Y’all remember when video games discovered empathy on accident, along with the notion that choices people make have consequences? What a wild few years that was. Suddenly every game advertised their elaborate systems full of Meaningful Choices™, where you, the player, would suddenly find yourself caring about the world you were interacting with. Every choice you made had an Earth-Shattering Effect on the story in some way – even if the game was still fundamentally linear. Then developers started remixing this idea by making games where the choices you made were permanent, even if you restarted. Games like Undertale come to mind here. Everyone wanted players to feel empowered, to have agency, to not walk through the worlds they made as ineffective gods but leave their marks. No game represented this notion better than Telltale’s The Walking Dead series. Even if you never played it, you no doubt have played something inspired by it. At the very least, you’ve heard or read or seen the phrase, “[X] will remember this” somewhere online.
Remember when national tat purveyor GameStop tried to argue in front of God and the government and everyone that it provided an “essential service,” all so it could keep its retail locations open in the midst of a global pandemic? That was only a few days ago, but you’ll be forgiven if the ensuing days have passed more like months or years. Yeah. While basically every other business has shut its doors for the foreseeable future, GameStop was planning on weathering the present storm in probably the dumbest way possible: by staying open.
That story at least ends well: according to Polygon, GameStop stores will not be publicly accessible starting tomorrow, March 22. They’ll be paying employees to stay at home, and any employees who do come in will be putting curbside delivery into practice. Of course, this only happened after public outcry, but at least it happened with less-than-terrible consequences.
At least it’s not this airport Chili’s that made their employees come to work, clean the restaurant space, and then fired them.
This is all happening against a backdrop of the worst pandemic in at least a few decades and a government that broadly agrees it should help its people, but is really hung up on what exact percentage of the population it actually considers to be “people.” The universal basic income everyone was floating last week has been exchanged for means-tested temporary disbursements and tax credits that will likely hurt the lower classes more than it helps them. Rent is still due for most of us on April 1. And cities, counties and states can’t agree whether folks who can’t pay their electric, gas or water bills should have their shit shut off or not.
When I think about the period when video games discovered empathy and “meaningful choice” I think that maybe folks all learned the wrong lesson from it. That maybe they all learned that it’s profitable to sometimes show their human side, to engage in behaviors that consumers might identify as sensitive or kind. That maybe it’s beneficial – financially, to the brand, et cetera – to foster “communities” of supporters and create workplace environments that are superficially positive for employees.
I think what they probably should have learned was that their real actions have consequences, and we will fucking remember this.
Those employees you fired because you didn’t want to pay sick leave to them? They’ll remember. The cashiers you treated like shit because someone got your order wrong and they’re the most convenient punching bags? They’ll remember. The customer service reps you screamed at who still have to go to work in call centers because their boss can’t let them work at home? They’ll fucking remember. And they won’t just remember you. They’ll remember everyone who fucked them over in a time when they could have used the most help.
The system is rotten, and at its core are people who pursued wealth and power for its own sake. Everyone from the executives at GameStop who decided — however briefly — that profit was more important than the health and safety of its mostly-part-time workforce to the senators who profited off the knowledge that COVID-19 would sweep the country like a crimson wave — all of them are culpable for what’s about to come next, and they should be held accountable with a fury we haven’t seen before in this country.
If your landlord tries to force you to pay rent on threat of eviction during the pandemic, go on rent strike. If you’re forced to work because you’re part of the “essential workforce” and you’re not a doctor or a nurse, unionize your workplace. If your city, county or state won’t provide relief, take it yourself — wherever you can get it. And once this is all over, it’s time to wrest a better world out of the hands of all the fucking monsters who currently shape this one.