I finally caved and bought a Steam Deck and promptly learned that, because my last Windows gaming laptop became outdated in 2017 and I became old (30) in 2020 and I just generally don’t love playing video games sitting at a desk anymore, I apparently hadn’t touched Disco Elysium for about a year and a half. I’m bad at finishing games! Which is not really that upsetting for most games, which present a kind of core “thing you do” action and you “got” it before the “end” of the game (in fact, in this regard, normalize not finishing video games), but more frustrating when the experience is story. Like, get this, a book. (Points at the about page where I wrote “This Substack is for you if you also think it’s kind of weird that a thing we do is sit around and read words, and sometimes we have to play a video game to get those words. Weird!”)
Part of my struggle getting into Disco Elysium, a murder mystery investigation kinda game, has been the absolute density of the game, which comes up against your expectations as a player of video games in that the density isn’t really resulting from a choose-your-own adventure design. You have a great deal of influence over the flavor of how things play out – you first spec out a character, weighting your stats across Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics, which influences what kinds of thoughts and observations your game’s version of the main character will have – but the interactivity isn’t of the choose-your-own adventure variety. For instance, you’re not going to come up with the right stat requirements, find the right dialogue options, or save scum your way to outsmarting either the big corporation’s negotiator or the local union boss who both want to use you, an agent of the law, as a tool to advance their own interests. Even any random idiot and/or bigot your investigation crosses paths with often results in an odd feeling that you should have been able to manage that better.
This is thematically cohesive, as the story is very much about the powerlessness of individuals – possibly even of organizations and movements – in the political or economic structures that govern their lives. I haven’t finished the game yet, put played the first couple hours like three times (because of technical hurdles completely unrelated to the game that honestly aren’t very interesting) thinking I had to be missing something, was I “lost”, was I “missing something”, and while thematically the answer is sort of yes, I think my expectations that I could somehow optimize the situation – as video games have historically come to teach you you can do – made me feel like I was doing it wrong. Now what I’ve landed on is that really what’s going on here is much simpler: it’s just… a really long book. The total word count is over a million words. Roughly 2/3 of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, roughly A Power Broker and a half, roughly 2 Les Misérables, roughly 20 minimum qualifying National Novel Writing Month winners. You just gotta let it wash over you and pick away at it, which is a weirder sensation in a game than a book, where the interaction is at a higher level than simply turning the page. It makes you feel overwhelmed with options, even if eventually you realize they kind of all take you down the same path, even if you realize that’s kind of the point.
Sometimes it seems you can just miss shit though (including, to my astonishment when I got to this point, wondering how the game would play out if you didn’t pull this off, the real cause of death of the hanged man you’re there to investigate), which makes me wonder how deep this game’s “oh, you can’t really mess it up, you’ll see the story through one way or another” goes.
The story’s good, I have no idea how far I am, etc etc. You play as a man who wakes up from such an extreme bender he’s forgotten everything, who he is, where he is, when it is, what he’s supposed to be doing. You learn some of these answers (a detective, in a town where union strike negotiations have stalled and possibly led to a lynching, which you are there to investigate) and seem to have an incredible amount of discretion, but not exactly any real power, over how you uncover the rest. I’m trying to keep him sober in my game despite some hints the game has given me that the cold turkey approach is going to shatter his wearied body at some point. I’m trying to keep him out of neoliberal trappings about his position of authority and who he’s supposed to be helping. I’m not sure how much agency I have over any of this. The game also is dense with ideology, and everyone will chew your ear off about this world’s metaphorical versions of our world’s ideologies. And this is all through the lens of our main character, a complete disaster who can sometimes dredge up enough skill to visualize a crime scene, sometimes needs to ask a random citizen what kind of government the country they’re in has, and sometimes gets to mull over a thought and turn out to be a socialist. Or a rock star. The price of delusion is surprisingly cheap.
Speaking of complete disasters and texts dense with disasters who go on and on about all the theory they’ve absorbed and what it means, I read Imogen Binnie’s Nevada, this week’s fodder for a wild segue between two totally unrelated texts and a novel about a trans woman who has a breakup, gets fired, and abruptly leaves town and crosses paths with a young man who reminds her of herself when she was younger, who may not realize he’s trans yet what happens next will shock you!!!
My pithy letterboxd blurb for Nevada would be something along the lines of “LiveJournal Fooly Cooly”, which sounds dismissive, but I mean, what is the problem there exactly? More coming of age stories should be about a cool older woman coming to town and ruining some young dude’s life for a hot minute. I enjoyed the book a lot and loved the ending, which is one of those endings that as you read it you just know that everyone has to have an opinion on whether it’s awful or fantastic. There’s perhaps too much text buried in expousing ideology, to the point where there’s a section where she’s just writing a blog entry about trans stereotypes. I could see how it’s grating in a “subtext is for COWARDS” way, but I didn’t find myself too bothered by it, even if I thought, yeah, we’re ignoring “show, don’t tell” for like 90% of this book, aren’t we.
Disasters. Powerlessness. Full circle. Back on track. Spoilers below.
So what I particularly liked about Nevada was – paraphrasing the author’s words here, which I have some intentional fallacy thoughts about but also I do generally agree with the author’s reading of the text so, whatever, nerds – the “well, that didn’t work” ending, where the fantasy of a fairy godmother of queerness swoops in, but no revelation or closure is gained by either party, and part of the takeaway is that you can’t bully someone into an epiphany. The character who fled her life in New York doesn’t magically end up with any new direction on what to do with her life. The character in a dead-end small town doesn’t magically get any conclusive understanding of his gender. Their serendipitous meeting doesn’t end up having any magic and just ends up a kinda weird bummer. It’s a real therapy-ass everyone is doing the best with the tools they have kind of story, and that just struck me as a lovely sort of honest.
The reason I think it’s very interesting to force books and video games alike into this blog/newsletter/thing about reading is because I think the mechanics of each medium’s storytelling abilities is worth studying. Disco Elysium and Nevada both become stories about people with significant shortcomings doing their best with the tools they have. Disco Elysium makes this concept extremely literal in a way that only video games can do, where the player has some agency in rummaging through the toolbox, and the game finds storytelling value in the ways in which it has created the rules for how the player can find new tools in there. Nevada isn’t limited by not being a video game, of course; pure prose exerts a lot more control over how the reader gradually gains their information about the characters’ tools. And both of them turn out to be stories about the point at which the reader/player realizes the main character might only have a hammer.
So as a cis person, I am somewhat aware I did just write a whole post of “this trans character is a disaster” and don’t want to unintentionally perpetuate the notion of trans people as a monolith, so I’m sharing this piece “We are all different, eventually you will see that this is beautiful” by Shel Raphen that I came across and read a few days after writing this. You would benefit from giving the whole thing a read, but a few highlights that reminded me of what Nevada made me think about, what my response to Nevada made me think about, also just generally more people should read these points:
If your trans community is primarily online, you will be encountering more nerdy white programmers by nature of the venue. If your trans community is through the Attic Youth Center in Center City Philadelphia your community is going to very different.
As a librarian, I work with a lot of community centers and stuff. And lemme tell you, there's entire trans communities where nobody has heard of Discord and instead of joking that all trans women are programmers they joke that all trans women are nail technicians and hair stylists. But we're all still trans and have a shared struggle and we have to be in solidarity with each other and fight for each other and love each other no matter how different we are.
…
There are privilege and power differences between people in the trans community but it's not because of the direction of your transition. It's because of race and wealth. White people who grew up in middle class families that enabled them to get a strong launch into the economy with degrees and stuff before they transitioned just have so much more power than people of color who didn't have the same opportunities before transition and face amplified racism every day. The power difference with the transgender programmer is because she is often white and attended coding camp at age fifteen, not because she's a trans woman.
And so I'll say this: as you get trans-older, you learn that the trans people of other directions are amazing people who you should love and celebrate and be in solidarity with and embrace.
…
these days, in this post-[Laverne] Cox era, so many cis people are our fierce allies because they actually are capable of feeling deep empathy for us. Because cisgender people also feel insecure and awful about their bodies because of the society we live in and they also feel pressured to behave ways they don't want to because of gender roles and they absolutely can understand how it must feel to have that amplified by 100× and they often genuinely take delight in seeing us self-actualize and be ourselves. Many are inspired by us and feel liberated to be more themselves because they see us do it first and take that first step. Even if they don't want to transition genders, they too want to self-actualize.
In other exciting news I’m thrilled to finally talk about, I’ve joined the team at Kissing Dynamite as a book reviews editor. I’ll be writing reviews of small press poetry books, but I’ll also be editing other writers’ reviews of small press poetry books. So: hit me up if 1) you’re a poet with a book coming out, or 2) you’ve got a review of a poetry book you want to write!