I was perhaps thirty hours into Kenshi (the open-world sandbox game set in a landscape of rust, dust, and intermittent cannibalism) when I first encountered the Holy Nation, and my reaction was the reaction of a person who has been trained, by a lifetime of narrative conventions, to recognize a villain on sight. Here was a theocratic state devoted to a deity called Okran, the God of Light, whose clerical apparatus combined the administrative zeal of the Spanish Inquisition with the technological anxiety of a particularly committed Luddite commune. They hated machines. They hated the machine-adjacent. They required travelers to carry a copy of their holy book as a condition of safe passage, in the manner of a customs office that had been placed under the management of an especially literal-minded seminary. And they enforced, on every aspect of daily life, a set of rules so rigid and so comprehensive that deviation was not merely punished but rendered structurally impossible.

My initial assessment was uncomplicated: these people were awful. The game, I assumed, had placed them in my path as an early moral landmark, a faction whose awfulness would orient the compass, so that I could proceed through the rest of the world knowing, at minimum, which direction was down.

This assessment survived approximately forty more hours of play.

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The world of Kenshi is, by any reasonable measure, one of the bleakest fictional environments ever committed to a game engine. It is set in the aftermath of a war between humans and machines, on a planet that has been, in the geological and civilizational sense, used up. The landscape is arid, vast, populated by things that want to eat you and things that want to enslave you and things that want to do both, in either order. Technology exists in fragments: books of ancient engineering scattered across ruins, robotic limbs that can be grafted onto amputees, and, wandering the wastes, fully sentient machines called Skeletons whose memories stretch back to the age before the collapse.

It is the kind of setting in which the question “Who are the good guys?” is not so much difficult to answer as fundamentally misframed.

The Skeletons, for instance. Some are philosophical, melancholy, decent. Others belong to a cult that disguises its members as humans in order to hunt humans more efficiently. Still others have degraded past the point of sentience and attack anything that moves, with the blind persistence of a broken appliance that cannot be switched off. The Holy Nation’s categorical hostility toward all machine life begins to look, in this light, less like prejudice and more like a survival heuristic that has been crudely but not irrationally calibrated against a genuine threat.

Then there is the faction that most closely resembles what a modern player might call a civilized state: the United Cities. They have technology, commerce, law, urbanization. They also have a nobility that may kill commoners at whim and a system of debt slavery so efficiently administered that anyone who loses consciousness in the wrong district may wake up in chains, having been collected, catalogued, and sold before regaining the ability to object. If the Holy Nation is a medieval theocracy, the United Cities are an ancien régime with better infrastructure.

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It was somewhere around this point that a thought arrived which I did not particularly welcome, because it was the kind of thought that obliges you to revise not merely an opinion but the framework in which the opinion had been formed. The thought was this: Perhaps the Holy Nation is not so bad.

I want to be precise about what this means. It does not mean that the Holy Nation is good. Their hostility toward the Shek (a proud, martial species) is bigotry by any definition that does not require the victim to be human. Their enslavement of prisoners is slavery. Their rules exclude anyone who does not fit the template, and the template is narrow.

What the thought meant was that the Holy Nation had solved a problem that no other faction in the game had solved, or had even attempted to solve: how do you maintain a functioning society in a world where the incentives all point toward dissolution?

Within their territory, the roads are patrolled. Travelers are, by the standards of the game, relatively safe, provided they meet certain requirements (which is itself an ugly sentence, but the alternative is roads on which no requirements are met and no one is safe). Hungry strangers are given food. There is a shared moral vocabulary, however repugnant some of its entries may be, and a shared sense of purpose, and these things turn out to matter enormously when the surrounding environment offers neither. In a world of cannibals, slavers, and malfunctioning war machines, the Holy Nation’s theocratic order provides something that is not available elsewhere: a floor. A minimum below which daily life does not, for most people, descend.

The ugliness lies in who is included in “most people” and who is not. The floor is not extended to Skeletons, or to the Shek, or to anyone who does not conform to the rules. The floor is built on exclusion. It stands on the backs of those it does not cover. And yet the floor exists, and in a world without one, its existence is not nothing.

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What stayed with me, long after I closed the game, was not the Holy Nation itself but the floor, and specifically how differently each person decides what floor they are willing to stand on.

Some players, I learned from reading the Steam community afterward, refused the deal entirely. They chose to be Tech Hunters, the faction that is in almost every respect the Holy Nation’s opposite: secular, nomadic, devoted to recovering the ancient knowledge that the Holy Nation would sooner burn. They built in the wasteland, lost everything repeatedly, started over, and considered the suffering a price worth paying for the principle. Others allied with the Holy Nation on the first day and never thought twice. Others allied, then betrayed, then rebuilt, then allied again. Each of them was responding to the same environment, the same set of threats, the same options. What differed was the floor they were individually willing to accept: how much danger, how much compromise, how much ugliness they could tolerate beneath their feet before deciding that the ground they stood on was no longer worth standing on.

This, I think, is the thing the game actually teaches. Not that order requires exclusion, which is a political observation and not a particularly new one. But that each person carries, inside themselves, a private calculation about what minimum conditions they will accept in exchange for stability, and that this calculation varies enormously, and that most of us have never been forced to discover where our own line sits. We assume we know. We assume we would refuse the deal. Kenshi suggests, with the patience of a game that lets you starve, that we might be wrong about that, and that finding out is more interesting than it is comfortable.