Tagged games

I want to fight a hurricane.

I'm sitting down at a pre-hurricane party with my cousin when the thought hits me.

What is a pre-hurricane party? Good question. it's not common, I don't think so at least. But I've been to a few. Unlike an earthquake or a tsunami, there's relatively a lot of heads up before a hurricane. After you've done the routine — stocking up on canned foods, buying batteries, storing water, battening up the windows, etc., there's not really a lot to do. A pre-hurricane party has no form; just a couple days before shit kicks off people get together to dance or drink or play dominoes or fuck. If you're a glass half-full person, then it's banking some good times because you might be stuck inside and isolated for a while. If you're a glass half-empty person then you can put that part together.

So many RPGs build up to you fighting god(s) or abstract concepts and I want to fight a hurricane. I don't know if I'd win but it'd be better than waiting around. Hurricane Melissa was late.

Another thing. We name hurricanes short, banal English names. One of the worst moments in Jamaica's history was when hurricane Gilbert blitzed the island in 1988. When the radio broadcasts and television addresses started dropping Gilbert as a comparison to the coming storm, you could feel a shift. Every one over 40 or so was activated. This wasn't rain that would blow over, this could kill. Gilbert hit before I was born but I heard the stories. You couldn't avoid them. It was the collective trauma of multiple generations of Jamaicans. Rivers overflowed and swallowed people, cattle, vehicles whole. Rooftops littered the streets and trees broken or bent into bizarre shapes, twisted from clenching the soil in violent wind. Depending on where you lived, it could take months for you life to begin to resemble normalcy.

Gilbert is not a good name for something to fight. Jenova has something to it. Sandy? Not so much. With Sephiroth you can feel the menace in the word itself? Maria? You went to school with a Maria. Sin however is pleasantly to the point. Sin's good. Stick a pin in Sin. We'll get back to that one.

With a name comes a gender. I still think it's weird how readily we'll give a storm a pronoun. With Melissa the jokes wrote themselves. Oh she late, gyal eva tek long fi get ready. She did really park outside the island for days grinding for a fight. A mass of 150 mile per hour wins moving at 2 miles per hour towards you. 150 turns to 160, then to 170, and then 185 mph. At 185 we're at race car speeds, wind turbines, freaky birds of prey. You're waiting for this to hit you and it's like you're trapped in a car and the car is stuck on a train track. You're there for hours, maybe days. You see the train coming in the distance. For some reason every station on the radio is telling you it's the heaviest train in the world. They let you know it's going to really hurt.

"Didn't you know a Melissa?" my cousin asked me on at the pre-hurricane party. I did. "Weren't you awful to her?" I didn't answer him. I wasn't great, but I think I was short of awful; I entertained the joking insinuation privately if only for a second. Maybe the hurricane was karmic. We're a superstitious people at times. Port Royal sank into the sea because its people were wicked. In fact it was once called the wickedest city on earth, a 16th century Sodom. To hear some Jamaicans talk about Haiti is to listen to collective xenophobia rationalising a series of unlucky breaks with respect to "natural" disasters and the routine exploitation by foreign powers — namely the US and Europe — as a punishment for wickedness. The wickedness? Hearsay about Haitians cultural practices obscured through uninterrogated xenophobic fuckery. I'm mad.

In Final Fantasy X there's a monster called Sin. It first presents as a hurricane (and a swarm of locusts) then as some cross between a tidal wave and a monster. Many think that Sin is a result of an out-group's fuck ups. I'm not going to get into the details of the plot of FFX. It's good and if I did it's not going to sound good. No RPG plot comes out of an article summary sounding enticing. There's too many nouns. FFX is the island Final Fantasy. It's the one where you do kind of (sort of) get to fight a hurricane. All the places are coastal. The main boy, and a very good one, looks like he's going to carnival. There's a focus on religion and prayer as a way for people to cope with disaster and to rebuild afterwards. Wakka, a less good boy, talks about how it's important to have distractions when disaster can strike at any point. He's talking about blitzball, but he would love a pre-hurricane party. At some point everyone learns that Sin was programmed to strike populated areas indiscriminately (I'm honestly done talking about the plot). Hurricanes are not karmic, they are tantrums. It's destructive blowback because the planet has terrible aim.

"The planet is dying Cloud," eco-terrorist and dad of the year Barrett explains. It's pained and earnest and almost there. Needs to read a little less like a New York Times headline. Try "they're killing the planet Cloud, they're killing us." I hate the word "natural" in natural disaster. It's a lie. Our oceans are hotter than ever before. Fuck the ice caps, I mean vapour. Melissa was the fourth Atlantic storm this year to undergo rapid intensification. In a day winds went from 70 mph to 140. So we're going to get more storms turning into hurricanes and more hurricanes hitting us in the coming years. As of 2021 Jamaica produced approximately 0.02% of global greenhouse emissions according to emmission-index.com. Cuba produced 0.06% and Haiti produced even less at less than 0.01 %. The US was second, 12.6% . China was first, 32.88%. A straight shot through us would have taken Melissa to the United States at full force. Instead, Melissa's path through the Caribbean was us, handbrake, turn, Cuba, Haiti, and then, at the time of writing, dissipating in the Bahamas. That's not karmic. There is sin here but it's not ours.

I'm not going to fight a hurricane. I'm not the protagonist. FFX's Sin tears through villages, it's a mass murdering weather system. The villagers pray and they rebuild but before that they bury and that's who I am. I will bury until I am to be buried. At best I'm an inciting incident. I'll be a call to adventure. I'll be a statistic on a power point slide, a red pixel on an arrow showing rising fatalities to make a point. When you say "natural" in natural disaster you either lie or belie a lack of spine and imagination. Your idiot mind has become so used to the pressure of greed and expansionism that you mistake it for gravity. I will die before you realise otherwise. You know who had imagination? Exxon. They had models too.

I think I want to be a hurricane. I'd be an ethical one. I promise. I'd rip private jets out of the sky with poise and precision. I'd hold in that rage going from sea to land. I'd be good. I'd wait until I was over who I needed to be over, who had it coming. Then I'd wail through the street tearing apart their buildings bit by bit. I'd cry and piss rain down their offices, into their homes. I would wash away their sin and everything else. I bet they could fight a hurricane. They'd find a way now that it would be them. They're killing the planet but they shouldn't die. That's what the games tell you at least. When a man becomes a hurricane he's gone too far. It's too direct. He's who has to be stopped.

One of the big and consistent pieces of advice that established screenwriters love to give is that every aspiring writer should take an acting class. I took an acting class during one of the summers before lockdown (I can no longer accurately recall any time before quarantine with any degree of accuracy beyond “Before COVID”). It was a class mostly made up of beginner hobbyist actors and dramatic writers. It was 3-4 weeks long, we’d write scripts for each other and then direct 1-2 person 3 minute stage plays. Working one-on-one with someone else’s writing was negotiation from a weaker position. I could test the limits of the character I was assigned, feeling the bits that were flexible and noting the parts that were rigid. I could give feedback, I could add flair, but it was not my character. I was working within the confines of a role defined by someone else.

It is common in casual conversation and criticism alike to compare video games to film and television. These are the most visible and commercially successful artistic mediums of the past 50 years minimum. They all prominently feature the camera as a key component in their production. As video game fidelity and technology have advanced over the past 30+ years, we see games dabble more and more into explicit cinematography rendering cut scenes as short films. Today we get anything from the moody vignettes of Strange Scaffold’s El Paso, Elsewhere to the 15+ minute photorealistic spectacles in Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding games.

When games are described as cinematic in modern parlance, it is typically through the lens of photorealism. It’s cinematic by way of tricking your parents into thinking you’re watching a movie. I hate this definition as it does not acknowledge that cinematography is a language, that the camera, the perspectives, the lenses, etc., have been studied, practiced, and mastered as to communicate everything from intent to emotion through position and angle alone. If anything, games have become less cinematic as perspectives have shifted from deliberate, fixed camera placements to fully surrendering control to the player with nothing but plot, geometry and their innate curiosity to guide their eyelines.

I posit that video games have more in common with plays and theatre, be it interactive theatre or otherwise. This is hardly an original observation. Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, Gina Bloom notes in Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of the English Commercial Theatre, “The overlap between games and theatrical plays was a foregone conclusion for premodern people. Medieval writers used the term ludus for both games and plays. (Bloom, 2018).” Theatre and video games share a quality that is outside the realm of film, interactivity. Gamers step beyond the role of the audience and into the space of acting.

“Breaking the 4th wall” is a well-known concept with roots in theatre. The fourth wall is an invisible screen between the theatre’s audience and the performers. Breaking down that wall meant the players would momentarily leave the world of the fiction of the play and acknowledge that they were being watched. This is often done for exposition or humour. Sometimes this “breaking” went beyond one way acknowledgement, and the performers would actively blend the line between audience and performer.

The first time I saw a lap dance was when I was 10 years old at a local Jamaican play I have long forgotten the name of. One performer plucked a woman out of the audience, sat her down on stage, and then it was pelvis to pelvis for 30 seconds of hooting and hollering from the audience and mock outrage from the other performers. Later in the play, that character’s partner would refer to the incident as a “deed” done in front of “all of those people.”

What does this moment look like without a willing audience member? You could insure against that possibility by seeding someone in the audience so if too many say no after 5 minutes they would volunteer. Even so, a different woman might react differently. At the show I was at, the volunteer watched it all through a tent of fingers, and while I couldn’t see her face in the dark of the theatre after she returned to her seat in the audience, I cannot imagine she stopped blushing for the rest of the night. On another night, another volunteer might be more into it, meeting gyration with excited gyration. Then that’s a different moment but a similar show, different audience members expressing themselves differently

The 4th wall example shows that within theatre, and under the right circumstances, an audience member can become a performer. In comparing video games to theatre, I assert that the video game player occupies a role akin simultaneously to a performer and an audience member, fluidly oscillating between the two.

Compared to other games (sports, children’s games, etc.) video games have a rigid rule set and narrative. The developer has to anticipate different player’s needs, abilities, and desires and then design around them. While this is less rigid in the patch-friendly post online-storefront reality video games exist in today, a video game will never be as flexible as a Game Master making a decision to bend her narrative to accommodate a player’s preference or completely change the rules on the fly to facilitate a new player or particular circumstances. The developer acts as the writer/director and in their anticipation provides feedback to the player as to the limits of the role they are acting within.

Bloom, G. (2018). Gaming the Stage: Playable media and the rise of English Commercial Theater. https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/20.500.12657/23988/1/1006146.pdf

The unexpected ramifications of Football Manger 2025's cancellation on the psyche of a Southampton F.C. fan.

This was written before the news broke late last night that Football Manager 2025 has been cancelled. It’s been lightly edited to reflect that but the tone of the piece remains the same as originally intended.

For the time being, seasons are predictable. Come October, the leaves change to reds and browns, crisp up and fall. The winter breeze blows through, bringing much needed cooling to the tropics, and the countdown begins to the release of a new Football Manager. 2024 was different. The tides rose, the rainy season sprawled most of the latter half of the year, and football manager, for the first time in my memory, was delayed for months and until it was ultimately cancelled. The delay was due to an ambitious overhaul of the game in both its systems and its visuals in order to give the team adequate time to meet their goals without compromise. At some point development team Sports Interactive decided that for the welfare of their staff and to ensure a quality product, they will punt on Football Manager 2025 (FM25) skipping straight to Football Manager 2026 (FM26) in the fall of this year. FM26 will now be the first entry to feature women's divisions, with developer Sports Interactive committing to not simply making a skin of the men's game. That's all well and good and exciting, except the team I support is shit and I can't do anything about it.

FM is the only annual video game release I keep up with for one reason: escapism. No, it'd be better to call it “wallowism.” An annual Southampton save is a ritual. I fire up the latest version of Football Manager after a heartbreaking loss or an extended run of heartbreaking losses as a balm for my aching soul. It's an “I can fix him.” I create a save where I am the fresh-faced manager of the Southampton Football Club, a mid-tier organisation on the south coast of England. Each year, through my own tactical nous, and research on what tactical tendencies overwhelms the opponent AI, I propel Southampton far beyond any realistic expectations and into the top 4 positions of the 20 team English Premier League.

In 2023, the real Southampton FC played in the English Football League Championship, after relegation the year prior. In the English footballing pyramid, so named after the seemingly endless divisions that converge at the Premier League, placing at bottom or near the bottom of the table results in relegation — demotion to a lower tier. We won the playoffs at the end of the season to secure promotion back to the top division. Today we are the worst team in the league. We are historically bad. Southampton FC is not only on track for another relegation, but the worst points finish in Premier League history. Rooted at the bottom of the table, we’re ten eight(!!) points adrift of 17th. There are individual players on other teams that have more goals by themselves than all of Southampton [FC or possibly otherwise] put together. We have won one two(!!) game(s) all season. A woman won a competition guessing the score in our match with Brentford -- we lost 5-0. It is dire.

The most recent release of Football Manager, FM24, covers the 2023-2024 season with us in the English Second Division aka the Championship. The rosters are now outdated, but more importantly, we were good. In that 2023 season we comfortably finished in the play-offs spots and at times challenged for top 2, which would have guaranteed automatic promotion to the Premier League. We played incredible football, monopolising possession and picking apart teams that were often too terrified to step out against us. It's the reverse of our present dynamic; we were the big fish in a small pond, and now we're eaten alive each and every match-day. So there will never be an entry in the Football Manager franchise with our current roster. There will never be an entry that captures how shit we are in this current moment. So I can never fix them.

Sports, at every level, is about losing. Even fans of serial winners craft situations where they are the underdogs. They beef with sporting laws, they beef regular laws, or they just plainly lie that ‘everyone’ doubted them. To be a sports fan, and especially a fan of a bad team, is to embrace vulnerability. It is loving knowing you will be hurt. To paraphrase Ryan Hunn, founder and co-host of the Stadio podcast, watching football is trusting your happiness to eleven strangers who do not know you exist. You lose so when you win it's that much sweeter. It's the promise of a better life to come. It's religion.

Football Manager is not the only football video game for purchase. There is EAFC (the video game franchise formerly known as FIFA), the biggest sports video game franchise on the planet, but Electronic Arts' annual football title gives the player too much control. With enough time, or by nudging the difficulty sliders in your favour, any player can take a team of even carpenters and plumbers to the top of the football world. Infamously, and accurately, dubbed a spreadsheet game, Football Manager provides the player with even more fine-tuned control. Players perform nearly every aspect of a real manager's day-to-day life. Much of the time in FM is spent poring over digital players, staring at their stats and tendencies, setting them up in tactics to succeed, training them up to shore up weaknesses, and signing off on purchasing new players when your old boys have taken you as far as possible.

All that control stops the minute you're on the pitch playing an actual game of football. On match-days your manager is bound to the touchline, like, I imagine, watching your children go off to school. Helpless. You watch from an overhead view as PS2 era 3D models go through canned animations, or, if you are a real pervert, you watch coloured dots pass around a ball from anywhere between 10 minutes and 2 hours. From there it's just more menus. You can tweak a formation. There's an option to “shout” instructions at your team or to scream from the touchline to encourage or criticise one of your boys. Here's the thing, the fuckers sometimes flat-out ignore you. This can lead to moments of magic. A winger disregards your patiently crafted and very intricate passing patterns to take on 5 defenders, dribble past all of them, and then slots the ball into the bottom right corner beyond the opposing keeper. More often than not, your defender delivers a perfect pass to the opposing striker, as if he has money on the game, who then canons the ball into the bottom corner of your net.

Usually I Alt+F4 here. This is the ultimate comfort I afford myself, an ad-hoc redo. Football is cruel and unfair and the simulator captures that fully, but in the digital world, it can be better. Football can work for me. We can do over a drubbing until it's a respectable loss, a nervy draw, or an undeserved win. This is sacrilegious in hardcore FM circles, but I don't care. It's a game for them — maybe even a lifestyle — but for me, it's therapy, and right now I need it more than ever.

A sladpash comparison of Minecraft and 4X Games that's an excuse for me to purge my brain.

I don’t play Minecraft. This is one of those things like “I don’t play mage in RPG games” and there’s nothing really to it. It’s probably problematic if I really dug into it, but this is all to say I do not play Minecraft and there’s no great reason.

I know many who do play Minecraft. It is the 2nd best selling game of all time, after all. That means I’ve been on a few server tours — this is just being shown around someone’s little Minecraft space. It’s cute. You get to see elaborate houses, self-sustaining farms, working computers, and some kind of vertical contraption that...babies keep falling out of every 10 minutes?

“Wait. What’s that?”

“Oh, that’s my Villager Breeder.”

“WHAT!?” Screenshot from a google image search for "Villager Breeder Minecraft" showing endless thumbnails from different Youtube tutorials on how to build a Breeder.

High level Minecraft runs on slave labour.

This is only a little hyperbolic. ‘Minecraft is colonial’ isn’t a particularly hot take. The core loop of Minecraft is objectively fucked:

1. Going to land that’s not yours.
2. Taking it because why not?
3. Stripping it of resources.
4. And rebuilding it better. (Better for whom? Everyone ™️. Obviously.)

Dan Olson has a very good (and short) video just saying it straight. Olson dives into the relationship between the players and the systems as implemented, further noting the behaviours these systems reward. For Olson, that was human trafficking.

Calling Minecraft colonial or imperial gets you laughed out of the room. This is one of the games. It’s foundational. There’s no plot. It’s like Pong or Tetris or Mario. It spawned a genre. I mean, if Minecraft is colonial, what does that say about the video games as a whole?

Could video games bad? No way, right?

Writer and narrative designer Meghna Jayanth in her talk at CGSA 2022, focused on the game design in the imperial mode and how to combat it. It’s a very good talk, the transcript of which is linked above, and it’s very cite-able, “As players and designers we all live, willingly or unwillingly, in the imperial mode of spectacle and alienation, geopolitical instability, global inequalities and accelerating ecological crisis. As Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen argue, the imperial mode of living is one in which the imperialist world order is normalised, and inscribed into everyday practices and even unconsciously reproduced.”

In Minecraft, there is a modelling of systems that bends towards human rights violations or at least you quickly run into the limits of what you can do efficiently and ethically. It’s grim and a little funny, but mostly grim. The appeal of a village breeder is making more villagers. Think of each villager as a shop, so more villagers mean more chances one of them might have something you’re looking for. Each villager has a set amount of trades you can do with them and once you trade with them, you can no longer re-roll their offerings with a job brick. Elaborate villager breeding operations can render some of the most expensive and resource intensive materials to produce trivial to acquire.

There are hundreds of tutorials and videos of Minecraft creators showing off their Villager Breeder setup. I cannot stress enough that these are Geneva Convention breaking Rube-Goldberg machines. In a YouTube tutorial by Bigbooty17 (yes), a Spider-Man avatar walks us through an update to their villager breeder contraption for Minecraft version 1.21 and above. Their breeder relies on beds and boats. The beds are necessary for villager reproduction. Villagers need food and lodging to mate and have a child. The boats are for... I’m honestly not sure. A lot of this is really beyond me. I’m trying really hard to keep up.

Halfway through the video booty talks about “baby trajectories” and how a previous design had a flaw. They declare, “The new baby trajectory allows the parent to see the child and they’ll try to give them food, which lowers the amount of breeding that can happen between the parents.” booty calls this an oversight with a quick fix — a block in front of the parents’ eyes. Adult peekaboo, the child is out of sight, out of mind. It’s time to make a new one.

This is undoubtedly looney toons shit.

It also echoes real slave owner tactics where slaves of ‘good stock’ were made to breed. A good breeding slave was a “cash cow” as breeding new slaves was cheaper than going to the market. Stick a pin here. We’re going to get back to this.

Breeders are far from the only atrocity that Minecraft power gamers dabble in. Minecraft has a memory limit, which depends on your hardware limitations. So, what do you do if you’ve bred too many villagers? You get rid of some. Minecraft has a reputation system, where directly killing villagers lowers your rep [ and summons iron golems as divine retribution]. But if you developed a contraption that forced a bunch of villagers into a space one block high, and one block wide, squeezing them just tight enough that they despawn, effectively suffocating them out of existence — your reputation stays in-tact. Of course.

On the voyage from West Africa to the Caribbean, human beings were packed so tight into such unsanitary conditions, and with little food and care, that almost 2 million slaves died in transit alone.

There are games that are explicitly designed to have the player role-play a colonist. It’s time to talk about 4X games. The ‘4X’ stands for Explore, Expand, Exploit, and Exterminate. It knows what it is. These are conquest games where, more often than not, you are racing other colonial powers to world domination in some form. This could be militaristic or a very loosely defined “cultural victory.”

For my purposes, I’m just going to talk about slavery again and why the systems that simulate and abstract it 4X are all lacking to the point of being detrimental to the depiction.

First, and perhaps most importantly, why does this matter? Most living people think, understand, or at the very least pay lip service to, the notion that slavery is among the worst things a human can do to another human. We are very good at acknowledging that chattel slavery was bad. There is a collective idea of slavery informed by popular culture — TV, film, and video games — that dilutes the notion of “a person as property.” But also most of us just lack the imagination to fully suspend ethics and see another human being as something less than a farm animal.

We’ve already mentioned slave breeding. ‘People as property,’ extended beyond treating them as farm animals. You know how in movies or maybe you have a friend from a well off family, or you are the friend from a well off family, you’ll see a parent gift a child a car for their 21st birthday? They used to gift them people. A father might gift his daughter 5 slaves when she married.

Slaves were assets. They were protections against poor investments. They were dowries. Poorer white men would fake large estates to woo women from well-off families with an abundance of slaves. They were protections for white women against the tyranny of white patriarchy. American historian Stephanie Jones-Rogers writes in her excellent historical account on how African-American chattel slavery in the States intersected with white femininity and feminism in ‘They Were Her Property,’ "No group spoke about these women’s investments in slavery more often, or more powerfully, than the enslaved people subjected to their ownership and control. They were the people whose lives were forever changed when a mistress sold someone just so she could buy a new dress. They were best equipped to describe the agony that shook their bodies and souls when they returned from their errands to discover that their children were gone and their mistresses were counting piles of money they had received from the slave traders who bought them."

A person as property was a tool, an animal, and, at times, lesser than both. No 4X game attempts a depiction of slavery outside of a lever to pull where your community’s morale falls and your production skyrockets. For these games, slavery is a onetime decision and not an industry to maintain. In reality, owners were shackling a standing army that, if rallied and co-ordinated, would easily overthrow them.

To destabilise movements, many owners forbade literacy, separated families, and dispersed slaves who were from the same communities on arrival in the ‘New World.’ But the path of all enslaved and oppressed peoples is towards freedom. Resistance and rebellion are inevitabilities. News of success would spread, emboldening other slaves and inflicting paranoia on their owners.

This was one cost of slavery. Created solely from the efforts of the brave and desperate people chained to plantations. Other costs were even less tangible. For the ‘owner’ class, slaves were a part of everyday life. The dehumanisation of Black people was so total and indoctrinaton of young white children was so complete, that it would occur to only a few of them that slavery was a cruelty.

Slavery was big business. Some form of is the backbone of nearly all ‘developed’ countries. The other cost to the slaver was their humanity. To maintain slavery was to become more and more depraved and to be less human.

So the TL;DR is that I feel better about the fucked up slave machines in Minecraft and how they depict the visceral horror of a human trafficking and slavery than the purposeful depiction of similar atrocities in Civilisation or Frostpunk or whatever. There’s something viscerally repulsive about the former, while the latter is too distanced and sterile. Notes:

1. This was supposed to be a short thing to plug two pieces. It ended up much longer and using research left on the cutting room floor of my most recent piece for No Escape. I’m glad to open and close the year writing with Kaile who is a fantastic editor that looks out for their writers while making sure their voice stays intact. My other piece for No Escape.

In modern times, the Greek Pantheon is often portrayed as a reality TV series with gods -- the real housewives, husbands, and partners of Olympus featuring larger-than-life personalities with exceptional privilege and power caught up in the everyday malaise of family drama, with a tinge of sex and murder. Most of you have come in contact with the stories in some form. There are television, literature, film, stage, and of course multiple video game adaptations featuring the Greek Pantheon. Sony Santa Monica's God of War series is perhaps the most well-known, with the earlier entries in the franchise featuring an angry Spartan killing his way up and down the pantheon. These first three God of War games are a run off from the 90s -- they're grime, guts, and blood. A digitised Liefield and Millar comic book arc where one man, cooler, angrier, and stronger than everyone else kills everyone else but always finds time to fuck. But the franchise top of mind when discussing the gods is Supergiant Games' Hades series. Compared to God of War, Hades is gentler. People often whisper, death is temporary, everyone is luxurious and no one is ashy. You do kill your father in both. Once in God of War, and over and over again in Hades.

Hades is a roguelite, with the looping nature of the game serving two purposes. Most obviously, it’s an abstraction of the gods' immortality. The player controls Zagreus, son of Hades, an immortal god who's been in his mid-twenties for who knows how long, desperate to break out of the underworld to meet his mother Persephone on the surface. In a ludic sense, most video game protagonists are immortal. The protagonist's death at the hands of the player tends to be easily reversible by loading a save state. Roguelites turn death into something ludically diegetic and, occasionally, narratively so. Hades' reactive dialogue is its innovation in this field. After every run, members of Hades' court will comment on how well Zagreus did. Hypnos might tease if a run ended prematurely at the hands of a jobber, while Achilles has advice on besting the Hydra you've been stuck on for 5 runs now. Win or lose, everyone has something to say.

Hades is also a coming-of-age story, and this is the loop's second purpose. Everyday life is a practice of navigating loops and mazes. A fall from the edge of a bed can be lethal for a toddler. In a year or so, that same child can crawl and stumble through the home navigating the rooms as if lost in a labyrinth. Starting school expands the loop, and settles them into a routine. In adolescence the house shrinks, and the town is the new maze. Maybe they're allowed to stay out late, maybe they're allowed to stay at a friend's for the weekend. At some point, what was a difficult trek becomes trivial: you know all of your town's local haunts, you can reach the final boss of Hades in your sleep.

The end of every loop is a fight to the death with Hades. It's not nearly as consequential as it sounds, win or lose you end up back in Hades’ court for more dialogue and to plan your next run. The fight is Zagreus and Hades' simmering relationship coming to a boil. At the beginning of the game the two can barely stand being in the same room as each other. Hades is immediately insulting, calling Zagreus "stupid boy," and Zagreus is in turn sarcastic and disrespectful. Make no mistake, Hades is an abusive father by any definition. He's emotionally distant, cruel, and repeatedly raises his hand to kill his son.

Obviously violence and murder mean something different when the end result is, at most, a minor inconvenience. When Zagreus is killed by Hades, it's the equivalent of being sent to his room. It's never final. Violence in the underworld is sparring, it's arguing, it's fighting, or it's just passing the time.

Patricide and filicide are common throughout Greek mythology and history. Hercules murdered his entire family in a god-addled rage. Hades, alongside his siblings, killed their Titan parents to claim Olympus for themselves, and perhaps most pertinent is the story of Oedipus.

Oedipus' tale is tragic - born to King Laius and Queen Jocasta but destined to be his father's murderer, he was abandoned to die as an infant. The servant Laius commanded to do the deed took pity on the child and instead arranged for him to be raised by another pair of royals, who brought Oedipus up as their own. Oedipus discovered he was fated to kill his own father and marry his mother. Distraught, the man left his home for the city of Thebes, unaware that the parents who had raised him were not his blood. During his travels, he quarrelled with an older man. They came to blows, and Oedipus killed him. When he arrived at Thebes he found the city under attack from a sphinx with no king to defend it. The sphinx would challenge humans to a battle of wits, asking a riddle and devouring them if they answered incorrectly. Oedipus bested the creature and the city in need of a king anointed him. Of course, Laius was the man Oedipus killed in a quarrel, and the queen he betrothed was his birth mother, Jocasta.

In 1899, Sigmund Freud coined the 'Oedipus Complex' in his landmark work the Interpretation of Dreams. Here Freud posited that the children were in competition with their parents of the same sex for the affection of the parent of the opposite sex. In Hades, the prize is Persephone. Having split from the game’s eponymous god of the underworld, Persephone resides in a cottage on the surface, living in solitude and relative anonymity. Hades stands as the final obstacle to protect this status quo. For Zagreus, the surface, and his mother, are emancipation. After several successful runs, Persephone decides to return to the underworld.

Peresphone's agency is what's won. In defeating his father, Zagreus gains control over his mother. Persephone's escape from the underworld was an escape from Hades himself and while the game foreshadows the reconciliation through its many other reconciliations, this is the one that grates. When you're victorious in a run of Hades, Zagreus emerges from the underworld and has a conversation with Peresphone. The catch, and how the game keeps the player running its roguelite loop, is that Zagreus cannot survive on the surface. Eventually he'll die, often mid conversation with Persephone but not before urging her to return to the Underworld to set things right. From Persephone's perspective she's reuniting with the son she thought died in her arms as an infant, and then watching him die. Over and over again. She left the underworld but hell has found her.

In an interview with the 'Origin Story' podcast, Hades writer Greg Kasavin talks about the direct connections the Supergiant team has with the story as written in the game, "It's something we could relate to in our own way having grown up with parents with very high expectations." Kasavin's parents immigrated to the States from Moscow, Russia. Like many immigrants they discovered their University credentials were worthless, and had to redo them from scratch. Poverty is a whirlpool; it takes all you can to make it out and escaping it is another thing entirely, some combination of luck and superhuman effort. Dogma, or stubbornness, is canonized and mythologized and out of distorted concern for their children, they insist on one path to 'success.' It ironically limits their options despite 'opportunity' often being the chief reason for immigration for the first place.

"I think of Hades as an immigrant story," Kasavin explains, "in the mythology [Hades is] charged with moving to the underworld and supervising it. He's not from there. He moved there to take a job and he had a son and stuff like that." Hades, as a reluctant immigrant to the underworld, is unquestionably a success story. Despite his stand-offish nature, the Underworld's denizens take to him and respect him. Hades' underworld subverts the frequent comparisons many adaptations make to Christianity's hell depicting an, for the most part, almost utopian setting.

There's pathos afforded to Hades that allows the player and Zagreus to understand how he became the person he is in the game. He’s a proud man who drew the short straw to manage the worst branch of the family business and despite that has carved out success. He thrusts his paranoia and distrust of the outside world and his extended family onto Zagreus, lies to him about his mother, and then comes to despise his curiosity and desire to connect. What more could the boy want outside of these walls? Why is he not content with the life I’ve built for us both?

Zagreus forgives Hades. In the same interview Kasavin gestures at this forgiveness as inevitable over a long enough timeframe. "The differences between the gods and the rest of us is that they have unlimited time," he explains, "They literally can't even kill each other to solve their problems. They have a really good incentive to work their problems out as long as it takes."

American author bell hooks, in the preface of her seminal work The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love writes, "As a young woman in my twenties who had not yet found her own powers, I often wished the men in my life would die. My longing for my father’s death began in childhood. It was the way I responded to his rage, his violence. I used to dream him gone, dead and gone." She continues in a later paragraph, "My reconciliation with my father began with my recognition that I wanted and needed his love—and that if I could not have his love, then at least I needed to heal the wound in my heart his violence had created."

hooks talks about establishing a relationship on her own terms, all the bits she wants and needs, filtered from the undesirables. It's obviously appealing. This summer as both my father and I faced separate invasive surgeries, I found myself with a need to connect with the man who was at one point distant to me except for the hot sting of hand to flesh. A provider made cold by the world and since thawed out in his older age.

This forgiveness and repair is an active choice. It's one for me, Kasavin, and hooks but it's not for the player. It's hardly a decision Zagreus himself wrestles with. He never leaves the orbit of his father, never gets enough space to navigate the world without his presence hovering over him, and his forgiveness is born solely through the [re]completion of his family.

Supergiant's game uses Greek myth to mythologize the nuclear family, now that mother, father, and child are reunited under the same roof, the game is finished having arrived at its thematic conclusion. Hades reluctantly apologizes to his wife and son and comes to an agreement with the latter for him to continue running his escape gauntlet to stress the underworld's defences. Zagreus moves from rambunctious rebel pursuing freedom from his father to joining the family business alongside his mother; the inmate becomes a warden, the house of Hades always wins.

TW: conversations on suicide. One [big] spoiler for the end of Persona 3.

In November 2023 I was laid off from a high-output, low-paying job where I churned out 6-8 articles a week on Caribbean culture. It was a hard job to love. In October we had an all-hands meeting on how to incorporate ChatGPT into our workflow. It was more important to get stuff out fast, a lot of it, than it was for it to be particularly well-written, or even interesting. That’s not just on my former employers, it’s the natural endpoint for online journalism beholden to the SEO and the ad model. The layoff wasn’t totally unwelcome; it would have been nice to have something, anything, lined up but the overwhelming feeling was relief.

Now the feeling is dread. Applying for jobs has sparked one of the worst, and most persistent, bouts of depression I’ve ever had to endure. Since January I’ve written and rewritten my resume dozens of times, trying to find the right distillation of me that is marketable. I’ve stared at a blank page for hours, taking full inventory of everything I’ve done thus far. Sometimes I pad it out like I’m trying to hit a word count on a grade school essay. Other times, I just stare at a blank page. Have I ever done anything worth mentioning? I strip out work that I’m proud of because I read once that recruiters look for resumes that pop. I all but beg to be hired. I’m a fucking mannequin in a store window.

Persona 3 Reload (P3R) is the latest remake of the classic PS2 RPG, Persona 3. It’s about high school kids shooting themselves in the head (it’s a metaphor?) to summon psychic manifestations of themselves to kill depression monsters. Who could say if this is a thing I should be playing now?

It’s a good game. This is not a review. Persona 3 Reload is missing the fantastic female campaign that debuted in the PSP remake, Persona 3 Portable, and it’s also missing the less than fantastic expansion, The Answer. There’s some mechanics stripped out, like the exhaustion/sickness system that prevents you from spending too much time spelunking in the dungeons or chaining back-to-back visits, and others are added such as theurgy system which gives each character a super move. There’s new voice actors who are all excellent and the series staple social links are all voiced. It’s good. This is still not a review.

My first time playing Persona 3 was on a PSP I stole in high school in 2009 or so. The PSP was the highlight of a short-lived and otherwise uneventful criminal career. On school nights, after the lights went out around the house, I would huddle under covers to suppress the shine from the screen and examine my prize. It was a well-loved machine: dust had infiltrated the screen, the X button stayed pressed a bit too long -- not enough to hamper playing, but enough that it felt like walking around in wet socks, and if you pushed the analogue stick too far right, it’d be stuck right until you snapped it back into place.

The fear of God, and my parents (same thing), embedded a fear of M-rated games deep within my psyche. I sneaked in rounds of Mortal Kombat at the arcade before it shut down when I was 10 and was allowed to watch my cousin rack up wanted stars in Grand Theft Auto III but I had to leave the room whenever story missions started. My gaming history before this point peaked at Kingdom Hearts 2. You could trace a straight line from whatever was on TV to what I wanted to play -- Pokémon, Sonic Adventure 2, that one Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy Power Stone clone. Games were expensive, doubly so in Jamaica where consoles had to be imported, and 5-year-old games sold at “for-new” prices. A new game was a reward for topping my class so I played it safe and got something I knew would be good…like the Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy Game. I was an idiot. So this modded PSP filled with games curated by someone with much better taste in the medium than I had at the time, that was an education.

At 15, I didn’t have the vocabulary for depression. I played Persona 3 like a man with a runny nose thanking god he doesn't have the flu. The facsimile of school life drew me in; it progressed when I wanted it to, it had friends who waited for me to talk to them, and it had extracurriculars that had tangible, trackable benefits. At the centre of it was a group of teenagers who had to save the world, it was something only they could do. In a single school year you, the protagonist, touched so many lives, impacted so many people, and then you died. Life stopped.

I had my second therapy session in August 2023 at 28 years old, 18 years after I tried to kill myself in grade 4. Together, my therapist and I marvelled at the clarity of thought to know “this ain’t it” before even hitting 12. Luckily I was awful at mechanical physics and understanding basic human anatomy, so I’m still here. My therapist started me on APO-fluoxetine, an antidepressant with a side effect of “suicidal behaviour.” We signed a contract -- my signature on the back of a used envelope -- that I’d contact a trusted person if I found myself thinking about ending things at any point during the treatment. The irony of antidepressants potentially triggering suicidal thoughts isn’t wasted on anyone. It’s a common refrain when you’re pushed away from therapy and modern science to faith -- pray the sad away. It played a part in my hesitation to get professional assistance. Nowadays, I think of antidepressants like a flu shot. Sure you might get flu symptoms but you’re gonna curb the rest of it for the season. A bit of suicide to treat the suicidal thoughts.

So high school kids shooting themselves in the head to fight depression monsters?

Playing Persona 3 Reload in 2024 has been a disturbingly vulnerable experience. Every remake, from the most faithful to whatever Square Enix is doing with Final Fantasy 7, is an exercise in nurturing or uprooting nostalgia, often alternating between the two. But what happens when a game that was the right time, right place, comes back to you and it’s anything but? Like comparing notes with old classmates at a high school reunion? What have you done in the last 15 years? How far are you from your 2009 self? Shouldn’t you be doing something else now? Shouldn’t you have done something by now?

Spoilers for Thirsty Suitors

All of our anxieties seep their way into the art we create and consume. So what does it say about us that we keep making art about reconciling with our parents? In the past 5 years we’ve seen generational trauma, and subsequent reconciliation, rendered in gargantuan scale. Domee Shi’s “Turning Red” blows up puberty and the frustration born from the impossible expectation Asian women face (and inherit) as “model minorities” to kaiju level proportions. The Daniels’ Best Picture winner “Everything Everywhere All At Once” collapses the multiverse because nothing short of that will address decades of repressed mother-daughter angst. Outerloop’s Thirsty Suitors translates a similar interpersonal friction and generational trauma to over-the-top cooking mini-games and extravagant RPG battles. It also helped me put into words how I want to think about love.

Thirsty Suitors is a turn-based RPG, narrative game, cooking game, skateboarding, rekindle friendship and flirt with your exes game. Serial heartbreaker Jala returns home to Timber Hills after her latest relationship falls apart, but for the first time she’s come out on the losing end. She moves back in with her parents, her sister is not talking to her, and she has to confront six of her exes -- well they confront her.

Jala is everyone’s “the ex.” It’s a universal concept — the person you spend the better part of a year or more recovering from. You either have one, are one, or are somewhere on the waiting list. Fights in Thirsty Suitors are melodramatic affairs where relatives are summoned like RPG gods and status effects such as poisoned and paralysed are swapped for ‘thirsty' and ‘impressed.’ It’s not deep, but the way the combat flows into the narrative keeps things moving. At the end of a fight, you reconcile, but on their terms.

The cooking mini-games shift the focus from Jala’s relationship with her exes to her relationship with her parents. Jala’s parents walk her through recipes, commentate on her comings and goings, and tell her stories. I’ve written about the utility of cooking as familial expression and conducting culture across generations in Venba and all of that applies here. These cooking sections are when you most interact with Jala’s mother, Rukmini.

Unpacking Rukmini is difficult. She’s a first generation Indian immigrant fluent in passive-aggressive English. There’s no doubt she loves her daughters, Rukmini accepts Jala’s bisexuality and her choice of partners, but she’s also overbearing and demanding. I hesitate to call her abusive, the term conjures up horrific physical violence and wanton neglect that Rukmini never enacts. But it’s hard to completely circumvent the term either, and if I’m honest, I’m reticent to use it because Rukmini reminds me of my parents.

My folks aren’t immigrants, not in the migrating between countries sense, but they moved from rural Jamaica to Kingston, our capital city. My stepmother, as much my mother as anyone else in my life, made a similar transition but from a garrison community to middle class Jamaican life. There’s an intimacy with poverty and hardship that never leaves. Social strata aren’t porous membranes, they’re rigid structures designed to pen people into the lot they’re born into. Thrusting yourself in a foreign space with the mission of ‘do better, both for me and my children’ — it has to change you.

There’s an exchange between Jala and Rukmini in the lead up to the first cooking mini-game. Jala’s father Arvind suggests that she takes the opportunity while she’s home to take cooking lessons from her mother, “It would mean a lot to your mother if you asked,” he says. Why can’t she just ask you directly? It doesn’t go smoothly during the cook either. Rukmini is incapable of seeing her 25-year-old daughter as an adult, she needs to see her wash her hands in front of her and seems physically incapable of giving a compliment.  Talking to your parents — talking to my parents, is occasionally a nightmare. It’s bargaining for autonomy with the cadence and calm of a hostage negotiator, as any wrong word or fluctuation in tone is immediately seized upon and exploited.

The final cooking mini-game brings in Paati, Rukmini’s mother. Paati is in town for Jala’s sister’s Aruni’s wedding. Before the ceremony she wants to inspect Jala’s cooking, but in actuality it’s to evaluate Rukmini’s parenting. Paati is exacting and inflexible, the ultimate matriarch and a shadow that looms over the family. My grandparents only exist as nostalgic stories, a distance afforded by death. I wonder if my father would shrink in front of his mother like Paati does in front of hers.

To form a cogent point about the interactions in Thirsty Suitors and how they affect me, I’m going to appropriate a term -- “love language.” The term was originally coined by Gary Chapman, an American author and marriage counsellor who, in 1992, published his book ‘The Five Love Languages: The Secret To Love That Lasts.’ In the book, Chapman describes five ways of showing/receiving affection. I don’t recommend reading it, the legacy of ‘The Five Love Languages’ is plastered headlines of how to find your love language on out-of-date lifestyle magazines at your GP’s office and buzzy headlines that pop up when a website needs to hit a click quota. So for the purpose of this piece, and maybe beyond if you’re so inclined, we’re going to define a Love Language as the way we talk and interact with our loved ones -- be it friends, partners, or family.

From Paati to Rukmini and then to Jala we can examine a shared vocabulary regarding love. It’s non-renewable and thus should be doled in controlled quantities. Affection is aggressive but also a tool for control; all three use love (familial, and in Jala’s case romantic) to maintain the upper hand in their interpersonal dynamics.

Jala ends this cycle by pulling from everyone she’s reconciled with to push back against Paati, the ‘original sin’ of stilted affection. Like any language, we learn love from a variety of sources, but our parents are our first, and usually greatest, teachers. We get their lips and their voices and a lifetime sorting out which parts of them to keep and which parts to throw out, hoping after each decision that we’ve made the right choice. Every friend and lover is an opportunity to take stock of how we love: what compromises are we willing to make? Where do we reinforce? What can we learn? It's an excruciating process; bodies and lives get tangled, and often there is no safe and painless way to untie people.

PS: In 2023 gamers discovered thirst and fell in love with twink white vampires, skinny white elf women, and slightly less skinny red women and I can’t express for free or in line of sight of the crucifix in my living room the feelings I have for Diya a brown woman who is thick as fucking porridge and I have to stop, I have to move on, we’re moving on.

PSS: I call Paati “the original sin” and that feels bad, but not bad enough for me to edit this. The “original sin” is probably the British, I live my life blaming them for pretty much everything, and it serves me pretty well. India was a British colony and like all British colonies was plundered for profit and robbed, or at the very least delayed, a chance at being a leading global economy. The British also ransacked the culture of every territory they violated. The promise of colonialism, or its justification so colonists and would-be emperors could convince themselves that life after death was still on the table, was rescuing indigenous people from their own culture. Absorption into the British Empire, even at the lowest levels, was rescuing the masses who didn’t know better. Living under that rule, where being yourself was defiance, and you had to smuggle your culture through their food and their religion and maybe eventually smuggle yourself out of your own country, away from your own…I don’t know, that has to change you. Like an animal in the wild surrounded by predators, you become caustic. Spiny. Too tough to get chewed up by the world. It takes active work to undo evolution, to return to a version of us that does not have the genetic memory of shit going awful. It’s a multi generational project.

There are no black women on the writing team. This alone is unfortunately humdrum in the AAA games space. These games are predominantly staffed by white people, and writer's rooms are no exceptions. Forspoken is admittedly unusual as a Japanese-developed game penned by an all-white writing team. Perhaps an attempt at crafting a hit in the Western market, I can only speculate. So the criticism of the writer's room makeup hitting the point where it was not just black women griping about their absence was novel and welcomed. A perfect storm of a game being very middling and starring a black woman protagonist.

In 2015 Jef Rouner for The Houston Press wrote that at the time there were around only around 14 playable black women in gaming history. "Only 14 black women have ever been put in the hands of a player, and only two of them before the year 2000. That is just sad."

Diamond Lobby performed an analysis on AAA games released between 2017 and 2021. They examined the 10 highest sellers of each year along with every major release from the biggest publishers including, but not limited to, Activision, EA, Nintendo, Ubisoft, and more. Diamond Lobby found that only 8.3% of games had a female character of Asian, Black, or other ethnic origin. Only 5.3% of the games examined had a non-white protagonist. This number shrinks considerably if you restrict the analysis to only black women.

2023 exists as an outlier year, you can readily point to two black women protagonists in AAA single-player games. Forspoken's Frey Holland and Alan Wake II's Saga Anderson. Two is a comparatively large amount to none. Saga is spared the same widespread dissection because the game is good. Alan Wake II is not my game of the year, but it's a lot of other people's. There's still racism (I don't want to link to it). Now it doesn't fucking help that members of the writing team were so visible in the lead-up to the game and voice-over and motion capture director providing the choice quote describing lead actress Ella Balinska's "very hip-hoppy kind of walk." Alan Wake II features dual protagonists and it's no sweat finding comments that shout about how much they don't care about race as long as their boy Alan is playable.

At this point, I'm going to broaden the scope to talk about black men and also explore outside of the AAA space.

Frey occupies another trend in the depiction of black protagonists, the proximity to criminality. Now, this is complicated. As explained before, the sample size is small. The number of black protagonists in AAA games is paltry. And being in opposition to the law, and having the power to not only exist but thrive in that state, can be cathartic. But there's no avoiding that many of the prominent black protagonists are introduced as criminals and this takes on a sinister read when you consider the all-white writing staff that makes up many of these games. We meet CJ, the protagonist of GTA San Andreas, on his first day out of prison. We're introduced to Lee Everett, the protagonist of Telltale's The Walking Dead Season One, in the back of a police car.

"Viewed aggregately, every (mis)representation—from Fight for NY’s pointed dangerousness to CJ’s criminality and Everett’s ambiguous scene, from street to screen, within gaming culture and outside of it—serve as visual microaggressions. Popular gaming culture argues that these are seemingly minor infractions of representation, that no offense is intended in creating these visualities. However, they are powerful purveyors of the structural violence perpetrated on black bodies and the simultaneous relegation of black people to the margins of culture: stereotypes fueling microagressions, microaggressions fueling stereotypes, a sinister synergy doing its part to mask the baseless authority of the white supremacist, capitalist order of exploitation." From Kishonna L. Gray's Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming.

Within the first hour, Frey falls out with a gang, is an arson victim, and might as well be squatting in the New York City juvenile courts. When this is the only depiction in AAA games, questions naturally cloud the representation. 'Why is Frey black?' 'Did the writers think this would lend authenticity to a redemptive criminal story?'

Harper Jay puts it best in their guest column for Giant Bomb, 'Visibility is not Enough.' "Representation is powerful. Having these characters matters. It acknowledges our existence. However, visibility is ultimately of middling worth when marginalized people are not included in the formation of their icons. It allows for the creation of inauthentic characters, the perpetuation of stereotypes, the preservation of insularities, and the continuation of professional and hobbyist cultural failings. Things are left incomplete; works are left imperfect by grand magnitudes. And this imperfection has a cost."

The common pushback here is, "Should white creators only create white characters?" This is a false binary. White creators are welcome to create black characters but should understand that their perspective is an outsider one. Absent prominent black developers on the team, early consultation is important. The nuances of black life (and the sub-cultures), nuances that will not be readily apparent because the people most versed in it won't talk about it, is what establishes authenticity. When something is normal, you take it for granted and it fades into the background. It's only when it's out of place that it comes into focus.

CJ and Everett are beloved by many black gamers. The former is the protagonist of a game that spotlights black life. It might be through the lens of crime, and a poor cover of the 90s and the early 2000s black gangster films, but the novelty of seeing a majority black neighbourhood and hearing black voices still resonates. Everett is one of my favourite gaming protagonists. While introduced in the back of a police car, he's quickly established as a man who is trying to do his best, he's kind and flawed. Thrust into the impossible position of caregiver during a zombie apocalypse, held accountable by his ward, Clementine, and by the suspicious and critical eyes of the other members of his group. He's the reverse of Joel's Last of Us.

I'm still susceptible to visibility. Modern AAA games are explicit about their characters. Gone are the impressionist of sharp-edged polygons, where you could squint at Lara Croft and go 'that's a brown woman...maybe.' Instead, pale skin is depicted with the kind of detail that borders on uncanny. You can see the light go through the skin and count the green veins beneath the surface. These characters are sculpted from scratch. Breathe into clay or marl to be more fitting. Made in his image. There's no colour-blind casting in games. You won't ever get a political subversion and borderline zombie narrative reclamation like in George Romero's Night of the Living Dead or an interesting mess to untangle like the BIPOC US founding fathers in Lin Manuel's Hamilton. No every white protagonist is a choice, or maybe they're not and that's what makes it worse.

Venba lays on a couch, her hair is a mess. She stares at the title.

My parents decided that the kitchen was no place for a boy. Instead, on their command, I shadowed visiting labourers -- carpenters, masons, electricians and plumbers -- working on our home, a renovation project that never ended. My parents hoped I would learn something from them through osmosis; as a child, I was so shy I'd bury my face in couch cushions to avoid eye contact. Now, an adult and comparatively trepid, I still can't imagine interviewing a man about elbow pipes and straights while half his legs hang out from under my sink.

While cooking was kept clandestine, food was, and remains, beloved and unavoidable. The matriarchs in my family had an enviable talent -- in under an hour, with any combination of ingredients, they could prepare a weeknight dinner that was inoffensive and often delicious. Over the weekend their powers were unleashed. On their feet the entire day, they would cook a big late breakfast that flowed into a feast for dinner. Coconut milk perfumed the house, husked from the coconuts from the tree outside, and used in just about everything. Breadfruit, roasted and wrapped in last week's news, was sliced thin and fried until crispy and not a second longer. Overnight soaked peas (kidney beans) were pressure cooked until tender then stirred into rice cooked in, of course, coconut milk. Oxtail braised in browning, a sauce made of brown sugar and water (almost caramel-like), until it barely clung to its bone. I could go on.

Today I woke up to an empty house and the sounds of traffic. There is no breakfast bustle and will not be until I saunter out of bed, past the sink filled with last night's, and possibly the night before's, dishes and towards the stove. I will not husk a coconut, I will hover over a kettle and wait to pour boiling water over a cup of instant ramen. Most days and most meals are like this -- quick, easy, food as fuel and nothing more.

Many video games interpret this literally. Food fills various gauges -- health, mana, or some equivalent resource -- buffing stats, providing extra lives, etc. Even games nominally about cooking, such as Overcooked! and Cook, Serve, Delicious!, focus more on the restaurant industry, bringing in more customers, and earning more money. Phoenix Simms, for Paste Magazine, wrote about the commodification of food in video games and how Visai Games' Venba shows that cooking can be so much more.

There are moments of great aesthetic pleasure regarding food in games, such as the evocative animations given to the hundreds of recipes one can cook in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Or moments of comfort and comic relief, like the cooking sequences in Monster Hunter World. But until recent decades, games centred on food and cooking have been ones that characterize food as buffs, achievements or part of a commercial venture (think Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley and any number of restaurant simulators). Not often has cooking in games been allowed to simply show us the identity of the characters we’re playing.

Venba alternates between cooking and dialogue. As the titular Venba, you recreate recipes from a damaged and poorly documented Tamil cookbook. In between cooking, you click through exchanges between Venba and her family -- her husband Paavalan and their son Kavin -- discussing the issues that most immigrant families face in majority-white countries; returning home, facing marginalisation, and assimilation. Food isn't separate from any of this. Venba makes Tamil food because she is Tamil and never entertains being anything else. Her food connects her culture and more directly, to her mother.

Food takes on added importance after Kavin is born. He's never been to India and has to learn how to live, without a guide, as a 2nd generation immigrant. I've never been a minority, not outside of trips to the States to visit family. It was not a thing I appreciated until I was followed by a security guard at Publix when I was 12 years old. I wasn't even a particularly large 12-year-old, just suspiciously black. But I've been susceptible to the allures of North America. When Kavin demands pizza over his mother's cooking, it's painful but understandable. Neither Tamil nor Jamaican food makes the television ads or the billboards you see on your way into town. It's "Louisiana Fast", it is "Fresh never Frozen", it's "When you're here, you're family." Learning to love your own culture is guilt-inducing work, it's seeking atonement for years of betrayal to yourself.

I think cooking is the ultimate act of love. Taking food, something we all need to live, and turning it into something else, something more than its ingredients, to give flavour to sustenance is beautiful. Every dish has its story and learning how to cook it, should be learning that story, to connect with the people who cooked before you. That's important to me. I'm black and Jamaican. Where people have family trees, we have shrubs. But the dishes we make tell the stories of the people who never got a chance to be the loving parents you see in Venba.

Venba and Paavalan stare out the window as we watch from outside.

Jerk Chicken is probably the most famous Jamaican dish. You can find in football stadiums and restaurants around the US and UK. You can find the spice rub in most supermarkets. Jerk has a spicy, smoky, charred flavour that is hard to describe for me; Jerk doesn't taste like other things, other things taste like Jerk. It's the perfect distillation of Jamaican history. Maroons, escaped slaves who lived in the mountains and rugged areas, were simultaneously on the run and at war with their British colonizers. Stripped from their African homes, Indigenous Amerindians guided them on which spices and herbs to combine for flavour and preservation. This was a time when cooking was dangerous, any smoke would alert the British to where they were musket in tow. So the Maroons started cooking in pits, trapping the smoke, and giving the meat its unique flavour.

Sometimes this is what I think about when I eat/make Jerk. Other times I think about my Uncle cooking the best Jerk Pork I've ever had, despite being a vegan and Rastafarian for 45 years prior. This is what I see in Visai Games' Venba -- this is what I feel when an adult Kavin recreates a dish his mother made for him or goes to visit her in India and she teaches him how to make dosas. I want that. I want to learn everything my family has ever made for me so that when we are separated by distance or time or death I can make something that captures how they felt about me. And I can eat it.

Why the fuck Do I know how to make a perfect steak?

First, Play Venba.

Okay, level with me because this is going to be messy, inconsistent, and probably won't find a good conclusion. I finished everything above this two months ago. I sat on it because I started to think about food and microwaved my brain. Let's say food, and cooking are everything I said it is, it's love, and identity, and memory -- intimate and collective. Cool, how does that work post-globalisation?

Last year my TikTok algorithm was hijacked because I liked one video about Jamaican Jerk Chicken in Canada and now I'm bombarded by food influencers and they all cook the same thing. I can cook a perfect medium-rare steak. I can make pasta from scratch. Why?

These aren't bad things to know, but they feel increasingly like common knowledge amongst my peers, here and abroad. The other day a friend of mine pointed out that there are roughly 6 cuisines represented in the conventional emoji slate. There's some spaghetti, sushi, hamburger, fries, and baguette. And every supermarket has instant ramen. There's a Burger King on every corner in the world. An earlier draft of this used the term "culinary imperialism" and it's not here right now because I'm having a calm day.

Food is content. Cooking programming migrated from television networks to social media over the last decade and created a bizarre Frankenstein cuisine devoid of cultural history. Everyone is a coffee expert and will tell you about it. Calorie-counting amateur nutritionists show off the next great dish that will maximise your gains at the gym all while going 'ew double carbs.' Male influencer cooks who perhaps were similarly kept out of the kitchen have masculinised the space through sexual innuendo -- jerking off anything phallic and literally 'slapping their meat.'

I don't think this is all bad, the guys jerking off the meat need to fucking stop though, but it's something, right? You don't need an intimate relationship with everything you eat but surely it matters that we're all kind of floating towards the same things? Why this and not that? Is it because sushi is that much more photogenic? Or because certain cultures are inherently pervasive?

And of course, you can develop your relationship and culture with food that's new to you. I think about my mother's lasagna that she made because I panicked and said my favourite meal was lasagna when she was pushing me for an answer. It was fine but I think about her whenever I eat any lasagna.

And I get it, who among us doesn't want a quick, easy meal? Our lives are split into sleep, eating, and work. Despite needing the first two to live, we need to do the latter to get them. They're something to be earned. So you cut corners, cooking goes out the window, sleep is a premium, it's a mess. But we can't all be eating fucking overnight oats???

I was in Chicago when some Youtuber made a viral video about Oxtail and then I was priced out of Oxtail because white people went feral and market forces or some shit. Despite oxtail, trotters, liver, etc., historically being the pieces that white people gave to their slaves. Yeah, yeah, yeah, times change, but you get why this feels weird right?

Anyway, play Venba. It's 90 minutes long. Has fewer words than this piece which definitely got away from me.

Blue Valentine (2010) was the first film I rented on my own. It was a bad decision. I cannot imagine what the cashier thought at the time. They suggested one of Michael Bay’s Transformers films and then something else animated. But I was dead set on this indie romance film. Desperate to carve out any semblance of taste. I remember their raised eyebrows to this day.

Directed by Derek Cianfrance, Blue Valentine stars Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams playing a couple whose relationship is on the brink of collapse. The film hops back and forth through time showing their meet-cute and how it falls apart; moments of tenderness juxtaposed with moments of cruelty. Each poignant moment is laced with tragedy and right up until the end, you hope they might rekindle the affection they once had.

You get one good love. If you’re lucky. That was the lesson I took from it. It fucked up my understanding of romance for a bit. As a teenager in Catholic school, how else was I going to learn how people work?

There is inherent horror to love. It’s vulnerable -- you’re sharing a life and tangling it with another. It’s exposing all your tender parts and weaknesses. It’s showing someone how to kill you and trusting them to never try to.

AAA games are uninterested in playing with the full breadth of the emotion. Romance is a common mechanic in games, you’re as likely to stumble into a debate on a Discord server about optimal builds as you are about who is the hottest companion in Mass Effect. Heartbreak is frustratingly less portrayed, let alone systemised. It’s at odds with the power fantasy that most big-budget games thrive on. Romantic systems are supplementary or afterthoughts that feel grafted onto the game. They are subplots and subsystems that need to come to a head before the plot is over.

Relatively smaller titles and independent games can centre relationships and dig into the arcs that are underrepresented in their larger contemporaries. Mountain Studios’ Florence speeds through a woman’s young adult life as she navigates burnout, a burgeoning romance, and separation. Death is a Whale’s piece breaks down how the game uses its interface and gameplay to depict lives blending -- the parts that are hidden and those kept on display. Atlus’ Catherine leans directly into the horror. The player controls Vincent Brooks, a man so terrified of commitment that his dreams are infiltrated by his own anxieties and intrusive thoughts as he wrestles with adultery. Catherine isn’t as small a game as Florence. It’s developed by much of the [in]famous Persona team and carries a lot of the polish and extravagant style associated with that RPG franchise. Like the Persona series, it uses the supernatural to express anxieties and emotions from the conventional world. Unlike the Persona series which relegates the relationship/romance aspect to an auxiliary system, Catherine spotlights it as the plot.

The itch.io shopfront is littered with games delving into all aspects of love and romance. Text adventures, mini-RPGs, and tabletop games that explore multiple interpretations of intimacy. My favourite of the bunch is author and playwright Franny Mestrich’s ‘answer these 10 questions and i'll tell you what kind of lover you are.’ It’s a small, free, text-based interactive fiction game that’s playable in your browser. It won’t take you longer than 15 minutes. Content Warning for a portrayal of toxic relationships.

Mestrich describes ’10 questions’ as ”a short story that's sort of like if a prose poem and a BuzzFeed quiz had a baby and they all fucking hated you.“ It’s a perfect description. The game starts innocently enough. A nameless interrogator asks “What’s your favourite flower?” “What’s your ideal first date?” It captures the feeling of an earnest conversation with a stranger. An old friend, maybe? It’s only by the third question, “Is that the same date you took me on when we first met?” when it starts to click.

It captures the feeling of an ‘oh shit’ moment, running into an ex at the cafe. With no names and no graphics, you fill those in yourself. When it reveals that you’re talking to an ex, the ex, you can feel the tenor of the conversation change. The questions immediately skew more personal. It’s alienating, Mestrich writes both these characters with a very specific history and dynamic, yet relatable. What they bring out of each other feels universal.

As you continue the game, your options restrict as it corners you. It presents 4 possible answers when it asks for your ideal first date and then three options for the next question, and then you get one response. You’re not allowed to be bigger than this conversation, and you sure as hell can’t walk away. You can’t shrink, either. They know where to poke that will hurt the most, they know how to make you fight back.

Break-ups tap into a fear of change. It feels sudden, a cliff face tearing off from the land and sinking into the sea feels sudden. But in reality, there’s been a steady erosion, rock face whipped by salt, rain, and heat. You have to make sense of what you’re seeing, your body fighting the muscle memory perfected over hundreds of thousands of tiny interactions.

Fighting is intimacy as well. Something is comforting in the violence of sharp words aimed at our softest parts. It means you remember my softest parts and how to get there. Memories, in particular, are easy targets. Unmooring you from what you’ve held as fundamental truths.

‘10 questions’ makes me think about bodies and lives and the priest in high school who sat us down and told us divorce was a sin. Maybe he was onto something -- our bodies seem eager to tie themselves into knots so tight you need to cut them off to get loose. I think about ‘10 questions’ every day and have been for just short of a year now. I want more horror games in the mould — break my heart and rip me to pieces.

There are many masked protagonists in games. Dead Space’s iconic helmeted engineer Isaac Clarke immediately comes to mind. So do Halo’s and Doom’s respective space marine-clad super soldiers. And of course, Dishonored’s Clockwork masked assassin of the empire Corvo Attano. I think the first-person point of view is also a kind of mask. It provides a player cipher through an anonymised body. That quiet lead could be anyone.

Until a sequel or a remake or late game reveal. The mask comes off. They open their mouths. A creative decision to seize back that anonymity. It’s important that you know there’s a person beneath this guise and they don’t look like you. They don’t sound like you.

I’m not as pressed about racial diversity in gaming protagonists as much as I used to be. Some days I would rather not be perceived lest I be privy to how a creative team caricaturizes any part of my compound identity. Maybe that’s why it took so long for me to notice that Sable’s protagonist was brown.

I remember when it hit me. Speeding around the desert on a hoverbike. Kicking up trails of dust and rotating the camera, every moment a perfect still waiting to be framed and sent to unsuspecting friends who would politely praise my basic photography, I noticed the back of her neck peeking out from behind her mask and kissed by the desert sun. It was this deep earthy clay, It was like mine.

I’m not sure what happened to the world in Sable. There are colourful cliff faces that intimidate and entice in equal measure. Old spaceships half submerged in bright sand. Broad expanses of nature give way to the intricacy of the man-made. Its world harkens to Jean Giraud’s iconic style -- thin-inked, sharp outlines framing splashes of colour that have inspired some of the most iconic sci-fi landscapes in pop culture. The gameplay borrows directly from a more contemporary influence, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Your character, Sable, can climb just about everything in this open world, limited only by a depleting stamina bar. She can glide gently on the wind until her feet touch the ground. She solves puzzles in temples and does quests on her travels. Her hoverbike, Simoon, marries the two influences and is your main way of navigating the desert.

What ties it all together into something special and entirely singular is the writing. For the first hour of Sable, you’re preparing for “the gliding.” It’s a coming-of-age ceremony, where a young person builds their bike and sets out into the world deciding who they will become before returning home. The gliding is the context which takes these influences and re-textures them as metaphors.

The gliding takes you all across the desert but it’s always at your own pace. Sable, the protagonist, meets people from different walks of life and they all ask her to do something somewhat pertaining to their occupation. It’s like an internship. After each quest, she’s rewarded with badges which she can turn in for a mask, her chosen profession. At the end of the game, you pick your mask and you return home signalling “this is who you are.”

Adulthood can feel aimless and unconquerable. You’re spat out of the worst tutorial that doesn’t really prepare you for any aspect of life. For the first time, there isn’t a track or a path to follow. I’m 28 this May, rapidly approaching the point where it’s indefensible to say “I’m in my mid-twenties.” I’ve considered going back to school in chase of “structure,” or feedback, or a mentor to yell at me. It shouldn’t be like this. The freedom, suffocating yet alienating, is a selfishness I’ve clawed out for myself. I’m in my gliding.

Sable is my escapism. Brown people with the agency to choose their careers and allowed room to fail. Parents unmarred by the realities of poverty and the spectre of colonisation. Like many children to poor or formerly poor adults, my career options were intentionally limited. The plan was always vaguely some form of doctor, lawyer, or engineer. The jobs that made money. The ones that would take care of not only me but my parents. My father had one suit of uniform that he had to wash daily to be let into his own school. His shoes, already too small for his growing feet, would disintegrate before the term was over leaving him to hop from shaded patch to shaded patch to spare the soles of his feet from the burning asphalt heated by an ever-present Jamaican sun. My stepmother, who practically raised me, spent her childhood in a squatted home. She shared a bed too small for the number of bodies piled on and they had to fall asleep to sirens and gunshots.

They believed that their choice was between tenderness and preparing their child for a world that would never have their best interests in mind. I don’t blame them for leaning into the latter. Career choice was the realm of white folks and the privileged. Sable imagines a world where the past, present, and future of indigenous and brown/black people are within their control. A world where generational trauma is no longer hereditary. Jadi, Sable’s matriarch, sets the tone for the rest of the game.

“When you leave today, you will no longer be Sable, clan-child of the Ibexii. You will simply be Sable, and the rest will come. But no matter what you are, no matter where your journey takes you, I will always know you. I will always love you.”

Unmoored from colonialism, from capitalism, Sable is allowed to simply exist. The dessert of her twenties is a grand adventure instead of looming dread. In the open world you can go anywhere, getting lost is the point. People in her world miss their gliding, the freedom they felt when they were still finding themselves. See that mountain? You can go there. Climb it or try to. The worst that can happen is you fall, unharmed, back where you started. If halfway up that climb something across a valley catches your eye, you can just glide there. Effortlessly pivot. No cost, no debt.

Sable never takes her mask off. She’s gendered but not in a way that matters, she’s never treated differently. I never doubt for a second that I’m her, not once. The only trace of her physical identity that I am privy to, the colour of her skin, only serves to further reinforce our kinship. Games, to many, are avenues for escapism, but for whom and from what? Often not for everyone, not for me. In Sable’s world I am free, My family, my people, they’re all free. Agency willed back into their lives. Emancipated from capitalism. Untethered from the long chain of history.

“But though you go by yourself, you are not without friends. You are not without family. You are not without love. These things you will always carry with you as you do your mask.”

On December 30th, 2019 I watched my mother die after a short, brutal battle with cancer. My sister and I were the only ones, apart from the doctors and nurses, left in the small hospital room, special exceptions to the stringent visiting hours at the Andrew’s Memorial Hospital. The doctor in charge had already briefed us on what to expect — she advised us to carry her home, and make her last days comfortable. She might have a week. She could have six months. She had less than 24 hours. The cancer metastasized. It was in her liver, then her lungs. Then it was in her brain.

Grief is seasonal and the winter months, or what passes for them in Jamaica, are particularly brutal. My sister and my mother’s sister live in Chicago, thousands of miles away. To everyone else, December 30th is just a day. The day before the day before New Year’s. It’s nothing.

I decided to finish Norco.

I first tried to play Geography of Robots’ Point ‘n click adventure game at launch, in March. The prose was immediately evocative. Pixel art was used to depict decay, grime, artifice, and beauty in ways I’ve never seen before. But 30 minutes in I hit this.

I uninstalled Norco.

I remember the pixel art morphing into blurry mosaics before I wiped my eyes and then I laughed hysterically. Here was Something so cosmically cruel; if I was younger it would have reignited my faith. But those 30 minutes of Norco haunted every word I read in 2022. My mind made solvent and my grief mixed with the game.

Norco is a real town in the real United States built on trauma and twice named after its traumatisers. Its first name, Sellers, was inherited from Thomas Sellers who purchased what would become the Diamond plantation land. Its second, and current name, Norco came in 1916 when 366 acres of rice, indigo, and sugar cane land was purchased by the New Orleans Refining Company (NORCO). In 1929, the NORCO refinery was acquired by the Shell Petroleum Corporation.

In 1954 the Shell Corporation opened an oil refinery and chemical production plant next to Norco displacing the majority black residents. The families that remained hoped for jobs in these facilities but were overlooked for their white counterparts, thus forced into working for lower wages in custodial positions. “It is estimated that only about 3% of Diamond’s (Norco’s) residents were hired at the plant” (Tanesha A. Thomas).

The virtual Norco is a digital document of its real-life counterpart. Shell is traded for Shield and while the dates are muddled and the names are changed, key events within the town’s history show up in the game subtly remixed. In 1973 a pipeline explosion killed Leroy Jones and Helen Washington. Duck, a secondary character, mentioned losing his son Reece in a similar incident, a gas leak from the pipes running near his yard was ignited by his son’s lawnmower. The devastating 1988 explosion which killed seven Shell employees is also depicted as the event which killed Kay’s father, Blue, among other workers. This is Cancer Alley Norco. This is a Norco that will be devastated by hurricanes.

These real-world allusions enrichen an already compelling world. Its citizens do their best amidst the oppressive factions that have woven their tendrils throughout the town. Men hold fast to routines of work and drink, guardrails to lean on to trudge through the weight of capitalism. A cult of young men centres around an influencer, first dressed like employees of an electronic store, then as knights of the English crusade, and then finally as the “Ditch Man.” They throw away their name to become Garrett. Nazis without ideology. Dangerous men desperate to be led as the confines of gender erode and capitalism emasculates what’s left, shattering the concept of “breadwinner.”

Magical realism makes Norco’s citizens’ paranoia corporeal and undeniable. Every day they are poisoned by a legitimate operation. Some of them are made to work on the machine that poisons them. This capitalist mechanism sickens your lungs and pays your medical bills. It empties your stomach and puts food on the table. If the system works as intended, if death, cancer, and petroleum are expected byproducts, then what else is true? Why trust the cell towers? The birds? If human beings are infected by technology and surveillance, then why not nature itself?

When we finally meet the people who benefit from this oppressive scaffolding, they’re at a costume party in an old plantation house. These faceless, disconnected ‘neo-planters’ inherit the role of the slavers swapping sugar and cotton for fossil fuel but stuffing their pockets all the same while grinding brown, black, and poor bodies into loam and oil.Kay, our protagonist, slots back into this Norco trying to piece together what happened to her brother and what her mother was involved in before her death. This brings her into contact with the town’s residents — both new and familiar.

Going home is difficult. Kay left home for the reasons many do, the walls of your town, of your home, that you’re so familiar with become suffocating. It’s only the gravity of maternal death that pulls her back. Her reunion with Norco’s citizens is an awkward dance as they compare the woman in front of them with the snapshot of her in their mind — playing spot the difference. I think you lose the light in your eyes before the baby fat from your cheeks.

In late November 2019, my mother texted me that she was in the emergency room. I visited her straight away. I hadn’t seen her in over a year and she was at my alma mater’s hospital. It was a double reunion as I recognised a few of the students-cum-doctors partway through their residency. My mother was in a gown in a hospital bed, she sat upright lecturing her attending nurse. She was jaundiced but otherwise fine, she had a mild pain in her abdomen that we all thought was gas. I asked if she wanted me to stay over but I had a 14-hour shift on set the next day, so she insisted I go home.

Over the next two weeks, I’d receive text updates from her number. Some were completely indecipherable but when pressed I’d always receive “I’m fine” in response. Her friends and our relatives would reach out to me and me to visit her. I was just breaking into the local film industry at the time, and I wanted to show that I was consistent and reliable. My mother knew how much this meant to me, she’d again insist she was fine.

If I’m honest, I knew. But you know when you’re 8 and you can’t imagine that the world keeps turning when you’re asleep? I didn’t want to see her and make it real.

Some days I wish I listened to that 8-year-old. My mother sat propped up in the hospital bed, a variety of tubes flowing into her body. She turned to face me as I walked in — her eyes were glassy like a taxidermy animal. Her once fair skin was stained turmeric and pulled tight like leather. I could see the detailing of her skeleton. She was thinner than anyone should humanely be except for her abdomen, pregnant with disease.I already knew the kind of person I was in the face of death. I pension my misery, damming my eyes and swallowing my sobs. I’m a “rock,” I’m a “tree.” I turn on the washing machine and I scream during the cycles.

During the three or so weeks I spent with my dying mother a revolving door of her friends and family passed through. Many appraised me with the kind of wonder I had no patience for — marvelling at what 2 decades do to a 5-year-old boy. My mother was dying and no one wanted to admit it. There were prayer circles for weeks — 8 people joining hands in a cramped hospital room. At the end of the circle, there was always a hand beckoning me in. It felt wrong to refuse but I hated everyone in that room, I hated myself the most.

“Do you think she’ll live?” my sister ambushed me with the question in the corridor while they treated my mom on one of the days when we were her only visitors. We didn’t grow up together, and despite loving each other dearly, direct conversation was never our strength. This time she looked me straight in the eyes. I told her the truth.

“I think she will,” she replied. There was no tone, no defiance. It was just a matter of fact. Sometimes I think if I believed half as much as she did then maybe she’d still be here.

At points in Norco, you play as Catherine, Kay’s mother. These moments are set before Kay returns to Norco, but Catherine is already in the throes of her battle with cancer. She moves with purpose, running errands for the mutated manifestation of her friend’s digitised consciousness — a grotesque radioactive giant bird with multiple heads that shrieks demands — to settle her debts before she passes on. Norco is a strange game.

Catherine is nothing like my mother but playing as a woman dying of the same disease as she was an unexpected surprise that nearly sent me running from the game, again. It’s the Catherine sessions where the game feels most like a traditional point-and-click adventure. You feed a man an aged hot dog in exchange for a secret from the vendor, you follow the “ditch man” up a canal into an abandoned mall taken over by a cult of best buy employees with the same name, you watch the ditch man harvest mushrooms from a toilet in an old bathroom stall. The logic never gets as loose as the classic LucasArts games, but the goofiness persists.

Catherine’s cell phone is key to solving many of the puzzles she faces. There’s an AR app which she uses to decode hidden messages around Norco and a voice recorder that she wields against the Garretts, pitting them against each other by revealing the widespread dissent throughout their ranks. A superfluous feature on her phone is the text message app. Catherine has open threads with her son Blake, her friend Duck, and a medical agency keeping track of her mounting debt. The final thread is with you, Kay. Catherine dotes on her runaway daughter, checking in only to receive terse, economic responses and then nothing at all. She died not knowing her daughter’s phone settled in the bottom of the canyon.

I never said goodbye to my mother. By the end, she couldn’t speak. Her words came out as exhausted groans. I’d later find out she couldn’t see either, the cancer was not satisfied to live in her lungs and her liver, it wanted her brain as well. She was desperate to touch me but she had no control over her arms. Flailing limbs reached for my face, and her fingers dug into me, barely missing an eye. Our last interaction was my recoil.

Norco is about trauma and mourning on every scale. The town will die, consumed by the waters that border it in a destined 4th flood. Amidst the suffering and impending doom of a localised apocalypse, the people live on. It’s what they know. They picked up the pieces when their streets turned to rivers and sifted hope from the debris of explosions. Norco is about communication with what we’ve lost. My mother didn’t leave behind a grand mystery for me to solve. She left behind books and people. I thumb through her journals — loose observations and indecipherable hieroglyphs — and demand stories from all the people who knew her, and whose condolences trip on their tongues out of their mouths.

Norco is kind and necessary.

Near the end of her journey, Kay walks through her home. She talks to the ghosts of the people who have lived there. Her estranged father Blue, her robotic best friend Million, and her mother. Kay and Catherine sit together on the couch.

“I wish you’d have come just a little sooner,” she says, and takes your hand. “I thought we’d have breakfast together or something. I dreamed about it.”

“I wanted to…” you respond.

“That’s what I’d hoped.” She smiles. “Just that you wanted to.”She hugs you awkwardly and kisses you on the forehead before wiping tears on her sleeve.

It all feels wrong. I’ve never been to Boston. Here, its hollowed buildings that jut out from the land towards the sky, like a carcass picked dry, feel dead like they’ve never been alive. I can’t comment on the topography or the placement of the streets; I don’t know where the turnpike should be. But I know this isn’t what people are like. They’re never this cruel. A world can never be this sterile.

The paragraph above is about Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us. A game heralded for its storytelling, its fidelity, and frustratingly, its grim realism. Another work in the long list of Post Apocalyptic Science Fiction media that posits cruelty as a foundational building block of humanity. Another game that’s set in the wrong place. Another game that cannot see the opportunity at The End.

My mother would sometimes wish for the world to end. She wasn’t serious, at least, not in the doomsday cult way. She’d shake her head, disappointed, exhausted, hands on her hips, and mutter “I can’t wait for God to come for his world.”

It wasn’t an uncommon thought. Jamaica has finished in the top 10 in murder per capita for the last 10 years. We’re besieged by corruption in our public offices. Debt looms over many Jamaicans who first have to meet the most stringent conditions to establish a line of credit. The list goes on. For my mother, it was impossible to imagine a world where we don’t suffer under the heel of oppressive institutions that are so omnipresent they feel as natural as gravity.

So one possible view of the post-apocalypse is salvation — undoing the maligned histories and realities that hold back BIPOC people and the citizens of the Global South. In many digital Western Apocalypses, the dissolution of these institutions is temporary. Developers re-imagine currency in much the same way it existed before, but instead of fiat paper, there are bottlecaps. In the absence of policing, the player is given a gun and a slap on the ass and told to make things right as they see fit. The power fantasy that’s become the default experience in many video games intersects with the power fantasy that pulls people into Law Enforcement.

However, it’s not these games fail to consider the post-apocalypse as possibly emancipatory, they do, but they scorn and fear those emancipated. Without societal rules, and the agents to enforce them, the post-apocalypse becomes a wasteland, and those who cling to this freedom have either made a poor ethical choice or are deeply unhinged.

A lot of this is rooted in fear. Arguably, the entire genre is. Interplay’s Wasteland, which would, in turn, inspire the popular Fallout series, extrapolated a fear and paranoia that festered during the US-Russia Cold War. The smaller-scale paranoia in the aftermath of these fictional disasters illustrates a similar ‘fear of neighbor’ that’s consistent with a celebration of individualism and exceptionalism. One has to look no further than the nuclear family and its mythic position within Western cultural ideals. Core to the concept of the nuclear family is intimacy with those immediately around you and rigid enforcement of barriers to restrict that intimacy and connection. Everyone outside of those four walls and white picket fence is a danger. Extrapolating that further, those outside of your district or scheme are threatening. Then finally, those outside your country.

Most of these apocalypses depict the horror of strangers. Communities cannot form or they cannot last as the individual’s ego supersedes the collective. These stories lean into the same power fantasy as the impromptu police officer mentioned earlier. The patriarch, stink with fear and excitement, grips his weapon so tight that his knuckles try to escape his flesh. He’s cocked and ready to protect what is his — his family.

But even this excitement is contained and dishonest. To reveal it for what it is — wishful escapism — would denigrate our protagonist, maybe even the player, to the role of the “savages” he has to defeat. And they are “savages.” From Telltale’s Walking Dead to Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us, and many many others, video game developers deploy ‘the cannibal.’ This monstrous individual has reverted to animal instincts in the absence of rules and norms to guide them otherwise. Christopher Columbus used the same tactic to justify the enslavement, murder, rape, and genocide of indigenous people in the Americas. There is a clear parallel — without the guiding presence of Western Civilisation to elevate these people out of ferality, they pose a danger to themselves and more importantly, to “civilization.”

At the mention of civilization, we should address the use of “reversion” and “regression” in this piece. These concepts are exclusively White and Western. In Audra Mitchell and Aadita Chaudhury’s research article ‘Worlding beyond ‘the’ ‘end’ of ‘the world’: white apocalyptic visions and BIPOC futurisms’ there is a coined phrase “the linear myth of time.” “At stake, these discourses (Western Post Apocalyptic Fiction) claim, is the ‘progress’ of humans and other life forms toward greater complexity and perfection,” or to paraphrase, the histories that led to our modern-day and then the fictional apocalypse were immutable, and ultimately constructive, regardless of the cost. Be it pollution into global warming, World Wars, or the Slave Trade.

As such the apocalyptic ‘regression’ represents a return to the conditions that Western Civilization ‘rescued’ us from. The predominantly white and affluent heads of AAA development studios cannot fathom a world of divergent timelines. In their fiction, history is re-traced, ignoring the possibility of exploring ‘what could have been.’ — the technologies that BIPOC people could have developed free from the ongoing trauma of genocide and forced migration.

The exclusive focus on what is lost not only results in worlds that are tired and unimaginative, but also empty and lifeless. Culture cannot progress because there is no eye to what’s changed in these artificial worlds, much less any consideration for a possible future.

By these works’ own admission, apocalypses are happening right now.

The metallic structures grafted onto the European City 17 during the Combine occupation is not unlike the US army bases found in the Philippines. The architecture is distinct from the occupied, imperialist in its very structure. To date, Japan is the only nation to have experienced fallout from a nuclear attack. In both examples culture proves amorphous, incorporating these “apocalypses” into the art and music of the people.

Jamaican reggae comments on abusive policing and the residual effects of chattel slavery to this day. But in these worlds, culture festers. Fathers teach their daughters Pearl Jam. There are no new songs. The art on the walls screams in easy-to-read text, pulling from a shortlist of tropes, “man is the real monster”, or maybe “history is doomed to repeat itself,” or something to that effect. The color of culture is washed out as it is subsumed into a blasé whiteness.

Finally, there’s the apocalypse as a metaphor and allegory. Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us franchise provides a unique example for analysis. The original game can be read as the apocalypse as a metaphor for grief. At the beginning of the game, protagonist Joel Miller loses his daughter to an instance of state violence. There’s a fungal (zombie) pandemic, humanity falters, infrastructure turns decrepit, and he grows hostile to life. The setting of the Last Of Us becomes the emotional landscape of Joel.

The violence he enacts to protect and then rescue his surrogate daughter Ellie is vengeful, not just for her, but for his dead daughter. There’s no healing for Joel. He doesn’t find community, at least not until he rescues Ellie. He leans into the common machismo power fantasy afforded by the apocalypse and protects what is his by force. In the end, he’s rewarded with said replacement daughter, fulfilling his wants. Even here the apocalypse is about reclamation and regeneration. The game never draws any parallels with real-life state violence, at least not until its sequel, where it does to harrowing ends. Instead, it individualizes Joel’s grief and his absolution.

The Last of Us was not the progenitor of this piece. These ideas were crystallized while taking pictures in Origame Digital’s near-future Tauranga in their stellar work Umurangi Generation. The player is cast as a Maori photographer taking pictures of graffiti, friends, strangers, whatever a bullet list instructs of you. Across the various levels, you get a grasp on the life people lead and the conflicts they face. We see UN soldiers who alternate between lazy and brutal. We see mechs gearing up to face horrifying kaiju, climate change given horrifying form. We see posters for missing children and memorials for dead pilots. We see protestors brutalized by an occupying force for voicing their dissent.

And we see a rooftop party. We see art plastered on walls. We see people determined to serve looks. We hear music blaring from diegetic speakers, teeming with energy.

For me, this was the first game that understood something that I’ve never articulated and that none of these Western apocalypses seem to understand — the suffering does not exclusively suffer. Cruelty does not manifest in the absence of Western institutions, but often because of them. And in the face of great suffering, people often band together.

In 2004 Jamaica was hit by the first Category 5 hurricane in my lifetime — Hurricane Ivan. The vicious storm pulled up trees and light posts non-discriminantly. Rivers because indistinguishable from roads and yet the pipes ran dry. We lived beside a gully, a smaller tributary to a larger trench. At 9 years old, it was deeper than I was tall. My family made a decision, that was foolish in hindsight, to cover the gully with these large concrete slabs. That’s thick lines of metal bent into the frame of a square, then coated in layers of cement. They were heavy. An aesthetic solution to an eyesore during our home renovations.

During the storm with no efficient runoffs into our gully, water began pooling in our yard. It reached my father’s waist. He waded to the slabs and tried to haul them up. He screamed for me to help. He was desperate, but I was 9. My head couldn’t reach his waist.

So he just started yelling. At me, my stepmother, maybe God, I don’t know. But outran our neighbor, Andrew. Barely dressed, in a fucking hurricane. Our families were not close. We were polite enough for good mornings and conversations about inept politicians. But with barely an exchange of words, my father and my neighbor lifted slab after slab, draining our yard.

We don’t fucking kill each other when shit goes bad. We don’t leave each other to die.

To live in the Global South is to brave apocalyptic conditions enacted by the West. They appropriate our stories, but they change the setting, they make up a villain, and then they cast themselves as the hero. Their empty dioramas are filled with caricatures of cruelty and sadism. Their “reality” is voyeuristic and escapist. After all, they’re only tourists here.