2016 in Review: I Put in WORK

An archive of things you may have missed.

I’m a profoundly negative person. It’s easy for me to forget the positive. Blame the depression, personal situations etc etc. So it was easy for me to forget that over the last year I’ve done a LOT of work, and even improved a bit at writing. So I thought I’d review everything I’ve done in the past year, and remind others of things they may have missed the first time.

This’ll be long, so feel free to leave and revisit if it please you.

The First Rule of Satire is: You Do Not Talk About Satire

Thoughts on how satire can play into and reaffirm harmful social ideas in its attempt to critique them:

There’s a mentality here that believes if you exaggerate something to a large enough degree it will draw attention to its own absurdity. That’s not always enough, especially in a context where we are routinely taught to dismiss those ideas. Take for example the handling of Far Cry 3. While the lead writer, Jeffrey Yohalem, attempts to subvert tropes and stereotypes regarding violence, morality and race, the format of its presentation ends up reinforcing those harmful ideas. Yohalem insisted that by casting the player as a gun or tool of the Rakyat (literally meaning “the people”) and creating a white protagonist referred to as “Snow White” he created a subversion of the stubborn colonial tropes that have existed since the 19th century.

But how many games have you played that cast you as “the gun,” as the tool for a greater machine’s aspirations? That describes the majority of shooters, including every entry of the Far Cry series itself. The “removal” of a character’s agency doesn’t make it any less of a power fantasy, especially when it’s already the basis of the genre.

One of my earlier attempts at cultural crit, which has some decent ideas, but suffers from being a bigger idea than the format and word count can give justice to. But hey, the director of Far Cry 2 liked it. Sort of:

A Majula State of Mind

A meditation on the world of Dark Souls II and its mirror to personal experiences growing up in poverty.

For all the violence, the resistance that it provides every step of the way, DSII brings respite to it in the community it builds, in the sanctuary of Majula. Even the narrative feels more compassionate. Gone is the the Chosen Undead of the first game, a character who success is a forgone conclusion before the game even begins. Instead you are the Bearer of the Curse, someone who travels from elsewhere seeking a cure for their curse, drawn to a new land. It’s an immigrant story. It’s the story of many drawn to the United States in search of opportunity, the story of my parents and I.

This was me finally putting to words my complex feelings on why DSII resonated with me, in a series that has often failed to. It’s also something that has only become more personal given the vitriol DSII inexplicably receives compared to the rest of the series.

Exploitation is Not Awareness

About how we often use the idea of spreading awareness to excuse actual critical engagement with tough subjects in games:

The problem with arguing that featuring these subjects brings awareness to them is that these depictions lack the contexts that make them meaningful. It flattens a complex subject in order to package it up for entertainment. It assumes the “how” of a depiction is less important than the “what”. Instead of turning the lens outward towards how history erases these facts, the arguments justify the original act of erasure committed. Is it okay to depict one of the worst conflicts of the last century with the cool of a Hollywood blockbuster if a few people go on to read a Wikipedia page on it? Is it admirable to have your characters tortured and raped if a games writer suddenly realizes that the government commits atrocities under the justification of wartime fear?

This one made it onto the May 15th round up of Critical Distance, a site that compiles the best of games crit weekly. It took a lot out of me to write, and at times I still find myself repeating arguments from it, frustrated at the efforts our insular games culture will go to to stay ignorant. I’d also like to think that I’ve improved a lot since writing this.

DEORBITAL

This one I’m particularly proud of. I started this with Dante Douglas, as a place for smaller voices writing about games to get noticed. So many great writers came to us, and there’s so many stories we published that are dear to my heart. Right now we’re on hiatus, since we’re currently out of funds and don’t want to ask others to write without pay, but I hope one day we come back to it.

Oh, and this repeatedly made it to Critical Distance, which makes me very happy.

Digital Secondhand

A personal history of emulation, and how experiencing old games without the context they arrived in changes your memory of them.

In a way, emulators were like getting a secondhand account of a game. You experienced games not through the direct interface between you and the original hardware, but through imperfect machines relaying the experience to you. The idiosyncrasies of each emulator’s operation made up part the personalities their creators had constructed, and each emphasized a different part of the game. Emulation is never 100% accurate, and hacks are often needed to get certain games to work at all. It gave everything the feeling of a bootleg: some details were off, some were considered close enough, and some were outright lies.

Child of a Jackal: Quick Thoughts on Overwatch’s Pharah

This one will haunt me. It’s likely the reason half of you are here. Its by far my most prolific piece, thanks in part to both the growing desire for this kind of cultural crit and the massive popularity of Overwatch. Every other week I’m reminded that this is still doing numbers, and it’s been cited by a bunch of others in similar critiques.

I also failed to successfully pitch this to any publication, got paid nothing for it, and have been hassled over it. I hate it, often think of deleting it, and it upsets me that of all the writing I’ve done this is the one that got others to pay attention.

Don’t read it. Read my response to it instead.

For the Old Neighborhoods, Both Physical and Digital

Reminiscence on how digital places can begin to feel as real and tender as the places we grew up in.

Sometimes those digital streets felt more real than the ones I lived on. My family lived in a state of flux back then, perpetually moving from home to home almost every other year, as far as I could remember. Maybe it was my dad’s stubborn personality that kept him at odds with the landlords, or his continually changing career path. Whatever the story, at some point these digital places became more familiar to me than the homes we constantly were uprooted from. I could tell you stories about the people and locations in them, give you better directions within them than I could my own block. Those islands were an anchor in a situation that kept sweeping us away to unfamiliar places.

This came out a bit rougher than I’d like, but it let me settle thoughts I’ve had on Link’s Awakening and Sonic R that I’ve tried to express for a long time. I’m appreciative for that, and being able to have it published somewhere I respect.

Who Does the Stars and Stripes Represent?

A story about trying to understand my place in a country my father loves, but where I never felt accepted me.

Today, I am an American citizen. After 20 years of living in this country, growing up here, and speaking only its language, the papers are now in place to confirm that, yes, I am a citizen of the United States. But while there are cities and neighborhoods that feel close to my heart, I still do not feel as if I belong here. When I see others stand for the national anthem, beaming with pride, I can only think of the ways the country has told me, repeatedly, “we don’t want your kind here.” When I hear of the “rockets’ red glare” and “the bombs bursting in air,” I don’t think of triumph, or freedom, but of drone strikes killing Yemenis on their way to a wedding.

This was published under the title “The American Flag is a Symbol of Oppression” alongside a picture of Trump. Not only did this immediately draw the ire of people who were already inclined to not give it a chance, it reframed what was a story of a personal struggle into something more aggressive.

Shock and Awe: The Political Influence of Modern Warfare

A critical look at the original Modern Warfare within the contexts of both games and politics, historically, and in a modern context. It’s amazing how different it feels to play in today’s political climate. More than anything, it’s implicated in the work both it and its imitators have done to propagandize American fears.

Another difficulty one to write, but something that I felt made good use of real world examples to illustrate the tensions I had with its treatment of war.

Why We Can’t Afford to Forgive the Trump Voters

A day after story. Full of anger at others who refuse, even with the election of a white supremacist, to acknowledge the serious problems with this country that have become more than obvious.

It’s coherent enough, but I have no love for it, and working on it has soured me on the idea of writing political stories for others.

22 Japanese Import Classics on the PlayStation Network

Sure, it’s a list of videogames. But it’s also a list that I spent many nights working on, going through every page of a store in another language to find cool things that others might enjoy. Plus, I wrote some decent, well researched blurbs that you’d probably enjoy even if you don’t play the games.

The Art of Nothing: A Look at Negative Space within Videogames

The other thing you might know me from. A look at what we can learn about games by looking at what’s not there. Introduces some art theory and history and brings them into games, which is one of my favorite things to do.

This could probably be condensed and sharpened, but at the very least I’ve been told that the examples I’ve made have been very useful to understanding art concepts, which I’m happy with. It’s also picked up attention, and while not quite as much as the Overwatch story has, has told me there’s a desire for this kind of writing, which I’m glad to see.

The Undeniable Beauty of Lo-Fi Gaming

My first feature with interviews, and my first piece on a larger games outlet. This one took almost half a year with all the effort involved and honestly felt like a lot more work than I’d have liked. In the end I turned my more theory focused ideas into something readable and coherent, with the help of my editor, Austin Walker. That, at least, was useful experience and some tough work that I needed to do.

Yoshi’s Woolly World, Badges and a Forgotten History of Cheating

Yoshi’s Wooly World is a grand game, and one that let’s you play around in its sandbox, often in ways that break it. It inspired some thoughts on how cheating felt much more socially acceptable before.

There was a certain social acceptance to cheating. In some games, cheating was the way to play the game. What are the early Grand Theft Auto games without a city-wide rampage fueled by an illegitimately earned arsenal of high powered weapons and flying cars? Likewise, my memory of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 will always be tied to the codes entered at the sound test screen.

These cheats would let you jump between levels, or get all the Chaos Emeralds and see Super Sonic, a feat no one I knew could do legitimately. And of course there’s the Konami Code, made famous by its inclusion in Contra, a demanding NES run and gun shooter. For games like these, cheat codes gave you a way to see parts of game you might not otherwise never see.

This, and my story on Negative Space, were a good start to this year. I’m hoping that I’m able to write more like this.

Speaking of which:

These essays, and video essays, are made possible by contributors from Patreon by viewers like you. Thank you.

Amr is the Editor-in-Chief of deorbital.media (@deorbital), and clickbliss.net (@clickbliss).