﻿Are you tired of being nice? Does your back ache from carrying the
hopes and dreams of precarious worlds? Are you done seeking redemption?
Do you want to scurry? Do you want to skulk? Do you want to eat trash and cause problems?
If so, I’ve got some good news for you. You don’t have to be the chosen one. You can just…
go goblin mode.
Goblin is a catchall
term for fae folk with ill intent. In European folklore, they’re usually a couple of hands tall,
pointy li’l teeth, covered in hair. Just about every culture has some sort of awful little
guys that cause problems for fun. For centuries, goblins served as a convenient folkloric scapegoat
for any of the rotten shit life could throw at us. A missing spoon. A strange smell in the house.
Baby theft. Then, in the 1930s,
JRR Tolkien repurposed Goblins, transforming them from mischievous household troublemakers into
twisted little servants of an evil god. Tolkien used “goblin” and “orc” fairly interchangeably,
but in the half-century of derivative fantasy fiction that followed, most creators settled into
an orc to goblin spectrum, with orcs being bigger and more imposing, and goblins being hostile,
but physically unimpressive little jerks. Then in 2019, Twitter user Leon
invented goblinposting. A comedic counterpoint to “radical
softness,” goblinposting gave voice to a growing sentiment. These awful little creatures, weak,
desperate, and ugly— they were a lot like us. Self identifying as a nasty little goblin is fun.
Going goblin mode fulfills the same psychological purpose of seeing a picture of a messed up bug or
a broken toilet and saying “that’s me.” In short, there seems to be, in the cultural
unconscious, a desire to be one’s worst self and make the lives of others bad in
funny ways. If you’re looking to go goblin mode in video games, there are some pretty good
options out there, so I reviewed them using my custom goblin appraisal criteria:
How do they carry themselves? Do they care about posture? Hygiene? These are all things
that we have to worry about as humans, but not when we’re going goblin mode.
Goblins of myth are willful, self-serving creatures. They do the things they do because
they enjoy them, or out of raw compulsion. If they’ve got a plan for world domination,
they’re thinking too hard. This one is exactly what it sounds like.
When you are playing this game, does it encourage you to giggle loathsomely to yourself? It should.
Of Orcs and Men is a 2012 action RPG that had a couple of goblin-centric stealth-action follow-ups
The goblin designs pull from the standard post-Tolkienian portrayals. Hunched posture,
sneaky creepin’, jagged little daggers. So it scores decent
marks in personal nastiness. But in “heeheehoohoo” factor,
it’s mid. It’s a stealth game, so it’s got a li’l bit of scamp sauce, but there is very
little whimsy or joy to the way you play. It’s just tactical espionage and knives to necks.
The series’ biggest downfall is that these goblins have great reasons to be doing what they’re doing.
Framing the goblins as “actually the good guys” might be a more subversive fantasy story,
but it also robs the gobs of the very thing that makes them charming.
[classical orchestral music]
[hi-tech impact sound]
Right out of the gate, Middle-earth: Shadow of War is serving top quality gobbos. From
the semi-procedurally generated nemeses, to the fully scripted orc companions, every
nasty little guy you meet oozes mischief, malice, and jubilance. There’s orcs who speak in verse,
orcs who love to cook, orcs who are voiced by Kumail Nanjiani, for some reason.
- Kumail Orc: Suuure you could kill me now, go the predictable route. BUT!
You're an original! A wild man!
- Pat: The problem is that YOU'RE not one of them. You’re a boring fucking ranger with an even more boring
ghost living in his brain, and while you run with the gobbies, all of the gobby behavior is justified,
as you’re a noble ranger trying to keep a greater evil at bay. It’s stupid. Fuck this.
[classical string music]
WoW has playable goblins, and the lads are jagged-toothed and nasty-looking...
...but the ladies…. are just green. This shit sucks. If nastiness
isn’t evenly distributed amongst the genders, then there’s no point.
[bone-crunching sound]
[dread silence]
[frantic piano building]
This is where we have to address the sad truth about goblin gaming. Many of the best goblin games
don’t actually have folkloric goblins in them. But the Untitled Goose Game’s Goose plays the role
well. The goose isn’t nasty and gnarled, but it is a small menace. Geese occupy this very gobliny
space where they are big and belligerent enough to be a problem for a human person, but they are
small and cute enough that if you punt one like a soccer ball, you’re the asshole. Nasty!
This goose also scores high for bad intentions. The Untitled Goose is truly in it for the love
of chaos. There’s no saccharine rug pull where you learn they were being a menace to, I dunno,
save their babies or something. They just really want to cause misfortune and hoard baubles.
And the heeheehoohoo factor is simply off the charts. Just look at this.
[delightful piano music]
[a smack, followed by silence]
Bear with me for a second on this one. In Star Wars: Force Unleashed, you play as
Darth Vader’s secret son and he is the strongest Jedi alive. But for some reason, he
only wants to wear dirty rags and stand like the caveman SpongeBob meme. He’s played by the very
handsome Sam Witwer, but he’s able to reclaim some nastiness points with his rotten attitude.
Unfortunately, he scores pretty low in intent. As Vader’s secret apprentice,
he’s an agent of the empire. When he inevitably goes rogue, he’s fighting for justice.
Believing in a cause? Not goblin-y. But here’s what brought Starkiller to the dance.
His heeheehoohoo factor is astronomically bananas. He’s got a lot of deadly techniques for
wiping enemies off the face of the earth, but he’s also got FORCE GRIP: perhaps the most hilariously
sadistic ability in any game ever. You can pick up your enemies and move them
around with unnecessary granularity. Full three axis manipulation, no time limit. The
whole thing is sold by the Euphoria physics engine. These guys are flailing and yelling
the whole time. They’ll reach for stuff in the environment, and even grab on to their buddies,
so you’ve just got this barrel of monkeys chain of screaming idiots. If you’re goblinly
inclined, this is the good shit.
[Pat laughing while gaming]
This game could have had perfect marks
if Starkiller was a bit less repressed, more useless, and 11 inches tall.
[silly spooky music]
Ghost Trick is a Nintendo DS poltergeist game with inventive gameplay, amazing
character design and stunning animation — BUT IT'S NOT A GOBLIN GAME.
[slide whistle]
- Simone: Yeah, but a goose isn’t a
goblin either, so that kind of like, negates… like… why would a ghost not be a goblin?
- Pat: Well because,
like… You can call, like, a goose a goblin, or you can call a guy a goblin cuz those are just things,
right? And a ghost is already like a different thing, from a guy or a goose, right?
You could look at your cat, right? And if your cat’s being a little shit and
you’re like “oh you’re being a real fucking goblin right now.” But you wouldn’t like,
look at a ghost flying around your apartment and say “you’re being a real goblin."
- Simone: Cuz you’re being a ghost. And if your cat goes ghost mode —
- Pat: Right. -Simone: You’ve got a different problem.
Pat: That’s right.
[CRUNCH]
But is Agent 47 a goblin? The biggest mark against Agent 47’s goblin status is his
absolutely perfect posture. Physically, he is not goblinny. He’s clean, efficient, and strong.
He’s also not especially willful or rude. While he operates beyond the laws of common man,
he’s usually just doing what someone else told him to do.
But Agent 47 comes to life when the player is in control. Together you hoard coins and
cans of soda and knives and wrenches. You gaslight goons by turning the lights on and off over and
over again. You giggle and scurry from room to room, swinging constantly between untraceable
mastermind and a fragile little pest. And you do this.
The clockwork worlds of Hitman really sell the goblin fantasy. The people around you seem
genuinely annoyed, vexed, and sometimes frightened by your antics. In order to be a proper goblin,
you need proper victims. A league of straightmen to let you know just how bad you’re fucking up
their day. Hitman gives that to you. If only it gave you this.
[crunch!]
We return to the realms of traditional goblinhood with a game that may provide the most holistic
goblin roleplay ever. Folkloric goblins are known for causing problems around the house. In Total
Warhammer, that house, is the whole world. On the Nastiness scale, these are straight 10s…
even though we’re using a 5 as our rating system…. The greenskin faction most closely resembles the
Tolkienian ideal — a loose confederation of goblins and orcs with terrible posture,
gnarled teeth, rusty blades, and bawdy Cockney accents. They’re good.
And their intent is bad, but in a fun way. Warhammer is an awful world to live in,
full of hateful, self righteous, pompous factions vying for control. The Orcs and Goblins are the
only ones having fun, because they simply love to fight. They’re a roving band of fantasy football
hooligans, whipping themselves a foam of… not rage, but destructive euphoria. There are few,
if any, ulterior motives. Just the overriding need to be da biggest, nastiest, boy dere is.
And if we’re willing to once again broaden our definition of goblinism,
they’re not the only stars. The Skaven are a faction of perpetually terrified
rat people. They don’t show up to battle with any particular bravado, but they do bring whimsical,
unethical war machines. They’re driven by a relentless desire to survive and eat,
and they’ve decided the path to salvation lies in obsessively overclocking their rigs.
And finally, there’s Nurgle’s little guys. They are perhaps
the nastiest of all. Just look at them. Their intent is to spread illness and decay. Not
out of any particular malice, but simply because that is what they do. That's pretty gobliny.
The heeheehoohoo rating here is also excellent. Not just because these factions have
unscrupulous playstyles and mechanics, but because they set you up to roleplay. The problem I have
in most games that give me a choice of how to act, is that I don’t like being mean or
sadistic — especially when it means my virtual companions will be disappointed in me.
But Total Warhammer doesn’t just give you permission to be bad — it makes being bad
a victory condition. And if you pick one of the gobby factions, the stupid snobby
humans already have an overwhelmingly poor opinion of you. That’s what I need.
I need to be told that the best way to regenerate my troops is to eat my captives. I need to be told
that my god will only love me if I give an entire continent diarrhea. I need to
be forced to roleplay doing things I wouldn’t normally do. There are no bridges to be burned,
no moral authorities. Just a tacit permission to be greedy, mean, and unclean.
[some fucked up circus music]
While the goblins of yore were a magical embodiment of life’s inconveniences and pain, going goblin
mode is an opportunity to get off the receiving end of that shit. It’s a chance to give your most pathetic,
fearful, destructive tendencies a gnarly little avatar and set them loose in a world
where nobody actually gets hurt.
That’s me.
[jammin out on some kind of electric organ]