Despot

The game that looks back

Abstract

Iain Banks’ Complicity (1993) features a fictional ‘world-builder’ game called Despot that actively watches and emulates the player. This fictional game emerges as part of the Scottish Fantastic, a literary tradition that explores split selves and divided identities. Despot plays into this literary tradition as it creates a violent ludic other for the otherwise passive protagonist that plays it. Yet as a closer examination of Despot reveals, the game does not ‘uncover’ or ‘mirror’ the protagonist’s latent violence so much as it refracts it through its procedural logic. Despot prophetically predicts and critiques the rise of the quantified self within games, as features like morality meters, achievements, reputation systems and Elo ratings all ‘watch’ and create ludic versions of the player. Towards the end of the novel, the protagonist leaves Despot running and returns to find a radically altered version of the game. Without the protagonist’s interference, his empire has crumbled and been reclaimed by nature. Through this, Banks also provides a lens through which the quantified self can be subverted and repurposed in ways not limited by the cultural logics that produced it.