I mostly stayed off of Social Media back in the day when the original Gamer Outrage happened, a woman who dared to exist in a public space was dragged into the limelight, all of the reasons for the hate and pitched crying of people describing themselves as Gamers – a sole unit, an unshakeable bond they see themselves as locked step with all kinds of Words to protect themselves with. Gamers are weak, gamers cry and shit themselves in confusion and panic and all of these things are true. Broadly, the conservative and backwards values of the movement crept into the modern day environment of games journalism.

Despite the amount of think pieces to the contrary, there was never really any reckoning with the original movement and its full movement – a lot of creators, writers, and artists left the industry over it. Small victories to the bleating horde, many of who graduated if not into financial insecurity grifting, then various right-wing political platforms and downward spinning careers, effortlessly moving from topic to topic with a kind of dead-eyed lack of belief that is the symptom of almost every conservative culture warrior. A sort of us-vs-them tirade, where the “us” is always a foundational readership not often of self described racists or white supremacists, but posters bearing an archetypal edginess “we hate everyone equally” that comes as much from middle America as it does whiteness aspiring latin Americans or Brazilians.

Sweet Baby INC came under fire over two weeks ago, deftly positioned in a way that much of the press has to think about using the phrase “came under fire” in any professional status: the new playbook for the class of racist nihilists is part grade school, part left-wing twitter emotional HR speak and part publishing guide. Call any one of them hateful and the burden of proof is on you, say that people participated in something anti Sweet Baby Inc, and the common excuse is that it’s simply a list to keep track of games. “Intent doesn’t matter” articles from Jezebel twenty years ago taken to an exceptionally dark place.

Much of the movement, from crawling through their discord and several Facebook gaming groups, is written about as being tinged with a type of radical conspiracy theory. There’s nothing radical about it, really, much of their conspiracies are the same great-replacement thing that’s been circulated through the internet for decades now. A catch-call belief system for a group of people that can’t be called racists because they don’t believe in a social construction of race, but see themselves ardently as temporarily embarrassed White Geniuses who’ve been denied a place at some table that can’t be named. For all their specificity about the “cause” when they try to say something – it falls on the back of vagueness that gets all too easily read as direct Fascism. We’re already there, and yet a burgeoning white Minority see themselves as somehow what they fear: powerless but infinitely imagined.

On twitter, account after account of Firstname Numbers accounts fail basic skill checks about the issues they’re concerned about. “Wokeness ruined the Saints Row Reboot” – they can’t tell the audience about why it did without linking elsewhere, if they can say anything of their feelings on it at all. Lists of games are being paraded about, but when repeatedly asked questions a bulwark of “I don’t know didn’t play it” are. A black commandment being built up of The Games You Can’t Play, the things of the other.

People are leaving the computer behind now, getting up in droves and wondering about the outside world. It can’t all be true, can it? the murder and crime fiction spread by endless podcasts and suburbanite cultural swell. Online is starting to look inward, a snake eating its own tale of conservative politics mining progressivism for a primer on how to sell themselves to a new network as a victim. Well, it didn’t work last time and it seems like the people on the front lines are a little more educated about how to handle themselves. I spent a few hours every day this past week trying to find out what it is they want, and answers remain unclear because they’ve lost the ability to actually say it, at least for now.

The first videogame I played where I couldn’t make the choice I wanted was Yoko Taro’s Nier. It was not a flourish of the skill of the director – or maybe like all directors supremely talented at hiding behind the stage and holding your hand, it was exactly what I needed.

In Nier: Gestalt for the Playstation 3, the main character pitches a kind of meager existence out at the end of a decaying, beautiful world. Trees still summit great forest canopies and strange deserts churn at the feet of sprawling civilizations. Coastal towns die one lighthouse at a time, the knowledge that keeps the world and its illusions declining back into the earth, and into the grave. Nier: Gestalt is a present dressed up in mortality, a parent holding the hand of a child right from the womb and assuring it only that one day the parent will no longer be there.

There are a handful of choices that have to be made in Nier: Gestalt, and all of them are locked into a series of ultimately binary outcomes. Will the quest end this way or that way? For all of the strength of videogames, we’re still ultimately locked into this dance with even the most sprawling role playing games released today. There are consequences in numbers, gear, stats, cutscenes – but these consequences bear no reflection on our identity. They grow inside of us, maybe, twisting and turning rotten. I came to a point with Nier: Gestalt where I could go no further, and for almost a year after that I didn’t touch a single videogame. I fell into music, back into drugs and sex. I made the type of questionable choices that I knew would hurt me and others around me.

I was looking for living a life filled with some kind of consequences. I lapsed into debt, I payed for things with money I couldn’t afford. I put years on my health and learned nothing, at the time. You never learn anything at the time. Years of my life spent chasing something bigger through videogames. Community, art, anything to make feel the weight of consequence on my body – ones that could be owed to and only paid to me.

I’d seen deaths and felt their weight, but they trickle into water before end credits. Drunkenly stumbled as an adult through raucuous laughter and my own inability to enjoy a party game with the right people. Shouted and yelled as we cut through dozens and dozens of townspeople in RPG’s. Laughing, hollering, getting everything we wanted out of it. Retreating to a bedroom to spend hours looking for photos of the characters I’d just spent hours with to have some kind of different connection with.

Sorry. I don’t think Nier; Replicant is that good. It’s missing the weight and feel of the original combat that dares and provokes you into figuring it out. Like a pin holding two train cars together, it leaves Replicant separating slowly on the tracks from the game that came before it: light, breezy, dark. A filigreed and silver laden paperback book filled with a dark romantic world to escape for. A cheap, tawdry doorstopper fantasy found tucked somewhere between R.A Salvatore and Tad Williams at a used bookstore.

Coming around to old thoughts again is hard, while all of this is happening again. A smart professor of literature one time said that a common mistake is to say people live in the rear-view mirror, but he laughs and reminds an interested audience that often rear view mirrors are meant to depict objects still yet approaching. If we like it or not, something is happening and I find myself asking what. All of this beguiling social media double speak, the twisting of familiar terms. It is easy to write a fantasy of wanting something sexy to look at, but men have made whole careers on doing just that – and doubtless dozens of dead and hidden away queers, faggots, poets, transwomen, dykes, dancers, have burned the mark of their half-hearted essays on sexuality onto their skin and in their most public souls as our personal crosses to bear – or else someone might get the wrong idea of us.

We didn’t really unpack or deal with Gamergate the first time around – and we’re still years later chasing Games as Art or Games as Emotion or Empathy Machines or Revolutionary Texts. Yet with all of the artists I know, the people who drift to these things because they see so much of themselves with a capacity for being reflected deep in them, I wonder if we’ve ever asked if videogames create an identity that exists in a consequence free world. A polished mirror of fantasy and escapism, a body-cloaking illusion that some part of these Gamer Bros and Pick Me Girls and Brazilian White Supremacists Living in White Italian Neighborhoods haven’t also found some mirror-salve for a life of hate. A place to go to live consequence free. I saw it once. I know how it makes someone live, how they might crave living. Sure, we have cute articles about wholesomeness and non violent videogames. Just as many still about videogames where you can fuck, or suck, but aren’t videogames a place to go and enjoy all of that consequence free? is it built into our text, our art, so much we’ve left a pitch-black room somewhere we never quite have wanted to look into?

Will it keep happening as long as the same questions are getting ask, the same doors opened.

It’s like there’s a door we can only see from the corner of our eye. We know it’s there, but acknowledging it is like asking to invite some kind of sin into the church. It’s already here:

“Videogames should be a place to escape from the real world.”

I’ve seen what that can do to a human heart.