Baldur's Gate 3 Is Very Anxious About Automation
Larian Studios
The videogame Baldur's Gate 3 earned accolades the moment it launched, dominating nominations for the 2023 Game Awards and being well-received by gamers and critics alike. The game takes place in the world of Faerûn (a common Dungeons & Dragons setting). The plot involves an invasion of Mindflayer parasites secretly influencing the minds of more and more hosts in a bid to take over the continent and perhaps all of existence.
Yet something is not typical with this resurgence of mindflayers. Not only is your character infected and not being turned into a tentacled monster, but the hivemind that usually controls such hosts is silent. In its place is the Absolute, a mysterious force your player must uncover the motivations of as you race to find a cure for your infection.
Although bugs were frequent, I found this game to be a treat to play, especially its narrative. There are many nuggets that one could deconstruct from this work: its unapologetic queerness as every other NPC casually slips in references to a same-sex partner or lover; the way it breaks down how innocent people can get indoctrinated into cults; the way player creation allows for transness in a way I haven't seen in a while.
Perhaps the most interesting is this fantasy work's take on security and Artificial Intelligence. Autonomous defense units, parallels of which are being deployed in the real world as we speak, are not depicted in the game as vehicles of safety but harbingers of fascism — an intriguing criticism as our world gears up to connect everyone and everything in the name of productivity and safety.
Fascist, fantasy robots
Automation may seem an unlikely topic in a fantasy game, where much of the population still lives in Medieval-going-on-Enlightenment-style housing. And yet, the techno-magic of Dungeons & Dragons allows for a wide assortment of flying machines, steampunk underwater bases, and, for our purposes, security robots called Steel Watchers.
Players (most likely) first hear about the Steel Watch, an autonomous defense formation meant to uphold the city's laws, from Counsellor Florrick. The politician sings the praises of Enver Gortash, the man credited with creating the Steel Watch. Depending on your companion selections, we know that Gortash is a bad guy because one of our companions, Karlach, was sold into servitude due to his backstabbing. But at this point in the game, we have yet to determine the extent of his plans and how it relates to the Steel Watch.
It takes us two-thirds of the game to reach Baldur's Gate. We have been fighting the Cult of the Absolute, trying and failing to stop their armies from making it to the outskirts of the city. When we finally get there, we are greeted by a metropolis that has been heavily militarized in response to these attacks. Massive Steel Watcher automatons patrol most of the city, checkpoints are frequent, the newspaper is being actively censored, and refugees and other displaced persons from the war have become heavily stigmatized. "We got to kick 'em out," young child Rhett says of refugees, mimicking her father's words.
The city-state of Baldur's Gate is succumbing to fascism, a loose term meant to describe authority centralizing on one figure or entity, often by relying on myth-making and violence, with heavy buy-in from a select portion of the public. Many of its habitants have willfully chosen a "tough on crime" mentality to pursue a sense of safety from both the army outside and the "threats" within. "Fear not friend, the days of proper Baulderians fearing walking the streets are over," remarks noble Saer Manzarde, glad that stigmatized people will be dealt with, out of sight by the Watch.
Fascism requires not only a fear of human difference and an exploitation of social frustrations but often the worship of a central figure for it to operate, what Umberto Eco called a "selective populism." Leaders become interpreters of the people's will, calling all of them to serve the majority, which, of course, only they alone can divine.
In this story, we have Gortash, a man who has created a cult of personality around himself as the savior of Baldur's Gate. NPCs everywhere in the city chat about how he will save their city, both physically from the Absolute and spiritually from the city's underclass. We first have a chance to speak with Gortash at his coronation, where he has a very paternalistic version of the public he "speaks" for. "…people are cattle," he lectures, "obedient until panicked."
The Steel Watch represents the security state that Gortash has built to tighten his hold on the city, one that he's candid about when you two meet. As he tells you moments before he's coronated: "…people crave strong leaders. Leaders that bring law, order, and protection. Leaders like me, Bane's unyielding hand, author of justice."
Gortash may publicly claim to have built this security apparatus in response to an emerging threat, but in much the same way fascists have historically relied on scapegoats such as Jewish people or communists to drum up fear, the Absolute threat was very much engineered. In a surprising twist, we learn that the Cult of the Absolute was a lie constructed by Gortash and other allies to create fear within Baldur's Gate so that enough of the populace would willfully accept his solution of the Steel Watch and the authoritarianism he wished to usher in.
You may think our population would never do such a thing, but the real world is rife with such examples. Following 9/11, our government adopted all sorts of security measures to provide the illusion of safety, including a massive surveillance network that is currently spying on hundreds of thousands of people via Section 702 (a provision set to expire this year, if not renewed). And because programs such as PRISM and Upstream have never disclosed a tally of American citizens being spied on, the actual number is most likely much higher. Several US cities are likewise now literally introducing robotic police dogs for the stated purpose of enhancing security. Minus the magic, the impulse to trade freedom for safety is genuine. It's easy to imagine such a tradeoff being made because, in many ways, it already has.
Furthermore, something is chilling about how Baldur's Gate 3 depicts the construction of these automatons, which relates directly to how automation works in the real world. Unlike the many fantasy golems that are animated via techno-magic alone — meaning we, as the player or viewer, don't have to think about how they move about — the Steel Watch is intimately tied to exploited sentient labor. It was, in fact, built by enslaved people, the Gondians, as well as your companion Karlach, who was enslaved for the purpose of prototyping the infernal engine foundational to a Steel Watchers design. More to the point, a Steel Watcher has biomechanical components with mindflayer brains used to pilot each and every one.
The Steel Watch, in essence, is not separate from biological sentient labor but very much intertwined with it, and this remains true of the AI of our world as well. Training deep learning models, which we know as AI, still requires human labor. For example, OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, outsourced to Kenyan laborers (earning less than $2 per hour) to train some toxic behaviors out of its model. This labor is critical to how such models work. And yet, these companies often try to obscure this frequently exploitative, underpaid labor that is increasingly vital to our automated world, pretending that automation just happens.
Returning to the game, there is a social and moral cost that came with the Steel Watches construction. Gondians, out of sight from the eyes of the Baldurian public, were brutally enslaved in the Steel Watch Fondry to make these automatons. NPCs may glowingly speak in awe about the efficiency of a Steel Watcher and how it keeps them "safe," but we, as the player, come to learn that these imposing machines are not only intimately tied to exploitative sentient labor but actively help prop up a fascist government.
An automated conclusion
Like many open-ended games, we, as the player, decide what to do with the Steel Watch and the foundry used to build it. We can either destroy it or side with Gortash and let his Steel Watch protect us (at least initially).
But like with many karma-based systems, this agency doesn't make the Steel Watch benevolent. The Steel Watch is the creation of Gortash, an antagonist of the game and the Champion of the God of Tyranny, Hate, and Strife. These were devices built by enslaved people and piloted by the organs of brainwashed and murdered abductees. Everything about them, from their dark origins to imposing frames, is unsettling. There is nothing good about the Steel Watch — a message that the game hammers home at every opportunity.
Art often reflects what is happening in the real world, and as anxiety about automation increases, we will see more and more pieces like this one. Baldur's Gate 3 is very anxious about automation and how it can be used to prop up fascism. And as authoritarianism emerges all over the globe — it's not the worst moral for a game to focus on.