We All Lift, Together.

Yeah, 'eskapape, ettupuipui' yourself, asshole, tell it to my union rep.

The story starts with a floor boss of a job site trying to keep her people safe from the management, by keeping everyone's heads down and voices quiet. This doesn't work, because not everyone can do that, and so that head gets lopped off, and that voice gets quieted, by people too removed from the realities of being poor and needing to work through privilege to even know how to care. Before that happens, though, a mission occurs where you're out to deliver a bomb to solve a problem; the floor boss heads you off, and says you're going to do this properly and civilly: by appeasing wealthy masters that would be unimpressed even if you did make it snow on Venus. Because you did make it snow on Venus, and they repossessed your legs for it and replaced them with more 'efficient' replacements, because you didn't make your milestone.

After that happens, though, the floor boss remembers herself. She says, to effect. "bomb huh? How 'bout we blow up the boss's reputation instead?" And organizes a strike that could, in fact, blow a chunk out of one of the planets of the Origin System.

"Because we don't fear death," the floor boss says, through her anonymous proxy, "as much as you fear poverty."

And the big boss? The one that was there to claim that he did this, he did it all, he made Venus into a ski resort, all by himself? He relents, like a man throwing himself on a sword, all the same drama. Composing himself towards his investors, he outwardly and loudly trusts that this will only be a "labour issue," an anomaly in "worker relations."

The angsty and fashionable forever-teen that is my ethereal inner-self in this game of God Technology and Spiritual Wifi guides their 300 kilogram gilded bio-metal construct of an Armed Man that is also a Rhino towards the union-built underworld. I have middle managers to murder.

Digital Extremes is a company that's hard to describe as anything other than 'abused' in its arc beyond Unreal Tournament to the first time word of mouth spread about their crazy everything-game, Warframe. Presenting an engine that was beyond anything anyone had ever seen to select few viewers at the end of the PS2-era, the game that was supposed to be Dark Sector, a saga of techno-mystical assassins in the court of a far flung future empire, was rejected by the publishers. It was too colourful, and nobody wants to play science fiction nonsense these days, people want military shooters. So Dark Sector was released, and it was gray and bleak and about a bio-weapon being loosed in a fictional former Soviet state. It was sort of like what they meant for Dark Sector? Sort of? It has a glaive, which you can throw, and there's things that sort of look like Infested life forms. But it also really didn't look like what they meant, because it also looked very boring, despite how otherwise competent it was overall. You can look it up and compare to the vaporwave neighborhood above. The gulf between the two end efforts are very apparent.

So Digital Extremes decided they were done with publishers. They decided to make their own game, the game they wanted to make in the first place, or at least an expression of it. It'd be free to play, online, co-operative, less a full blown MMORPG, and more like an action game with a long-form career mode, where you build an arsenal and can play with as much or as little co-op as you want. It caught attention, because it was a better and more elaborate looking free to play game than had ever been seen in games. 

Which is why everyone told them they'd fail. Again.

They didn't, though. The reasons why aren't actually the story I should tell, because it's already been done better by Danny O'Dwyer and Digital Extremes themselves. Part of them, though, is that they were willing to demonstrate themselves different from a game industry that was becoming more and more greedy, more and more predatory toward players and their wallets. They listened to feedback, they opened the development process up to the community with their Devstreams, they even removed a premium currency feature and refunded the money of the people that paid into it, because they felt they had made a slot machine, and it left a bad taste in the team's mouth. They, in effect, realized that a game that treats its community less as a field of people with money to exploit, and more of the other, larger half of a symbiosis, which will actually willingly support their end with their money if they like what they see, and play.

In other words, Warframe is here, today, bigger than ever, because the players kept playing. Because they had helped lift it to where it is.

We All Lift Together is the slogan of Fortuna, the major update that rolled out tomorrow. It's also the title of the song that introduces the new area, a chain-gang song sung by debt slaves that have been made 'efficient' via means of having their biological parts 'repossessed' and replaced with synthetic prosthesis owned by the Corpus, the corporation-slash-church that is one of the game's major antagonist factions. They need to work off their debt, so it's only right they have proper tools, yes? That's why children should have their necks replaced with spinal hinges, so they can better work in factories.

It was also the refrain spoken by creative director Steve Sinclair during his personal stream yesterday, as the team finalized the release. "We all lift together," he said to the people waiting to play, because he's the guy who knows, and knows well at this point, that's true. He's here, making the game that he and his team wants to make, because the people who play it are here too, because we both respect one another. This was not "don't you guys have phones," this was "thank you for letting us make our art by playing it."

Then there's the fact that the art they made this time around is unambiguously pro-union. 

This is a story of organized rebellion, against corporate authorities given carte blanche to wreck your life because you didn't work hard enough. This is the story of being met with a strike-breaking giant spider mech, and countering by threatening to melt down a terraforming engine. This is phrased, by the villain, as "not the time for collective bargaining" over the commlink, as you hear his investors beginning to boo and throw trash, while you eviscerate and gun down the corporate cops coming to halt your demonstration. "You didn't make this, we made this," says floor boss Eudico, speaking as Vox Solaris. I shoot down a Corpus dropship with an airburst shell from my Corinth shotgun, and then summon my new space skateboard to do sick flips over the ensuing pigroast. This game is fucking awesome.

Laced everywhere throughout this experience has been dialogue that's so on the nose, it would be offensively dumb, were it not done out of an act of pure audacity. People were making jokes about the real subtitle of the new update as Fully Automated Gay Space Communism. Here's the thing: they weren't far off the mark.

Thursby, the young debt-prisoner whose mission and subsequent capture form the impetus for Eudico to remember that nonviolent resistance only works if the adversary has a sense of shame, has his legs taken. Low-key former Bad Man, now current inmate-worker and terraformer animal conservationist 'The Business' laments the kid's condition: "I don't know how anyone can live with how little they left him..." he says. Ticker, an individual whose gender I believe is "fantastic" and is beautiful because of it, offers to trade in a higher form of Fortuna currency, by buying out the debts of prisoners who are destined to have their various bits repoed. On each dossier, you can see their personal history and infractions. Number of dependents. Medical issues. Crimes rendering punishment, such as "perpetually late," "poor at-work attitude," and "not a team player." The twin brother and sister leaders of The Vent Kids, the multitudinous gangs of orphans that live in the life support ducts, have a little bit that can run when you enter their shop, in Cyber-Dickensian Future-Cockney:

"We down in a hole, cause some got lots more than they need."

"How you get most people to have less than they need?"

"Throw em down a hole!" 

Warframe is a game that surprised me. When I got a new computer, I downloaded it because I had no money left, and it was free to play. I liked it, but that was it. Then I decided to check back a year or two later, to see how things had changed. They changed a lot, for the better, and more, there was stuff to do. That stuff proved to contain the narrative rug pull that hooked me on this game forever, because now it's not just me being about what this game does from a gameplay or story perspective; I've got an emotional investment in this world that any dipshit with a Cinematic Experience with Real Choices could pitch to me, because it continually hits me from angles I don't expect, in ways that make me feel. This is a game brought up tears more than once, for its portrayal of themes extremely close to my life and my heart. But yesterday, it put a big stupid grin on my face. Because supporting a game developer is a case by case basis of knowing who isn't willing to screw you and knowing who makes the art that you want to support. For a long time, I've known confidence in supporting Digital Extremes, because they tick both those big boxes for me.

But yesterday, more than feeling developers giving me a touch on the shoulder and saying to me, it's okay, we know too, I felt something different. It wasn't a touch on the shoulder. It was a hard clap, with the clamp and the shake. It had weight to it, the kind of weight that comes from holding a blunt instrument on the other hand. The devs said, it's okay, we know too: you want to kill these assholes as much as we do. So here's your Valhalla: kill, kill and kill again. Then go rescue some wildlife, or fish for drones, and help the needy. Because that hurts the enemy too. Here, have a skateboard. They hate those too, for some reason.

So let's shift this culture. We all lift. Together.