“Violence is man recreating himself.”

XCOM: Enemy Unknown places the player at the helm of a global effort to fend off alien invaders, and indulges the fantasy of human-as-underdog: that mankind, even outgunned, ought to be capable of overcoming odds too stark to fathom. The series, which originated in a far more newbie-unfriendly fashion in the 90s, is in part so memorable because of its reliance on random chance. Soldiers can hit impossible shots, or impossibly miss. Random events can sabotage the player’s best laid plans. A tight wartime economy necessitates constant sacrifice. Soldiers who are wounded in battle require time to recover before they can be redeployed, and a soldier who is killed in action is lost forever. This means that a game played without the use of save-scumming is susceptible to a snowballing sense of collapse.

Most Ironman games – those who autosave after every turn and do not allow mistakes to be replayed – end in failure before the midpoint. Even skilled players may be unable to recoup an unlucky shot, a dead soldier on the field, a lack of funding or equipment to put out the next fire set on the world map. In the event of the player’s failure to mitigate international panic, Earth’s governance cedes their political rights. The XCOM project is defunded entirely, and in the place of all preexisting systems, the ADVENT Coalition takes over, colonizing Earth and reshaping it to fit the economic needs of its conquerors.

Symmetrical warfare tried and failed to overcome the superior firepower of the extra-terrestrials. Is it any surprise, then, that the second-go-round so wholly embraces asymmetrical warfare?

While its predecessor heralded a militaristic fantasy grounded in the classical ideal of the noble war, XCOM 2 presents armed conflict as a Sisyphean, largely-thankless struggle against impossible odds. It places the player directly in the seat of the native revolutionary, fighting on familiar turf against encroaching others who station themselves as superior. XCOM 2 employs an overtly anti-colonial narrative, and does not restrain itself from presenting the stark realities of this form of resistance. In doing so, it proves resonant with the work of Franz Fanon, which speculates on the causes and nature of violence-as-political-tool.

In XCOM 2, the titular organization embraces terrorism to achieve its goals.

The Earth of 2035 is marked by a new form of binary division: those who embrace the invaders and comply with their systems of control are granted modest lives in white, futurist cities, and those who do not are condemned to living in off-grid shantytowns, eking out a meager existence. XCOM 2 does not dedicate a significant amount of time to the minutia of life in an ADVENT city, but what is presented is deeply Orwellian: masked, armored humanoids patrol with high-powered firearms, alongside armed robots and gun turrets the size of an SUV. Citizens are forced to pass through security checkpoints, interrogated by armed goons, often disappeared without warning. Any auspices of peaceful coexistence are decimated by the weaponry displayed throughout the cities of the occupied earth. The violence that permeates ADVENT’s control is aesthetic, all-consuming. The ideology of the occupiers is “violence in its natural state,” just as Fanon says of European colonizers in The Wretched of the Earth, and this brings with it one shared truth: “it will only yield when confronted with greater violence” (61).

The XCOM of the future is outgunned – so the fight must be brought from the shadows. XCOM 2 asks the player to envision fighting as a guerrilla force: the concealment mechanics allow players to exist in stealth when dropped for a covert operation. Soldiers navigate a cityscape, unnoticed, until, ideally, they initiate combat with the occupying forces. The player is guided to set ambushes: a grenadier throws an explosive into a group of enemies, sometimes destroying property or even maiming a nearby civilian. Other soldiers, placed in advantageous positions, then open fire on the scrambling aliens. The second turn of a mission’s first fight often becomes a one-sided mopping up of a wounded straggler.

The XCOM of the future is also outmanned in a different sense: while some of the fighters are survivors of the original organization, most are former civilians who have turned to combat out of necessity: the brief biographies of volunteers who can be recruited often tell stories of alienation in ADVENT Earth. A soldier may be the sole survivor of their family, accused of sedition against the state; a petty criminal subjected to draconian punishments and total isolation; a convicted murderer who escaped during a violent prison break. XCOM 2 does not require every fighter to be an ideological pure revolutionary, nor a glowing bastion of humanity’s spirit. Instead, the resistance pulls its staff – fighters, scientists, engineers, civilian collaborators – from the wretched of the Earth.

XCOM 2’s early game difficulty is in part due to the lack of adequate resources: while enemies fight with plasma weaponry and advanced armors, the guerrilla fighters use refurbished ballistic weaponry and jury-rigged kevlar. The aesthetics of ADVENT as a whole, and its society, are constructed in such a way that engenders passivity in the colonized. Resistance feels hopeless long-term when the player is only able to take half of an enemy’s health with a direct hit. The advanced technology of the aliens is as much a psychological tool as it is practical. Fanon comments on this effect as well:

“Moreover, there are some individuals who are convinced of the ineffectiveness of violent methods; for them, there is no doubt about it, every attempt to break colonial oppression by force is a hopeless effort, an attempt at suicide, because in the innermost recesses of their brains the settler’s tanks and airplanes occupy a huge place” (63).

However, in spite of their superiority, the soldiers of ADVENT are mortal. A savvy player is capable of using guerrilla tactics to minimize the power discrepancy between occupiers and occupied. All of the firepower means nothing when the wielder is dead before they can pull the trigger. The best way for a soldier shaken by the stark realities of their battle to overcome that fear is to realize that it is grounded in the colonist’s propaganda. A shaken soldier benefits from this crisis of faith, even. They receive a bonus to their willpower – a stat that determines resistance to status ailments, such as panicking when an ally is wounded or killed – after overcoming it, making them more effective and more resilient in the face of terror. 

Most missions are based around some form of sabotage, placing the player as an active agent rather than a reactive one. In contrast to Enemy Unknown, which often has soldiers responding to enemy attacks and countering incursions, XCOM 2 has soldiers working to infiltrate networks, sabotage supply lines, or raid landed UFOs. These are actions that can easily be condemned by ADVENT media, made unpalatable to a captive, colonized audience: they are, from a certain lens of objectivity, acts of terrorism. Fanon provides a counter to this narrative: “for the native, objectivity is always directed against him” (77). The powers that be present the truth as it appears to them and mark it as immutable fact.

The condemnations of XCOM’s methodology in-universe are pervasive and identical to those used in the western world. Perhaps these anti-social ne’er-do-wells should attempt to reform the system from the inside, should engage politically to mobilize modest, positive change against the colonial force. Intellectuals bend over backwards to justify the infractions made by the state against its people – but these intellectuals are themselves compromised, if not overt quislings. ADVENT disappears those who question its methodology, XCOM 2 explicitly tells us, and engages in retaliatory violence against those even suspected of dissidence.

The mask falls further after XCOM has succeeded in a few missions against the regime and the player is forced to respond to an attack against an off-grid shantytown by ADVENT forces. Soldiers land amidst an ambiance of gunfire and screams. Each turn, at least one cowering civilian is murdered by an armed representative of ADVENT. Each victim has a name. They do not fight back. In fact, the enemy troops are coded to prioritize firing on unarmed civilians rather than the armed insurgents shooting back at them. War of the Chosen, XCOM 2’s expanded edition, even incorporates explicit death squads that wander these maps trying to slaughter as many innocents as possible. Some of these people work with the revolution, but many are simply survivors, condemned as terrorists by an uncaring, unsympathetic network of propaganda.

These missions work on a ludic level to engender more sympathy to XCOM as an organization: while their methods may be asymmetrical and terroristic in practice, they are equal, if not surpassed, in brutality to their enemies. If anything, the reciprocal violence only encourages further resistance. Saving enough civilians to succeed in the mission rewards the player with a permanent bonus to the supplies donated to the cause by the region. The Wretched of the Earth describes this sequence of events as follows:

“Mass slaughter in the colonies at a certain stage of the embryonic development of consciousness increases that consciousness, for the hecatombs are an indication that between oppressors and oppressed everything can be solved by force” (72).

The murder of these civilians is intended to re-legitimize state authority by force, and “at no time [does the colonial regime try] to hide this aspect of things” (Fanon 84). However, they only cement the necessity of violence as a tool. The moment that a civilian witnesses this kind of force and survives it, argues Fanon, they cease to be a civilian: they either succumb to their own fatalism and embrace cowardice, or become more steadfast in their advocacy against the regime. Whatever compliance the violence buys is soon repaid with interest.

War of the Chosen, in fact, is wholly based around the expansion of anti-colonial networks throughout the planet. The disparate groups besides XCOM who are engaging in rebellion – the Reapers, the Templars, and the Skirmishers – are politically and tactically very different groups who are nonetheless forced by necessity to understand that they cannot lose to infighting. The titular Chosen are, in a sense, Fanonian “native intellectuals” who funnel their aggression and maltreatment downstream in a desperate attempt to overcome their nature as colonized, victimized beings (60). Their taunting of the player and of XCOM are as much a pathetic attempt to make the freedom fighters experience the same powerlessness and humiliation that they once experienced. While the Ethereals are largely unseen threats as befits their name, the Chosen are the mouthpiece of the perverted, shattered native, who sees their only path to personhood in total submission to an enforced status quo.

The systems of oppression were not created a priori to subjugate humanity: as the player investigates and infiltrates ADVENT forces of increasing value, they discover that Earth is simply the latest civilization to be homogenized and exploited into a galactic south, to extrapolate the International Relations term. Many of the aliens the player fights are also victims of a greater colonizing body. They have been robbed of their culture, their birthright, their personhood. Most are genetically and psychologically modified to serve specific combat purposes by the regime. Each culture is raped by ruthless extractivism: that which is useful to the colonizer is kept, while all else is burned away or cast aside.

Any veiled metaphor present in that extractivism is ceded by the endgame: XCOM 2’s primary missions are based around the elusive Avatar Project, which progresses as new research facilities are built across the globe. Completion of this effort is an instant loss condition. The colonization of Earth is motivated by humanity’s psionic capabilities, which would allow ADVENT’s god-emperors to outlast their decaying bodies — and it may be inferred that every occupation occurred in search of ideal hosts to parasitize. The final goal of the occupier, both in the real world and in XCOM 2, is to totally subsume that which they have overtaken. Their success is the final form of what Fanon dubs “in terms of syncretism” the “death of the aboriginal society” beyond any hope for recovery (93). A humanity that is existentially compromised in such a way cannot hope to resist the regime at all.

XCOM 2’s primary tagline during its marketing offered humanity a binary choice – “Join Us or Become Them.” This phrase manifests a direct parallel to a warning Fanon offers in The Wretched of the Earth. The colonized must look over their differences, real or synthesized, to create ire between disparate groups, based upon the reality that “everyone will be discovered by the troops, everyone will be massacred – or everyone will be saved” (47). There is no fence to sit on, no way to inhabit the ideal, submissive role demanded of a native. Even the quislings will be slaughtered when the bell tolls.

The Wretched of the Earth was published in 1963, directly connected to the liberation movements throughout Africa, and in particular Fanon’s home nation of Algeria. XCOM 2 was released in 2016, at a time when, broadly, the notion of colonial violence was considered dated and a historical artifact. In spite of this, XCOM 2 aligns itself so starkly with the political theories of Fanon as to seem directly inspired by his work. The fight against ADVENT both translates and adapts the ideas of violence-as-necessity in resisting a colonial force. The player is not asked to consider the moral quandaries within because the reality is made immutable by the depiction of the colonizing state. Looking from the outside, the violations of native dignity and human rights cannot be masked by an effective neoliberal apparatus. There is no way to view ADVENT as benevolent when humanity is treated, explicitly, as nothing more than genetic raw material to be exploited.

In this way, XCOM 2 stages itself to create sympathy for revolutionary bodies in the real world, and to challenge the player to question the narratives of terrorism and violent resistance against conquering bodies. It provides an accessible angle to understand the label of “terrorist” as a strictly political term, rather than an academic one. An old adage suggests that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and XCOM 2 allows the player to inhabit the duality of this role. If attacking armed authorities who are free to inflict violence upon civilians is terrorism, what does that make the gunning down of the innocent to maintain state control? Suggesting the two are equivalent only masks the moral rot of the latter, and robs the former of context and cause. 

This is particularly important because the probable majority of players are rooted in “Western civilization” – which simultaneously frames itself as being grounded upon human rights and enlightenment ideals while justifying a legacy of genocides and exploitation. Violent resistance against equal violence inflicted by an imperialist nation is to be strictly condemned on humanist values. The reality is shaped by the colonizer, and the notion of objectivity exists only to be weaponized within its sphere of influence. Revolution is only appropriate when sanctioned by a colonial body, suggests the colonist, and thus it never becomes truly appropriate; simply an earnest mistake made by those too desperate to know better.

Western values cannot withstand the reality their upholding systems create without cognitive dissonance, says Fanon, and as such the native is inclined to ridicule them:

“The violence with which the supremacy of white values is affirmed and the aggressiveness which has permeated the victory of these values over the way of life and thoughts of the native means that, in revenge, the native laughs in mockery when Western values are mentioned in front of him” (43).

The humanity of the colonizer is affirmed alongside every act that robs a native of theirs. Every member of the colonized group is unified by their shared experiences of loss, whether of life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. Every element that separates them – tribe, faith, political orientation – becomes a smokescreen to keep them from unifying in revolution against those who use violence to suppress them while condemning the use of force.

XCOM 2 informs us that insurgency works. The long months (or years) of resistance and chipping away at ADVENT’s strongholds finally give XCOM all of the evidence it needs to broadcast the cruelty of the regime. Feeds are overtaken with a genocide-in-motion. The peacekeeping broadcasts cannot talk around footage of massacres and human exploitation. It may not be the entire human race, but the evidence is enough to persuade enough of the colonized to openly resist. It is enough to severely destabilize ADVENT in the lead-up to the final assault.

XCOM may be the ones to destroy the Ethereal’s Avatars, but this is only achieved as the climax of two decades of fighting, and hundreds of thousands of individual acts of resistance. Perhaps this is where XCOM 2 is at its most optimistic, with the suggestion that proper evidence of injustice is all that is needed to overcome the programming of occupation. The implication is that once the realities are presented to the common people it is enough to recontextualize XCOM entirely; the subjective differences between terrorist and freedom fighter are recognized as an easily-manipulated metric. The choice was never to “Join Us or Become Them” – it was to fight or die.

Revolutions will never be televised because they never arrive ready-for-TV. No revolution meets the colonial standards of aesthetic, of deference, of politeness. Every native who fights does so not out of nihilistic extremism but to repay real harm done to them and their culture. One may be led to ask how an individual can sacrifice their comfort and their safety for the sake of revenge – but the objective reality is that neither of those things ever existed for the colonized. Violence is not an active choice but a reactive one, a reciprocation, a reflection of the systems of oppression that make the revolutionary and imbibe them with a fighting spirit.

This essay finds it relevant to end with one last quote from The Wretched of the Earth, a promise to the lost and destitute and oppressed, those who have no choice but to fight from within their concentration camps, from their shantytowns, from their ancestral homes:

“A colonized people is not alone. In spite of all that colonialism can do, its frontiers remain open to new ideas and echoes from the world outside. It discovers that [revolutionary] violence is in the atmosphere, that it here and there bursts out and here and there sweeps away the colonial regime – that same violence which fulfills for the native a role that is not simply informatory but also operative” (70).