I’ve always thought it was funny that there were two huge triple-A franchises whose titles ended in ‘of War’. As a Nintendo kid who didn’t have access to Xbox or Sony exclusives and couldn’t pick Marcus Fenix and Kratos out of a line-up, I probably even assumedGod of WarandGears of Warwere related somehow. But games including ‘war’ in the title makes sense. Games tend to do violence really well, and wars are where the most violence happens. Not too much of a stretch.
Are We Human? Or Are We Gamer?
But recently, I’ve noticed that there are a lot of games with a less likely word in the title: ‘human’. Starry Studio’s new post-apocalyptic survival game,Once Human, got me thinking about this and, once I sat down to list them all out, I quickly came up with several other games that include the word in the title. The sheer number is a little surprising. Off the top of my head: Too Human,Detroit: Become Human,Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, andHumanity. TheGamer’s Joe Parlock reminded me of the 4X strategy game,Humankind. And I did some digging online and found an isometric survival game called HumanitZ which launched last year, a puzzle platformer called The Humans that came out in 1992, a 1979 arcade game called Human Cannonball and, of course, theDestroy All Humans!series of alien invasion action games.
That seems like a lot of games with “human” in the title, though I don’t know if it really constitutes a trend. But here’s what I noticed: games that use “human” in the title are almost always seeking to draw a distinction between humans and something else. Some of these games, like Humankind, don’t fit this trend, but most do.
In Destroy All Humans!, you’re playing as an invader from outer space. In Detroit: Become Human, you’re an android. Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey charts the course of evolution beginning with earlier ape-like hominid species, as you guide them through eight million years of evolution.
Sometimes, you are the human, but the game wants to make mundane humanity remarkable. The Humans casts you as a group of Lemming-like humans among dinosaurs. In HumanitZ, you’re a human attempting to stay alive in the wake of the zombie apocalypse. In Too Human, you are the least cybernetically enhanced human among a group of humans with god-like tech enhancements. A Human Cannonball is notable because we expect cannonballs to be, well, cannonballs.
The Strange Appeal Of Being Human
Being human is only really noteworthy when there’s a comparison point. Otherwise, it’s an unhelpful descriptor. If I tell my wife a story about going down to the library and seeing a bunch of humans, she would rightfully ask why I was noting their species, since that’s usually assumed. It makes me think of the joke that David Foster Wallace told in his commencement address at Kenyon College: Two young fish are swimming along when they pass an older fish who comments to them, “Morning boys, how’s the water?” They keep swimming for a while, then one turns to the other and asks, “What the hell is water?” We know the circumstances of our day-to-day lives so well that we might not even recognize them if someone pointed them out.
Games usually sell us on the fantasy of being someone else. We get to be Kratos, the powerful warrior who can tear through hordes of vicious enemies without breaking a sweat. We get to be Sonic, the world’s fastest hedgehog. We get to be Spider-Man, with all the web-slinging powers that entails. Video games offer us the opportunity to have the powers we dreamed about having as a kid. So, when games ask us to merely be human, they have to acknowledge the mundanity before they can begin to make it interesting.
