Stand Up / Stay Silent by Y Ceffyl Gwyn
Clearly, I spent too much time mulling over one of the things the game tells us about its own message: “Black lives matter. That’s a statement of human rights, not politics.” If anything is a statement of politics, it is surely Black Lives Matter. It is one of the central political statements of our time, involving as it does politically contested conceptions of society (as systematically racist) as well as politically contested solutions to society’s problems (taking money from police departments and spending it in different ways, retraining US police forces to be less violence-oriented). Of course this is politics. And how could ‘human rights’ contrast with ‘politics’? Surely human rights only make sense in a political context? They don’t exist in a Hobbesian state of nature! I guess you could hold some kind of divine command theory of human rights, but then you’ve sort of just taken politics and projected it into the realm of the divine… anyway. All of those reflections are perfectly irrelevant when it comes to playing and understanding the piece Stand Up / Stay Silent.
It’s a very short game in which we play through two scenes in a future society on Mars. We don’t learn much about this society; it contains some form of police violence, but we are clearly expected to take our ideas about contemporary society – possibly contemporary US society specifically – and project them onto Mars. The sci-fi is more for colour than for substance. In each of the two scenes, we can choose to either Stand Up for human rights, or Stay Silent and do nothing. I didn’t play through all possible combinations, but if you Stand Up both times, you end up being part of a powerful and seemingly successful BLM movement; whereas Stay Silent loses you both your significant other and your freedom, as the police ends up barging into your apartment.
As other reviewers have noted, this plotting seems to weirdly sugar-coat the reality of protest. Protest doesn’t involve any real sacrifice. Staying silent doesn’t bring any rewards. I’m not saying that it’s impossible to make a case for this; there is real camaraderie and sometimes success to be found in protest, and we all know the famous Niemöller poem about what happens when you don’t speak up for others. But in the case of Stand Up / Stay Silent, the combination of a sketchy world, a dualistic moral dilemma, and a suspiciously neat resolution, end up generating a game that feels curiously flat and unemotional. I wouldn’t call it bad – among other things, I quite enjoyed the writing – but there’s definitely a lot of untapped potential here.