#IRL I can always pattern spot and see when people are going to fuck me over and I have no ability to counter plan

[bharv]

People who write Gortash as properly scheming, plotting, all the things he definitely is as a tyrant, I am in awe of you.

I am just far too stupid to do it

[carolynpetit]

Reason to Play, a Journal--Entry One: Fortnite, MGSV, and Finding Ourselves in the Act of Play

Hi. 

This is the first entry in what I hope will be an ongoing journal of play. I wanted to start by explaining my thinking behind this project.

Right now, I’m looking for a reason to play. I’m always wary of games that seem to offer nothing beyond a mildly pleasant occupation of my time, and right now, I find such games downright inadequate. Unworthy. These are horrifying times, and yet, like so many of us, I find myself exhausted by it all. Unable to maintain the levels of rage and resistance that the actions of the current administration demand. I see it all becoming normalized and I feel powerless to stop it. And as the days and weeks and months go by, I feel as if this numbness accrues. I become increasingly detached, not just from the horrors of the moment but from myself. I start to wonder where the person I believed myself to be has gone. 

I believe that art is most vital in times like this. I love this quote from Kafka: 

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for?...We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”

If a game isn’t going to be the axe for the frozen sea inside me, if it isn’t going to cut through the numbness, shake me up, break my heart, fuck me up, do something to rehumanize me, it is not worthy of this moment. 

But I might find what I’m looking for anywhere. I’m not talking just about games that explicitly comment on fascism or racial injustice or economic inequality. Yes, I think it’s essential that we have art, including games, that confronts these things directly, but it’s also true that a game can have the noblest aims and leave me cold, while a throwaway moment in a big-budget mainstream game of the sort that certain gamers like to call “apolitical” can crack my heart wide open. 

Like most of my writing about games, this journal will be a place where I fully embrace the subjectivity of my own experience with the games that I play.

Okay. Here we go.

Testin’ My Mind, Shakin’ My Body in Fortnite

Yeah, okay, Fortnite’s a Battle Royale. That’s just a fact. If you’re playing solo, which I almost always am--I’m uncomfortable teaming up with random players, though on occasion I’ll play duos with a friend, which makes for a completely different, really exciting dynamic--you drop onto the island with close to a hundred other players, and the way you win is by being the last player standing. Now, I encourage conversations about the violence inherent to the format, as well as about all the other aspects of Fortnite that people rightly raise concerns about--the way in which it’s monetized, Epic’s pattern of repeatedly profiting off of dances associated with artists and communities of color without compensating the artists or communities that created them. All of it. But if we’re gonna go to the mat with Fortnite on these aspects (and we should), let’s also at least have a full, multifaceted conversation about why we play Fortnite, how it feels, and the moments that can emerge from a fully invested experience of the game.

Did you know that earlier this year, a massive beast that had been frozen in ice under Polar Peak broke free, that huge footprints showed it had made its way to the sea, where it’s occasionally been spotted, roaming the waters around the island? Did you know that right now, a towering robot is being built in the remnants of the volcano? It seems inevitable that soon, a massive Pacific Rim-style fight between them will take place, almost certainly resulting in a new wave of major changes to the island. Indeed, the island is always a place in flux, changing in big and small ways. It’s alive in ways that I’ve always wanted my game worlds to be alive. Landing near Loot Lake a few weeks ago, I was excited to see that the massive power cable that runs through the area was shredded and sparking, as if perhaps the monster had taken a bite. 

But the life of the environment wouldn’t mean much if it weren’t for my encounters with the lives of other players. The other day, I was trying to complete a challenge that required me to get a certain score on a balloon board at one of the numerous little beach party setups that currently dot the map. Jumping from the bus, I swooped down to a spot in the desert, opened a chest, grabbed the weapon, and made my way over to the nearby board. Another player got there just before me, and I stood still, hoping to indicate that I didn’t want to stop them from completing the challenge. They froze for a moment, but then proceeded, and when they hit the necessary score, a little celebratory explosion of confetti occurred, and I got credit for the challenge, too. 

Basking in the glow of our shared little moment, I wanted to walk away then, wishing them nothing but the best in the match ahead. But then they took a shot at me. In that instant, a sinking feeling ran through my whole body, a physical expression of “Aw, why’d you have to go and do that?” and in an instant, I obliterated them. It wasn’t a victory. It was more like putting someone down. I didn’t feel good about it, but it sure was a real feeling. Something surprising and immediate that emerged from my encounter with another living person. And that’s what I’m here for. 

Yes, Fortnite is a Battle Royale, but so much of the experience of Fortnite is about unexpected occurrences like this, and about the things we do in the stolen moments between the shootouts and build battles. The other day, I got so caught up in playing a silly memory game I stumbled upon that I wound up getting caught in the storm. Not long before that, I danced with John Wick to raise a disco ball in an abandoned lair so we could snag a fortbyte, one of this season’s collectibles. These are the things I really remember, not my win-loss ratio or all the times I’m eliminated by players much better than I am before I quickly hit play and hop on the battle bus all over again.

I’m eager to return to the island because the island itself feels vibrant and alive, emanating a kind of Spielbergian Americana and optimism, but also because of the vigorous bodies and exuberant identities I get to inhabit while I’m there. The mix-and-match nature of Fortnite’s customization means that one round I might be a sprightly female wizard with a sleek laptop on her back, and the next a nerdy, purple-haired gamer girl with a satchel full of potions and spellbooks. “Fun” may be overemphasized in some of our conversations around games, but it certainly has its place, and playing as these colorful characters, well, it’s just fun.

Every character in Fortnite plays exactly the same, but they don’t all feel the same to me. I just unlocked a black variant of the character Sentinel, a robot or power suit that looks like it might have appeared on Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, and I think it looks kinda cool, but I sure don’t want to be it. On the other hand, playing as Elmira (pictured above) feels good. And oh, do I love the way that some emotes make me feel. Tweeting recently about an emote called the Laid Back Shuffle, I wrote:

I’m almost always pretty uncomfortable in my body, for a number of reasons related to my appearance and my transness and things. The easygoing physical exuberance of this emote, the way that the avatar performing it, whatever avatar that might be at any given moment, appears to feel so loose and free in their own body, makes it really appealing to me, like a virtual experience/expression of a sensation that I’ve never known IRL. I think emotes have some kind of power beyond whatever power we often think of them having, perhaps particularly for those of us who never really feel comfortable in our own skin. 

And all the kids playing Fortnite that we’re so worried about, let’s remember that their experience of this game isn’t as simple as just trying to slaughter everyone else on the island. Setting aside whatever value there may be in the particular type of complex thinking and skill-building that it requires to try to simultaneously outbuild and outgun your opponent, there’s also the fact that they, too, are experiencing the life of Fortnite’s island, having encounters with other players that play out in unexpected ways, and experimenting with self-expression. Yes, their opportunities for that exploration and expression are gated by money, and that’s a real issue, but that doesn’t change the fact that a young person finding that they feel particularly cool when playing as a woman in red with a bionic arm is valid, and maybe even valuable. 

II. MGSV and What I Know Is True

I set The Phantom Pain aside for a few years after hitting a mission that I found maddeningly difficult, but something called me back to it. Now I’ve powered through the mission that gave me so much trouble, and I’m making progress again. I enjoy the geographical roughness of its environments, and the way you really have to deal with that roughness, often lying flat and crawling along the ground. The truth is that I spend far too much time alone in my apartment, and though it’s no substitute at all for the real, natural world, when I take my time being rooted in one spot to scout out locations and tag enemies before making any dangerous moves, I feel the shape of the space around me in a way that I rarely do in games. 

The other day I fought a grueling boss battle and then, finally, when it was over, hopped onto the helicopter to return to base, exhausted by the ordeal. Just as we were about to lift off, Quiet hopped on, hanging off of the side of the chopper as the rotors above her head spun faster until we lurched up and away from the ground. She held my gaze the whole time. I think a lot of games look at the player too much. They want you to feel like the center of the universe, the only person who really matters. But that wasn’t the feeling I got from this moment. I’d just fought for my life, and the way she looked at me, without malice or sympathy for what I’d just been through or anything, made me feel like I was being sized up. Looked at in a real way. Seen.

Do you know that feeling--Does this happen to everyone or just me?--that feeling where, for a moment, your awareness kind of spreads beyond yourself and you’re suddenly very aware that what you’re experiencing is something real that is happening in physical, three-dimensional space at this exact moment in time? It’s a feeling I get sometimes when I’m in a moment that I wish I could make last, or that I really want to remember. Sharing a last drink with a friend before they move away, that sort of thing. This feeling of momentarily being very much rooted in myself but also outside of myself and acknowledging, This is real. This is something that happened. That moment where Quiet was looking at me in the wake of the momentous battle I’d just fought felt something like that. 

It didn’t happen in real, physical space, but virtual space is a valid space, too, a space where real things happen. Sometimes when I’m playing Fortnite I’ll see the hillside where a friend and I once sped away from attackers on a Quadcrasher, bullets whizzing past our heads, and I’ll think, We were there. That happened. These moments become part of my relationship with the ever-changing island, just as my memories of San Francisco become part of my relationship with the city.

On another recent mission, I was sneaking my way through an enemy outpost when, from a nearby building, I heard the familiar sounds of Spandau Ballet’s “True.” To be honest, I never liked “True” much. The Phantom Pain takes place in 1984, and as a kid in the suburbs of Chicago in that year who sometimes saw the video on MTV, the song felt too airy and ethereal to move me. But recontextualized in The Phantom Pain, I heard it differently. That precise ethereal quality made it such an effective contrast to the grim military seriousness and the tactile terrain that my heart began to ache. 

The presence of 80s pop songs in the isolated military outposts of the game is politically fascinating to me. It says something about how American and British cultural exports are absorbed by the entire world, but it’s largely a one-way street. A Pakistani friend of mine in high school had grown up with Sting, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis, but I’d never heard Pakistani music in my life. I don’t understand why so many players are so intent on not considering all the political dimensions of a game like this. They only make the experience infinitely more fascinating, even if and when they reveal the game’s failures.

The songs also allow for the creation of some great moments. I snuck into the building where the song was playing just so I could snag the tape, and the next time I was in the helicopter, I played it, and as the opening notes of “True” played, I panned the camera slowly around Big Boss, creating a very short music video that I honestly found exciting.

I tweeted the clip, jokingly commenting that I’d “won Metal Gear Solid V by creating this beautiful moment,” but it had really felt this way to me. Creating this moment had been as fun and rewarding to me as anything else the game offered. Playing MGSV isn’t just sneaking and shooting, or at least for me it isn’t. This, too, is play.  So obviously, I get frustrated with the “Git Gud” players, those who feel that games are at their best when they’re perfectly calibrated tests of raw skill, that the only thing that matters is having an awesome KDR, or earning the highest possible rating on missions, or whatever. 

But the truth is that it’s not just hardcore gamers who set limits on our notions of play by talking about games like this. A lot of us do it, even a lot of us who consider ourselves emphatically opposed to the “Git Gud’ brigade. We do it when we look at a game like Fortnite and see it only as one simple thing, a struggle to be the last remaining survivor, without at least acknowledging all the other things a player might go to the game for. We do it when we deny the possibility for moments of strange beauty to emerge from even a grim, ugly, grossly misogynistic game like MGSV. We do it whenever we, ourselves, adopt a limited, conventional understanding of what it means to really play a game, rather than fully engaging with all the different ways that we can find ourselves and each other in the spaces that games create.

-----

I’m currently looking for work. If you enjoy my writing and are in a position to do so, please consider supporting me on ko-fi.

[christmasace]

some scars. - fan apprentice/julian

IT’S 1 AM AND JULIAN DEVOARK OWNS MY SOUL.

anyway so im uh;;; a tad bit shy to post this because, well, it’s a self insert fanfiction and those are Generally Frowned Upon™ by most fandoms and the like. but it makes me happy that the arcana fandom, from what i’ve seen, is super welcoming about it so!! here we go.

mainly my inspiration to post this came from the amazing writing of @malaktheraven and their fan apprentice Henny falling in love with Jules, but also... I had a rather bad mental breakdown the other day, after I’d gotten into the game, and I needed someone to be there for me when no one was irl. so, Julian came to mind. I apologize if he’s OOC; Im still trying to get the hang of him. hope you all enjoy tho!! my apprentice ref can be found here.

(warnings for self hatred and self harm by means of punching stone.)

Sneaking out was all routine.

She knew what passages to avoid, how to get around Mercedes and Melchor, all the turns that lead towards the hidden door, the paths she traveled to get into town- all of it. Sure, walking and climbing nearly nightly had taken a toll on her sleeping patterns and muscles, it was all worth it when she got to see him.

She was in love with a wanted murderer. Seems about right.

She could’ve skipped along to the Rowdy Raven with how her heart was pounding from anticipation. She was in love with Julian, and she intended to let him know that when the time was right. They had certainly bonded, yes, in ways friends would bond- they shared stories about Asra being dumb, Julian told her about medicine and medical procedures (which she was terrible at), and she told him about the wonders and evolution of music- even singing a few numbers, with or without him. He was a lovely baritone, even if he didn’t think so whenever she brought it up.

His mysterious, dark rimmed eyes, his high cheekbones, his curly, soft, dark ginger hair…. The damn low cut shirt he always wore under his coat…. Sure, those were some things that made her love him at first. But it was his hidden kind heart, his humour, and his breathtaking smile that helped along.

She was head over heels with the help of a fugitive, and she could care less.

Her eyes wandered up to the roof of the Raven, grin ecstatic when she saw its most notable attender, Malak, sitting on a perch, being jittery as ever. But then… she looked inside, and her heart fell.

There he was, sitting in his usual spot near the back- with a woman. She was gorgeous, dressed in a bartender’s uniform, with sky blue hair and light skin. A splash of freckles was across her nose, and she was sitting on his lap, obviously flirting with him. And he seemed to be flirting back, that stupid, attractive half smirk ever present on his features, his eyebrow twitching…

And then his visible eye made contact with her through the window.

...

Typical.

Gloria turned on her heel and sped up the alley near the tavern, attempting to find her way back to her shop… might as well stop in during all this torment. Of course, she didn’t notice the accompanying footfalls that seemed to follow close behind her. Indeed, she could only arrive at her magic shop, shut the door- and throw the nearest book at the wall.

“Of fucking course!” She screams to herself, “Fall in love with someone when nobody gives a shit about you. Hell, that’s so fucking typical, you dumb sack of shit!”

She wasn’t yelling at the Doctor… but herself instead.

“Haven’t you learned by now that you don’t deserve anything? Asra only picked you off the street because he’s using you to get popular, even if he avoids his damn responsibility as a magician! The Countess is only using you to find a fucking fugitive! Portia could care less- she’s probably afraid of you! And Julian…. Used you as nothing more than a fucking trophy!!”

During all of this, she could only punch the wall and scream, her knuckles bleeding from where she hit the stone. They were covered in scars, reopening wounds from previous punches that had not quite healed. This is how she truly saw herself, as the scum of the world, who people only pretended to care about.

“It’s not Julian’s fucking fault, you dense motherfucker!” She continued punching and screaming, tears falling down her face, “It’s your fucking fault! Everything you do is your own damn fault, you worthless, goddamn, motherfucking, lying bitch!”

Suddenly, something caught her wrists.

Turning sharply at the hard grip, preparing to kick and scream and yell, her brown eyes fell upon the last person she’d expected to see.

“... What’s all this, then?” Asked Julian, softly, “I didn’t think part of an apprentice’s training was punching a wall and yelling at themselves.”

She could only stare at him dumbly, sniffling and shaking, as tears ran down her face and blood spilled from her knuckles. “Come on now. Was this about what happened at the tavern? … If it was, I will have you know that Denise was coming onto me without my consent.” Ah, there’s the flush of embarrassment that often stuck his pallid features, “I had no say in the matter; I was simply trying to wish her away.”

Gloria sniffed. “Uh huh. Yea. Sure you were.”

After a moment, he let go of her wrists, folding his arms in front of him. This was absolutely… perplexing. The cheerful, musical spirit he had come to know well in a short amount of time thought of herself like this? How had she survived like that?

… Then again, he was one to talk about surviving like that.

“You can believe me or not,” he said with a sigh, “but what I say is the truth. I would never lie to you, Gloria, because…” another blush, “... well, I wouldn’t. That’s all.” Another sniff from the apprentice, and suddenly his one-eyed gaze turned gentle. “Come on. Let me bandage those hands of yours-”

“No.”

He blinked as she drew her hands back, swatting him away. “... Why not?”

“I deserve it.” She spoke, looking down at the blood flowing from her knuckles. “I deserve every bad thing that happens to me. And will happen to me. And had happened to me. Everyone forgets about me. Nobody cares about me. I know this, I’ve learned it, I’ve heard it for years. I just-”

“Did Asra ever say that to you?”

She looked up at him suddenly, brown eyes wide. “... No. But I’m sure he was thinking it-”

“Listen to me,” he was stern now, though stern out of compassion, “I’ve known Asra for a very, very long time. Quite well, actually, as I’m sure I’ve told you. Know this, shopkeep- everything he does is not without good intention. There’s a good reason he took you in as an apprentice.”

“Because he craves popularity,” she responded, sniffing again- there’s some fresh tears coming down her face now.

“He would ne’er do such a thing,” Julian retorted, determined to win this battle, “he could care less about being popular; he wants to help people. Why do you think he and I tried to help find a cure for the Red Plague? Regardless of what he thinks of me now?”

She didn’t have a response for that.

“I cannot speak for the Countess,” he continued, “nor can I speak for Portia. But you must know this. So many people care about you. You have an infectious mirth about you, Gloria, that I have not seen for quite some time. Your determination to make people smile, to make people be safe… it’s a thing to be admired.”

She was sobbing again, sniffling, and her stupid motormouth flung out the emotions she’d been holding onto, “But do you care about me?”

A long, silent pause, only broken by the sniffles and sobs from the witch. Until finally....

“... Yes. Yes, I do.”

She took in another shaky breath, suddenly watching him come closer to her, and a gloved hand laid on her face, brushing away her tears, as his tall frame loomed over her- comforting, securing, welcoming.

“I thought myself undeserving of someone like you,” he said after a second, leaning closer to her, “but… you made me feel accepted around you. Something I didn’t know I had needed. We’re one in the same, you and I.” And after another hopelessly soft smile, tears formed in her eyes as he continued speaking.

“Gloria, I love you.”

She blinked once. Then twice. A third time, feeling another sob come up in her, and she freed it, flinging her arms around Julian’s neck. Christ, if he was lying to her right now, she didn’t want to know it. She just wanted to feel this strange, warm feeling inside her for as long as she could.

She buried her face in his neck, feeling his strong arms hug her back tightly, like he’d never let her go.

“...I love you too, y’know,” she said, after she’d calmed down due to his hug. “Since we’re in the middle of confessing things right now.”

“... Since when?” He asked from where his face was on her shoulder.

“Since that time at the Raven where we did the Minuet song and dance,” she answered, “you just looked so elated, spinning me around and singing your probably drunk heart out.”

He recalled the time fondly, of course- she had been elated too, even is he suspected she was using her voice magic at the time to spread the feeling of joy throughout the room. But at this point, he didn’t care.

“What about you?” she asked.

“The first night you sang for me.” He answered without hesitation, “well, not just me. For that drunken old man at the bar some weeks past- the one who’d just lost his wife. It was the first time I’d heard you sing, and there was something about it that had just…” Suddenly he pulled her out of the hug, pressing their foreheads together, “You didn’t spell me, did you?”

Despite her current mess of a face, she smiled a little, “Of course not. I can control my own voice, you know.”

He laughed then, enough to make his small smile increase to a dazzling grin, “I have no doubt.”

“So… what happens now? Do we, uh, kiss or something?”

“If you have no objections, I would very much like to kiss you.”

“.... Definitely not.”

What happened next was a kiss that made her forget about the blood on her hands, and the scars inside her that would soon heal in time.

It was a very good thing she’d fallen in love with a Doctor.