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Written by Karin Malady

“Fire Starter, it’s a hand-held video game. No one knows how Endsville, the city of devils, was created, but as soon as it appeared, it started to grow, and slowly eat up the world. You are an agent of Canti, the god of the black flame, and you must stop Endsville from destroying the world. Your only weapon is flame: matches, lighters, and fire-bombs. Get the weapons, outsmart the firefighters, hide from the police, torch the city, and purge its devils. But you must be careful; you cannot burn everything. If the entire city burns down, there will be no place to live.” – FLCL (2003)

There is a city. Buildings rise and fall, seemingly at random. The laws are mutable, caught in the churn of constant change as much as anything else here. Streets swarm with empty cars driving ghosts to work on a daily basis. They trace their path across miles of convoluted squiggles – a demented, labyrinthine joke to amuse a mad architect. The grim weight of commerce floods the streets. From where? To where? Placelessness prevents anyone from answering. A forced perspective renders it all in a toyetic Eye of God view from above. The sewer system is constantly changing but never quite works out and the filth the city can’t repress spews into soon-to-be-abandoned structures. Phantom fire trucks rush through wall to wall traffic to put out a building that has been burning for three years. Ambulances make their way to invisible injuries. When zoomed in close enough, life in the city appears out of thin air. Suddenly the streets are full again. Any inhabitant’s life story can be examined in a small menu. Arbitrary details to examine the ghost. Implied life in place of the fullness of one. Something familiar to anyone who has ever filled out a resume. The churn of data hums at the center of a din of noise. It moves to its own rhythm, not like an orchestra, but like a kid bobbing his head to music off his phone in the subway. It’s growing. The city is growing. That’s the only thing it can do. Upward and outward. Along the rivers all the way to the edge of the invisible walls dotting this perfectly square parcel of land.  Garbage and bodies pile up in every building. No one knows why, it’s just the way it is in a city like this. Disaster can strike at any moment, as a tsunami, earthquake, tornado, or even kaiju. Not even that can stop expansion.

One person here must own a computer. Pull up a tiny world on a smaller screen. The world is coming from inside the house. In this act, principles forming this city are transfigured to a single location. A house that changes shape, seemingly at random. Furniture appears and disappears. People gesticulate through conversations spoken in glyphs and some kind of nonsense esperanto. Years pass before the blink of an eye, relationships begin and fall apart within them. Their aspirations seem as inane as anything else. A rock star, a mad scientist, and an influencer all live together. Everything still breaks, catches fire, and disappears. All the food is either burned or slop. Bodies mosaic in fear of a great voyeur, like the world itself is ashamed. Death doesn’t stop here, but at least these dead get their own escort. Unless the grim reaper gets trapped in a room with a single clown picture and no doors, that is. Vast, Machiavellian schemes are enacted just to make two girls kiss. The inhabitants leave for the day only to return with money all the while a revolving cast of strangers enter and leave the home. In these virtual worlds, we build family units. Maybe we call them colonists or survivors or roommates. Maybe they have backstories or complex arrays of skills. Maybe they’re stuck on an island or stranded on a planet or exiled to the wasteland. They gather wood, stone, metals, meat, and dry flesh. They are beset by animals, monsters, and strange powers. Or we zoom out. Watch the fate of nations and galaxies play out before our very eyes. Wars started over incest or psychic dust. The drama unfolds. Everything is recursive. But does it mean anything? Can it mean anything at all?

2022 was a strange year. For all of my growth I felt stunted. Promises I made to myself were only realized after the year was over and I forced myself to make changes. My free time was spent zoning out to simulation games that are easy to play or get absorbed in. Stellaris, RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress, etc. I’m not even sure if I enjoy these games anymore. You have to set goals for yourself. I’m not even good at doing that in my own life. You have to narrativize the struggles you experience. Yet I can’t make sense of anything. During lockdown, I read obscene amounts of yuri manga, maybe 100 different comics, very few of them updating frequently, trapped in the gentle fantasy. Emily Haines sings “I’ve been held in place with wire and lace / And waltzed around the drain.” I sing it too. Video games are an exquisite cage. It’s called the gameplay loop. Repeating the same actions over and over again. If 2021 was about time loops, the year after was about being too tired to escape them. We need to be distracted from all the things we can’t control, so we create tiny worlds that do what they’re told. We talk about games as a possibility space, but what do we do with these possibilities?

Abstracting our world into models, we need desperately for there to be a consensus on how it operates. Numbers are neutral, they tell us. Facts don’t care about your feelings. Realism is less about what is real and more about what you want to make real. The simulationist hands you a snow globe and says “this is reality.” Sure, when shaken, it does look like it’s snowing, but the materials are fake and the physics are wrong. What media is considered realistic is largely arbitrarily dependent on what a society tells someone human nature is. Apocalypses, disasters, zombies – movies are assigned this value all the time, it goes hand in hand with grittiness. When I’m told it is the innate nature of every human being to fuck over others out of self interest and only laws hold us back, I learn from that. Nothing universal – it just means that the speaker will fuck you over as soon as they get the chance and projects on to everybody else. If these are things that are true, why is media needed to affirm it? If it really was true, it would be evident just by existing. The wool pulled over our eyes can look like the pop of 3D glasses. Sims can be cozy moments of vibing, or intense struggles of survival, or long chess games of political machinations. The most vital thing they all have in common is resource management. Currency is a mathematical abstraction we’ve been living since before computers existed. Count each grain and assign them a quality and a value. A mandate of heaven that states “Everything must be rendered comprehensible.” All the resources we gather by punching trees are just measures of our worth. Doesn’t matter what the cost is, we all love watching the numbers go up. Sometimes that number is a death toll.

Is it a surprise our technocrats think this way? They adore the simulation hypothesis: that our entire universe is just numbers running on some machine, as if the ineffable cosmos work 1:1 to our shitty computers. The consumer-nerd is not capable of understanding metaphor in any context. They cannot hold the contradiction of the literal-metaphoric. So, the world becomes a video game and video games become the world. We’re all just numbers on a page they need us to fit so we can keep being sold apps and subscriptions. Maybe you run a diner on your phone, or a farm, or a kingdom: they think they run the world on theirs. The world wasn’t originally a simulation, it was turned into one. When I close the game and walk outside, what do I find? Wrongness penetrates everywhere and it is no longer subtle. A veil lifting to reveal a sea of grotesqueries. More and more AI tools keep emerging to mimic our culture. Generate your own art, stories, music. Talk to a real robot! But behind the robot is sweatshop labor in some country devastated by the United States assigned to impersonate a machine that is imitating human beings.

In isolation, DALL-E spitting out an anime girl in a renaissance dress with perfect tits, too many teeth, and rapidly mutating limbs doesn’t fool anyone except for the perpetually down bad. When every commercial, YouTube video, or selfie is made by a neural network, it’s all going to start blurring together. Dead Internet Theory believers say the web is more bot than not. With the sheer amount of narrative warfare and disinformation passing through social media, they’re not far off from the truth. Reality is getting more fake by the day. Next time you meet a friend for coffee, watch their hands. Next time you look in a mirror, count your teeth.

Collectively, the tastemakers have given up on trying to fool us. I’ve seen so many recent ads that involve an actor staring at the viewer and saying, “We get it. You’re tired of this, I’m tired of this. We’re all tired of this. Please buy our product. We need to keep going.” A media landscape stuck in the ethos of Pop Art was always going to lead us here. In the 50s, the realists defeated abstraction and became advertisers. Everything rendered into a symbolic representation of itself,  a soup can flattened into a soup can. All the indescribable and the unknown got banished to the human heart as the internal and the external were inverted. Dadaism had to face a reckoning in the eyes of the war profiteers, so the logo was born to kill it. Why does social media constantly revolve around arguments about identity? You need to be defined in order to exist or else they can’t spell out what rights you do or do not have in legislation. Or else the heat seeking missiles of promoted content can’t find you. In defiance, I do not want to be reflected endlessly. I will be unlegislatable, unmarketable, ungovernable, and undeniable. My ambiguities will flourish and they will make me invisible in the panopticon Eye of God. When the lockdown ended in 2021 and I started leaving my apartment again, I looked out at my neighborhood. Buildings rose and fell, seemingly at random.

Arguments about “what video games are” started in tabletop games. The three schools of design are called Simulationist, Gamist, and Narrativist. The gamist gives you defined win conditions, the narrativist centers drama and character, and the simulationist emulates the reality of a genre. Our first simulations weren’t created by programming, they were paper and pencil. The medium has a history in war games: strategy designed to emulate scenarios of armed combat, accurately enough that we can even account for unpredictability. Simulation (how a grenade bounces), game (defeat the enemy), and narrative (ideological conflict, “good vs evil”). Countless losers whine “Keep politics out of games!” What IS politics? Let’s pull up a definition – “the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area.” What could be more political than creating a system of rules governing a world and participating in that system? Dungeons & Dragons simulates fantasy tales and wild adventures, it follows a certain logic to get there. A hero is a person raised up by special circumstances, for one person to be special, others must fail to be. You start as a weak beginner in a world trying to kill you (the Dungeon Master), and it is through being chosen by luck (the dice) and cleverness (the player) that you can prove that you are truly exceptional. From Disco Elysium, “Still, there’s something inherently violent even about dice rolls. It’s like every time you cast a die, something disappears.” Almost any simulation video game follows that thought. Designers talk about what systems to emulate and what lessons are learned. Players of these games always wind up with a machine that grinds organs of orphans and prints money. A machine that can’t stop growing until it doesn’t get fed.

My RimWorld colony is perfect. Most of the map is a massive fortress-compound surrounded by turrets, mines, and sandbags. Everything runs like clockwork. We have all the resources we need. Deforestation is completed and the toxic waste of machinery has made the land unlivable. Organs are harvested on time and we can always get more bodies. Children work hard in the mines for materials to make more drones that shoot any runners. The emotional breakdowns are frequent but they can’t do much other than obey their invisible manager in the end. A single colonist, more machine than person, points a gun at the sky as I watch from above. Recently, I was introduced to a quote from Andor that struck me, “Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere.” There is something about this sentiment from Andor that is surprisingly poignant. It is reminiscent of other manifestos, from Tristian Tzara’s Dada Manifesto 1918 to D. Scot Miller’s Afrosurreal Manifesto. Consider those last words: the Rebellion is everywhere. From the sand surfing bandits of desert planets, to the chittering smallfolk of primeval forests. From the graffiti sprayed down the street that reads “No cops / No Jails / No linear fucking time” to the dogeared Animorphs paperbacks you read as a kid. Can you feel it? Everywhere means everywhere. Mario swings a hammer to the head of a gamer, elsewhere Sonic bursts through the screen like a bullet. Death to the players, power to the people.