Pocket Monsters, Knowing the Devil

It’s difficult to qualify a single year in the 9x-(estimates vary)-billion-dollar games industry, especially one with as diverse and entertaining an output as 2016.

What do you say about a year where most critic’s best-of lists will likely include a farming game (Stardew Valley), a murder simulator (Hitman), a literal romp through hell (Doom), a magical-boy road trip (Final Fantasy XV), and a cartoony first-person shooter (Overwatch) known as much for its balanced play as the developer’s inability to stop fans from drawing the characters having sex with eachother?

All-in-all, that it’s been a pretty good one!

Which is great news, because between the far-right’s terrifying ascendancy, and capitalism’s slow lurch toward imminent global catastrophe, fantasy and escape will be integral in making 2017 tolerable.

But how can games make it better? Or at least, in what way can game critics frame the experience of playing them to counter the tactics employed by the right and corporatist-center in their quest to marginalize, fracture, and ultimately destroy anyone who is not explicitly with them?

This year, two properties stood out as succeeding in this, generating intoxicating, deeply complicated gravitational fields that I found myself swiftly falling into, and summarily ejected from, changed for the better:

Niantic/Google/Gamefreak/Nintendo’s AR sensation Pokemon Go and Aevee Bee/Mia Schwartz’s work of interactive fiction We Know the Devil.

Though entirely different types of game, they both succeeded (though not necessarily by design) in igniting people’s passions and complicating their relationship to spaces, both real and imagined.

I was invited to participate in Pokemon Go’s beta-test just a week after being included in a massive round of layoffs at the ad agency I worked at. Flush with time, I walked the streets of Los Angeles, enraptured by the transliteration of a childhood fantasy onto the real world. I knew it would be a hit, by virtue of the franchise’s power alone, but I had no idea what the world was in for when the game went to general release a few weeks later.

For ten glorious days people just seemed to get along. Conversations with strangers erupted at dinner, ad-hoc gangs formed near “gyms”, and crowds with as diverse a personhood as one could expect in a coastal American city coalesced around the ubiquitous “poke-lures” that lined the streets. But it wouldn’t last—it couldn’t. Not long into the game I started asking myself questions about who these strangers were, if they shared my values, and how inclusive they would be if this experience was stripped of the adorable, recognizable little monsters. Was I participating in some kind of sinister neoliberal pacification psyop? Whose streets were these?

Then it got old, and I stopped.

Likewise, We Know the Devil made me question where I belong. A Decidedly more personal affair than Go, the game is an interactive storybook that details the supernatural and intimate experiences of three teens dealing with their sexual and gender identities. It has inspired a fiercely dedicated fan base increasingly protective of the rare property they feel accurately represents their experience.

Though the creators have gone on record against this sort of gatekeeping, as I lurked through fan-art, fan-fiction, and countless fan-conversations, I was forced to ask myself (as decidedly not a teen struggling with their identity) what I was gaining from the experience other than a vicarious sense of thrill and ennui that I’m not sure I’m entitled to.

Which in the context of 2014’s divisive and ultra-toxic “Gamergate” (a likely catalyst for the “alt-right” movement), is an important thing to consider. Though these ethno-national fascist movements across the globe are coalescing around identity politics themselves, they see its iteration in the left as a potential weak spot, an opportunity to agitate and encourage infighting. Though there are innumerable “leftists” who fail to recognize the importance of intersectionality, understanding and reconciling our differences is an indispensable aspect of finding the common ground.

There are probably a dozen games that came out this year I enjoyed playing more than these two, but Pokemon Go and We Know the Devil transcend their value as distractions and distinguish themselves as experiences that might help us navigate where, when, why, and how we belong in a given space, a skill we will all need to organize and survive in this dire political climate, and a quality I hope to find more of in future games.