EDIT: This post got split by a mod, and now makes no sense at all! It’s referring to this podcast.
I just now listened to the part about The Baron, which is the first part of the show. These guys have done their homework and they’re making a great podcast. But there’s a criticism of The Baron, first on Adam Cadre’s Radio K and now here, that really stings for me, and I want to say a few words about it. At some point, I suppose I’ll have to do a better (and maybe easier to find) write-up, but I want to get it off my chest. Spoilers galore.
The criticism is, roughly, that this game handles the topic of sexual abuse / incest clumsily, or perhaps worse than clumsily, because (a) it uses it for shock value and (b) it does not give a voice to the victim and does not tell her story; and, the criticism continues, this is typical for a certain male-dominated gamer environment that spawned The Baron.
Now it could very well be that the game handles the topic of sexual abuse / incest clumsily. I was young, and no doubt even clumsier than I am today, and even today I can get worried when I write about such themes. There are in fact a lot of fair criticisms you can make of The Baron. There are many things I would now do differently, including not mentioning the concept of ‘moral dilemma’ within ten miles of the game, because it is not about moral dilemmas at all. And probably also adding some kind of big fat content warning somewhere. We just didn’t have those back then!
But what’s important to me is that the genesis of the game was nothing like these stories tell it. The Baron came from deep, long, going-on-until-3-am conversations I had with a female friend of mine (not a lover; a friend) who had been abused for many years by her father. My understanding of incest and sexual abuse came from those conversations, not from something I had read or heard in an edgelord online community, or anywhere else. I knew the story of the victim. And it was not my story. I did not want to tell that story, because it was not mine to tell. I would never have written a piece of IF about it.
But one thing I couldn’t stop thinking about was something that was not quite my friend’s story, but merely adjacent to it: it was the question of how anyone could do this. To their daughter! I had met the father in question. He seemed a normal, friendly guy. But he did this. (Impressively, and in the end fairly successfully, my friend was actually in the process of getting back into contact with her parents and building up some kind of normal relationship with them again.)
How can a human be a monster? How should we deal with monsters? Can you be monster and human at the same time? Must we understand monsters in order to make sure there are fewer of them? And could I have a soul as forgiving as my friend’s? Those are the questions The Baron is trying to answer, and its answer about how humans can be monsters is mostly: self-deception. The entire game is about self-deception. The major plot arc is the abuser thinking of themselves as the rescuer, until they reach the final point at which they can no longer do so and have to face the truth. That’s what the game is trying to do: understand the logic of monstrosity as it applies to real, actual humans, through the idea of self-deception. And maybe it does it well, or maybe it does it badly, but The Baron is completely uninterested in shock value and if the victim doesn’t have a voice, it’s because of two reasons: (a) in my mind, the victim already had a voice, which I was not trying to channel in this game, indeed precisely not; and (b) in the mind of the protagonist, which is the world of the game, the victim has no voice. If she had, he would not be in this situation. The only voices in his mind are his own. Self-deception is not done to you by others.
I think that 2006 Victor Gijsbers was clearly guilty of a certain naivety: he did not know that there was a long, powerful tradition of not giving voice to the victims of sexual abuse, and he made a game that fitted too neatly into that tradition. I think the game itself does, on a careful reading, show that it is different from that tradition, but this is easy to miss if you are well aware of this larger context that the author didn’t know about. It’s therefore easy to slot it into a certain pigeonhole where there’s this fairly clueless dude trying to use a theme he doesn’t understand in order to do edgy things with moral dilemmas. 2025 Gijsbers is sadder and wiser, and he’s wise and sad enough to write in such a way that he wouldn’t be pigeonholed there. But I have a soft spot for that earlier guy, and I’d like to defend his naivety (which came from a place of love and of faith in people) from overly cynical interpretation.