Three Machphrases for dealing with an uncertain future.

Kawika Guillermo

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ANMLY

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8 min read

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Nov 28, 2016

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The election on November 8th has revealed our vulnerability to the wave of rightwing strong man politics. As an American living in Hong Kong, I can’t help but perceive this event in the larger wave of Brexit, Duterte, the anti-Democratic PRC, the bullies like Hun Sen and Putin who supported Trump, and the Syrian crisis. It’s been said that queer people of color need to reach across the aisle — an aisle we can barely spot from the back rows.

What I feel is not the urgency of reconciliation, but the paralyzing fear of an uncertain future. The iPhone-politics of self-congratulating status updates has begun to unravel, revealing a dark underbelly that we thought was merely dead weight. We thought this election would cast it aside, like stones in a backpack. But the weight is inside of us, deeper than any limb, side-by-side with our heart.

This darkness leads us into an uncharitable future: What happens when the immoral strong men of the world start feeding off each other’s hatred and fear? What happens when politics becomes a “come at me bro” dick-measuring contest, but with guns and bombs? What happens in four years when a certain strong man sees his poll numbers, and realizes that he must do something drastic to get re-elected?

Games can hep us chart these uncertain futures. We often chastise them for their overblown violence, their way of forcing players to take the helm of imperial, bigoted racism. Games put players in the space of racism, bigotry, and xenophobia. And in this darkness that games capture so well, we can find glimpses of our own futures. They haven’t been charted, but they have been imagined.

Here I present three machphrases, which I defined in my last installment as “prose inspired by the machinations of video games, their universes, their puzzles, their social and physical systems of logic, their rules and boundaries, and their emotional resonances.”

Massive Chalice (Double Fine Productions, 2015)

In Massive Chalice I play an immortal ruler tasked with breeding superhuman warriors like cattle. I make them strong, smart and resilient, and distribute their children to kingdoms whose plebeian populations will serve to protect their sacred bloodlines. Because of their racial stock, they possess a unique power over the masses. In other words, I’m put in the shoes of a Medieval eugenicist tasked in creating a super race in order to keep out an infectious element from taking over my Kingdoms.

The racist logic present in Massive Chalice is a Trumpist racial logic. It is the logic that the few oligarchical businessmen and their families (Trump and his filial cadre) contain the sacred gene of celebrity. The rest of us protect them in the name of survival, sharing their tweets, keeping their name in the media, legitimizing their voices by including them while keeping the rest in the back row.

In Massive Chalice, the sacred race’s personality, class, and interests are “matched” to create divine offspring, and these unions are celebrated even when I marry a 19 year old to an old man. They all reproduce just fine, their superhuman race capable of generating offspring like ever-flowing child mills. Then I match a same sex couple, even though their chances for children read “none.” This does not help their survival in the least. In the Trumpist racial logic of family first, queer sex decimates any chance for a livable future.

This War of Mine ( 11 bit studios, 2014)

In the brutal war survival game This War of Mine, I have already let three members of my survivor family die. One starved. Another, the football star Pavle, was killed by a soldier while scavenging for food. The journalist Katia was stabbed to death by thieves who ransacked the house. There are three of us left, a desperate group of strangers who have huddled together to escape the city streets where soldiers of the new regime run amok. The soldiers have guns and a growing sexual appetite, and we have failed to find a gun.

Our daily lives have become inured to the screams outside. We move about in sadness and depression, going about business as usual: scavenging makeshift parts to build weapons, finding books to burn before winter sets in. We survive in an abandoned house, not daring to go outside, where the soldiers see us merely as resources, as bodies to be raped or tortured for information. The days seem the only important thing now — each passing day is a sign of progression. But the only thing that really progresses is the cold, our hunger, and the weapons they use against us, which turn from fists to knives to shotguns to tanks.

This War of Mine fosters not power but desperation against new regimes of power. We are the broken, keeping our bodies alive though our will has shattered. The first time I rob the house of an elderly couple, I steal only the things I need: food, metal parts to make weapons. Unlike the soldiers, I have not stopped questioning my morals, and I leave just enough food to keep the elderly couple and ourselves alive. By day 15, I return to the house, step over the sobbing old couple to ransack every resource I can. By day 20 I am willing to torture them to get them to give up their food. The sense of desperation enfolds around me — what will I do to get to the next day?

When dusk comes I make for a new house, one closer to the soldier’s barracks. I hear muffled sounds, but sneak in anyway. Where there is people, there is usually food.

My vision sees the sky in a bruise, and as the sun sets, it turns into a welt. My body feels heavy, wavering, but somehow I make it onto the house’s tiled rooftop. I hear sounds and hide in a small garden canopy. I leer inside the house, feel its warmth, and hear a strange sound, a wail. I use the sound to cover my own as my feet meet the thin blue tile.

“I’ll do anything you want,” a woman’s voice comes through the drapes. I shuffle forward with each word. I grab onto a wooden pillar when the sound stops.

The sound starts again: “…please, no…please,”

The wall across from me pounds a heavy beat. I walk to the end of the hall, afraid the wall will break and I’ll be caught. When the sound stops I stop. When it comes, I move.

More sounds: “it hurts…make it stop.”

A basket! I can’t help myself — I dive for it, open it, see the glorious treasure — the bread, the salted meat, the eggs.

The screams follow me out. “Please no more. Please no more.” I thank god for the screams.

When I return to the mansion, with a pack of food, I find the house empty. I watch my last surviving character abandon the house, the depression and alcoholism sending him into the open no-man’s-land of sniper fire. It’s a better fate for him than the empty prison we helped create.

Papers, Please (Lucas Pope, 3909 LLC 2013)

This machpharsis is from Patricia Hernandez, Deputy Editor at Kotaku, who writes of her playthrough of the video game, Papers Please, a game about a border control guard in a post-socialist dystopia (her post: “The Game I Played When I Was Sacred to Death of Being Reported”). The game invokes Hernandez’s relationships to undocumented latino/as, her family and friends who fear of being taken by border guards and government agents. When Hernandez loses her ID, she plays the game to cope with the fear of deportation, putting herself in the shoes of the border guard.

Hernandez writes: “Everyone who tries to pass through an immigration checkpoint has a story, both in real life and in the indie computer game, Papers, Please. Maybe they’re visiting family. Maybe they’re looking for work. Maybe they’re taking refuge. Maybe they’re just taking a vacation. Or sometimes — and this is probably way more common in the game than in real life — they might be something a bit more dangerous. Maybe they’re a smuggler. Maybe they’re a terrorist.

“Do you want to be a hero — this is a video game, remember? — or do you want to provide for your family? Is smuggling someone through the border worth it if it might mean your family goes hungry? What if you were the only thing standing between them and the hope for a better life?

“ I empathize with the character and his unfortunate situation, but only to a certain degree. I don’t know, there’s something about your role as an immigrations inspector that reminds me that even when a game manages to be different from most, it’s still likely to have a hell of a hard time giving you a role that isn’t defined by power. You’re in control of the lives of so many people — you can even choose to play a small part in taking down the government, if you play your cards right. And when I think about things like how my grandmother likes to go off about a time before you needed a piece of paper to prove the land you lived on for generations is actually yours, the fact that your chief activity in the game is sorting through paperwork makes the game feel profoundly white, profoundly of an empowered class. A well-disguised power fantasy, if you will.”

The Trump Power Fantasy

The power fantasy Hernandez writes about is enacted in a depressing sets of repeated gestures: checking passports, stamping, comparing, checking for visual authenticity, all with a growing paranoia for terrorism and the growing fear that your children will not have enough food if you don’t meet your quota.

If games excel at anything, it’s exposing these fantasies for what they are, making them repetitive and realistic in a way that prepares us for what’s to come. It’s a future of deportation, Islamophobia, and racial violence that will somehow out-pace a present already fraught with drones, prisons, and guns. These games put us in the fantasy. But they are still futuristic fantasies. We, who live with uncertain futures, are not living in mere chance. The fantasy can be dismantled before it begins.