DAY SIX: trapped in the city
2018 was a hard year: for me, for my country, for maybe everyone on some existential or incremental level. I can’t articulate this better than just to say, everything felt like it got worse, like we stepped that much closer to the point of no return, edged ourselves that much closer to that drop into yawning, destructive nothingness. In 2018, politics was meaner, social media was louder, the news got stupider, the Earth got hotter, my family and friends and friends of friends started having children and marrying and — in some cases — dying, and I got older in a way that made me more tired and not wiser.
And in 2018, it got harder for me to believe in the idea of the apolitical.
In 2018, I was reminded again and again that try as we might to esports a haven away from everything, there is nothing we can do to keep politics and the consequences of politics out. Sometimes, that’s a good thing, like SonicFox’s acceptance speech at The Game Awards. If there was ever an example of thriving versus surviving, surely it must be SonicFox as he stood there, the head of his blue fursuit under his arm, giving a “super” shout-out all his LGBTQ friends that “have always helped me through life.”
But sometimes, it can feel like the worst thing in the world. In 2018 I was reminded that esports exists in a world with guns, with the worst excesses of corporate culture, with virulent militant anti-feminism. In 2018, I was reminded that it was okay for prominent industry figures to dunk on the enthusiasm of primarily young women fans for a laugh or two on Twitter. In 2018, I saw countless times how men are always one sob story away from a redemption tour, while women are pummeled time and time again for their opinions, their appearance, the way they sound, or maybe just their gall to continue advancing in their career. In 2018, I was reminded all too often how we are all just one unexplained business decision away from losing our jobs. In 2018, well, unions.
Some of you reading this may be less obviously political, in your heart or in your existence. Maybe you are not obviously a racial minority, or maybe you have always lived and worked among people who look and talk similar to you, or maybe you are still young and are still trying to figure out what feels like politics and what feels just like an emotion. And I’m here to tell you that it’s all politics, and it’s all political.
Politics is not a switch that you can flick on and off whenever you like; by its very nature, politics is intrusive, because by its very nature, it is made up of everything you experience in life, and it makes up everything you experience in life. It is the rude guest that refuses to leave your house party even when you’re ready to clean up, the wine stain on your carpet that only you can see, the migraine you have taken everything for. When someone tells you that they are neutral, that they can afford to be apolitical, they are lying.
The reality is, in 2018, as is true of every other year, my very existence is political and politicized — if not by me, then by someone else, when viewing me as an aggregate or as an example of “my kind.” My ability to position myself in my industry because of my education and background is politicized. My marriage to a white man as a Chinese woman is politicized. Every part of my body — woman, child-bearing or at least capable of being so, bleeding or not, conventionally heterosexually or not — is politicized. Every inch taken from me in my life, and every inch I gave in, is wholly, uncompromising, undeniably politicized.
But it’s from this place — my life, my job, my relationship, my body — that I watch esports. It’s from this political and politicized space that I love esports. I can’t adopt the body, the mind, the heart of a person I am not when I am watching esports, anymore than a progamer can adopt my body, my mind, my heart and live my life when they don’t want to play anymore.
We don’t watch esports in a vacuum. We don’t play games in a vacuum. I am not a fan in a vacuum. To live in a vacuum is to live in a lie.
(This post is part of 12 Days of Esports for 2018.)
