“No affluence without effluence” – Fable III

When Fable III asks you to make a selection, pressing a button is often not enough. You have to hold down the button, wait long enough for a ring of light to circle its icon on screen, and then let go. The added level of commitment required is there to provide a sense of weight to your choices and actions, and the whole game is structured to similar purpose. The content of those choices eventually makes for the oddest Fable game so far, a game not so much about fantasy heroes as fantasy economics.

One weighty choice comes right near the beginning. You play as the younger child of Fable II’s hero, and your older brother is the King of Albion, ruling with an iron fist. He wants to execute some protestors, your best friend/love interest objects, and your brother offers you the choice to have the friend executed instead. It’s a sort of trolley problem by tyrant, and whatever you choose it sets the scene for a typical heroic quest to travel to the corners of the land rallying rebellion to overthrow his rule.  

From then, the big messages take a back seat until a fairly late game twist, though. Before that, it’s Fable II again, only even more streamlined. You do a similar set of things in a similar order, up to and including a set of arena battles with live sports commentary (this time provided by Jonathan Ross). You now don’t have menus full of items and reactions to pick from, but a couple of context-applicable ones which the game pops up for you in any situation. While it’s a game about choices, it’s concerned specifically with binary choices, which tracks with Lionhead’s work from Black & White onwards.

The combat in Fable II was already simple, but with the addition of auto-aim and some powerful wide area magic effects Fable III turns it completely trivial. Hit enemies with magic to stun them, shoot them and slash them on the rare occasion they get too close, over and over again. There are some neat Fallout-style dramatic closeup angles of flailing bodies, but that doesn’t do much to enliven it. Much of the game becomes a set of endlessly repetitive battles, bearable only because they’re interspersed and overlaid with a high level of comedy writing and voice acting. 

Everyone you meet is full of character and it pitches the level of self-awareness just right. Sometimes that level is extremely high, like the mission where you are shrunk down to play the hero in a table-top RPG game while it’s players bicker over the narrative (one contends that having the female hero kissing the princess at the game’s close is “an incredibly hot self-aware commentary on the nature of the cliché”). That kind of thing is rare enough to be effective though, and mostly the humour is in things like surreal ethical debates over chickens, and asides like some enemies you hit with fire saying “too bad for you I’m wearing my flame-retardant underpants”.

The only new thing along the way is the promises you make to each new faction you persuade to join you, generally involving supporting and reviving their homelands. You have no choice but to make them, weightily holding down the button again, producing certificates with a signature and your Xbox Live avatar, the better to make them more personal. These are displayed on the wall of the pan-dimensional suite that serves as your pause menu. Even before the late game twist, it couldn’t be much more obvious that these are going to be important.

That twist comes once you successfully usurp your brother and become the new Queen (or King) of Albion. It turns out that the far-off dark demonic force that you briefly fought along the way is mustering a major invasive force and you have a year to prepare your defences. Getting the kingdom ready depends on one thing: cold, hard cash. And despite your brother having supposedly been working towards the same aim, there is hardly anything in the treasury. You need to raise 6 million gold coins.

Life as Queen involves making a lot more binary decisions, on things like whether to open a school or instead to put children to work, or whether or not to introduce various environmental abominations in order to raise money. Each time one of your supporters or a concerned member of the public introduces the case for the non-horrific side. The other side is taken up by the industrialist Reaver, played by a clearly delighted Stephen Fry in full charismatic smartest-person-in-the-room mode. When you choose the path of light, he is tasked with begrudgingly implementing it and commentates on that, too.

Choose to fulfil your promises and be nice to the people you rule over, and you lose money. The counter which tracks your bank balance also tracks the number of expected civilian casualties in the upcoming war, and there is literally a 1:1 relationship between the two. Each coin earned is a person saved. The man who manages your treasury and diary also encourages the route which maximises your income. He is named Hobson, as in Hobson’s choice, the better to suggest that there is nothing else to be done.

In doing all of this, Fable III accomplishes the rare video game achievement of actually making its moral decisions carry some weight. For once there is even a reason to take the evil side beyond just evil being more fun or easier. When you side with Reaver, the game congratulates you on being pragmatic enough to break all of your promises. You did what was necessary, and what was necessary included child labour and stripping the outlying areas of your region of all their resources having promised to make them equal partners in Albion.

In centering the second half of the game on dealing with the kingdom’s parlous finances, the resonance with the UK at the time is obvious. Earlier in 2010 the country had elected a new Conservative-led coalition into government, and they almost immediately introduced an austerity budget with big cuts to public funding in response to the global financial crisis. When you take over Fable III‘s Albion you are not quite provided with a note saying “I’m afraid there is no money”, but there is one point at which you have to choose whether or not to bail out the banks and the economy. 

That’s some context for devil’s advocate Reaver and his absurdly tall top hat and erudite affect. He’s someone you watched earlier in the game say that “any worker who takes longer than a three second break will be shot”, and had you fighting monsters in his mansion for his own amusement. When he asks what use “the inept and unskilled” are to society and suggests that no money should be wasted on them, it’s not hard to see the posh and heartless portrayal as satire of David Cameron’s government of the time.

Mechanically, Fable III doesn’t just present him as posh and heartless, though, but posh and heartless and right. Its vision of the ruling establishment is a cartoon villain, but its world operates on his economic logic. Cutting back on spending makes the country financially better off, and that’s that. Its version of austerity may be evil, yes, but it hammers home again and again that it is a necessary evil.

There is another way to win, of course. You can win as a good monarch, fulfilling all your promises, treating your people with beneficence and still paying the price of repelling the invasion. All it takes is building up a vast personal fortune and donating it to the treasury. The many choices you make as ruler run in the same direction: being nice costs money, and no investment in education or development ever pays any economic dividend. 

Instead, the realistic way to win the game as a force for good is to become a mega landlord, gradually buying up the world’s properties and taking your people’s money through rent (good) rather than taxes (bad). That or playing a whole lot of lute concerts, since when you get good enough at the associated mini-game you can earn more in a few seconds than the value of most people’s houses. How the impoverished people of Albion can afford to be so generous to buskers is not explained. While in previous games such things were trifling details attributable to them running on the logic of a storybook hero, when Fable III is simultaneously trying to get you to make serious economic decisions it’s a bit more of a problem.

Since the winning route is to redirect the income from your rental empire to the nation, you can squint and look at it as a suggestion that bringing housing into public ownership is good. It takes a bit of a stretch though, with the game consistently presenting giving your money as a matter of personal generosity. All of that comes from the Hero side of your role, rather than the Queen side, too. While carrying out your royal agenda you can choose whether to deck out your castle in Good Decor or Evil Decor, but you can’t choose to forgo the cost of redecoration entirely for Albion’s benefit. You can’t downsize or rent out your castle. Any philanthropy remains strictly private. Which is in line with the game’s position on austerity, of course. Its political satire all takes personal aim without ever questioning the existing terms of the debate. It’s an approach as familiarly British as any of its comedic cross-dressing or chicken puns.

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