“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster…when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Baldur’s Gate, 1988
“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.” – WarGames, 1983
***
Name a game you lose before you learn to understand the rules.
This one.
***
There’s a popular conception, widely held by gamers themselves, that games don’t mean anything. Don’t take them so seriously. They’re just for fun.
When I was 7, I helped teach my brother how to read, not with a book but with a Nintendo Entertainment System. Neither of us were interested in picture books—I had read everything there was to read twice, and my brother’s attention was impossible to keep. But our dad had bought himself Final Fantasy (the first in a series that spans decades), and it was a video game that featured a story, characters, foreshadowing, dialogue, and, strangely, hundreds and hundreds of words. Dick was playing fetch with Spot somewhere in a saccharine book, but my brother and I were commandeering pirate ships and inhabiting characters with motivations we had to look up in the dictionary in order to understand.
You could fight monsters outside the town without reading, but before long, you would have no idea where to go, what to do, unless you could read. My brother never fell in love with books, but to this day he plays games.
Read War and Peace. Read it again, front to back. That’s about how many words there are in the video game Baldur’s Gate 1.
***
My brother and I know the Nietzsche quote above not from a book but from Baldur’s Gate, a game I vividly recall reading and playing between reading The Handmaid’s Tale. Part of my literacy I owe to video games. Part, in fact, of my identity. And while it would be years before either of us saw a black character in a video game, for a long time, video games were the only media I was reading that had characters that reflected me. Because I was the character I was playing. Final Fantasy let me name my character. Baldur’s Gate let me name my character. And each time I named him Keith.
***
Resident Evil is perhaps more famous to some people as a movie than as a game, but it began and remains an extremely popular video game series. The game centers primarily around the dread surrounding undead monsters, and, in popular video game fashion, the joy of killing as many of those creatures as you possibly can. The fifth game of the series takes place in an apocalypse. Well-trod genre material for any American. And like the Walking Dead, much of Resident Evil’s world is overtaken by zombies that seem to suffer from what must be a kind of disease. Resident Evil 5 takes place in Africa. The short of it: in many scenes, you spend the game as a white character in impoverished cities emptying round after round into crowds of diseased Africans.
It is easiest to believe this doesn’t mean anything, that games don’t mean anything, if pulling the trigger doesn’t trigger any sort of negative response in you. This isn’t to suggest that games need to be non-violent, or that someone who plays Resident Evil 5 and enjoys it is likely to want to harm black people. But it is easier to play a game without a critical eye under certain conditions.
That is, when you look like the heroes and not the monsters.
***
I teach high school students, often students of color in the Chicago Southside, how to write poetry. But I also teach other groups of students, often in neighborhoods with the money to devote toward technology-based education, about designing analogue and digital games. One of the first exercises I have game students do forces them to question their understanding of games, because they almost always actively resist taking them seriously.
Who can name a game where winner takes all?
Monopoly.
What about a game that doesn’t have a winner?
Jenga (Some would argue here, but the primary driving force of Jenga is not to win so much as to avoid losing. Jenga really has one loser and 1 or more schadenfruede participants).
Great. Now name a game that doesn’t end.
Tag (Tag has no winners either, or, for that matter, losers. Tag has no end game. You can be bad at tag, and you certainly can be good, but never good enough to win).
Great. You just lost The Game.
***
“Welcome to Africa,” Sheva Alomar says to a broad-shouldered white man (you). His name is Chris, and he might be related to Channing Tatum. Sheva is the other playable character in Resident Evil 5. She is light-skinned, with a gye nyame adinkra symbol tattooed on her arm.
Later, she (you?) will ask: “Wouldn’t you rather be back in American than a place like this?”
***
The origins of The Game are unknown, but it has been popular on portions of the internet for as long as I can remember. The rules vary, but the most consistent ones are as follow:
1. Everyone is playing The Game.
2. Whenever you think about The Game, you lose.
You don’t opt into The Game, and you can’t opt out. You’re playing it now (and losing). Your boss, wherever they are, is playing too. If your parents are alive, they are playing. The guy you went out on a date with one time, and you don’t remember his last name or even his face, really: he’s playing The Game.
A popular tactic (tactic is the wrong word, as you will see) of The Game is merely to announce its existence, on a message board. On a Facebook status. Aloud. In doing so, you lose The Game, of course, but so does everyone else, there, at that moment. Even if they’d been winning for years, suddenly they have lost. Lost, of course, until they forget they are playing The Game.
***
In the opening scene, Sheva and Chris walk past a group of black men beating what appears to be a human figure wrapped in cloth. The men’s clubs are makeshift. When you approach, they stop, staring at you silently.
The game has given you no weapon. Not yet. These are not the monsters you are looking for.
***
When I was 12, my best friend at school and I were in the cafeteria. To get my attention, he called me an Oreo. I laughed (I still have nightmares about that laugh). He was teasing, I knew, but what a ridiculous thing to call me. What, like the cookie?
Later, I walked to the library. No more the days of finding a dictionary. The internet made looking up words easy.
Maybe even fun. It was the early days of the internet.
I found that Oreo was a racial slur. At the time, in a diverse school, I didn’t think about my blackness much. Perhaps that’s part of what made me an Oreo: someone who is black on the outside, and white on the inside.
***
A user named Krellen, from shamusyoung.com, offers one of the most popular defenses of Resident Evil 5:
“A recurring character (who happens to be white) going on his latest mission to a place that happens to be almost entirely populated by people that happen to be black does not make the entire model itself racist…Out of context, it looks pretty racist. In context, not so much.”
Gaming culture is such that players often strongly identify with their games. In much the way that a band, especially in high school, is not just a band but a statement you are making to the world, games tend to be integral to one’s sense of self.
In an all-white high school, part of what led me to listen to rappers like Onyx and Mystikal was to claim my blackness.
And sometimes, for that sense of identity, we are willing to do backflips. About the way our music talks about women, or what the violence in our games might mean. I am careful to remind students that critiquing a game does not make it (them) bad. That a game mechanic can be racist and you might still like the game. I remind them that intention matters, but it is not the only thing that matters. And I ask them if a statement, if a movie or song or situation, has to be designed to make you feel unsafe or uncomfortable in order to make you feel unsafe or uncomfortable.
I want to ask them “Do women have to feel safe walking alone at night if the city didn’t mean to make it unsafe for her to walk?”
I want them to ask, “Whose context?”
I want them to know that characters never happen to be white men, people do.
***
1983, the year I was born, the movie WarGames was released. WarGames is about a hacker (Matthew Broderick) who accesses a military supercomputer called WOPR (War Operation Plan Response), a machine capable of predicting the outcomes of a nuclear war. Broderick’s 80s-style hacking nearly starts World War 3, and, famously, leads to one conclusion:
“The only winning move is not to play.”
A reminder: you’ve just lost The Game.
***
Being a teenager is overwhelming enough. Instead of designing a game from scratch, I have teens modify (mod) games that already exist. Think of them as house rules. The rules don’t have to make the game better. They may make it worse, but we can consider how the rules change how the game feels, what it means, and how we operate within it.
For instance, consider these pretty big house rules:
Imagine playing poker. You’re playing with your life savings, but curiously, everyone else is playing with plastic chips. If you win, you keep your money, and, you suppose, the plastic chips. If they win, they have your livelihood.
Is this fair? Would you play this game, if you had a choice?
Let’s up the ante, so to speak. We’re playing The Game (sorry, you’ve lost again, but bear with me). Only now, knowing that the game exists whether or not you choose to play it, people consider it when their children are born.
So before playing, your parents pass onto you a token. Perhaps their parents had given it to them, in fact. Let’s say the token is tied to your family. You can’t give it away. Like the poker experiment above, this token changes the stakes of your game. Written on the token, perhaps in Tolkien-esque script seen only when the token is thrust, unburning, into a fire, is a script that says, simply, what precisely happens when you lose The Game (sorry). For a majority of the players, the coin says nothing. This is the best case scenario. For some percentage, it says something worse. Perhaps you lose your job. Perhaps your house is taken from you, or your right to choose what to do with your own body.
Remember the two rules of The Game.
1. Everyone is playing The Game.
2. Whenever you think about The Game, you lose.
Some tokens simply say “death.” Perhaps women receive two tokens. Perhaps some people receive many more.
Perhaps this doesn’t matter to you. Perhaps you have a token with nothing written on it. Perhaps you are one of the lucky few who gets to play the same game as us, but with none of the stakes. Or maybe you’re tired of talking about The Game. Maybe you earnestly believe the only way to win the game is not to play it.
But Like Jenga, The Game has no winners. Only losers. Like tag, it has no end.
You can refuse to talk about it, but you’re still playing with the rest of us. You’re still playing The Game.