The universe of FTL: Faster Than Light is riven by conflict between the previously ascendant Federation and plucky rebels. The player is dropped into the midst of this civil war and tasked with fighting through dozens of hazards in order to reach their headquarters, deliver top-secret information, defeat the enemy superweapon and save the Federation?! Perhaps the reader was expecting to be aligned with rebellion in the vein of Star Wars and other science fiction properties the game draws heavy inspiration from. This inversion of the bad bureaucracy versus valorous rebels trope is not just a twist to grab player attention, but in service of promoting a stance on the political question of the benefits and risks of multiculturalism.
FTL’s gameplay cycles between decision making, where the game presents discrete options to the player, and combat, which proceeds in real time with a toggleable pause. During combat players control a multitude of systems including their crews’s positions, individual airlocks, weapons targeting, and energy distribution among a dozen subsystems. As all gameplay takes place in space, the risk of depressurization and fire are ever present and fully simulated. A battle can be won, only for the player’s ship to break up into pieces later from the uncontrollable spread of fire from combat damage. All this information would be overwhelming to the player if it were not for the pause mechanic and the game’s crisp 2D graphics layered through a top-down perspective. However, FTL is still brutally hard. I have only won three games on normal difficulty after over 70 hours of play; this is not an unusually low amount for the average player.
The other half of FTL is the choices players make while interacting with the almost 300 events they may encounter when entering a new system. Each event serves as a vignette with branching options and is the primary way the game’s narrative is told. Through them we gradually learn of the human-supremacist philosophy of the rebels in a galaxy occupied by seven different races of intelligent life. For example, in the “Civilian Checkpoint” event the player can choose to bribe a rebel checkpoint to let everyone through which they accept “as everyone currently awaiting inspection is human anyway, the Rebels let them go.” This stance is also conveyed through combat gameplay. Almost all rebel ships are staffed entirely by humans supplemented by a drone contingent due to manpower shortages caused presumably by their exclusionist practices. When other races are found on their ships, such as the peaceable cybernetic Engi, it is implied that they have been press ganged into service. In the pivotal final battle of a campaign, their vastly superior flagship can be defeated because their all human crew opens them up to strategies such as firebombing or boarding which could have been thwarted if they allowed “lesser” races to staff their prized asset.
In contrast, the player unlocks and flies a wide variety of ships from all galactic races that are often staffed by a diverse crew. Here the game’s position on diversity becomes clear; it is an asset. Each race has unique abilities that can be combined synergistically to increase their effectiveness. For example, a Mantis can be paired with a telepathic Slug to wreak havoc upon the less martial proficient enemy crew. In addition, many events have special blue text options which are always the best choice and can only be selected if a player has a crewmember of a relevant race. This allows to player to surmount cultural barriers that otherwise lead to conflict, such as when your Engi crewmember bashfully informs you that what looks like two Engi ships crashing into one another is actually something much more private (the game’s answer to how a race of beings composed of nanomachines reproduces).
Through these mechanics the player is naturally guided to having a diverse crew. Using a science fiction setting to draw analogies to ethnic or racial tensions on Earth is always problematic because unlike the alien races of FTL, humans are all members of the same species and possess the same genetic potential for strength and intelligence across any grouping. However, the systems of FTL allow players to reach the conclusion that diversity is beneficial through their own experience of gameplay. Furthermore, it complicates this position by proposing that multiculturalism is good, but it is hard. The races of FTL are not monolithic and in the absence of Federation oversight their have internal schisms and inter-racial conflicts have exploded. Additionally, not all races play well together. The anaerobic Lanius will gradually kill other species if placed in a room with them and diplomacy with the isolationist Rockmen is difficult and frustrating. As noted before, if these challenges can be overcome the player is able to reap greater rewards.
Released in 2012, FTL can speak a lot to the current political moment where many members of white America want to reject multiculturalism and a large federal bureaucracy which works towards integrating and overcoming the barriers and faultlines separating different ethnic groups. While not envisioned or promoted as a political game, the climate of the divisive election of 2012 which has lead to many of our republic’s current afflictions may be responsible for the message that was ultimately embedded within it. Perhaps it can serve in a small way as an antidote. There is one area where FTL falls a bit short on this message and that is in its flavor text description of humans, “common and uninteresting.” It is not enough to assert that multiculturalism is good while still promoting a notion of a “normal” group by which the strange, but beneficial “other” is compared. A truly progressive philosophy which embraces aspects of queer theory recognizes that all groups are weird in their own ways, even humans and even white americans.
Image 2: http://monthsbehindreviews.blogspot.com/2012/12/ftl-faster-than-light.html
Thanks to Reddit user Random-Webtoon-Fan for compiling narratively relevant game events:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ftlgame/comments/3jlleo/i_have_looked_through_all_ftl_events_and_results/
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