ten years is a long time. studios and businesses can shutter then – ten years ago, much more of Gaza was standing then stands now. Ten years ago my room shades opened to a chain link fence and an empty lot. There are more with less, I’d think to myself. Patting myself on the back for a job well done – after all I was one of the good ones. four years is a long time, three months is a longer time. Right now: some election is carried out and now a New York Gossip Mogul is responsible for carrying the War machine to a new location.

Forever Winter is a game taking place over a long time: topical and crass, retrofuturistic and forward-looking at the same time. It’s a third-person not shooter scavenger game and I swear the marketing terminology is getting longer the shorter the budgets get. Drop in an endless warzone where there’s no point in remembering the place destroyed under your feet. It may as well be the entire concept of “the world” The largest War Machines are a group of malevolent, possibly stupid, Artificial Intelligence that proxy war going on for a long time, which is forever. A horrible no end, no bad guys state is created right there in the fiction: we’ve made something big enough to make us all suffer – a path through the suffering.

The game is pitched as a non-shooter, a “not the guy” simulator. Thrust rifle or pistol first into the scavenger zones of the West Coast of the United States. Abstracted towards surrealism through the lense of cyberpunk. we have a see through image in videogames, a new world lens every time I choose a new way to lose the long time of four hours a night. Hooks of teenage escapism run deep in every game, but Forever Winter is an action game through and through.

A destroyed city ruined by war is a staple part of the texture of the post apocalypse: loved and held dear in every part of our deepest recesses of pop culture for time immemorial. ‘a ruined earth’ is something we’re in love with somewhere in the cultural memory of the entire species: at least the people living in places regularly called Civilization by the news. These are things that are in stasis, falling apart eternally before our eyes just enough to be places in .

Every day you take away from Forever Winter is a day your own, personal water supply will disappear by one dram: it is nothing new, that kind of videogame idea where I know I must have seen it somewhere but nothing immediately comes to mind. As an abstract mechanic it’s a wonderful way to juggle responsibilities while out in The Field. The field is a nightmare, easily accessible after a ten second countdown.

The Gaza strip is 25-miles long of dwellings that Palestinians, some 44,548 thousand: there is nothing coming tomorrow to reset the cycle and put things back into place. It wont: a police state backed by western block interests wants Gaza Gone, to turn it into a shambled mount of concrete and blood with a red sky that cannot be forgotten by the people ripped from their homes. I crack a joke about “America 2” in public to a group of new-agers that goes over poorly when we start talking numbers.

Pictures of Gaza now will eventually be studied (or more then likely; mined) for information when the next round of concept artists that run away from a studio to join one are tasked with creating the most realistic simulated warzones ever seen: pop culture makes a myth-industry where the only hunger is from bad taste, but we’ll surely have emotional contact with whatever version of events comes to us on a console over the next decade of culture war fall-out. An exhausting time to be alive, eight hours turns into a long time between runs to the wasteland.

According to Reuters, there’s an estimated 37 tons of rubble – the present rubble, separating Gaza from a past that the citizens of will never be able to reclaim. That rubble will be comprised of concrete, slate, rebar. It’ll also include pounds of metal filament and copper wire used to power electronics. Batteries, discarded waterbottles, self defense tools and probably firearms. According to the nation of Israel, every single thing included in the rubble has gone to empower the supposed terrorist organization they are fighting. Another day, tomorrow, most likely, will have another group of soldiers denying food and pointing rifles at Palestinians who’ve been living there for decades.

My work shift ends, and today I have to log on to increase my water count by one. The developers of Forever Winter have said in interviews they’d like to showcase the true humanity on both sides of a conflict – missions have players delivering cigarettes from the wasteland or rations to the frontline operators who any normal time might turn a rifle barrel their direction and pull the trigger. It is not uncommon to turn a corner into a fresh spawn, only a simple board and pipe gun with five rounds for emergencies being enough to leave me on the ground in a mess of dust and hamburger meat.

I joke and balk when I read pop-culture theorists describe things as particularly American as if there’s a psychic force emanating from the land that stokes the fires of cruelty currently coming out of our flailing democracy: if that we’re true, we’d all start calling the nation of Israel America 2 for how culturally built upon western war engineering it is: it is also a place where the dead that litter the streets of Palestine are women and children, fathers and brothers. These are family terms, but they’re also the terms to describe the people who die on either side of a conflict.

Forever Winter has a uniquely videogame approach to depicting a warzone: there are no fathers, brothers, or children visibly depicted being crushed under the foot of a ten ton mecha ripped straight from the more dour episodes of Votoms. Mostly it’s sand and dirt – that concrete and rebar, endlessly respawning every time we load the map. The only thing really under the threat of dying is us, the player, and the people we bring with us. It’s an empty war zone and I do not believe the little toy soldiers are anything approximating people: I shoot them every time, free of consequence, even when I sometimes deliver them cigarettes.

You’ll not generally see such chaste depictions of war outside of a newspaper or a movie, anymore, barring the kinds of stuff popular in alternative film circuits and widely shared and discussed by the kino crowd online: a lethargic and massively anxious group of people from every corner of the world, stuffed with images of war that are too much comprised of a type of filtered fetish content or blase nationalism that even the critiques of that type of nationalism are widely misinterpreted as being center and attempting to humanize it.

War continues to grind away at the soul and salt of our planet and its people, too massive of a machine anymore to stop or even consider the purpose of: Israel believes they have a right to land, and that is a dumb, cruel way of mobilizing a people to empathize a genocide into action. If only – if only there were a non-benevolent computer making the decisions: only then would we be able to understand a limit and a starting point for where human cruelty and stupidity begins and ends. The violence lust to create new shopping malls for teenagers, new resident housing for tourists. The passive need to turn every square mile of occupied land in the world, regardless of who occupies it or the right to live and breathe, with a new hotel or vacation spot. It is a far crueler war than can be imagined in fiction, even as videogames start getting out of a childlike face associated with destroying sand piles in yards or placing toys in taller grass.

It’s easy to escape into these digital apocalypses, always offering us some kind of a salve. My backpack always carries two guns and enough bullets to get me through to the next map. I have 320,000 credits in my bank account pushing me forward. There’s always another map to conquer, another five square miles to push my way through. What we refuse to understand, will eventually become level design. I will march through the warzone from the comfort and safety of my trailer and some voice inside might tell me I have engaged with the locus of history, right as it’s being made. Isn’t the view from here pretty nice?