YOU KNOW I’m almost a specific age that implies a downward slope. I can’t for the life of me picture what age this is. For some people it’s 25, 30, others: 45 years exactly. Whatever the case: I reckon with a body built by my choices every day.

A long time ago I would surround myself with images of the bodies I wished I could have. It’s an old fitness coach thing. Have a clear picture of your goals around you at all times. These images were the stock images every gym seems to have. I’d pepper them with a phone full of images of pole-vaulters and swimmers. These bodies are every bit as fictional as comic book superheroes.

We’re all in control of our bodies. We’re not in control of 40 hour work weeks and coping mechanisms. The daily grind wears us down. Maybe we go hiking because it’s an excuse to stay active and be in nature. Did I choose a body shaped by time hunched over a laptop? No, but I didn’t choose to be a fucking mountain of a person with tree trunk legs and arms, either.

Making peace with our bodies is all a kind of dysphoria. From the body builders I know to the constant dieters who swear off alcohol and carbs and everything they don’t need to make sure their waistline looks like they remember it did.

OUTRIDERS is a videogame by People Can Fly. You may remember them as the auteurs behind the previous first-person shooting simulator that had a whole separate category for shooting huge dudes in the neck. It’s +500 points in that game. I remember the sound of my score going up for every neck shot.

The first character you meet in OUTRIDERS is Teddy Roosevelt filtered through the lens of Warhammer 40,000. A mustache, a gun. He’s named something like Calvin Buckstrong. He doesn’t last long: it’s rare in games where everyone is this brawny for anyone to not die immediately.

You don’t see bodies like Calvin Buckstrong has in a lot of videogames. Spawning in my underwear, there’s not a striated muscle in sight. I pick a male character.

I usually don’t. Come on. My Final Fantasy XIV character is seven feet tall and red. I can say she’s a way for me to process the feelings I have about my own body: but she’s barely disguised as a fetish to anyone who looks. I have paid for game time exactly the way you’re thinking.

Every man in Outriders has a capacity to look like a greasy Freddy Mercury. At some point, the developers at People Can Fly go off the deep in. Here I am, a few hours later, still in my underwear. I’m playing another videogame character who seems to constantly wisecrack. The only difference?
This body is familiar. I look just like it.

As I get older I have to reconcile the state of my body with the history of my family. Maybe we could say “genetics” but height and build aren’t something I’d ever be in absolute control of.

“You’re really tall for an XXX” Please fill in the blank with whatever is not appropriately supposed to be tall. “You’re big for someone in this space.” is the left-wing variation of the same phrase. Thank you. Please take a number at the door and seat yourself appropriately.

The Men of Outriders are sliding down that slope we call age. Every timber of hair comes with a little grey. The young people in the fiction seem desperate and worn down. The older people just wish everything would end once and for all.

Then there’s the protagonist. Dumb, thick, and full of fucking awful one liners. Possessed of a body that is not entirely under their control or beck and call, yet not sculpted by those fitness gurus of places like “Hollywood” or “Television”. To wander around in my underwear in Outriders is to see a body not dissimilar to mine. Shaped by years of yard-work and service industry jobs. Sure, I fill out just fine, but I don’t fit a masculine ideal.

For fucks sake, all of this because a character in a videogame is shaped like a real person. Is that queer? Is it suddenly queer to see a body that looks like mine in a videogame? I don’t know: there’s a lot of academic writing about that sort of thing I’ll never read because it’s behind a paywall or buried in an article about movies I’m never going to take the time to watch.

Here I am in my underwear again, naked and alone on a battlefield. Dispossessed of the kind of body that movies tell me is heroic or aesthetic. The kind of body that begs to be touched and maybe one I’d like to touch, too.

I know martial artists, powerlifters, yoga instructors and cross fit champions. I have the body I have now, and very rarely does enjoying it get any kind of note of confidence from pop culture at large. If my body type gets recognized at all, it’s often as a punchline or a joke.

Now I can run through these trenches, rifle in hand. Looking at a screen that’s playing a familiar image of a body like mine back at me.

There’s so few faces in Outriders that you really have to pick one and learn to let it grow on you. I described earlier a kind of sweaty Freddy Mercury looking person – a tower of nonbinary fury. Living out like Bulletstorm’s story, an epic of What if War Were Fucking Cool.

In these fantasies, these fantasies that feel so good. Like seriously: it may stand as a B-movie knockoff of other Open World Massively Multiplayer Science Fiction game, but it feels good. Every time I pull the trigger I snap out of that daze videogames these days put you in, where it wouldn’t really matter if the corridors I have to walk through had any textures at all. Back to focus.

Time to kill.

Killing never feels good in the more serious war-games, the ones that are trying to teach us something. But you can’t really paint a picture of violence feeling gross if no one has seen a painting where it looks fucking cool. Outriders can get in your head if you let it.

Maybe it’s not healthy to see the bodies in these games as representative of some kind of personal reality. I am, after all, telling you that I’m glad to see my kind of body killing people. Tall, wide, ideally covered in glitter but we’ll hope they add that into a patch somewhere down the road.

This is of course no different then the dozens of articles calling attention to how Cool it is when you can perform extrajudicial killings in Rainbow Six Siege as a woman. What a powerful move for representation that is.

Here I am falling in love with and falling for a kind of machismo propaganda. Conditioned through years of pop culture and media to hate my body, to hate what it doesn’t stand up to. To see in advertisements clothing meant for bodies sculpted by fashion designers and fitness gurus. The disappointment when we fall for the magic and buy it, only to have it hang loosely or bunch up on our bodies that seem to get a little more worn out no matter how much we cut or bulk.

We put so much faith in feeling comfortable with our videogames. To see ourselves, staring back at us. The big corporations or small indie developers helping us feel recognized in a world where our bodies are constantly told they aren’t aesthetically beautiful, they aren’t passing, they aren’t what people want.

I almost wonder, cutting a path through the soldiers hungry for my blood, if a little distance wouldn’t be better. Or is it really worth feeling a little more comfortable in my own skin, getting to see where the blood and grime accumulates over time.