One of my college professors once argued that all narrative fiction is voyeurism. It’s always about the pleasure of watching, of perceiving things that are normally beyond your field of view. Not in the psychosexual sense of voyeurism, or at least not necessarily, but in the way that the act of seeing other people is entertaining. Through fiction, we get to see people as we never could. In film, we see renderings of people who act as if they don’t know they’re being watched. In books, we read their actions from the most intimate of perspectives, even gaining access to their thoughts. Fiction is a chance to transgress the boundaries that normally separate us, and there’s a real pleasure in that transgression. We like seeing other people’s dirty laundry, and fiction lets us.
It’s striking, then, when République casts the player as a watchful set of eyes behind a camera. You play as an individual behind a security apparatus of some sort, capable of interfacing with the cameras and systems of a cloistered, dystopian boarding school. République doesn’t establish or question who you are. You could be a valiant hacker fighting for freedom or just a surveillance officer with a conscience. Either way, the game begins when a teenage girl named Hope, one of the République’s captives, turns to the camera in the corner of a room—to you—and asks for help. You become both guide and watcher, assisting Hope from afar but also observing her and her world. You get to learn about it from a position of absolute safety and absolute power. République makes our voyeurism inescapable, explicitly tying your only means of absorbing and interacting with the game’s world to the surveillance state it critiques.
Surveillance is a type of voyeurism, too. Your position at the other end of the camera is a reminder that behind every security system, there are people watching and making choices about what gets seen and what doesn’t. It’s a salient point. Consider that one of the most well-reported revelations offered by Edward Snowden is how frequently staff at the NSA would abuse their power to entertain their own desire for viewing private moments by exchanging nude photos of American citizens like the creepiest trading cards imaginable. République’s political target is one that’s always shot through with the private and personal, and the game confronts it by putting the player in the tempting, uncomfortable role at its heart.
As you play, you scan objects in the environment for information that’s often needed to navigate Hope’s surroundings and get through all the security pitfalls blocking her path. However, these objects are almost always tagged with related audio-surveillance clips pulled from God knows where. They’re records of private conversations between the boarding school’s security staff, or arguments between the headmaster and the politically aware librarian, or the egoistic musings of the headmaster himself. It’s a glimpse into the soap-operatic machinations behind République’s politics, but they’re also consistently more interesting than the overblown political narrative the game would prefer you care about. I scanned every room meticulously to ensure I didn’t miss a single hidden conversation. For freedom? Truth? Nah. I just wanted to hear the drama play out.