The Packbats' Weblog

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.

Forgot to post here, but I've made two more teavlogs over the past two weeks:

• Complimenting Myself: one of the things that I struggle with is accepting that I'm a good person, so I talked a bit about that and also said some nice things about who I am.
• Does any1 care?: I talk about how having an audience affects my motivation to create.

...they're fun. Making a vlog while doing something else adds visual interest, gives the vlog a natural stopping point (the tea is done and the kettle refilled), and it's just kind of fun to perform for the camera. And I pick topics I feel capable of speaking extemporaneously about - subjects I've thought through and have a pretty clear idea of what I want to communicate.

From baldanders, here and there:

Alan Grayson (D-FL) is my hero. Seriously, he tells it like it is, without fear of the insurance companies, and certainly not without fear of the Republican lie machine:

"We as a party have spent the last six months, the greatest minds in our party, dwelling on the question, the unbelievably consuming question of how to get Olympia Snowe to vote on health care reform. I want to remind us all that Olympia Snowe was not elected President last year. Olympia Snowe has no veto power in the Senate. Olympia Snowe represents a state with one half of one percent of America's population.

"What America wants is health care reform. America doesn't care if it gets 51 votes in the Senate or 60 votes in the Senate or 83 votes in the Senate, in fact America doesn't even care about that, it doesn't care about that at all. What America cares about is this; there are over 1 million Americans who go broke every single year trying to pay their health care bills. America cares a lot about that. America cares about the fact that there are 44,780 Americans who die every single year on account of not having health care, that's 122 every day. America sure cares a lot about that. America cares about the fact that if you have a pre-existing condition, even if you have health insurance, it's not covered. America cares about that a lot. America cares about the fact that you can get all the health care you need as long as you don't need any. America cares about that a lot. But America does not care about procedures, processes, personalities, America doesn't care about that at all." [. . .]

"Last week I held up this report here and I pointed out that in America there are 44,789 Americans that die every year according to this Harvard report published in this peer reviewed journal because they have no health insurance. That's an extra 44,789 Americans who die whose lives could be saved, and their response was to ask me for an apology." [. . .]

"Well, I'm telling you this; I will not apologize. I will not apologize. I will not apologize for a simple reason; America doesn't care about your feelings. [. . .] America does care about health care in America. And if you're against it, then get out of the way. You can lead, you can follow or you can get out of the way. [. . .] America understands that there is one party in this country that is favor of health care reform and one party that is against it, and they know why.

"They understand that if Barack Obama were somehow able to cure hunger in the world the Republicans would blame him for overpopulation. They understand that if Barack Obama could somehow bring about world peace they would blame him for destroying the defense industry. In fact, they understand that if Barack Obama has a BLT sandwich tomorrow for lunch, they will try to ban bacon.

"But that's not what America wants; America wants solutions to its problems, and that begins with health care."