CW: discussion of suicide, domestic and workplace abuse
Spoiler Warning for a “Honkai Star Rail” sidequest
This morning I read about a stabbing massacre at an Australian mall. This evening I read about the Iranian drone strike on Israel, an escalation that shouldn’t happen in reaction to an escalation that shouldn’t have happened in reaction to an escalation that shouldn’t have happened ad nauseam, to which someone is likely to escalate. And to escape, I watched a show about the end of the world. “Fallout” is giddy. It’s cathartic. It’s simple to watch every fear transpire, and imagine that humanity will still have the capacity to laugh. Maybe that’s the American catharsis, laughter as a buffer against breaking. I find myself drawn to so much comedy these days. “Fallout” is a place to imagine we’ve already broken and yet still laugh.
The show’s great, funny, colorfully macabre, cynically absurd, a demented displacement of 60s kitsch into a wasteland so void that the kitsch is all that defines the survivors. Lucy’s grown up in a vault where the privileged paid to hide after the bomb dropped. Maximus is a hopeful aspirant in a religious order of mechanized soldiers. The Ghoul is woken up every few decades when there’s a bounty large enough to warrant it. All three search the wasteland for a fugitive scientist.
I’ll tell you about how I felt while watching it, but bear with me; I’ve never reviewed an existential crisis before.
Mind of the Mound: Critical Mass
I once saw a contemporary art installation by Trenton Doyle Hancock called Mind of the Mound: Critical Mass. It featured towering mounds you could walk into and under, each built from decades of jettisoned trash. Toys and widgets and disused knick-knacks, furniture of bygone eras, out-of-date rugs and wallpaper, scrap all cleaned and well-maintained, organized on shelves inside, and the mounds echoed slightly. The colored walkway that led one to the next was interspersed with: a cut-out living room paused in mid-evening, rows and rows of boardgames, a picket fence front yard behind which self-standing Halloween costumes were caught frozen on their way to trick-or treat.
It felt like some alien archaeologist had stumbled on a dead planet, collected our discarded refuse, and organized it into a children’s museum, defining the footprint we once made by the landfill we produced. It felt like a slow loss of hope – instead of staring at the stars and feeling the peace and wonder of being infinitesimal, to stare at endless dolls and plastic balls and one-use discards and feel like each human life added up to our contribution to a chunk of landfill.
Between those two things, there is a tension. As a Millennial, we were taught to think we could change the world. The world tried to nip this in the bud early and often, in ways that repeatedly proved why we were taught that way. And yet the times when we do create a change, our impostor syndrome is so deeply ingrained that our first reaction is to take the credit that community efforts deserve and grant it instead to a celebrity or politician. We were taught to wonder, even as we stare at the world and feel that wonder slipping away bit by bit. We still know the right thing to do is to try to change things, even as we fear we’re tilting at windmills and become more isolated. Just getting to the starting point on every effort feels more deeply bogged in mud every year. We’ve spent eight years bolstering against waves of fascism and nearly triple that knowing that our futures were traded away for oil profits, private military contractors, and the militarization of police.
‘Envision a Rose Forthcoming’, “Honkai Star Rail”
There’s a quest in “Honkai Star Rail” I recently played. It’s called ‘Envision a Rose Forthcoming’. On a journey through the stars, you stop at a tourist destination called Penacony. It was once a prison, now repurposed as a hotel, where you come to participate in a dreamscape. You meet a shopgirl named Cocona, who works in the dream, underpaid, disillusioned, abused, ambition carved away. To learn about her past, you dive into her dreams within the dreamscape. There are two moments of choice within this quest:
The first is a false dialogue option where Cocona confronts her parents. You can choose her independence, to continue studying music, to take a risk…but it’s not a real option. The dialogue repeats. Cocona’s parents have a name to maintain, a history of abuse to keep her in line. They demand that she owes them. You can choose her independence again, but the option disappears. The dialogue repeats. The only choice left is to stay under thumb. Anything else was an illusion. She has other options for escape, but as they disappear and she slips behind at work, her boss and coworkers become abusive.
The second choice comes when she stands on the ledge of a building. You can grab Cocona or let her go. You’re in her dreamscape, itself inside of a constructed dreamscape, confused about what will happen either way. Words erupt physically out of the air around her, suggesting the choice is a metaphor you’ve misunderstood, questioning if the kinder thing is to just let go. I lost count of how many times it asks, of how many dialogue choices you have to make, of how many layers deep and re-phrasings try to confuse, convince, or outright trick you. Is letting go a metaphor about her feeling freedom that she’ll carry from the dream to reality, or is it just releasing the one thin tether of care that still connects her to life? Do we use that earlier false choice as a guide when we’re six layers deep, and guess that holding on is a false choice we should just give up on? Every mechanic in the game tries to convince you to let go. It captures how tenuous that moment is, however fair or unfair, to be that one thread a person has back to continuing. It captures how tenuous those choices are, how doing the right thing five times but not the sixth can be the hair’s breadth between someone living or dying.
The quest has two endings derived from how your actions in Cocona’s dream influence what she chooses to do in the real world. The sadder one is what you’d expect, and it happens even if you chose to hold on five times but failed the sixth. I’m glad I’m stubborn and get angry at games in these moments, choosing to do what I would do…or what I hope I would do. And yet, how often can any of us do the right thing six times in a row, or ten, or dozens, when the effort wears us down and our impostor syndrome’s already told us the choices we make have no consequence?
‘Envision a Rose Forthcoming’ is the most impactful moment I’ve played in a game. Something from it galvanized in me like a stone. It’s some strange melancholy housed in the middle of a game that balances Pratchett-esque humor and digging through trash cans against towering political trade-offs and somber reflections on those sacrificed to achieve them. From that bit of storytelling: the acknowledgment that if we do the right thing all but once or even all the time, or even perfectly and make no misstep, it still might not be enough, that if we change the world dozens of times and fail only the once, it still might be one step short.
I can’t write a review of “Fallout” properly because what it makes me feel is existential crisis. In its unreal, jokey vision of the post-apocalypse, there is also the crystallization of a sense of doom so ingrained and generational and ever-present that we treat it in the most realistic way we know – we practice laughing at it, not out of ignorance, but out of recognition, as if preparing for its inevitability, honing our coping mechanisms, leveling up what makes us endure the breaking. I can only write the shape of the things around it, the other pieces of art that shift in me as “Fallout” nestles down between them.
Misery Loves the Company – “Lethal Company”
“Lethal Company” was an out-of-nowhere hit last year, an indie multiplayer game about players hopping from moon to moon. They collect scrap for a company, to feed a voracious monster they must visit every three runs. The quota keeps on going up until it’s nearly impossible to hit in just three landings, and you’re charged by the company for every little piece of equipment, to travel to each moon, and for whenever a player goes missing. Fail a quota and the game is over. You restart the cycle from the beginning, and the only reward (thus far) is to achieve higher quotas and feel more stress about them.
There aren’t big spikes of unfairness; the game is just a massive plateau of it. The procedural generation means hundreds of thousands of level layouts are possible, including many unworkable ones. It may spawn a hallways full of landmines and monsters that cuts off access to an entire section of the facility you’re scavenging, essentially torpedoing that landing. The facilities are labyrinths, most scrap is deep inside them, and multiple monsters are far faster than you are.
It’s a game that intentionally uglies itself and is built around players being at an enormous disadvantage. So why did it become the most popular paid game at the end of 2023? “Lethal Company” speaks to the call of the void. There’s a strong possibility that people alive today will see a hard shift in how this planet lives – whether through economic crisis, the spark of nationalist fervor, or simply climate change proceeding apace if we can’t fully beat the first two. There’s a sense in us that what we do…may not ultimately matter much.
“Lethal Company” offers the call of the void as a toy. That may seem like a horrible idea at first. Why should we play with such a horrific concept that lurks at the backs of our minds? Yet play is coping. Play is practice. Play is anticipation. It’s a form of acknowledgment in us of something that’s very much there, that culturally and globally is there, yet that we don’t allow ourselves to recognize in many other mediums, let alone our daily life.
It’s refreshing to play something overwhelming that we can laugh at together when life is often overwhelming in ways that make us feel isolated. Being overwhelmed in “Lethal Company” is a feature, but as frightening as it can be, its special magic makes being overwhelmed frightening one minute and the chaos it causes utterly hilarious the next. Once, I turned around to find a snare flea crawling after me. It’s a relatively minor monster that attaches to your head and makes you drop your loot. It’s only dangerous when you’re alone, since you need someone else to get it off. I was alone, though. I was near a precipice, familiar with the layout of the space, and could see the flea was far enough away that it couldn’t jump quite yet. I had a second to think. Maybe I could give myself another second. I stepped back, and plummeted, loot and body disappeared forever. I was completely safe in that situation, even calm, and yet made the only decision that could have spelled doom. When my team left the planet, after we were fined for lost players, I waited for my teammate to tell his story about his equally dumb death and then told mine. Everyone shared the part of it they saw, on the map or watching me play after their own deaths. It didn’t matter whether we made quota or not. At some point, at some number, whether this one or another, the company would deem we’d failed and spit us out into space. It mattered that we had stories, experiences to share and identify with. If all of us were spinning uselessly down the drain, then at least we were doing it together.
That is cynical, but “Lethal Company” is a place to gather and satirize the way we’re asked to live. So too, similar games like “Content Warning”. As in life, we fail in ways that are ridiculous and nonsensical, where we do the right thing and fail, or make one wrong decision and fail. Even when we succeed, the quota keeps going up. There’s no such thing as a win state, there’s just a higher quota. The way to resist it, to set it aside for one brief minute, is to come away with stories, with experiences, with something to share, with tales of utter failure or shining moments of success, to have met an unfairness and loss we all understand, momentarily bond over our common experiences of them, and laugh at how ridiculous the whole thing can get. The developer promises endgame content in a future update. Perhaps it will make our toils amount to a way out of our fate. In the meantime, we work to keep that chance alive. We are overwhelmed because we’re human. The last part is what’s important.
Maybe I connect these things because artists and storytellers keep making wonderlands that tell us recognizing an existential crisis is not the same as personally having one. Sometimes that divide is lost. We act like the crisis in another or in the world is something we can choose to personally have or not. But the crisis isn’t ours to embody, it’s ours to respond to. If play is practice, and artists keep telling us this is what we need to practice, we really ought to be listening.
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Gabriel Diego Valdez 