The Reveal Of Helldivers 2's Game Master Joel Turned Me Into A Nihilist Again

I have found myself deeply troubled since it was revealed that there is a single developer at Arrowhead tugging at the strings of Helldivers 2’s Galactic War. Joel, an Arrowhead employee with the job title of Game Master, reacts to what’s going on in the galaxy in real time – apparently, even in the middle of the night. Joel will make your mission more difficult by buffing your enemies, if he feels like you’re having too easy a time. Joel will drop you extra stratagems for free, just for fun. Joel has a lot of power. I’ve realised that Joel is, in some way, a god.

I am not the only person to think this – over in the Helldivers subreddit, people are calling Joel a “god of war”. They’re inserting him in the game’s lore as a mythical figure. They thank him when they win, they blame him when they lose. Because we don’t know the extent of Joel’s power, it’s all too easy to speculate on what he’s already done, and what he can do. We know he’s given us a free day of incendiary mine stratagems, but he also started the Automaton invasion.

It really makes you think. Did we lose Draupnir and Mantes last month because we didn’t try hard enough, or because Joel decided we would? When we fought to liberate Mort last week, did we succeed because we were supposed to all along? Does Joel decide how quickly or slowly that progress bar beneath every planet ticks in either direction? Are some battles completely futile? Is there a point to any of this? Are we shaping the story at all, or are we just bodies, dropping dead en masse to pass the time while the bar moves independent of our actions?

I don’t believe Joel is an evil god. Joel doesn’t want us to lose, but Joel isn’t a benevolent god either. It’s like Joel has written a story – an RPG campaign, even – and we’re just there to play it out for him. We’re stage actors. We’re characters in a book. The story is already written, and we can’t change it.

Is this true? I don’t know. Maybe our actions do matter, but we aren’t really fighting bugs and robots, we’re fighting Joel. Every time we launch ourselves onto a new planet to take on a new mission, we’re trying to use the power of collective action to defy a god’s will. We are trying to rewrite fate with sheer numbers, and every successful mission is a small push against a predetermined outcome.

It’s strange – even though this makes me feel like nothing matters, I know I’m still going to log in later today and die a couple of times. What else is there to do but try to write your own story? I’ll shoot a few Automatons, squish a few Terminids. I’ll blow up an enemy radar station. I’ll face Joel and walk backwards into Malevelon Creek. It turns out that in the end, that’s all I can do. The rest is up to Joel.