A Place for My Ideas

A Tribute to Working Class—Night in the Woods (2017 Game)

Many miners old and young,
With home in heart and coal in lung,
Were taken by the trolley men,
Up to the mine and back again,
… (A poem by an NPC in the game)

I got familiar with this indie and less-known game to due to a game journalist who tend to be through: George Weidman. He pointed out this narrative and story/character-based games is interesting to tackle dissociate youth's problems and world. But I wasn't ready to for a game that emphasize on working-class struggle in a world that intensely try to eliminate unions & years of labour fraternity.

This game is based on, Mae, a daughter of a working-class family who, after generations, is the first person who entered college from her family. Nonetheless, she dropped-out and came back to her city. That's the far as I can tell about the story without spoiling anything, and the story itself isn't the point of this post.

I was amused when the heroine as a farewell message asks the cashier of a T-shirt store to break her chains to raise against the corporation. An obvious and amusing node to the Manifesto of Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels:

The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

The burden of generation before weights heavy on Mae and the people of the city. The long, intense, and bloody history of workers' union struggle with bosses and national guard can be seen can be seen, listened, or read in the game by everyone. Angus, and Greg will talk about it or

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

The economy is shifting. In this new age, the glass factory, sawmill, and most importantly the coal mine are closed and abandoned. The elderly, previous generations, are working in a supermarket that has everything and the new generation are applying & hoping for the job in that supermarket.

A neighbour who just lost his job: they say construction always hiring, but it is not.
A people who want to go to a new town for a work with less monetary benefit, just because, don't want to work in telesales any more. In one of the conversation, two colleagues are talking about their telesales job, and one mentioned she may use drugs to handle her current problem (not sleeping well). The reply is a bit awkward: we shouldn't use drugs to sleep as a remedy to work conditions.

The secretary of education has this to say about public schools:

Having public schools is like having public hamburgers. That's insane. Everybody should buy their won hambergurs.

Or getting quotes such as:

It is not your fault the world is like this... One day folks like you are going to overthrow the whole thing. The. Whole. Thing. Stay strong you beautiful dreamer. You have nothing to lose but your chains.

or

We love our war monuments in our city.

You walk by a city which has a very obvious social security office. In front of the door, you'll see an army recruiter.

An elderly person who knows the Mae mentions that in her father side, several generations before, there were people who were involved in time “… when the workers went against armies.” But now, this elderly person has been around to watch the tide roll out.

Arnold Applebaud: the crook who owned the mining company and despised unions, has this in his plaque: a father to all workers, a grandfather to their children, a great-grandfather to those children's children

#NightInTheWoods (2017) #GameReview #KarlMarx #Labour #TheManifesto