The Jackal Is Wrong And That’s Why Far Cry 2 Still Matters

I was laying near Washington Pier recently, under unusually stormy Southern California weather, when somehow my thoughts wandered back to Far Cry 2. That probably says something about how much this game has stayed with me. It came out in 2008, and there are objectively better games I have played since then. Better shooting, better graphics, better stories, better characters, and certainly games that were less committed to making basic transportation feel like an expedition. Yet Far Cry 2 is one of those games that never completely left my head.

I think part of that is because it came from a period of gaming that felt very different from today. Far Cry 2 was almost antagonistic toward the person playing it. Guns deteriorated and jammed. Vehicles broke down. Checkpoints repopulated with enemies shortly after you cleared them. Traveling across the map could take forever. Your character had malaria, which wasn't merely part of the story but something that would periodically interrupt gameplay and force you to take medication. None of this was particularly convenient. Some of it was downright irritating. But all of it contributed to a world that seemed completely indifferent to you.

That mattered. You weren't the center of this universe. You weren't a superhero dropped into Africa to fix everything. You were another mercenary with a rifle walking into a civil war already filled with mercenaries carrying rifles. The two major factions; the UFLL and the APR presented themselves as opposing political causes, but the longer you played, the less meaningful that distinction became. You worked for both of them. You killed for both of them. Leaders were replaced, alliances shifted, and the machinery of the conflict continued regardless.

At the center of all of this was the man you were originally sent there to kill: the Jackal.

The Jackal is supposedly the villain of Far Cry 2. He's an international arms dealer supplying weapons into the civil war, including to both of the factions fighting it. Yet calling him simply the villain almost does the character a disservice. What made the Jackal memorable wasn't that he was some cartoonishly evil gun runner. It was that a surprising amount of what he said made sense.

Throughout the game you can recover recordings of interviews conducted by journalist Reuben Oluwagembi. Those tapes gradually give you the Jackal's philosophy of war, economics and human behavior. He views warfare largely as a system of incentives. People want weapons. Governments manufacture weapons. Other governments or armed groups want to buy those weapons. Someone facilitates the transaction. Everyone involved may construct a grand political or moral explanation for what they're doing, but beneath the rhetoric there is still a transaction taking place.

He's also deeply skeptical of the moral narratives surrounding violence. Governments condemn weapons trafficking while simultaneously using intermediaries when doing so benefits them. Political movements claim to represent ordinary people while their leaders fight for power. Men convince themselves that their violence is somehow cleaner than the violence committed by the man standing across from them.

The uncomfortable part is that none of those observations are particularly stupid.

I actually agree with a considerable amount of the Jackal's diagnosis of human behavior. Human beings are incredibly good at creating moral explanations for things that also happen to benefit us. Institutions frequently describe themselves in idealistic terms while responding to incentives just like everyone else. And I absolutely do not believe humanity is eventually going to evolve beyond violence. As long as people exist, there will probably be wars, murder, political conflict and people willing to provide the tools necessary to conduct all of them.

The Jackal looks at those realities and concludes that someone is always going to sell the guns. And that's exactly where I think he goes wrong.

Human violence being inevitable does not make your participation in human violence inevitable.

That distinction sounds simple, but it destroys a large part of the Jackal's moral defense. Perhaps someone else really would sell those weapons if he refused. In fact, that's probably true. The factions aren't going to look at the Jackal's sudden moral awakening, shake hands and announce that the civil war has unfortunately been canceled due to a lack of firearms. Another supplier would probably appear.

But what does that have to do with his responsibility?

If I decide not to rob someone, I haven't eliminated robbery. If an official refuses a bribe, he hasn't eliminated corruption. If one soldier refuses to participate in an atrocity, he hasn't eliminated atrocities. The fact that something will continue to exist without your participation doesn't somehow transform your participation into a morally neutral act.

“Someone else would have done it” is an explanation of a system.

It is a terrible explanation of an individual choice.

The Jackal is intelligent enough to recognize agency everywhere except when recognizing it would become inconvenient for him. When he talks about governments, factions or other people, he talks about greed, power, incentives and choices. These people make decisions because they want things. But when the discussion turns toward his own role, suddenly his choices disappear into historical inevitability. Humans fight. Wars happen. People want weapons. Somebody has to supply them.

Well, no.

Somebody probably will supply them.

It doesn't have to be you.

And this is where the ending of Far Cry 2 becomes much more interesting than I appreciated when I first played it

By the end of the game, your mercenary is dying from malaria. The country has descended even further into chaos, and civilians are attempting to escape across the border while armed forces pursue them. The Jackal develops a final plan. Someone needs to take a briefcase filled with diamonds to the border guards and bribe them into allowing the refugees through. At the same time, someone else needs to take a battery to explosives positioned along the escape route and manually detonate them, destroying the pass behind the refugees so the pursuing forces cannot follow.

The Jackal tells you to choose.

Diamonds or dynamite.

I chose the dynamite.

And thinking about it years later, I know exactly why.

With the dynamite, the causal chain is incredibly simple. Civilians are escaping. Armed men are following them. There is a route through the mountains connecting the two groups. Destroy the route and the pursuit stops.

There is no grand philosophical theory required. There isn't even much trust involved.

There is a problem. There is an action. There is a measurable result.

Blow the mountain.

The other choice has always bothered me more. If you take the diamonds, you bribe the guards and then, according to the Jackal's plan, you're supposed to kill yourself. His reasoning is that the two of you are essentially terminal cases and parts of the disease that created this war in the first place. The Jackal, meanwhile, takes the dynamite. 

My immediate response to that philosophy is: you don't get to decide that for me.

You don't get to spend the entire game explaining the inevitability of violence, rationalizing your own involvement in it, and then suddenly inform another human being that morality requires him to put a bullet through his own head because you've decided the two of you represent some metaphorical cancer.

So I picked up the battery and the Jackal got the diamonds.

In retrospect, there's something almost darkly funny about that choice because of the expression “put your money where your mouth is.”

That's effectively what I'm telling the Jackal.

You have spent the entire game explaining warfare to me. You've explained how the market works. You've explained why arms dealers exist. You've explained why governments are hypocrites. You've explained why violence is inevitable and why there will always be another man willing to sell the weapons.

Fine. Now put your money where your mouth is.

Except for the Jackal, that phrase becomes disturbingly literal.

His money came from guns. The diamonds represent the economic rewards of the world he participated in. Now that same money has to be used to get civilians out of the war he helped supply. And according to his own plan, after the transaction is complete, he intends to use a gun on himself.

His money came from the gun. Now the money saves the refugees, and the gun becomes the price he pays. That's some incredible symmetry. But it also raises the question that makes the Jackal's ending much more morally complicated than a simple redemption story.

Why now?

The player's condition is obvious. Your mercenary has malaria, and by the conclusion of the game it has become terminal. The Jackal refers to both himself and the mercenary as terminal cases, although the game leaves his exact physical condition much more ambiguous. What we do know is that the Jackal behaves like a man who believes he's reached the end of his road.

So when he suddenly decides to risk everything helping civilians escape, I'm skeptical.

Did the Jackal finally experience some enormous moral revelation?

Or is he dying and trying to do one unquestionably good thing before he clocks out?

Those possibilities are not mutually exclusive, but they aren't identical either.

It's considerably easier to sacrifice your future when you believe you no longer have one. If the Jackal had walked away from arms dealing ten years earlier, that decision would have cost him something. He would have surrendered money, power, access and potentially decades of his life as the person he had chosen to become. If he's terminally ill at the end of Far Cry 2, suddenly the moral calculation becomes very different.

If saving these refugees is worth dying for today, what was saving people worth when the cost was merely making less money?

That's the question I would ask him.

I don't think that makes his final act meaningless. Quite the opposite. One of the things I appreciate about Far Cry 2 is that the Jackal doesn't need to become a secretly good person for his final decision to be good.

People are more complicated than that.

Maybe he's motivated by guilt. Maybe he's genuinely changed. Maybe death frightened him into reassessing his life. Maybe he's still rationalizing himself until the very end. Most likely, it's some mixture of all of those things.

None of that changes the immediate reality that helping those civilians escape is better than allowing them to die. A good action doesn't erase previous bad ones, and previous bad actions don't make every future good action fraudulent.

That is actually a far more interesting form of redemption than the Hollywood version where somebody performs one heroic sacrifice and the moral balance sheet magically returns to zero.

The Jackal isn't suddenly absolved. He simply finally makes a better choice.

And that brings me back to what I think is the Jackal's real philosophical mistake. He believes that because he understands the machinery behind morality, he has somehow escaped it. He sees incentives. He recognizes hypocrisy. He understands power. He knows that people often use moral language to disguise self-interest.

But identifying hypocrisy doesn't make morality disappear. Showing that somebody benefits from a moral position doesn't automatically prove that the position is false. And demonstrating that something terrible would happen without you does not make your decision to participate in it morally irrelevant.

The Jackal spends most of Far Cry 2 answering the question:

“Why do people do these things?”

By the end of the game, another question finally catches up with him:

“What are you going to do?”

Those are not the same question.

Understanding why human beings behave badly can help explain the world. It can help predict behavior. It can help build better institutions. It can keep you from accepting simplistic stories about good guys and bad guys.

What it cannot do is relieve you of agency.

Maybe that's part of the reason Far Cry 2 still occupies space in my head nearly two decades later. Plenty of games have given me villains who were evil. Plenty have given me villains who thought they were heroes. And plenty have given me supposedly profound antagonists whose philosophy falls apart the moment you think about it for thirty seconds.

The Jackal is different.

He's interesting because he's almost right.

He looks at humanity without many illusions. He recognizes several genuinely uncomfortable truths about violence, institutions and self-interest. Then he takes those truths one step too far and turns an explanation of human behavior into an excuse for his own.

That's a much more interesting mistake than simply being evil. And maybe that's why, all these years later, I still remember sitting in that hut and choosing the battery.

The Jackal could keep the philosophy.

Give me the job where I know exactly what happens when I complete it. People are escaping on one side. The people trying to kill them are coming from the other. There's a mountain in between.

Blow the mountain.

And Jackal? You've spent the entire game telling me somebody else would have sold the guns anyway. You've got the diamonds now.

Put your money where your mouth is.