(I made the site into a book kind of! It’s on itch.io! It’s a dollar if you want to buy it!)
The video game industry brings in tens of billions of dollars a year. It’s more lucrative than movies, music, books or any other type of media you can think of. The stories the medium tells run the gamut of human emotion and expression, from whimsical fantasies to hardnosed military fiction.
And all of it is political.
Before we get too far into this project, we need to define terms. When I say “video games are political,” here’s what I mean.
Politics is an ongoing conversation about how the world should operate. This conversation is happening all the time, not just between Big Boy State Actors but between you and me, right now, as your political worldview – your ideology – comes into contact with mine in the moments you are reading this book.
Ideologies are complex and usually not very static. We might not be very ideologically rigid or consistent, but that’s fine – I’m not expecting that here. Simply put, when I say “video games are political,” I’m saying that games and the people who make them are part of this ongoing conversation about how the world should operate. Let me show you just a couple examples of what I’m talking about. Spoilers for The Outer Worlds ahead.
In 2019’s The Outer Worlds, one of the protagonist’s first companions, Parvati, is an asexual woman who over the course of the game becomes romantically attracted to another engineer, Junlei Tennyson. In the side quest “Drinking Sapphire Wine,” you can help Parvati open up to Junlei, and if all goes well eventually they will go on a date in the Unreliable. If things continue to go well in your playthrough, you might get this dialogue at the end of the game:
Once the matter with the Hope colonists was resolved, Junlei bashfully asked Parvati if she’d like to join her permanently on the Groundbreaker, and Parvati enthusiastically – if somewhat awkwardly – agreed.
The stories of her adventures spread across the colony, and Parvati soon found herself the center of attention. Having served as the engineer of a renowned spacecraft, tramp freighters and wildcat miners sought her out by name, and in no time, she was a fixture in the Groundbreaker’s mechanical ecosystem. She and Junlei were never far apart.
The politics of gender and sexuality are very much at play here. Obsidian narrative designer Kate Dollarhyde and writer Chris L’Etoile made a conscious choice in creating Parvati as an asexual character. In an interview with VICE Games, Dollarhyde confirmed that L’Etoile, who left The Outer Worlds during production, included the detail, and as an asexual person herself, she was able to flesh out the specifics of what that meant for Parvati.
Asexuality is a marginalized sexual identity where someone does not experience sexual attraction to anyone. It doesn’t often get represented in popular media, and when it does, it seldom gets represented well. Parvati has a backstory that is very familiar to many aces, including Dollarhyde: historically, her relationships with allosexual (non-ace) partners strain and, at best, the people she likes or loves begin to think of her as cold or robotic.
Dollarhyde told VICE, “This person that she loves might start a relationship with her and be gung ho, maybe over time, they’ll realize ‘I can’t actually do this. I’m not. I’m not capable being in a relationship with an asexual person and dealing with those challenges’ and they gotta bounce. That is a fear that has persisted through all of my adult life, so I wanted to put that directly in the text to speak to those people who I assume probably feel the same way.”
The genius of Parvati’s story within The Outer Worlds is that it’s 1) so mundane and simply a part of the game world and 2) it has a chance to end extremely well in the context of a larger story. She gets a happy ending where she and Junlei are both sought-after engineers. Even in the versions of her storyline where things don’t go so well, it’s got nothing to do with her sexual orientation, which – and I need to stress this – is rarely the case when talking about asexual folks.
This is a conscious push to challenge a dominant ideology in storytelling. The way queer people in general, and ace folks in particular, are presented in media usually follows a specific track, depending on the sexual orientation or gender of the subject. In The Outer Worlds, we got to see a queer relationship develop without sexual pressure. It wasn’t announced; it was merely discovered by players in the course of their play. It resonated with folks who are particularly sensitive to these kinds of narratives, and it created a possibility space for new ways of thinking among those who weren’t.
Another example of an explicitly political moment in games is the ongoing discussion surrounding crunch in game development. If you’re not familiar with crunch, it is the practice of compelling employees to work harder for longer hours than normal, usually before a major deadline. In the games industry the practice can be permanent, depending on the company or the title you’re working under.
This is explicitly a space concerning the politics of class and labor struggle. And new organizations have arisen to challenge the industry along class and labor struggle lines, like Game Workers Unite. It is a direct challenge to the particular ideology of capitalism many corporations subscribe to, but to which game companies seem to really love: that workers are expendable, that profits must always increase no matter what, and that, “if you do what you love, you’ll never ‘work’ a day in your life!” What Game Workers Unite and other unionists and activists say in response is that all workers deserve dignity and respect in the workplace, and making someone work a 100-hour week every week for six months is neither dignifying or respectful.
So, politics is a constant conversation between opposing and complementary ideologies about the world and how it works. Video games clearly fit into this mold, but there is a reluctance to talk about it. At least, that’s what I thought prior to starting No Escape last year.
What I found is that actually, there is an incredibly vibrant group of indie critics and freelance writers who are very plugged into this conversation. The folks at RE:BIND, Uppercut Crit, Unwinnable and so many more writers and outlets than I can even name are doing incredible, thoughtful and provocative work in this space on the daily. I’m stoked as hell that I stumbled into this group of amazing writers. It has profoundly effected me as a writer.
Last year was a wild ride in a lot of ways. Hell, the last six months have been wild. But through it all, No Escape has been the thing I can hold onto, a place I can return to refocus. I published the following pieces for myself, initially. Usually as an act of catharsis but sometimes because I wanted to see how far I could push myself as a writer. There are moments I’m deeply proud of and moments that are, as the kids say, major Ls or epic bruh moments. I’m printing them all here, again, for you. I hope you read this collection of essays and, at the very least, are entertained even for a moment.
Thanks for stopping by.