POSTS

I Don’t Have Dreams Anymore, I Just Game

Sometimes the act of sleeping terrifies me. I know it’s necessary–in fact most days it’s the only thing I’m looking forward to. I enjoy the post-sleep feeling, waking up to a world that feels wholly new. Thoughts of yesterday and what’s to come not having made their way back into my brain. There’s a sense of freedom in those first few minutes where I can let myself forget about who I am or the world around me. I am the beginning and end of my universe. But, when I lay in bed and think about the action of ‘falling asleep’ I am filled with a sense of dread; The slow transition from consciousness to unconsciousness, the way I can feel my body start to become rigid and immobile, the numbness of limbs. It doesn’t feel natural to have this reaction to sleep, to be so extremely aware while my body begins to shut down for the night. Sleep is a natural bodily function, everyone does it, everyone needs it. I wish I didn’t need sleep, I wish I could just live and function and be conscious eternally. I wish I didn’t have to die.

“Look at us–a bunch of deathless freaks, meeting like this” – Die-Hardman, Death Stranding

In 2019, a video game called Death Stranding was released for PS4. This game would forever change my life and by that I mean ever since I played it, I’ve been obsessed with it in a way that borders on unhealthy. If you’ve seen pictures of Norman Reedus and Mads Mikkelsen covered in oil it was probably a screenshot of this game. Emphasis on probably, I have no idea what happens in The Walking Dead & Hannibal fandom circles. In Death Stranding the protagonist, Sam Porter Bridges, is something that’s known as a “repatriate”. It’s a term that essentially means ‘immortal’. Sam’s connection to the world of the dead was severed at some point and as a result he cannot die. His soul can leave his body when he succumbs to severe injury but it gets stopped before he can fully cross over. When Sam “dies” his soul arrives at a beach, a metaphysical shoreline that acts as a border between life and death. The natural order of things would dictate that he is at his end, all living beings arrive at this beach eventually, they all make their way from sand to water. Step-by-step as they make their final pilgrimage to somewhere unknown, somewhere they belong. Sam would join them, a look of awe on his face as he wades his way through these same waters. He could finally be free from his burden, reunited with those he’s lost, but he can never join them. He’s lost something vital, something integral and that makes him different. This endless sea where all souls drift and coalesce into a single mass rejects him. The sand beneath his feet giving way as he is suddenly thrust back into his body, back into the world he wishes he could escape from. He is alone, a deathless freak. I can understand his struggle, being rejected by that which should come naturally. I am a sleepless freak trying to place myself in the shoes of a deathless freak. If I can follow him on his journey, become him, maybe I can understand my own. Closing my eyes as I let myself meet with Sam on the beach, blurring the lines between my reality and his. Wading through the waters and sinking into his body. Becoming one.

“Sam Porter Bridges. The Man Who Delivers” – Fragile, Death Stranding

I’m awake in my private room. Lifting myself out of bed is as easy as the press of a button. It’s quiet and solitary in this space I’ve created. Everything I could need to sustain myself is right here. I almost don’t want to leave. But a journey west must be made. I am a porter. I can’t stay here isolated all day. Soon, I’m going to have to be a person. I make my way into the world outside, tools fastened to my back ready for use whenever I might need them. I breathe in the fresh air from a world that is born again after every rainfall. Night never comes here. The rivers are fresh and unpolluted. It’s freeing and it’s new. It’s not a world that encourages traversal over long stretches. I travel the distance I’m supposed to, I make the deliveries as I’m told and at the end of the day I return to my private room. Back in my own bed, staring at the ceiling above me as I let myself drift away from today into the next. Inescapable thoughts that filled my head, existential dread over what’s to come. Sleep is simple here. I’m isolated even in my isolation. This is what I look forward to most days. Sitting here staring at this screen, through the eyes of another.

“I haven’t been outside in a long time. It’s just too much to take in all at once” – Mama, Death Stranding

A new day, feeling like a new existence. I enjoy this moment of conscious tranquility as long as I am able before I remember the inescapable truth: I have to be a person. Yet that truth seems almost harsher today, as if the universe is punishing me for enjoying myself for too long. Today’s journey is somehow even more taxing. My distance traveled, my deliveries made, injuries sustained. All were within the normal range. I should be capable of more here and yet it’s as if the strain is exponential. Everything is constantly moving. I can barely keep up. My eyes red as they strain to keep focus. A tinning sound enters and leaves my ear. Sweat drips from my furrowed brow as I lift my hand from the controller to wipe my face. I can feel it again. This world is necrotizing beneath my feet. The strain of degradation is evident on everything I see and touch. I can feel my cells dying one by one. How can I live here, how can anything live here? Just merely existing is enough for this tax to be levied against you. Why does this world have to erode too? I can’t be a part of it anymore. I won’t. I must remove myself from this world within this world. I need to go back to sleep. All the noise of the world outside of here can be repelled. I’m safe. I’m alone here in this bunker. My stamina won’t be drained.

“Living is no different than being dead if you’re all alone” – Amelie, Death Stranding

It’s difficult to know how much time has passed since I’ve confined myself to this room. Sitting in this same spot, staring at this screen. Everything can fade and degrade but as long as my eyes can remain transfixed nothing needs to change. I can be alone, not truly alive but not really dead. I can be at peace here. However the world I once knew refuses to be so easily forgotten. Rumbles manifest not from my controller but from outside my door. Feet hitting the floor as my youngest sibling runs around the house. The roars of a garbage truck outside my window. Daylight breaks its way through my black-out curtains. My private room is being breached, the walls of isolation I’ve built are beginning to crumble. I’m not ready to leave yet, I refuse. The word outside does nothing but drain. My heart begins to race as I remember the pains of what sent me here in the first place. The senseless noise and light that demand my attention begin to coalesce into one tinning sound.

*DIE* *DIE* *DIE* *click* *click* *click* *DIE* *DIE* *DIE* *click* *click* *click*

Alarms going off demanding that I reckon with their source. I look towards my bed and see my phone lighting up and buzzing. Missed calls, unanswered texts, emails that need to be delivered. A whole life that is going unlived. All that ties that keep me suspended in this isolation begin to unravel in a single moment as I am plunged back into the reality I’ve been avoiding. The world in which I belong. A sleepless freak and a deathless freak still have to reckon with the world around them.

“See the sun set. The day is ending. Let that yawn out. There’s no pretending” – Cliff Unger, Death Stranding

The world demands I must be my own person. Channeling my struggles through Sam Porter Bridges makes the truth all the more evident. We’re always going to have to step outside. The blood this world demands of me must be spilled. It’s a ritual I must perform daily in order to live in a world where I don’t belong. The knife plunging into the skin gouging out hours at a time so that we may have another day of lucidity. That is what sleep is. The slow transition from night to day as the sun creeps over the horizon beginning the cycle anew again. We are all living things. So know that while the choice to step outside may always be inevitable it will always be uniquely yours.

 

Nathanial Torres is a Latinx writer and a life-long gamer born and raised in Southern California. They are at times a poet, a performer, and a comedian. As a writer they seek to engage with all creative formats that inspire them. They hope to continue to pursue their creative endeavors while also finding the time to game.

 

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Limitations at Play

Part of the magic of childhood is that the world is not yet familiar. With that lack of orientation, of acculturation, there comes a relationship to questions we’re scarcely able to hold onto. A relative lack of time spent in the world means that there’s so much to ask about, to learn, to discover, but equally important is what you don’t question.

The nature of the questions I had as a kid about my hodgepodge of hand-me-down toys wasn’t based in skepticism at the lack of cohesion or a need to reconcile with sense; the questions were based in possibility, in what I might try—and, generally, in process over product. What would happen if Batman fought a Power Ranger? How might dinosaurs and fighter jets coexist? The question isn’t: Why would a lego man in a go kart be able to fly alongside an A-Wing spacecraft from Star Wars? It’s: Why wouldn’t they?

Before we get good at self-censoring and unpracticed in being sparked by wonder, we are driven into experience by imagination and curiosity. We take whatever ingredients we have and cook up something new whenever we can, something wonderful that holds our presence and attention even before we discover the otherwise un-withstandable world, the world from which we’ll inevitably need things to take us away.

Of course, there are limits. The toys you have, perhaps—though especially time, space, health, and so on. Even a game you’ve invented is tied to its premise or rules, even if those rules are always changing. Even the game of Calvinball from the iconic comic strip Calvin & Hobbes—a game whose only real rule is that you make up new rules each time you play as you go—always includes some type of ball and is tied to whatever equipment Calvin happens to have on hand at the time.

But that tension between limitation and possibility, that discovery of the infinite within the constrained, is part of what drives us to play. Take any board game: there’s the win condition, but how you arrive at it is—generally—flexible. You have to strategize, determine a route around the rules of the game and the other players.

You can play—or even just watch—a sport for decades and still be surprised. Athlete’s push the limitations of physics and bodies; the result is endlessly-generated creativity and innovation within rules and structure.

This creativity begets an alchemy, a magic, what Graeme Kilpatrick, scholar of media arts and digital cultures, refers to when he says, “Play is what enables us to conjure something out of nothing.” And what we conjure populates worlds that widen the edges of this one.

In my youngest memories playing video games, it was the limited-tech era of the 8- and 16-bit—Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Gameboy—just before the launch of the Nintendo 64. Regardless of generation, video games from any era can still feel infinite, and my experience of playing them then and now aligns with Mario- and Zelda-creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s idea that playing video games is to have “a whole drawer-full of playgrounds,” to have “places you’re attached to and go back to again and again.”

On those real-life playgrounds, when someone told you there was a hidden boss if you could scale a certain hill outside of Peach’s castle in Super Mario 64, or that you could unlock Sonic the Hedgehog or Ash Ketchum from the Pokémon anime in Super Smash Bros. (long before Sonic or Pokémon Trainer did in fact become playable characters in the series), or that you could find the legendary Pokémon Mew under a truck near the cruise ship the S.S. Anne, even when you doubted you wanted it to be true, went home and experimented with what possibility still lies behind the walls of a world you’ve already spent dozens of hours in. Sometimes the effort would be rewarded with verifying the truth that you can—for example—talk to Yoshi if you make it to the roof of Peach’s castle, but sometimes the push itself was reward enough.

There’s always more to push toward. As many times as I’ve played 1994’s Donkey Kong Country I still don’t think I’ve discovered all the bonus areas and other secrets. One of the things I love about FromSoft games like Dark Souls, Elden Ring, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is how they provide impossible-seeming challenges to prove the player’s ever-growing ability to improve and overcome: to face a mysterious king riding a wyvern; an undefeated goddess of rot; a legendary swordsman who also wields a spear, a gun, and lightning, and to (after many attempts) stand victorious, achieving what felt certainly unachievable.

Whether you’re taking on the challenge of incredibly difficult games, or practicing speedrunning—which often involves not only completing a game as fast as possible but finding ways to glitch and break the game to do so—or just playing with the hope of as much fun as you can have, there’s always a higher score, a faster time, a way to be better at it than your friends, or simply more enjoyment waiting for you—something to push and discover and remind you of possibility beyond your initial understanding of limits. As possibility pushes those limits, so are we pushed, expanded, adding experiences as if amassing exp. points toward leveling up.

We might call play and the possibility therein a type of “escape” because it is a form of inhabiting a somewhere or something beyond the confines of our immediate environments, but I love that this kind of escape is not a disengagement: it’s a process that forms linkages between worlds, that better equips us for what internal and external worlds we must face otherwise

I think often of a comment from poet Ray McDaniel—author of Special Powers and Abilities, a collection of poems inhabiting a world of superheroes—who said, “There’s something true and valuable about the psychological or emotional impulse to escape [but] I resist really flat characterizations of any kind of genre as escapist … What is being escaped to is almost always an editorial commentary on what is being escaped from.”

Relatedly, the protagonist of John Guare’s 1990 play Six Degrees of Separation, Paul, posits “The imagination is not our escape . On the contrary, the imagination is the space we are all trying to get to.” He adds that imagination should be “our most personal link, with our inner lives and the world outside that world—this world we share” and is “God’s gift to make the act of self-examination bearable.”

In her essay “Barbie Taught Me the Power of Play” in Harper’s Bazaar, Airea D. Matthews says about her childhood that to play with Barbie was to be “where time and space curved to create a different existence,” to be “in a place where money was no big deal, where glamour and ecstasy were facts of life, and you could be in Malibu one day and space the next.” Her times of play “afforded [her] an elsewhere.”

But even within this framing of play as escape, she adds that Barbie and the gang “were the kind of friends who let me work out my fears and desires through a story” and that “Barbie … unveiled the underlying impulse of play: to create an extension of the self, to articulate one’s will and to bend the body of limits. … She reminds me of the imaginative intensity that children take on to push past time and space, or, perhaps, refine the ways in which they understand even their own capabilities.”

By pulling us into the possibility of other worlds, games push us closer to understanding our possible selves; and the pushable structures of games can remind us of our ability to push the “rules” of our world. Laws of physics and the like are one thing, but so much of what we accept as real and true is constructed, is more akin to the physics of games: manmade, bendable; some structures and limits we may never fully transcend, but we can reshape them, redefine them, recontextualize them, rethink them, and maybe break them like a player finding a way to glitch through a wall.

It’s that same magic of bending toward possibility that draws me now, as an adult and a writer, to poetry—one of the primary places I turn for cultivating the practice of play. (“[C]ontemporary poetry is a playground of possibility, an opening to other ways of existing,” says Sarah Nielson in the intro of BOMB Magazine’s “Why We Should Read Poetry.”)

The pursuit of the limitless within the limited is one of poetry’s central endeavors. Language itself is just a series of socially-constructed shortcuts to give shape to the abstract and communicate in lieu of telepathy. In poetry, you can become hyper-aware of how language limits our understanding through how it filters meaning, through how it can shape and obfuscate and redirect, through how it is a tool which can never be wielded with complete mastery.

But just as language comes with limits, so does it unlock possibility. A poem might impart a previously unimagined image, might defamiliarize the familiar or vice versa. Poems reach their blistered fingertips toward the ineffable until the blisters rupture—the blood finding shape in the grooves of fingerprints.

Poetry in the English language tradition has lived openly into the opportunity of free verse for fewer than 200 years. But even in free verse, there are structures: lines, stanzas, repeating sounds, patterns of images, and so on.

And the opportunity to transcend the limit of fixed forms afforded to us by the lineage of Walt Whitman can still by contrast make the idea of writing in pre-determined forms enticing, even enchanting.

How might I fit a poem’s vastness into a sonnet’s 14 lines? How might I use rhyme to create rhythm and pattern without the poem feeling predictable or antiquated? How might I honor or subvert the tradition of the haiku or sestina or villanelle, while also pushing the boundaries and making it my own?

According to T.S. Eliot, “When forced to work within a strict framework the imagination is taxed to its utmost—and will produce its richest ideas.” Amorak Huey and W. Todd Kaneko add, in their book Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology, “We often do our best work when we’re pushing against something, fighting with the difficult or uncomfortable part of a writing challenge.”

We see this, too, in video games, though generally less because of self-imposed constraint and instead because of technological ones: in some cases, creative decisions weren’t just made despite the limitations, but because of them. Mario’s iconic mustache was added so Shigeru Miyamoto didn’t have to animate a mouth in such limited pixels. Little Mac from Punch Out! needed to be small so he didn’t block too much of the screen given that the player’s perspective is fixed just behind him, but this size constraint feeds into both his name and his character context as an underdog.

There’s a version of this essay that adds these parts toward a conclusion of being thankful for barriers, for struggles, for hardship—that praises the hurdle because its presence sweetens the air above it as your soaring knee clears the metal. That is not the version of this essay I’m interested in.

Rather: I want the world in which I retained that sense of self I had before schema, before memory, as a small child when I didn’t question putting barrettes in my hair, just as I didn’t ask questions about what my toys couldn’t do or who would or wouldn’t coexist in a world together.

I want the world in which the students I mentor don’t have to confide in me their queerness because there is no need to emerge, no need to escape the harshness of their fear, no need to be protected as they prepare.

I want the world in which I am not afraid, in which my conflicts are intrapersonal and interpersonal but not pushing against power, in which the coding of our platform is not embedded with statistics and new stories and studies and lore of our deaths, our disadvantage, our worries and sorrows.

I want the world in which I can spend more time than not in the final line of Czeslaw Milosz’s poem “Encounter”: “I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.”

I will praise the incandescent sun over Anor Londo, how its flames model a hope beyond the dark and downtrodden world of Dark Souls, fallen from glory—will praise the sunlight piercing the window in the ceiling of Princess Peach’s castle knowing that looking through it will grant me wings to fly above.

But I do not want the takeaway to be that limitations are inherently good, though of course they in context can be; I can praise my strength and resilience without praising the struggle through which I built it. Still, having safe, controlled environments in which to play, to lean toward a fullness of imagination and discovery gives us space to practice, gives us structure so we don’t lose ourselves as we do our best to progress. Gives us a sandbox in which to practice building as we learn to move away from internalizing the barriers of the world around us and into Barbie’s desire at the end of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie: “I want to be a part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that is made.”

During a panel discussion in which poet Franny Choi was asked about their poem “Field Trip to the Museum of American History,” they discuss how the poem arose from advocating for the kind of world the poem describes—a world in which police violence is an unfamiliar, near-forgotten past—but, despite that advocacy, having trouble believing that world was possible because they hadn’t seen it; the poem then became “a brief teleportation” into living something beyond our present.

That’s what I aim to praise here: the teleportation, the inhabiting of worlds that give us what we need to make this one better, the cultivated balance of agency and openness that strengthens our bonds with ourselves and with others.

And so I keep pushing toward where we might go, through games—where, according to Shigeru Miyamoto, “indeterminacy, knowing that something might happen, is the most fun”—through writing—which is, in the words of Alexander Chee, “to sell a ticket to escape, not from the truth, but into it”—and in my day-to-day even when I’m not engaged in those activities.

Returning always to play in its various forms doesn’t let me forget: the questions we have filled with skepticism and pessimism and doubt are not the only questions, and there’s no limit to the number of better questions we might imagine and ask—and maybe answer.

 

Marlin M. Jenkins was born and raised in Detroit. The author of the poetry chapbook Capable Monsters (Bull City Press, 2020) and a graduate of University of Michigan’s MFA program, they currently live and teach in Minnesota.

 

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“Are you a boy? Or are you a girl?”: A Walkthrough

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“The game starts by asking you if you’re a boy or girl.”¹

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You’re sitting in the back of the car en route to the outlet malls a few towns over. In front of you is a GameBoy Color with a Pokemon Crystal cartridge inside. You’re five years old – going on six soon – and admittedly too young in the eyes of many to be comfortable reading, much less well-versed in playing video games. That doesn’t stop you.

> turn on the game
The game starts and a prompt appears.

“Are you a boy? Or are you a girl?”

> read it again. carefully 
“Are you a boy? Or are you a girl?”

(It’s a rhetorical question)
(It’s an accusation)
(It’s just some stupid dialogue from the Professor)

A selection screen appears.

“Boy”
“Girl”

> hide the screen
You curl up in the seat, obscuring the screen from view. 

MOM and DAD won’t notice. They can’t. They’re in the front seat, preoccupied with a conversation you barely understand.

> eavesdrop
Some tito, a friend/your uncle/someone at work, who’s not doing well. They pray for his family. They’re always praying.

> pray
You don’t know how. But you try.

Nothing happens.

The screen hasn’t changed. 

> make a choice
You must make a selection. 

> make a choice
You must make a selection.

> boy
It feels like lying. It feels like the truth, or at least closer to it. 

> hide.
The game continues, asking questions about the day and time. Mundane. Objective. Easy.

> move on

---

“As this is a role-playing game, there is more to roles than just the role you play in combat.  You also will have a role in society to play, and that will mostly be determined by things such as your race, gender and background.” ²

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You start the game by waking up in your room. Get ready for the day by going left to the bathroom and look in the mirror.

(It’s you!)

Go downstairs where your DAD is waiting to take you to school.

In the cutscene, your friend SILVER is talking with a gang of grunts. His best friend is GRUNT LEADER. They don’t want to play with you because you’re a girl and supposedly don’t know anything about Pokemon. 

SILVER laughs, not because it’s true (he knows it’s not) but because he’s a boy, like them. Prepare for a fight. 

> Attack
“I’ve played all the games! I probably know more than you!”

                  Miss!

GRUNT hurls an insult.
“We don’t care. Go dig your family out of the dirt. I hope they’re dead.”

(It’s typhoon season in the Philippines. Flash floods and mudslides have made international headlines. Your immediate family isn’t affected, at least not physically. It doesn’t matter.)

                  Critical!

You can’t use any items, defend yourself, or flee. You cannot win this encounter. You’re not supposed to.

SILVER doesn’t laugh. (He’s brown like you. He hurts like you. You both aren’t boys like them, and you never will be. But you wish you were and there are parts of yourselves you are willing to betray to get there). He doesn’t interfere.

Move on. Play Pokemon and Fire Emblem and Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts. Play as boys and girls (and girly boys and boyish girls). Build up your party again and again. Save scum so you never lose a fight.

[Spoiler: You and SILVER aren’t friends anymore.]

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You’re back in the Philippines for your uncle’s wedding. You’re supposed to be a flower girl. MOM and your LOLA are in the room preparing.

Speak to your LOLA. She will ask how you want your haircut.

Option 1
“Just a little bit.”
> MOM approves.

Option 2
“Short.”
> MOM disapproves. 

Option 3
“Short, like a boy.”
> MOM disapproves and yells at you for half an hour.

It ultimately doesn’t matter. LOLA approves either way but will do as MOM demands. Change for the wedding and look in the mirror. It’s you, but uncomfortable. The dress you wear is itchy, your tights are too tight, and your shoes are too stiff. Your LOLA hugs you when you cry, promising it’s only for a little while. 

She hugs you the first time you come out as queer.

---

Fall in love with wearing the words “BUTCH” and “DYKE.” 

[Spoiler: it’ll take longer to love the words “FEMME” and “FAGGOT,” but you’ll wear them just the same]

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Spend hours in character creators making alternate versions of yourself. There’s always something missing

                  gender < – – >
                  height < – – – – – >
                  weight < – – – – – >
                  skin < – – – – – >
                  eyes < – – – – – >

and you can never get it right.

---

In your room late at night, check the door of your room to find a towel shoved into the crack, hiding the light from your parents. You’ll need to do this every time you decide to stay up. After a bit of downtime, you’ll get a text from a friend to hop onto Gaia.

Log on to see your sprite appear: some kind of goth wizard/ninja in a bandit mask. You’re happy with the laser sword and angel wings, but games like this don’t carry your skin tone. Regardless, you’re approached by several equally ornamented (and pale) avatars.

LocalDemon: Haiiii
Uniquorn: :3
XoXStina: Its u!!

RP holding hands and making out and being in love. You don’t know their real names. You don’t know what they look like. Wish that it was this easy.

---

“The differences between genders in this game are fairly limited. A few NPCs will address you differently, depending on your gender, and there are more opportunities to get laid if you’re male (although the sequel really makes up for it in favor of the ladies). It’s ultimately not a big deal” ³

---

=============
ROMANCE GUIDE
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ABIGAIL
Likes: Candy, Anime, Emoticons, MMOs with dressup mechanics, Men, Women
Dislikes: Unavailability

SHANE
Likes: Grilled meat, Horror movies, Practical jokes, Smash Bros., Other Asians, Men(?), Women
Dislikes: Being alone

PENNY
Likes: Iced coffee, Acoustic guitar, Band merch, Left4Dead, Other Filipinos, Men, Women(?)
Dislikes: Commitment
=============

Your friend JACKNIFE goes on and on about how Mirror’s Edge combines his favorite things: parkour and badass Asian women. He tells you how hard he is. Choose however you want to react, it doesn’t affect the outcome. 

Later he asks you what it’s like to be bisexual. 

(It’s a rhetorical question)
(It’s an accusation)
(It’s a prayer)

=============
ALEX
Likes: Energy drinks, Heavy metal, Skateboards, First person shooters, Men(?), Women
Dislikes: Questioning his masculinity

HALEY
Likes: Instant ramen, Adult cartoons, Crystals, Racing games, Men, Women
Dislikes: Questioning your masculinity

SEBASTIAN
Likes: Chewy candy, classic films, dandelions, Skyrim, Other Asians, Men(?), Women(?)
Dislikes: Questions
=============

Turning off your PC, inspect your reflection in the blank screen, blurry in the dark. Pull your hair back, then take it down. Picture what it’s like to be a woman. Picture what it’s like to be a man. Picture being wanted as either. Squint at what you see. It’s you.

You buy Mirror’s Edge but can’t play more than twenty minutes before feeling sick.

---

Leave your hometown to go to the Big City several states away. Everyone introduces themselves, including their pronouns (how nice!), and you really want to 

> make a good impression 
> reinvent yourself
> make a different choice

Say “you can call me whatever you’d like, just don’t call me a lady,” to boost your approval and unlock new abilities.

---

[Spoiler: you’re the first and only asian she dates]
[Spoiler: you’re the last asian he dates]
[Spoiler: she only dates other asians]
[Spoiler: he only dates asians in general]
[Spoiler: she fucks a filipino guy right after you.]
[Spoiler: he fucks a filipino guy right before you.]

It’s a coincidence.

---

Your partner’s friends (white like them) don’t like you and don’t want you dating them. Their other friends (brown like you) put together the pieces. They’re the ones that intervene.

It’s not about incompatible personalities. It doesn’t matter if you’re queer like them, trans like them, nonbinary like them. You’ll never be like them, but they expect you to want to.

---

You get called every possible slur in chat even if your mic isn’t on. Sometimes it feels good. It feels closer to the truth. 

[Spoiler: You can be seen for you are, or you can be desired.]

---

How many endings are there? ⁴
How do I get the true ending? ⁵

---

The week before your LOLA dies back in the Philippines, choose to make pancit for Friendsgiving. 

She speaks Taglish over Facetime. You’re so beautiful and pretty and handsome. She likes your hair. She calls you gwapo and pogi and she’s proud of you for cooking more. She says she wishes she could hug you. Play Pokemon Shield the whole flight to her wake. 

You never get to come out to her a second time. You never learn enough Tagalog to do so. You know you could have done it in English.

---

Schedule your shots, work out a bit more. 

Dyke nights stop feeling like home, especially when you forget to shave the patchy goatee. 

Circuit parties also don’t cut it. You end up too short to be read as a man in most cases. You don’t want to get top surgery but you don’t like the way you stick out. You will stick out.

You always get clocked and even though it’s not necessarily wrong, it’s also not right. 

You stay in more, blaming the 40+ hour campaigns in your RPGs you want to finish. Keep buying them. Never finish.

---

Look in the mirror. It really is you. 

---

Make a queer Discord server. Join a queer Minecraft realm. Fall in love.

She brings you to your testosterone injections and to farmer’s markets, and you get her the Stardew Valley soundtrack on vinyl.

---

You’re sitting in the back of the car en route to some mountains a few hours away from DAD’s hometown. Scroll through Discord while your younger cousins also tap away at their phones. They ask if they can be your friends.

> add them
Added. You immediately are sent a DM.

> read
SilverBullet: Can I show you some stuff I drew? It has to be a secret though.

> yes
SilverBullet: cool

You receive a few illustrations – Genshin Impact fanart, Among Us memes, and a self-portrait of your cousin wrapped in a trans pride flag. 

> it’s you!
SilverBullet: it is 🙂 

---

_{¹ Pokemon Crystal Version – Guide and Walkthrough (GBC) by Rolent_X 2002).
² Dragon Age: Origins – Guide and Walkthrough (X360) by scopius2 2009.
³ Fallout – Character Creation Guide (PC) by Haeravon 2014.
⁴ Dragon Age: Origins (Xbox 360) Q&A by Reemption626 2010.
⁵ Persona 4 Golden (PlayStation Vita) Q&A by GEB123 2013.}

 

Lyn Rafil (they/them) is a queer nonbinary filipino-american first, an unabashed nerd second, and everything else third. They have a B.S. in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University; and they work commercially as a researcher, strategist, and writer specializing in cultural and media analysis of games and gaming communities. You can get in touch with them at lrafil.com.

 

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