drawn at hurting living things. Meanwhile XR is a completely non-violent movement that uses civil disobedience to raise awareness and put pressure on people in power, often by using their own bodies to block traffic or operations, purposefully getting arrested en masse as a tactic. When they cause disruption, it is targeted and calculated, not aimed at hurting ordinary people but businesses and governments with specific goals and demands in mind instead of "purging the parasite of the collective mind" or whatever the Hell the UPF spokesperson was babbling about in the game. When four Greenpeace activists boarded a Shell oil rig back in 2023, they did so without weapons, threats or violence, and eventually left peacefully without being arrested. Several previous protests aboard oil rigs in the past have followed similar patterns, and all were completely non-violent. Yet all of these groups and even less extreme ones have been labeled by some as "threats to society." And you might even disagree with their methods, but there is a big difference between them and the faceless, gun-wielding terrorists of UPF who attack people, invade private homes or livestream hangings. 

Source: Greenpeace

What frustrates me both as a player and as a hobbyist game designer is that the concept of a mission involving activists and a protest as a problem to solve isn't inherently a bad idea and could, in another game, even lead to interesting decision making. For example in a more dialogue focused game you could be asked to find a deal to end a tense protest by negotiating with the activists, sort of similar to Disco Elysium's storyline about a union strike. And if the game was well written with believable, rounded characters that have clear motivations and goals rather than unquestionably villainous caricatures, it could provoke actually thoughtful dialogue about activism and acceptable ways of protesting. Using force to end the protest might even be an option in the game, but at least you would then as the player have to be the one to make that choice and live with it.  

But Ready Or Not is not that game. Fun or not, the gun-centric nature of its FPS gameplay does not have enough verbs in its toolset to support this sort of storyline or interaction. Your only options to deal with people in the game are either to yell at them to surrender or subduing them with force, either lethal or "less lethal" like rubber bullets and gas. (Which, make no mistake, can still kill.) So in turn, all suspects in the game need to pose a possible threat to the player, since otherwise there is no real challenge or decision making to be had within the limitations of its first-person shooter language. This is why the UPF members have to be armed and dangerous, and there is no room for negotiation. As you are helpfully informed at the beginning of the mission, that part has happened and failed off screen, and now it is up to you as the brave SWAT officer to go and clean the mess up by taking down those pesky "UPF assholes", as the  briefing calls them. 

Press F to yell at suspects.

At this point I do want to be clear that my aim is not to make accusations about the political beliefs or intentions of the developers at VOID. Instead I want to emphasize that whenever an artist tackles complex and sensitive topics such as these, they have a responsibility to do their due research and avoid potentially harmful depictions, or recognize when something is best left alone. Because regardless of how sympathetic or not the developers at VOID are to environmental activism, the reality is that the type of game they have made and the necessities of its gameplay are clearly unsuited to tackle the topic in a nuanced way. Even if the depiction of the UPF in the game was not meant to be purposefully hateful but simply thoughtless, relying on old media tropes about villains with understandable motivations but misguided methods, the game also lacks any positive examples of activism which inherently skews the portrayal of the whole issue to be one-sided and negative. 

And while we can hope that most players would be able to see the line between fiction and reality in this case, the unfortunate truth is that whether intentionally or not, the game is reinforcing the myth repeated by right-wing and even some centrist politicians and billionaires that people taking direct action and fighting for the planet through protest are "dangerous", "unhinged" or even “terrorists.” To the people who profit most from the destruction of our planet, any sort of disruptive action or disobedience against capital or governments is immoral and criminal. Even in my home country of Finland, politicians on the right have made attempts to label the local arm of Extinction Rebellion, Elokapina, as a criminal organization that should be banned. This was after a series of peaceful protests where the movement blocked traffic by sitting on a road in the centre of Helsinki for a few hours. Because to unfortunately many people, the only right way to protest is to do it in a way that does not inconvenience or bother anyone. 

But in fact it is that exact sort of rhetoric that is either naive, or worse, purposefully harmful and dangerous. Just this year we have had another record hot summer as the global temperature is rising with heat waves and unprecedented amount of forest fires across Europe, drying lakes and melting ice causing massive floods wiping entire towns in Nepal and Tibet in the recent weeks. Climate change is a real, pressing threat, and these cases of freak weather and natural disasters will only become more common if the current status quo remains. I might not have a solution to stop it all, but I know that inaction is not the answer and that the last thing we need right at a time like this is to further vilify people actually trying to do something about it.