The Power of Nicknames: XCOM

May 2016. Term 2 of university had finished, and all the students were released from their enclosures for a few weeks, before reluctantly returning to finish essays and do exams. I was one of these students. I still had exams at this point in my History degree – each year my workload shifted further towards the coursework end until by my Masters I had no exams at all. (Which was definitely a good thing for History, which is a degree that trains you to be a historian, which means writing with sources to refer to, not just cramming facts into your brain to regurgitate on one June afternoon.)

So I’d gone home for a few weeks, nominally to revise and do some essays. And I did. Some of that. What I actually did most of the time was sit in the kitchen with our new puppy asleep on my lap, and play XCOM: Enemy Unknown.

XCOM: EU is one of my favourite games (though Stardew Valley has threatened its position in my top 3 of late). It’s basically a 50s B-movie in game form: little green aliens are abducting humans with their flying saucers and trying to take over the world with mind control, and the heroic soldiers of XCOM have to stop them. Everything is exaggerated, the graphics are a bit cartoony and the aliens are delightfully old-fashioned. Later entries in the series take a much more gritty approach, with more realistic graphics and darker storylines. They’re also great games and I enjoy them a great deal. But there’s something about the goofiness of Enemy Unknown that makes it so much fun.

Image credit: Teugene on XCOM Wiki

And that’s before you start playing it. XCOM is a turn-based strategy game: on each mission you order your little soldiers around the map and try not to get them all brutally murdered by space lasers. But there’s also a higher layer of strategy where you manage the world’s defences, recruit troops, research tech, etc. And a big part of that is managing your soldiers – each of whom has their own appearance, personality and skills. The more missions they do, the stronger they get, and the more personality they develop. Randomly generated pixels they might be, but when your shotgunner misses a point-blank shot for the fourth time, or when your marksman pulls off an impossible shot, they start to make stories around themselves. A nice aspect of this is the nickname system: you can assign monikers to your soldiers to give them a bit more personality. You even get to award medals. John Smith is nobody. John ‘Imperator’ Smith, master sniper, Urban Combat Badge 2nd Class, is a character. (The later games actually let you write paragraphs of backstory too, which is great fun for a writer like me.)

Annoyingly I can’t find ‘Imperator’, who was a great sniper, but this guy will do.

You get attached to all these little packets of data. Which makes it all the more powerful when they abruptly, messily and permanently die without the slightest warning.

Because XCOM is infamously difficult. The aliens are strong. They always outnumber you, they get stronger and stronger as time passes, and they can and will snipe your most powerful soldiers from halfway across the map whenever they feel like it. And when they’re dead, they’re dead. Spent in-game months training your machine-gunner to be an unstoppable death machine? Whoops; they just got their head torn off and they’re never coming back. You can, of course, save-scum (reload a previous save and try a different path to save a life), and sometimes I definitely do that. But wherever possible I avoid it, for the sake of organic storytelling. Sometimes great people die, and it makes a burgeoning story that much more compelling.

All this brings me to the saga of my first XCOM campaign, back in that summer of 2016, spaniel on my lap and essays ignored. It brings me to the base defence mission, and Mary Watson.

About halfway through the game, things get shaken up. Instead of you shooting down UFOs or invading alien bases, suddenly the aliens come to you, attacking XCOM headquarters and catching you completely off-guard. It’s neatly done in gameplay terms: you don’t get to prepare at all; no equipping different weapons or organising your squad, you’re just thrown into the mission with whoever’s first available, with your other soldiers turning up in ones and twos as the mission goes on. “No problem,” I thought, as the fight began. “They’ve given me some of my best people, and they’ve still got decent weapons from the last fight. I’ll be alright.” Most of my A-Team of best soldiers were with me straight away. I had a Major with a shotgun, several Captains with a variety of weapons and a few Lieutenants bringing up the rear. I’d be fine.

I was not fine. One by one, the best XCOM had to offer fell. My Major was torn apart by eldritch Cyberdisks. My captains were eviscerated by plasma fire. Even my lieutenants and sergeants got killed, stomped by giant robots or mind-controlled into murdering each other. Every soldier made the aliens pay a price, but there were just too many of them. A few turns later, and XCOM had essentially been wiped out.

Except one soldier. She wasn’t from my A-Team. She’d barely made my B-team. She was carrying a glorified laser pointer and I’d barely noticed she’d been promoted. She was sniper Lieutenant Mary ‘Angel’ Watson. And, through extraordinary luck, through turn after nail-biting turn, chipping away at the remaining aliens from the shadows, running and firing and running again, she managed to finish them off. XCOM was saved. But I had almost nothing left. All my best soldiers were dead; all I had were a bunch of rookies and now-Captain Mary Watson.

But she was all I needed. ‘Angel’ Watson had been an angel, saving XCOM from the brink of destruction like a divine guardian. Now she would guide it to victory as ‘Archangel’. And she did. With ‘Archangel’ at the front of my reeling army, I pulled things back from the brink. I recruited more soldiers, I survived mission after mission, I slowly and painstakingly turned things around and finally defeated the alien menace – and I did it all with ‘Archangel’, the most decorated soldier in my army, the most experienced and the most capable of all, at my side.

Watch out ayys, she’ll blow you up.

Remember how I mentioned nicknames? When a soldier first earns a nickname, it’s randomly generated. Mary Watson became ‘Angel’ by complete chance, and then saved my entire campaign. (I added the ‘Arch’ myself after her extraordinary victory.) It was such a small thing, a single random word, but it made that whole game feel so much more special. It gave Watson her personality, it transformed her into a character, with more emotional weight to me than the protagonists of any scripted drama or narrative game.

And she lived on, too. XCOM 2 takes place in a different timeline, where the aliens win that base assault and force XCOM to become a guerrilla resistance force. But who should turn up in my first campaign, skull mask and all, but the sole survivor of that assault: Mary ‘Archangel’ Watson? Who then went on to be my best soldier again in another excellent campaign.

A single deed. A nickname. A few words. Sometimes it really doesn’t take much to turn a few scraps of data, or a miniature, or a handful of words, into something extraordinary.