My Year as the Killjoy
Notes on Walking Away
Games Media Can't Ignore BDS Xbox Boycott was published one year ago today.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there snivelling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer.
Now do you believe in them? Are they not more credible?
Writing a manifesto for doing games criticism during the Palestinian genocide did not make me a pariah in the press. I've drawn followers and readers for taking such a vocal position in the field. I've been recognized by colleagues who I have only met in recent months for writing something so widely read and held with some regard of importance. What doors it did close I did not hear shut. My inbox is quiet.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message
It is the journalists who decide which sides are legitimate and which are not, which views shall be considered and which pushed out of the frame. And this power is an extension of the power of other curators of the culture—network execs, producers, publishers—whose core job is deciding which stories get told and which do not. When you are erased from the narrative, you do not exist. Thus the complex of curators is doing more than setting pub dates and greenlighting—they are establishing and monitoring a criterion for humanity.
Writing a manifesto for doing games criticism during the Palestinian genocide did make me more isolated. I find myself at a pole of an industry libidinally driven by fun and nostalgia and insecurity. I no longer view the willful ignorance of the majority of games media as hypocrisy or contradiction. Today, I see the progressive posturing beneath it all. Outlets and editors who were vocal 12 months ago cover Microsoft published games without even a cursory acknowledgement of their abetting the deaths of tens of thousands of people nor mention of the calls for solidarity from our siblings who are feeling the imperial boot directly while we watch from below. I am sick of sinking further below other bodies as the boot comes down, my space to retreat into fun and distraction shorter than those comfortable maintaining their ignorance. But the boot will reach them one day, too.
Andrea Long Chu, Zero Tolerance
All social movements are also intellectual movements: They both contribute to and rely on the ideological groundwater of society...Every time a person contests or defends a political situation, they are also contesting or defending the intellectual terms on which that contest is conducted. You cannot fight without fighting about how you fight.
Games media was dying before 2023. It would still be spiraling, perhaps even faster, if its majority operated in solidarity with Palestinians. I know that, despite this, the ones who remain have much to lose (healthcare, rent, groceries). It's never been all fun and games, but I reject the notion that things must get better before we start making them so. What is the point of independent publications if they employ the same white men to sell cool cover art and write the same industry boosterism? If the outlets with the most subscribers advocate for slop or the sites with the most progressive headlines excuse themselves from culpability? For all their play, these writers have such small imaginations. All I see is a games media recreating an image of an idealized past.
Jay Castello, pre-mushroompunk
I can feel mushroompunk coming. We are not in the 2010s optimism anymore and we will want to find things growing from the destruction we’ve created. And we love an easy story. Even moreso, we love an aesthetic, something that doesn’t even require the nuances of a narrative at all, just an easy-on-the-eyes spark of hope to tide us over. But we owe it to the complexity of fungi to be open to ambiguities. Find out if that matsutake is growing despite its circumstances or because it was planted there to look good. Make that context the story.
It is possible that something better does not exist. What would it even look like? I am a cynic; I could not begin to describe it at all.
Emily Price, Stop Telling Me What I Want
I think we are suffering from a critical mass of tuning everything out. Toxic nihilism has us convinced that if we’re not doing the max, we might as well do nothing. And more than that, it’s right that we do nothing; we’re realists for doing nothing.
Find those who seem to know where they are going. Make them endure, give them space.
Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion
Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future. Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we don't have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground.