Pathologic, Seeing like a State (Patreon)

I recently found this fantastic work, a real masterpiece, a piece not quite anarchist in what it says explicitly but deeply focused on the struggle of human beings under hierarchical systems and rigid taxonomies and gently and brilliantly issuing what I think is an authentically anarchist perspective, not in what it says but in what it doesn’t say. It’s called…

Pathologic (or Pathologic 2) by Ice Pick Lodge || Seeing Like a State by James C Scott

Pathologic is a game set in a nonspecific part of the Russian steppe in a strange town only ever referred to as "the town" in the game. The town probably has a name, but it's so remote and cut off from the world that "the town" works just fine. It's not like they're ever going to be referring to another town. That said it certainly feels a bit odd they never say the name of the town, I can't help but imagine my confusion if I were talking to an NPC and he casually mentioned how lovely the sunsets here in Beefgrad are. How pleasant Wormburg is this time of year. Where? Oh, sorry. The town.

The town has no name because it acts as synecdoche for all towns, the people synecdoche for all people, the dynamics of the teeny little society here a microcosm of the dynamics we see everywhere in life. It’s fittingly Brechtian for a game that says a lot about society and the systems of control that exist around us, and it also has a running secondary narrative throughout that the entire game and all its events are part of a play being staged by a man called Mark Immortell, which definitely jives well with it just being “the town” - it’s very theatrical like that.

You play as three different people in the game: a doctor called Daniil Dankovsky who just sucks; a surgeon and student of the local traditions called Artemy Burakh who is my precious boy who can do no wrong; and the most relatable character for pro-gamers, a supernatural child with extradiegetic powers over life and death. The reason all your characters are so concerned with mortality is that the driving force of the plot is a disease called the sand pest or the sand plague or sometimes just “the plague” which is ravaging the town. It came through once before and the father of one of the player characters - Isidor Burakh - then the town surgeon, handled it then by quarantining the affected district and basically just letting everyone there die. The approaches that the three different player characters take to battling the disease are fitting with their approaches to medicine and ultimately, to life more broadly. Dankovsky, the prickly prick, would rather synthesise a vaccine so that in future people can be protected against ever catching the disease, adding to the overall progress of medical science and what he hopes will eventually be the triumph of the scientific method over death itself. Artemy cares about the community, the people in front of him, and human suffering far more than Dankovsky and would rather find a way to cure the people who are already sick. Clara, the changeling, being a spooky super-baby, will ultimately use her magic powers to try and find a perfect solution to everything that transcends the nature of the disease, Mark Imortell’s play, the [redacted] ending with the two giant [redacted], and even Pathologic the video game itself - as I joked earlier, she’s kind of a representation of the player in some ways.

The actual meat of the gameplay however won’t just be about stopping the disease - stopping the disease is the melody you hope will come together over the top of the entire orchestra, but just surviving day to day yourself against the basic human needs of food, sleep, social reputation, not catching the disease yourself, that’s what makes up the rhythm and body of the piece, the percussion, the bassier strings the cello, the… bassoon…. That one kind of got away from me. The point is, mechanically the vast majority of actual gameplay is in trying to walk places to find food or things to trade for food or things to trade with children who will have things you can trade for food, or medicine, or bullets, or knives, so that you won’t die, and the fact that what feels like 90% of the game isn’t the plot or the quests that you are undertaking but just the act of survival makes everything around the plot feel exceptionally silly. Walking to your destination when you have a nearly full exhaustion or hunger metre and barely dodging around muggers and assassins and infected citizens and maybe having to kill two people and nearly get beaten or stabbed to death is so fucking draining, just emotionally, and then you walk in and it’s Georgiy Kain saying “Do you think fate is an inescapable constant in the universe or a semipresent force, and if so what are it’s limits? They say fate has plans. Does fate want something for us or–” Sorry Georgiy I’m just bleeding to death and I gotta eat 4 tins of vegetables, drink 6 bottles of water and bandage myself up while I try to remember if there’s a bed in your house I’m allowed to sleep in but let’s debate on the possibility of a deterministic nature of the cosmos in just two seconds yeah?

Now is probably a good time to mention that when I’m talking about “Pathologic” I’m actually talking about two games - I mean, considering you play through so many times and have so many different experiences arguably it’s many many more, but strictly speaking I’m talking about two games - Pathologic and Pathologic 2. Pathologic 2 isn’t exactly a sequel to Pathologic, it’s a complete remake from the ground up by the same people, it’s way more smooth and cohesive and well made - it’s also not finished yet, you can only play the Artemy playthrough and a little bit of Dankovsky, but that’s okay, because today I really want to talk about what the tension between the Dankovsky and Burakh playthroughs explores.

Also, in Pathologic 2 the themes and messaging seems more refined. If you go talk to Mark Immortell, the guy staging the play at the theatre, he says that he tried to put the play on once before but it was a mess and nobody really got what he was trying to say with it. Remember, the play in-universe is a bizarre supernatural mime show that predicts what's going to happen to you each new day, and it's constantly made clear that the entire story of the game itself and everything that happens in the town is also kind of part of the play, like when people appear and disappear and are replaced by the strange mimes called The Tragedians.

It’s also just interesting that Pathologic 2 as it currently exists is almost entirely Artemy Burakh’s story, authorising his perspective as the essential Pathologic experience, making Daniil Dankovsky’s perspective one that only exists to contrast the “core” story. In the original game, people take “the bachelor” playthrough as the default, and that makes a certain amount of sense because he’s an outsider to the town which makes him a handy stepping stone character for the audience. Everything that’s weird to the audience is also weird to him, all our questions are his questions too. However, something really important is missed in treating Dankovsky like this kind of default - you don’t really get to understand the flavour of his perspective on the town, the people and the local traditions as well as you could. We’ll get into it.

Suffice it to say: there’s a lot going on here. This game is quite a hefty gesamstkunstwerk - that’s german for “please let me have a normal brain instead of spending my whole life overanalysing video games”.

Pathologic exists in a weird space culturally and artistically. The game is holistically composed to make you suffer - it is a masterpiece of misery, a symphony of struggle - and because of that basic nature, the game is just a real fucking slog to play. So, for years now, the bad game - the game that sucks to play - the bad game that sucks to play and that’s why it’s so good has prompted reviews and analyses by game critic after game critic, and now we’ve reached a point where I can talk with a girl I just met on a lesbian hookup app for 6 hours about Pathologic and have a fully in depth discussion knowing the whole time that I’m the weird one for having been foolish enough to actually play the thing. Foolish enough to play it all the way to the end, even, can you imagine?

The eternal problem plaguing game criticism, at least in my opinion, is a deep focus on the phenomenology of games rather than the actual intended discussion inherent to the art of games - that is to say, part of the reason that all my friends who’ve never played Pathologic can talk more or less as though they have is because the critics from whom they learned about Pathologic were describing, reviewing, and analysing the experience of playing the game. I think this is ultimately borne out of how commercial games and all of the conversations around the medium are. Essentially, everyone tends to review a game as a product - how much fun will you have playing this? Is this game good value for your money?

But games are art - a complex intersubjective expression and discussion of ideas and meaning through the experience of playing them - so if the experience is the whole thing, then describing something experientially works really well. Every now and then though, a really good game like Pathologic comes along, and all anyone wants to say about it is what it’s like to play - the most intellectual conversation around the game over and over and over again becomes “can games be good if they aren’t fun? Do games have to be fun?” and the answer is “yes, it’s a good game” so cool, great, what a good and interesting conversation we had - but like.. What the fuck was the game actually about?

I’m being flippant. There is plenty of really good discussion of Pathologic, and a lot of people watching this right now are watching it because they already watched, in all likelihood, Hbomberguy’s Pathologic is Genius and Here’s Why or maybe Sulmatul’s analysis, it’s just that by the time you get to hear what the game is actually about you’ve already spent a really long time thinking about “do games have to be fun?” and I think, from my conversations with twitter lesbians at least, the take that most people are coming away with is that Pathologic is really interesting because it’s bad, and nobody seems to actually know what the game is about. To be extra fair to other critics, even the developers themselves seem to most enjoy talking about how punishing the game is to play as a selling point for the experience of playing it.

So Pathologic is in a weird space culturally, because lots of people talk about it without having engaged directly with the actual text. Basically it exists in the same cultural space as lots of academic socialist political theory - you saw a nice British leftist talk about it on youtube for hours and hours and now you talk about it like you actually read it.

Let’s talk about a really good book.

Seeing like a State by James C Scott is one of those books that you get a chapter into and go like “oh fuck this is going to change how I see everything now isn’t it” and boy does it ever. It’s a book about the ways that systems - especially state systems - reduce complex realities into blunt and simplistic measurements or taxonomies. It’s an interesting exploration of the underpinning reasons people hate the ideas of bureaucracy and central planning.

If the state was planning your birthday party it might say “here’s your cake. Any allergies? Any vegans? Great. Here’s 20 of your friends and a roller rink. Happy birthday” but if your best friend was planning your birthday she might think “I want you to have your favourite cake for your birthday, but I also know that you wanted to lose weight recently so I’m going to find a recipe to make it a bit lighter on the sugar. Also I know 20 of our friends who are free, but Ginger and Skye and Molly are all working the next day so maybe it’s better to start it earlier so they can be around for longer, and Riley doesn’t like being around Ginger after what happened with Bella, so I need to let Riley bring a plus one in order to keep things copacetic, as long as they don’t bring Kayden because Molly is Kayden’s ex and they literally cannot be in the same room together, plus Sock and Leaf just got back together and their relationship is super toxic and whenever they show up to stuff Sock is being passive aggressive and Leaf is drunk, not to mention Jezebel just had surgery so she’s not going to be able to do roller blading anyway so we should make sure there are other people happy to sit it out as well or she’ll be on her own”.

The different kinds of approaches I’m describing here rely on fundamentally different kinds of knowledge, as James C Scott discusses in the book. The kind of knowledge that the state can use to plan your birthday party, like “is the venue wheelchair accessible, and are there wheelchair users attending” is a type of knowledge called techne, whereas your best friend is relying on a kind of knowledge known as metis (pronounced met-ee) or, if you listened to the audible audiobook version of Seeing Like a State “meat-us”. Meatus.

Metis is the kind of knowledge that is hard to impart in a manual or a pamphlet or a training video, specifically because it relies on a sense of relationships between things and the deployment of improvisational skills. There would be a lot of metis that relates to sailing a fishing boat that you wouldn’t get if you read a book but you could gain through experiencing time actually working on a fishing boat. A friend gave me the example that people who regularly give ultrasounds know that on some machines the cord for the scanner is too long for the size of room that the scan is being done in and so instinctively wrap the cord a few times around their arm so it doesn’t get in the way.

In Seeing Like a State, Scott talks a little about the example of Odysseus, from The Odyssey. Odysseus possesses certain skills like fighting, sailing, acting, and so on, that you can certainly convey through techne but also rely on a lot of metis, and in the story when Odysseus encounters different mythological beasts he displays incredible improvisational skill and quick wit. When he blinds the cyclops he’s improvising with his skills of performance, combat, and making a big fire on the end of a stick, and bringing them all together to do what he needs to do. The story isn’t a How To Defeat A Cyclops manual, but it’s captivating exactly because of the cunning utilisation of different skills and improvisation. As Scott says, we admire Odysseus because he has “considerable metis” or if you listened to the audiobook, because he has “considerable meatus” - still admirable, one could argue.

Techne comes from a proto-indo-european root that means “to weave” or “to fabricate” and I think that gives a really good idea of what we’re talking about - following a recipe to produce a repeatable result. Metis on the other hand comes from a greek god who was said to possess prudence, wisdom and skill, and the name originally referred to a sort of “magical cunning”. The fact it’s so hard to describe and always was even in its first form tells us something about the nature of metis, as a type of wisdom defined by an absence. Metis is the kind of knowledge that undeniably continues to exist beyond the reaches of techne and by definition is hard to define.

Scott makes the excellent observation in Seeing like a State that while the work in, say sweatshops, is monotonous, repetitive and mechanical, and the people doing the manufacture are following strict patterns with results expected to be within acceptable margins, it is the metis of each individual worker that makes the enterprise possible at all. If workers weren’t using their judgement, their prudence, their metis, then the slight differences in density, weight, stiffness, pliability etc of the fabrics they were working with would produce wildly different results. Techne may provide us with ways to produce a specific result using a recipe, assuming the ingredients are uniform, but metis is what makes up the gap between that assumption and the reality that real materials are never uniform.

The knowledge structure of ruling classes is an expanding taxonomy of techne that disregards metis and treats techne as the only valuable form of knowledge while at the same time benefiting and profiting from the metis of the whole population. Under capitalism people don’t get to use their magical cunning to solve problems they want to solve but rather ones that they are made to under the basic threat - work or starve - but the working class is also constantly mythologised by the ruling class as containing more metis, maybe even being in a more animalistic and natural state.

What I guess I’m saying:

It’s the meatus of the working class that the bourgeoisie is really afraid of.

A really interesting example of collective action against bosses that directly exposes the dichotomy between techne and metis under capitalism is something called work-to-rule. When a union calls a work-to-rule action, the workers do exactly what their contract says and absolutely no more. It’s essentially a form of protest that says “you want robots? Okay, you got robots” and removes everything extra that workers usually put into their work every day, showing how insufficient their compensation is and how much more they do than what their bosses actually admit.

Another really important part of the discussion of techne and metis that Scott explores in Seeing Like a State is the different forms that techne takes as well. The form of techne that we’re most familiar with is based on the scientific method and the philosophy of science, which for many, considering the vast accomplishments of the scientific method, is proof that the systems of knowledge with which we are most familiar are infallible. This is of course, as Sherlock Holmes would put it “twisting facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts” - we should remember that the missteps of systems of knowledge supposedly based on the scientific method include race science, eugenics, practically all of the horrors of the 20th century and Richard Dawkins.

Techne can be recorded and passed on in many forms, some of them relational rather than building up from the most basic principles in the way that scientists find preferable. In the book, Scott focuses on a possibly apocryphal example of the settlers off the Mayflower learning how to plant corn from Squanto, a member of the patuxet tribe. The settlers were shown that the right time to plant maize was when the leaves of white oak trees reached the size of a squirrel’s ear. To a scientist this might seem folksy and perhaps unreliable, but this is advice that works anywhere that maize can grow that also has white oak and squirrels. It doesn’t need to rely on accurate data about temperature trends, soil conditions, previous farming methodology, or even absolute measurement of time. It is, therefore, easy to follow and very durable guidance.

This is where we can start to link the discussion back to Pathologic.

Daniil Dankovksy is a dickhead - for real, this is the thing that everyone universally takes away from his character. He looks down on everyone he meets unless they’re an aristocrat or a scientist, and even then he’s spiky and condescending. He calls the people in the town backwards and makes absolutely no effort to hide his disdain and disgust for them. He randomly inserts latin into shit he says like some Eton educated gammon. Specifically the way he’s a dickhead to everyone is that he’s an outsider who assumes by default that the knowledge he is bringing to the town is superior to anything that anyone there has to offer him. He’s got that sticky icky coloniser brain.

Dankovsky is all about techne - my terrible stinky boy is absolutely brimming with techne - but firstly, he doesn’t respect the techne of the indigenous population, and his respect for metis is near to nonexistent. Daniil has no meatus.

This isn’t to say I think the scientific method should be entirely thrown out in favour of folkloric traditions, in Pathologic or anywhere else. There are real consequences to the traditions and beliefs of the indigenous steppe people. To complete Artemy’s quest in the abattoir you literally have to do a human sacrifice, but it’s like… a cool human sacrifice? It um, makes sense in the context of the quest, I am not endorsing human sacrifice (unless it’s cool)

There are some genuinely horrific attitudes in the townsfolk too, that don’t even have the benefit of sending you on mindbrain expansion quest where you discover indigenous communism. On the first day that you arrive in town, mobs of townsfolk hunt down and burn women alive because they’re looking for a folkloric steppe bogeyman they call the Shabnak Adyr which they believe killed Simon Kain and Isidor Burakh, Artemy’s father. Women, am I right?

Also In the remake, Pathologic 2, it’s even more explicitly indigenous steppe women who are the ones being hunted and burned by the townspeople. There are attitudes which are just appalling and have no benefit, not every superstition contains hidden knowledge, but some of the stuff that Dankovsky dismisses out of hand as being backwards nonsense is legitimately useful in not just creating a vaccine but curing people who have the disease right now.

When I’m talking about different forms of knowledge it’s really worth acknowledging that you don’t just play in different characters or different stories when you play Daniil and Artemy, you play in different logics - you play in different epistemologies.

To switch over and look at Pathologic 2 for a second, Artemy’s medicine uses a logic called The Lines, which is closer to how a butcher looks at the body than a doctor. It’s very reminiscent of - bust out your Year 11 GCSE history of medicine textbooks everyone - the mediaeval concept of the four humours. Artemy looks at the body in 3 “layers”: skin, blood and bones. These “layers” can be stimulated with tinctures made from different herbs, and doing that can tell you which layer of the body the disease is in, allowing you to reduce the symptoms and later, when you’ve been on the torture dungeon brainquest and get the right ingredients, cure the disease altogether. You can see how even though it isn’t empirical or scientifically rigorous, it is a holistic model of health that can actually be used to treat the disease. The empiricism, the trial and error, comes from generations of trial and failure and testing and observation and though there might not be a carefully documented understanding of why something works, it does, in fact, work.

And hey, Dankovsky’s science can’t explain everything by a long stretch, if he were willing to open up a little and accept that the method works, he could be treating people and there’s always time later to conduct studies and figure out why it works.

I find it fun that Daniil is called “The Bachelor” by the game - as in, bachelor of science, a learned student of medicine. He’s specifically a learned kind of doctor. Even the word doctor (from the latin to teach, same root as education, doctrine, indoctrinate) itself first appeared in middle english as an explicit contrast to the kinds of medical practitioners that came before. It was worth distinguishing doctors from the people who came before, they uhh, weren’t the best. In the middle ages if you needed your appendix out and you didn’t happen to live right by a monastery or convent that doubled as a hospital your next best bet might be to find a barber surgeon. The reason they were called that is because surgery would not be their full time job - I mean how often do people need surgery - so you’d be going to have an organ removed (or more realistically your gangrenous leg amputated) by someone who was really a hairdresser who just also did surgery because he’s the guy in town who owns a lot of sharp knives.

Artemy isn’t quite a barber surgeon, although it would kinda whip if he stopped in the middle of shotgunning six muggers to give one of them a short back and sides. I’ve heard of having a bit off the top but this is ridiculous (footage of Artemy shooting someone in the head). Artemy is a menkhu, the game calls him The Haruspex, and although he has been away for a few years to study medicine, it’s his grounding in the traditions of the local people that allow him to function as a good doctor in the game. I am inclined to think we only hear that he went away to medical school so we know that he probably like, disinfects his knives or whatever. Daniil and Artemy are both practising medicine in different ways, both of them work, but the two are in many ways incompatible because they each see the world in a completely different way.

Let’s talk about modernism? Can we talk about modernism for a minute? Can we just all stop for a gosh darn second and talk about modernism? Thank you.

In Seeing Like A State, Scott talks quite extensively about modernism, and specifically how it has served as an ultimate ideology of state control with lots of modernist theorists and urban planners treating people as discrete little units to be handled and controlled by well-designed systems. Through this he explores critiques of soviet socialism, mid 20th century capitalist though and nazi germany, which, as Scott points out, was also its own kind of attempt at modernist utopianism - just a utopia for fascists.

Scott also talks a lot about modernist architect and theorist Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, who was a city planner and architect and high modernist - as in what the fuck was this guy smoking. Jeanneret was a proponent of the idea of monocephaly (single headedness) in urban design, that a city should be designed with all roads literally leading back to a single centre, ideally situating the organs of state control at the centre. In this way modernism as a school of thought loves imagery and metaphor, but a lot of flowery metaphors and imagery don’t add up to good urban planning, making spaces that are strange, cold, inhuman in favour of the architect's personal metaphor over actually livable cities. It's a really good example to think about how modernism uses the state-like way of seeing because Jeanneret worked with and inspired designs among both the capitalists and the soviets - as well as being close friends with a bunch of eugenicists and Mussolini. His work tied together a lot of seeming opposites, because the underlying modernist ideas were the same - all these states and the people involved in statecraft believed they could make systems that would make people behave better.

Also Jeanneret called himself le Corbusier - meaning “the crow-like one” - and that’s just cute. I love when a silly french guy has a name silly enough to warn you in advance just how silly his ideas are going to be.

Hon hon oui oui, I eat la baguette, I design le monocephalic cité, I believe le movement social can be controlled by physical structures. I am wrong.

So we should talk more about the town. The town, in the game, was canonically built by the Kain family, all very much plugged into the high modernist brainworms. The streets are built to be winding and lead to frustrating dead ends because the game designers wanted the player to experience the stress of going somewhere to complete a time sensitive mission, spending ages getting lost getting there, arrive and realise you’ve gone the wrong way and know that the only way to actually get where you’re supposed to go is to retrace your steps all the way out of the winding spiralling dead end you’ve been led into and go down another path that is equally esoteric and difficult - I’ve actually reloaded saves because the town wasted so much of my very precious and limited time.

The town is also seen as a living organism by the people there, especially by the people belonging to the indigenous culture, and the more you think about this the more you feel like a cell travelling through the bloodstream of a large animal as you find your way around. The thing about organic bodies though, as opposed to machines, is that bodies are all about semipermeable membranes, boundaries that hold in some types of things but allow others to move between channels. The people in the game who designed the town see it more like a machine, and in that way the hard boundaries of the streets actually aren’t like blood vessels. They’ve taken something organic and changeable and made it rigid and quite importantly to Seeing Like a State, they’ve made it monocephalic. In Pathologic 2 every road essentially leads back to the town hall.

It’s been commented on before how Pathologic making a commentary on high-minded utopianism and how it can lead to tragedy is especially relevant coming from the former soviet union, but I think that misses the forest for the trees a little. The game is very deliberately timeless, the architecture of the town refusing to be pinned down to one period. Characters who could be read as a soviet apparatchik in one light could also be seen in another as a capitalist boss or a tsarist landlord - the game makes a very astute point that the same kinds of people are able to clog up the arteries of the system by being obtuse, greedy, bloody minded middle men no matter what the system is.

I think there’s a strong argument to be made that the fact Dankovsky is willing to destroy the town in order to preserve the polyhedron could be compared to the mass starvation caused in Ukraine by Lysenkoism - the USSR allowed peasants to starve en masse partly in an effort to test out a version of agricultural science that was more communist. I don’t mean the farm labourers get paid the same, I mean Lysenko rejected Darwin’s theory of evolution because it said that living organisms compete for resources rather than working together for the common good.

However, I also think that the awful conditions that people lived through under the Tsar in pursuit of the Tsar’s divine right of kingship and the awful conditions people have lived in since the fall of the soviet union and the replacement of marxism-leninism with free market economics as the immortal inviolable science are, in perhaps equally valid ways, just as good a historical analog for what the game depicts. Dankovksy sees the ordinary working people as worthless, stupid, backwards, savage, and incapable of creating something as beautiful and brilliant as the polyhedron, and because of that he’s willing to sacrifice them all. Artemy sees the polyhedron as a foreign object impaling the body of the town, leading to a sickness, and that progress should be discarded to protect the ordinary people.

Interestingly when you get to go up the polyhedron in Pathologic 2 the kids at the top all talk with quotes from the people who made the game. For me, that's the best way of understanding what the polyhedron is, like, no adults are allowed in, it's a space that sort of reflects and represents the idea of a protected childhood, and in a way it can be seen as a metaphor for the game itself. In terms of Dankovsky and Burakh's opposing views, on the one side is life and on the other side is what we live for, what we strive to achieve and create and how we make spaces to make life more beautiful and enjoyable.

Artemy wants to just save the people, Daniil wants to just save the creations.

Both of them are wrong, but obviously Daniil is more wrong.

Every day as you play the game the soaring death count climbs more and more and it seems like a miracle there’s anyone left in the town at all. As Dankovsky pushes toward trying to quarantine, abandon or destroy the people of the town it becomes ever more apparent the ridiculousness of his outlook on life.

As Bertold Brecht put it "Who built Thebes of the seven gates? In the books you will find the name of kings . Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock? And Babylon, many times demolished. Who raised it up so many times? In what houses of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live? Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished did the masons go? Great Rome is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song, only palaces for its inhabitants? Even in fabled Atlantis the night the ocean engulfed it, the drowning still bawled for their slaves."