Thinking about sharing videogames with the universe

[packbat]

Gaming and the Golden Record is a compilation of tiny video essays on the theme of the Voyager Golden Record, each answering the question: if you could package up videogames on a golden record to send out into the universe, as a communication to people who don't know anything about Earth about what we people on Earth are like, what would you send? We have issues with some of the responses - a little blatant fat-negativity, a little casual amatonormativity (assuming romance is for everyone here) - but it was interesting and the question was interesting: what do you send?

Our first thought was a game we loved and loved the plot of, pretty unsurprisingly - one that has things to say about who we are, what our social structures are like, what motivates us, what kind of injustices happen ... but we stopped, and we thought, and we decided that a story next to a game just wouldn't work, however well told. Every story is full of gaps, assumptions about what people will infer and therefore shouldn't be said, and if all you have is handfuls of words, there's so little to help you find what you're missing in them.

And on that note, shouldn't we try to help them understand us? There's going to be loads of stories on this, a lot of which will probably take for granted an understanding of our ordinary. Maybe we should include a game about that ordinary - give them "Gone Home" and let them pick up books and pens and cassette tapes and turn them over and around in their hands, or give them "The Long Dark" with bodily needs to be taken care of in a world physical enough that exertion keeps you warm and different species of wood burn differently, or give them one of The Sims games and let them watch the characters seek to fulfill their bodily and social needs both.

...we probably shouldn't give a group of people who, we presume, will tear apart the few records they have of an alien civilization for every atom of information it can give them ... a game with easy-to-find glitches that break things as a guide to what normal is. We don't want them to think the most efficient form of human locomotion is backwards long jumping. We probably also don't want to give them a game quite so cisheteronormative.

So ... screw it, "Stay?" by ejadelomax.

"Stay?" is a choice-based text adventure. You act by clicking links, not by pushing joysticks - the extent to which you can glitch out the story is probably near zero. ("Stay?" also deals with abuse, body horror, and violence, so be prepared for that kind of thing. Also food and alcohol, incidentally.) "Stay?" is a story about being a person interacting with people - about lying in bed the morning after failing at the task you were trying to achieve, about deciding who to spend time with in school, about asking your friends for help, about leaving everything behind and walking off into the mountains to go be somewhere else for a while, about mysteries and secrets and turning over every metaphorical stone in your hands until you understand enough about the situation to do something about it. "Stay?" stuck with us for hours after we played it, grieving our choices.

It's a whole lot of words - a whole lot of details, for everything it glosses over - even if it doesn't have images to help you interpret what the words are describing. But it has words, it has the specificity and perspective that words make explicit, assuming we send their readers enough dictionaries and encyclopedias to understand them. It has choices for you to make, and reactions for you to have to them. (I love abstract expressions of meaning, but ambiguity is not so helpful here.) It's not everything we want - there's a dating sim component to it, even if it lets you turn someone down and remain the closest of friends, and we're sure that there's not gonna be much aro representation in the collection - but ... but screw it. I want a story that doesn't apologize for queerness on the disc, and I want a story that talks about war and suffering and injustice, and I want a story you can spend hours pulling apart to try to understand, and a story that matters a lot to us and we want to share.