And here’s the script:
In 1973, Disney released Robin Hood, a charming and delightful classic of the genre that taught a whole generation the story of Robin Hood and how many of them were gay furries. In this story, we see Robin Hood reimagined by the perspective of the Disney company freshly post-Disney. In this narrative , the act of taxation is a cruel evil. The mindset of this story is one where a dashing hero can steal and redistribute wealth, but only because the current system is doing something wrong with that wealth, heaping it in a big pile that the king can sit on. The king is bad, because he’s a bad king, but kings, well, kings are great. You can see how good things are when a good king appears. Giving up all your money to the state? That’s terrible. Giving it up to the church, though? That’s a good thing.
In 2018, Lionsgate released Robin Hood, a critically panned financial flop of a movie that taught the people who went to see it the story of Robin Hood and how Tim Minchin’s ability to improve work has its limits. In this story, we see Robin Hood reimagined again, where the story wants to talk about wealth inequality, if that wealth is being put to the wrong ends. The mindset of this story is one where wealth and power are bad things because they’re put to work feeding conspiracies. The wealthy aren’t bad because of what they are, some of them are just bad because of their choices about how to spend their money. The real thing to be afraid of, you see, is for rich interests to arrange terrible disasters so they can pull you into an unjust war in the middle east, and oppress white people with militarised police.
In this way, Robin Hood, a timeless story that largely stays the same, reflects the concerns and ideology of the people who tell and retell his story. It can be extremely specific to a particular point in time, or it can be very general, but it will almost always reflect what you think, in your place, and your time, represents a hero, and the things for a hero to fight.
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Title card
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I’m a massive mark for Mike Bithell games. At the moment I can think of three of his games I’ve played, Thomas Was Alone, The Solitaire Conspiracy and this, Volume, and every one of them is an enduring favourite of mine. I don’t presume to know anything about Bithell as a person, his ideology or his perspective, but what I can say is that when I look at the things Mike Bithell chooses to make his games about, I keep finding things that I like. I don’t find myself wincing or qualifying.
Volume is a stealth game from Bithell studios, which is, as far as I know, just Mike Bithell. It’s a game which casts you as Rob Loxley, in a cyberpunk future where you’re using a piece of corporate programming technology to orchestrate not a military coup, but instead heists on every single high-profile target he can find from the many different cronies and onsiders from Gisborne Industries, who have capitalised on economic disparity to institute a new class-based system in Britain where people are divided into categories based on what their family’s role is in life.
Which
Yeah, that’s pretty much how things go right now.
Anyway, Rob does this with the assistance of a stolen AI, given the reassuring and friendly name Alan. Bithell is really good at writing disarming AI, capable of managing that particular air of ‘a robot made by humans to be approachable to humans, but still definitely a robot,’ and Alan is a really solid version of that character.
Then, you arrange these heists by, well, just doing simulated versions of them. You run around in the levels presented by Alan that are based on real locations and with their real security measures, including the real security robots the real rich people use. The way that the society has become automated by the people with privilege means that they introduce a structural weakness to their own lives, and, well…
They can’t catch us all.
It’s a story under tension, knowing that, at some point, you’re going to be found, the stream is going to stop, and you’re going to be caught. But what’s more, the examples you’re presenting – the people in question are going to see them too. They’re going to have to change their security measures. It’s a call to act, to act now, and in doing that, every one of these targets is going to be panicking and paranoid and stressed and scared. It’s a kind of mass doxing event but for stuff not for people, an absolute salvo of information warfare.
You might not like that this story plays out pretty much exactly how you expect from its premise and even its starting scene. You might not like that, knowing it’s about ROB LOXLEY opposing GUY GISBORNE, that it’s about a cheeky hero who gets away and his band of merry folk that he collects throughout the story. You might not like that it’s basically a stealth puzzler, where you have only one real solution to any puzzle, and that is do stealth at it. You might not like this kind of game, and it’s not going to do anything to change your mind on the kind of game it is.
If you do like this kind of game, this kind of story, this kind of aesthetic, it’s a hundred levels of them, and it does them so well.
There are some genuinely interesting questions at the heart of what Rob’s trying to do here. Born into privilege (as like, let’s face it, if you’re listening to this, you probably are, in a global sense), and without the social contacts to build skills to capitalise on what he’s got in the name of making the world better, Rob is pretty much limited to only being able to immaterially support revolution. He can’t physically hand his money to people – he doesn’t know who to hand it to, and he doesn’t know who he can trust to do that to.
Instead, he basically spends three hours putting together a list.
Here are the people with the money.
Here are their houses.
Here’s what they’ve got.
Here’s how to take it.
This is really interesting to me. It’s interesting because we often think of the internet as being fundamentally limited in the good it can do. You can tell people thing, but how dangerous can any given piece of information be? What can a stream do? Entirely digital objects are very easy to distribute, ideas can fly freely, but what good are they? Are the ideas we share on the internet meaningful, are they as weightless as their instant transmission suggests?
What can you do, once you’ve sent money?
Well, one thing you can do is share useful knowledge – not just spamming it out there, clout hunting while I give untested, unuseful information about how to make a gas mask out of a leftover canteloupe, but actually actionable, useful information and to recognise where I cannot help. Another thing is to make sure that the people around me know that they’re not going to suffer social ill, at least from me, for the crime of opposing evil.
The game is so fundamentally about communication as power that it opens with a statement about how Bithell are happy for you to stream the game – a promise that this information, at least, is welcome to be shared. This may be a bit of a thing but back in 2015, there was a very real lurking threat of companies shutting down streaming of their games. Nintendo were trying to get an angle on things so that people had to sign up for specific Nintendo affiliation, for example. These days it seems that kind of noise has quietened down, but it’s wild to remember that there was a time when they were trying that, and even as I say that, there’s talk about restricting use of major platforms because of who owns them.
This is a game about practice. It’s not a game about being perfect and getting it right the first time – the game doesn’t even have a way of recognising that. Not Volume. If you want to 100% every level and get a cookie for it, the cookie must be self-prepared; the game will check your times and present those on a leaderboard, but there’s no reward for doing things perfectly versus doing them quickly.
When stories talk about Robin Hood, you’ll also see a lot of ways to represent how these stories involve people fooling one another. Picking pockets, emptying caches, blending in during fancy dress balls, and occasionally luring people into a save spot on the road so you can rob them – Robin Hood has a bunch of stuff in his stories about controlling and manipulating tension. For a narrative that almost never uses magic as a fictional construct, they often rely heavily on magic, the real world skill.
In magic, real magic, it’s never about things that look like they were done effortlessly the first time. You never see a trick the first time. You may even hear the magician say this is the first time – but that’s absolutely a lie. Every time, it’s a lie, because they have practiced it, over and over again. Volume gets remarkably hard as it goes on, even as it introduces more toys and tricks for dealing with its difficulty, and the way it keeps this difficulty ramp going and engaging is by making sure you have to practice, practice, practice. And diegetically, that’s what Rob is doing: Rob is showing the audience dozens of different ways that his attempts to steal from Gisburne and his associates don’t work.
It’s beautiful, it’s elegant, and it’s not something you can do in a lot of other games; you couldn’t make a second game about streamers fomenting revolution through streaming how-to-guides on crime. Any game that wants to reiterate on this idea space needs to build itself from the ground up, and there’s something really pleasantly clever about so blatantly using the scaffolding of the Robin Hood archetypes. Once you know that these things are from this space, a lot of the forgiveness is already there.
It wasn’t made to be about the current today, where terrible things that aren’t really AI being used to replace people who are really workers. It wasn’t made with a direct anticipation of a new rise of fascism. It’s a happy coincidence – of a sort – that the ideas Volume has are so important to the now. And a subtheme here is all about how Rob is constructing an identity, a face, that mask, and that then commentators look at what he’s doing and decide how good a job it is.
I love, so much, that one of the first voices you hear in this game describing how little they trust your identity, how you need to be able to project and commentate on who you are in what you do, is a character voiced by a pro wrestler. It’s such a nice little wink to the idea of identity as chosen, as expressed, as demonstrated.
I love this little gem of a stealther. I love its silly on-the-nose naming, I love its explicit connection to streamer culture, I love its Stephanie Stirling cameo, I love its robot guards and its collapsed-together midgame of levels that are, no lies, probably too difficult for me to do fairly. I love Volume and I love the things it tries to show you
So that you can learn about the value of showing, and sharing, and playing.