I've read developer Jason Rohrer's account of the events that inspired his game, The Castle Doctrine, many times, in many places, leading up to its release. His family lived in a bad neighborhood. A dog attacked his wife during a family bike ride. He bought a club to beat away any other dogs that might threaten them in the future (a club that he'd later offer as a reward for an in-game contest). It's begun to sound like a mantra, imbued with greater significance through the act of repetition. Rohrer sought to probe the conflicted feelings that haunted him about the event--about his role as de facto protector of his family and his home. The Castle Doctrine is the game born of that narrative, and named after the principle of law that a resident is free to use deadly force on intruders.
That's a touchy proposition. Emotions swirl around the doctrine. It's bound to systems of economic and racial disparity, to prejudices and fears that are inherently irrational. Yet The Castle Doctrine nimbly leaps that moat, and assumes a scenario in which a break-in is inevitable. You're given $2000, a vault to hide it in, and a pixelated nuclear family that looks on, expectantly, for you to construct a fortress. And you'd better do so, because a server's worth of other players will get a chance to invade the minute you step out the front door. They'll be coming for the cash you've left in your vault, and the only things standing in their way will be the walls, traps, and pit bulls that you've placed in between.
. The zero-sum structure of The Castle Doctrine encourages this sort of casual indifference. Cynically, the game parcels out half of your cash to the wife character with the expectation that a mechanical concern for her safety will bleed into an empathic one. But the decision provides a motivation for attackers to kill wives, too.
What is The Castle Doctrine, without empathy, without emotion? Just a game, in the most pejorative sense of the word. From their removed, isometric vantage point, the player gets no sense of the concerns or fears that could rouse a new father from sleep, baseball bat at the ready. Nor do they get a fair look at the political and ethical undercurrents that run just underneath just such a hypothetical. Any semblance of reality evaporates the first time they attempt to return to their house only to be turned away with the message "Your house is currently being robbed. You can't work on it right now."
Rohrer may have set out to make a game that puts players in his shoes, that plays at conflicted machismo and the fuzzy logic of home invasion paranoia. I would have been interested to play that game. But the flawed, nihilistic, trap-building simulator that resulted isn't worth a look. In the whole of the game, only one metaphor hit home for me. Sometimes when you manage to reach another person's vault, you find it empty, pillaged by a previous robber. There's nothing to take away, and all the time and effort you've put into the endeavor has been wasted.
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