politics

Disability

I don’t know how to complain.

Let’s start silly. As I said, I don’t use Backloggery the way it’s supposed to be used. You are supposed to put games you want to finish. But I put already finished games there.

I described my @bmo account as a rubber duck. You should explain the problem you have with it. But I put solutions there.

And I can justify both of those things. Well, sort of: I don’t want to promote, even in this small way, games I don’t know enough about. And I want to be useful.

But it goes way, way beyond that. You see, I’m disabled. I have a pension and everything. But I never talk about it. Why not? Internalized ableism? Patriarchy? Self-esteem issues? All of the above? Probably all of the above.

I have no opinion about “disabled person” vs. “person with a disability”. You can call me both.

It even goes to ridiculous places. I care about ableist language regardless of the fact that I’m disabled. I care about racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, etc. languages without being a member of any of the groups affected by those. But I fear that my contribution would be less if I presented myself as disabled. “Of course you care about yourself!” Ridiculous, as I said.

I even justify writing this not as something about myself, but because it is still very important to raise awareness. Which is true.

At the end of the day, I don’t think I would ever feel comfortable complaining about everything about or around me. I would never call myself a survivor. But at least I would try to pick one or two things and be more open about it.

Being useful

I was throwing away my old computers – not into a landfill, people took them, who do you think I am – and one of the things I found on one of the hard drives was a Minecraft server I was running back then. Unfortunately, it seems to be an old iteration before I moved it to a real server and actually built the thing I want to talk about. Oh well.

You can click on the image above to see the whole map, but there is not much to see except for this central part. We were in the resource gathering phase, if I remember correctly.

At some point on this server, I built my first mob farm. And while figuring out how to do it – how mobs spawn, how to transport them to a place where you could easily and safely whack them with a sword, that sort of thing – was fun in itself, the fact that it was being used by everyone on the server (which is just 3 or 4 people, but still) was much more satisfying.

Honestly, this is one of, if not the most satisfying gaming experience I have ever had. But as I said, I use games as a lens to talk about other things, so draw your own conclusions about the collaborative nature of human beings :)

Pet Joys

I think we as a society – at least that part that uses social media – lost a collective remote and every issue now is at the same, very high, volume.

It’s hard for me to take any publication, video blog, whatever else, seriously when at the same level of intensity there are, for example, a piece about how representation is still lacking and after that another one about how achievements are bad, comma, actually.

By the way, in case it wasn’t obvious, I have a habit of using video games as an example to talk about anything and everything. I know enough about them to feel confident, but even if I make a mistake, it is no big deal. So this is not just about video games.

Maybe it’s just me, but we kind of lost our pet peeves. Issues that are there, but, you know, less important. That have less of an impact on the final score, so to speak. But instead of writing examples of my video game pet peeves, I decided to share some of my, for lack of a better term, pet joys.

Smile icon in the center, with a dog icon and a cat icon hidden in the corners.

I like it when games treat their worlds like real places. Instead of a marker on a map, the NPC tells you to leave through the southern gate, get to the river, and follow the right bank until you see three dead trees.

I like it when games take some basic mechanics and wrap them up in an interesting way. Instead of just upgrading your characters, you build a settlement that attracts new people, which can then help your character grow and get better equipment.

I like it when games are open about their puzzle design. Tell me up front if I can solve it now, or if I don’t have the right thing yet. Give me hints when I’m struggling (subtly, please, otherwise it’s annoying). And at the end of the day, do not be afraid to just give me tools to help me find, solve, whatever.

This is not about Quake ][

When you’re young, everyone is very eager to tell you that you’ll lose your strong opinions when you get older. I’m still waiting.

What actually happened to me is that I realized that it is impossible to have a strict rule – of law, moral, or any other kind – without many exceptions. Sometimes so many that it’s better to turn the rule on its head (from “it’s good unless” to “it’s bad unless” kind of thing).

I’ll use games as an example.

Quake 2 logo, a crescent moon with two nails through it on a green-purple gradient.

Let me put it this way, I’m not fun at parties: if you say to me “hey, remember that cool game?” I’m going to remember that it was published by a company that thought it was a good idea to advertise on 8chan, or that the developers were harassed and crunched a lot, or that despite having, like, two female characters, the game was both sexist and transphobic.

I also never thought that games were better back then, or that they ruined it, or anything like that. I felt like I evolved with the games, more or less. (To be fair, that has changed a bit in the last, say, 5 years or so, where I feel there are not enough games that challenge me with something new, but that is another story.)

Basically, what I’m saying is that I don’t do nostalgia. I don’t put old games on a pedestal. I rarely replay games.

But.

I spend about a week replaying the Quake II campaign, and playing all three mission packs, old and new, for the first time. I can’t deny that there’s a pleasure, a comfort in that experience. Q][ is my Doom. I played all the versions – PC, Nintendo 64 and PlayStation. I found excuses to replay it a few times, like playing it with a Steam Controller.

Nostalgic? Sure. Old? Definitely. Replay? Absolutely.

Two images representing two achievements. On the left, a scantily clad female enemy, a cyborg with metal legs, a weapon for a hand, and many other metal parts embedded in flesh. On the right, a human soldier, a prisoner of war, cowering in fear on a conveyor belt, ready to be crushed by a metal device with spikes.

I’ll talk about the re-release in the monthly summary, for now I’ll just point out that I have complicated feelings about it. There’s a lot not to like about the game, and I can’t really come up with an argument for someone who’s never played it to give it a try. I don’t think there’s any undeniable value in it. But I like it, I still do.

I’m not writing this to make excuses. I’m not writing this to say that it’s okay to have problematic faves. I still believe there are hills to die on, and I have plenty of them. I’m writing it to say that you can only hope – I can only hope – that you have a decent grasp on those very fuzzy good and bad things and can apply them as best as you can. Because I’m pretty sure there is no alternative.