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The video game Uncharted 2: Among Thieves opens in media res. The camera pans to Nathan Drake, treasure hunter/adventurer/thief, who is barely clinging on to the side of a rusty train car that lays perched on the edge of a deadly cliff in the freezing Himalayas. You are thrust into embodying him, forcefully immersed by the snow-silenced soundscape and the vibration of the controller at each precarious grasp to safety. A bond is formed between player and character in those first few urgent moments where you shepherd Nathan back to relative safety. This sense of embodiment is the Uncharted series’ greatest ability and its fatal flaw.
Nathan himself is snarky and charming, but never too much. He was designed to be an everyman. He’s a white American man, the same as the de facto gamer of his era. He’s an agreeable conduit, one that easily flows between feeling like the players’ self and the players’ friend. His exploits are typical of the action-adventure genre—the games take you to exotic locations in search of priceless treasure. Uncharted doesn’t stand alone in the narrative it serves, but it is a notable entry in a long line of pulp fictions that treat tangible cultural heritage as objects that can be removed from their context with no change in significance. Nathan’s adventures always end in the destruction of sites and artifacts, a fact that isn’t discussed with the attention it deserves. The consequences of his actions are never his fault, and therefore they are not the player’s fault. Yet it falls on the player to examine the emotions that are elicited when controlling Nathan’s adventures.
These video games shouldn’t be expected to tell a certain story from a certain perspective, as they are entertainment and not anthropological studies, but there is a duty to consider what lessons the player will walk away with, especially in a series that excels at immersion as much as Uncharted does. Fictional stories don’t exist in a bubble. They impact our lives and our ways of thinking. Uncharted is a series that leaves little breathing room for critical thought on the history it draws from and the tired tropes it replays. It hammers home the ideas that Nathan deserves the treasures he gets because of an unnamed innate quality—his whiteness, his maleness, his American-ness. The game is built on a set of implicit ideas and motivations that, when examined together, highlight the tension underlying this series and other narratives in this genre. First, it posits that long-lost cities and treasures should be accessible to the hero because (through the narrative) the hero deserves to find them. And such a pursuit is noble without being imperialist. Second, money can be the hero’s primary motivator for seeking treasure. Nathan’s story is driven by a falsified connection to Sir Francis Drake, a connection that motivates him to attempt to follow in Drake’s footsteps as an adventurer. Francis Drake’s involvement in the slave trade is not mentioned. This omittance reflects a precedent of ignoring that Nathan benefits from colonial systems in favor of selling a certain narrative. “Sic parvis magna,” Francis Drake’s slogan, is the series’ tagline. In English, it means “greatness from small beginnings.” In context, it communicates that, by aligning himself with Drake’s moniker and its violent legacy, Nathan is owed the treasure more than the other thieves and antiheros—his antagonists—who have not done the same.
Stripping tangible treasures of their cultural value so that they become idolized tokens is a key part of the colonialization process. This is how Nathan interacts with treasure and heritage sites. He walks away from the ruins of Shambhala without a care, he feels nothing when Iram of the Pillars is swallowed by the sands, and by the time he reaches Libertalia, which burns, he’s desensitized. Of course, after facing near-certain death in fast-paced action, there’s really no time for him to lament the cultural loss. Given that he is a treasure hunter, is it not necessarily his character’s role to care what happens to a place, no matter how mystical or legendary it is. Within the games, the destruction of the sites communicates a “so it goes” attitude that tells us that Nathan has seen and done outrageous things, and he values the experience he had over the continued existence of the location. Again, we have to pull out of the game. It’s not admirable to be careless when instigating much of the action that destroys these places.
Colonial attitudes in general have a very visible relationship with treasure: what white people deem valuable, exotic, or otherwise interesting, and how they treat those cultural objects. It’s a colonial strategy to ascribe mystic elements to people, places, and things. This serves to both remove them from their real cultural context and also to alienate them from the ‘rational’, ‘scientific’, white humanity. Treasures that are revered or have mystic significance in their cultural context are perhaps even more subjected to a narrative that works in colonial favor. Shambhala, for example, originally exists in a context that reinforces Buddhist values and teachings. In Among Thieves, this spiritual significance is repackaged to make it little more than El Dorado in Asia.
Within the series, realism is often adhered to in interpersonal relationships and characters, but not within the plot. In Among Thieves, the opening scene (helping Nathan narrowly escape a train plummeting over a cliff) is revisited midway through the game. After Nathan escapes the train, shoots some mercenaries, and succumbs to the cold, he is rescued by Tenzin, a Tibetan man who takes Nathan to his village. Tenzin’s dialogue is captioned only as “speaking Tibetan.” There’s no way for the assumed English-speaking player to interact with or understand him unless they can accurately phonetically transcribe his lines and visit a Tibetan dictionary later. The “realism” here is that Nathan doesn’t understand Tenzin, so neither do we, but it serves to exotify this character who’s another example of the tired old trope of an Indigenous person nursing a white person back to health. The white adventurer can therefore continue on their way and the Indigenous person is only relevant in the context of servitude. Tenzin’s dialogue instead becomes ambient noise on Nathan’s quest to Tibetan cultural treasures.
Within Tenzin’s village, there’s a man who knows of Shambhala, who has seen the effects of the Cintamani Stone first-hand and aids Nathan in his quest to reach it before the villain can. This man is Karl Schäfer, an ex-Nazi Ahnenerbe officer who watched his fellow Nazis be transformed into ghouls by the power of the Stone, and vowed to protect the world from its power. Nazis are a long-running staple of antagonists in the action-adventure and pulp stories that inspired Uncharted (think Indiana Jones). They’re a shorthand for the immoral bad guy, for America’s enemy. Their use in Uncharted 2 deserves discussion, as the central villain, Zoran Lazaveric, is a Serbian warlord so cartoonishly evil that he has dialogue praising Hitler and Pol Pot. Sandwiched between Nazis and Lazaveric, Nathan’s status as an antihero in his own right is largely diminished. Since no one would argue that the treasure should fall into Lazaveric’s hands, Nathan’s motions for the treasure are presented as the correct moral path, instead of a desperate action that raises its own questions of morality and ownership. In Uncharted 3 and 4, these themes are revisited again, and again unfortunately fall flat. Nathan’s villains berate him, compare him to themselves, point out that he is also violent and has killed people. But these discussions on the value of intention are largely invalidated by the simple fact that the outcome for both Nathan and the villains is the destruction and extraction of cultural materials, and that fact is never truly given the time of day.
Uncharted’s Schäfer isn’t a fictional ex-Nazi; he’s a real one. Ernst Schäfer of the Ahnenerbe lead a party to Tibet in search of Shambhala and stole treasures that have never been returned. The fictional Schäfer carries on the real Schäfer’s legacy by displacing cultural treasures to a white caretaker. At the game’s conclusion, when Shambhala has been destroyed and the villain is dead, Nathan pays his respects to Schäfer’s newly interred grave. The real Schäfer moved to Venezuela after the end of World War II. His fictional counterpart has a chance to face the consequences that Ernst never encountered, but the game lets him die a hero. Ernst Schäfer isn’t a popular name, nor is the Nazi expedition to Tibet well-known. Mythologizing him is another way that Uncharted rewires history to serve Nathan and to deliver him treasure.
The treasures and cities Nathan encounters—El Dorado, the Cintamani Stone, ancient amulets, Iram of the Pillars, Libertalia—all exist in a vague, romantic sense until Nathan encounters them and brings them to life. This is the fantasy of discovery: items and places that only exist through loose tales and pretty drawings, untouched and unburdened by cultural and historical factors. Uncharted presents a quick version of what is at the core of the colonial process. Cities are razed and their stories are told by outsiders. In the games, there is a massive disconnect created between the modern day and the past. In Among Thieves, Nepal is shown as an active warzone due to the efforts of the villain. By the time Nathan arrives shortly after the explosions have begun, the city is already rubble, already another empty set piece for Nathan to explore, rather than a real place where people lived and died. In contrast, Shambhala is perfectly preserved and glittering. The countries Nathan visits are populated by stereotypes, or not populated at all, while their pasts are inaccessible to the population of the native culture, requiring Nathan’s interference for interpretation. Conveniently, the historical knowledge given to Nathan is that of the European and often explicitly colonial powers: in Uncharted 2, he learns from Marco Polo and the Nazis, in Uncharted 3, from the notes of British alchemist John Dee, and in Uncharted 4, from Henry Every, a notable Golden Age pirate and slave trader.
Uncharted also doesn’t leave any room for nuance. This is again reminiscent of explosive action stories. Uncharted 1, 2, and 3 all contain mystical elements, whether it be the zombies of El Dorado or the hallucinogenic waters of Iram of the Pillars. The plots are largely black and white, secondary to the beautiful game design and set pieces. Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End is Nathan’s last adventure and dips into realism a bit more. The treasure is Libertalia and the lost gold of the pirate Henry Every (spelled Avery in this game). Nathan has a more personal connection to this one it is what his mother was looking for before she died. The themes of greed come back with a heavy hand. Nathan’s wife, Elena, berates him for returning to the treasure-hunting world out of his own lust for adventure. At the end, Nathan’s life is only saved due to his willingness to forgo the treasure. The moral of the story is one of balance: Nathan can’t pretend that he’s happy with a mundane life, but he’s getting too old for the adventures of his past. To this note, it is satisfying ending for the series and a message to the player about finding adventure in your own life. The problem is that adventure and treasure hunting come at an expense. Nathan’s lesson comes not only at an expense of tangible value (he loses the literal treasure), but it is also paid for by the secondary characters like Tenzin and settings in the wake of the adventurer’s destructive path. Through Nathan’s journeys, insights into the value of culture are largely missed.
The idea of treasure and adventure presented in Uncharted is a most blatantly American one: journeys to foreign countries with beautiful women in the hopes of obtaining physical items of a high value. The series either reinforces these ideas for Americans or helps instill them in non-American players. It is a series about places and treasures without people. But it is still a series about a white American who loots and destroys. When the player embodies Nathan, they are embodying his actions and his complacency. When the human price of these treasures isn’t on display, it’s easy to buy the narrative and walk away.