Our Death Is All That Matters in Duloga
In a game about cops killing criminals, the kill quota is the law.
I’m probably not the right person to discuss Duloga, a game about cops killing criminals. At least I thought I wasn’t.
My understanding of politics, government, and the justice system can be considered pedestrian at best. Before the pandemic, I was regularly semi-engaged in discussions about the latest national news at the studio where I worked, surrounded as I was by people who can make informed opinions about those things. An office sounds like the last place to have an intense political dialogue, but I was very grateful: it was a safe space for me to ask elementary questions and get straight answers without judgment.
On my own, I rely on basic concepts of social good to evaluate the day’s news. Does this interfere with the rights of the common Filipino? Does this uphold a person’s right to life, free speech, and access to security? These questions keep me aligned in the right direction, but I don’t get very far with arguments on them alone.
I’m just not the person to go to for hard-hitting and fact-driven expressions of outrage on the state of our country. The most I can contribute are impassioned tweets that echo someone else’s words—those that come from journalists, activists, and critics who make it their business to demand accountability from our leaders. The rest of us aren’t any of that. We’re marketers, accountants, vendors, drivers, and cooks. But in Duloga, who you are doesn’t matter. Not when there’s a hit list to fill.
Duloga is a small game by Filipino developer Snack. It’s billed as a “reverse space shooter” modeled after the 8-bit classic game Space Invaders. The setup is very similar: a lone police officer sits at the bottom of the screen while he fires a gun at a group of people arranged in a grid. The twist is that you are actually one of the civilians in the group, which you move left and right as a single unit as you try to “help” the officer land shots on yellow-colored individuals among your ranks. Each level is equivalent to a single night of the police’s patrols as they try to meet an ever-increasing kill quota for seven nights.
There is immediately a push-and-pull tension generated by the game’s objective. As the law enforcer unloads bullets in a regular rhythm at the crowd, your instinct might be to dodge each shot and keep everyone in your group from getting hit. However, there is the quota to meet if you’re to advance to the next level. And so you start letting the yellows take the shot. That’s until you proceed to the following night and the kill quota is higher than there are yellows in the group. What do you do then?
Duloga’s references are as pointed as a gun to your chest. A January article by Rappler reports that more than 6,000 people have been killed in anti-drug police operations in the Philippines since 2016. The Commission on Human Rights believes the numbers may be as high as 30,000. Even in the middle of a pandemic-induced lockdown, the government’s drug war continues to claim lives: between March 31 and May 31, there were 67 deaths from a total of 5,840 operations conducted during that period.
One of the most prominent drug-related killings was that of 17-year-old Kian delos Santos in 2017. The police officers who killed him claimed that he fought back, but CCTV footage showed that he was dragged in a dark alley and shot. Witnesses claimed that Kian begged for his life, saying, “May test pa po ako bukas”. The three officers involved were found guilty a year later.
At the end of each night in Duloga, your score is tallied. The bodies of those slain are wiped from the screen, replaced with a list of their names and their occupation. Addict. Pusher. Student. Janitor. Worker. The longer you play, the bigger the list grows. The people who get shot make no noise. Instead, short lines of text float in from the background each time a bullet finds its mark. Dilawan! Adik! Para sa bayan!
There’s no room for conjecture about Duloga’s intentions here.
In the middle of all this, there’s you. One person among many, standing in the very back of the crowd, just barely out of the gunman’s line of sight. In a game that could get you killed, you have the convenience of choosing who dies first and under what circumstances: because the mission demands it, because you were too clumsy with the keyboard, or because you needed a human shield to absorb the shot. None of it is important, as long as the bullet doesn’t find you first.
Because of this, Duloga places you in a position where you are complicit no matter what your motive is in this game. It’s a game that exposes our privileges and how they protect our own self-interested survival. As the player, we have the privilege of being in the relative safety of the back of a crowd and the power to choose where the bullet lands. Because it obviously shouldn’t be you. You’re no criminal. You’re Miguel, a harmless copywriter who plays video games. You’re the last person that the government should be hunting down!
The game takes about 10 minutes to complete. As each night wears on, the kill quota demands higher. What happens at the final night of the game (should you reach it) is inevitable. You have no other input but to keep moving from side to side, sometimes mere inches from a white-hot bullet. The timer continues to count down. The kill quota sits empty in the corner. Without a single word, the game asks: who are you and what are you doing outside on a night like this?
A very vocal (although loosely gathered) subset of gamers on the internet insists that video games aren’t and shouldn’t be political. Some big publishers, in what could be an attempt to appease some greater capitalist power, also swear that their products bear no political message, despite clear evidence in their marketing.
The truth is, there is no way to remove a game, or any piece of media, from politics of any kind. The industry has grown past the point where games cannot be consumed outside of the conditions surrounding their creation. These days, it’s myopic to support a video game about good triumphing over evil while ignoring its publisher’s silence on the very real social injustices that its fans are suffering from. Duloga, which wears its politics on its sleeve, is important for being the very thing that many people want to keep out of their video games.
Duloga tells me nothing new about the human rights crisis we’re suffering in the Philippines. What it did was invade a medium that I turn to for comfort and fun, and that could be the other point it wants to make. It’s foolish to dismiss the intersectionality of video games and politics, in the same way that it’s disingenuous to say you’re not qualified to talk about the issues that don’t directly affect you. The reality is that we’re not just writers, waiters, and clerks. With the way the odds are stacked against us, the common individual, we’ll eventually be forced to explain ourselves. Eventually, we’ll be the only one left outside in the night.
You can play Duloga for free on itch.io.
Hits right home. Thank you for writing this.