Dishonored Step by Step Part 1: Dunwall Tower
The Limits of Imagination
I had an idea about whether or not a game might be rich enough to yield material to write about each individual room, piece of writing, or character. Dishonored came to my mind and I ended up playing the first two sections of the game and taking copious notes. I decided to break it up by location and write what comes to mind due to the imagery, fiction, and actions of each. This piece comes from the game’s introduction until you wake up imprisoned.
Dishonored sticks in the mind due to its deviations. It launched at a time when open world games were beginning to take off but instead utilized a linear mission-based structure. It was single player with no tacked on multiplayer mode handled by a for-hire developer. While the setting has many familiar features, it is also full of timeline contradictions. You have an Empress, a Spymaster, a High Overseer, a Russian renaissance man, Wrenhaven, Whitecliff, Dunwall, Lord Protector, trees resembling those found at Slope Point, New Zealand, and a plague that threatens to destroy this world/city-state/seat of an empire. There are also hydraulic machine-powered water locks, pistols1, motorboats, towering automatons, and deadly electrical fences powered by explosive whale oil canisters. It is imaginative in altering a familiar type of fiction, steampunk, and pivoting it around a different kind of unconventional yet historically familiar power source: whales.
Whale oil is not as odd as it may first appear, as whaling was long practiced in our world. During its peak in the 19th century whaling was done for their blubber in order to render oil that would be used for machine lubrication and fuel for lights. It was only due to the emerging dominance of petroleum (crude oil) drilling in the late 1800s that whale oil was dropped and specific species were not hunted to extinction. Whaling’s importance to Dishonored’s fiction does not come into full perspective until later, but is one of the most important aspects of what separates the game from other fantasy settings that mix monarchies, swords, guns, and magic.
Where Dishonored becomes limited in its imagination is in the narrative of restoring the sole authority figure to the throne due to their birthright. This problem is inherent to the setting itself. If you’re going to have a fantasy world it is presumed that it will follow the historical way of governance of those sword-based times: a monarchy. It also falls into the trap of thinking, “If only we had a good monarch in charge things would be okay!” This is where a majority of my distaste lies. We see this story repeated throughout our fiction. The tales of Robin Hood were later supplemented with an escalation of conflict between Robin and the Sheriff becoming representative of the good King Richard and the bad Prince John. A more recent example of this trend was in Black Panther (2018) in which Wakanda is a country whose sole authority figure can be filled by anyone able to pass a trial of combat, a flaw the villain takes advantage of but a flaw that seemingly remains unchanged and unrecognized by all involved. Perhaps having an individual dictate the entire policy of a country is not the best form of governance?
This repeats in Dishonored, whose Empress Jessamine is portrayed as a good monarch who cares about her people. She is killed by a conspiracy of the aristocratic class, and so the narrative becomes aiding the loyalist aristocrats to restore Emily to the throne. Both of you are merely tools for them, as they dispose of Corvo and seek to press Emily to their whims once the proper authorities have been deposed. Despite this, the game still leaves the fate of Dunwall dependent on Emily sitting upon the throne. There are two flavors of Emily’s reign depending on the player's chaos rating2, but the worst ending that results in the complete destruction of Dunwall is the one in which Emily dies.
Fiction reflects but also influences our reality. It allows us to imagine new ways forward. My problem is that this specific lack of imagination in the way we perceive power, who wields it, and how it works in changing our daily lives, makes it so that we come to believe that if we just had the right person in charge, things will be okay. This is not true. Our current system is not rendered moral when the good candidate (read: Democrat) is in charge. Dishonored and its ilk muddle the fact that voting an individual into the role of president is not the cure-all for our ills. We have already had one in charge for four years and what has been accomplished compared to how much remains to be improved? How many have died and will continue to die under another? We lack the imagination to find a different and better way forward and instead are bulldozed into the same circular arguments every election cycle. I acknowledge the appeal of the story of the king and his divine sword, but I don't want us to be restricted to it. Arkane could imagine a world much like our own powered and altered by a different application of whale oil, but couldn't seem to imagine a different way of rule from our own, both past and present.
The pistols themselves are hard to determine if it is a flintlock or percussion or breech-loading. They lack the large ignition mechanism common to most all pistols of the 1800s and are limited to a single fire until upgraded later on. Their reloading happens off-screen and due to its speed is likely breech-loaded.They are obviously modeled to appear in-place within the nebulous mixture of timeframes the game presents while also being “whale-powered.”
I appreciate the endings being reliant on a separate character’s (daughter’s) choice who is informed by the player character’s (father’s) as it is taken from BioShock 2, which I have written about previously. While Corvo’s familial relationship to Emily is less explicit, the consequential choices are more, which unfortunately reduces the conclusive effect comparatively.