Fuck the Game Awards. The Game of the Year is Laika: Aged Through Blood.

Laika: Aged Through Blood opens with this content warning:

This game contains depictions of extreme acts of violence towards children and suicide, and mention of sexual assault, which some players may find distressing.

Don't take this warning lightly, 10 minutes into the game, before the first mission, you ride your motorcycle up to the strung-up corpse of a child.

"Crucified with his own guts," your daughter, Puppy, tells you over the radio. You're Laika and you're many things -- a killer, a daughter, a mother, but right now you're scared. Your journal updates.

After the Birds killed his son Poochie, Jakob took my revolver and went after them.

The moment Puppy told me, I knew we were doomed. Because Jakob is like a brother to me but more importantly, Poochie is like a brother to my kid Puppy. Tragedy will make her grow up and if there's one thing in this world I fear, it's Puppy growing up.

The goal isn't revenge, that will come later, it's "Find Jakob." Stop him from doing something stupid.

I think about The Last of Us Part II (TLOU2) and not for the last time. In 2017 for Paris Games Week, Naughty Dog released a brutal trailer showing an attempted lynching with, at this point, unknown characters. It was a tone piece for the game that would come out 3 years later and will now come out again in a few months. 

That trailer captured the imagination of some and repulsed others. Laika's opening will do the same. But for me, TLOU2's lynching trailer fell flat despite its realistic bodies dragged through mud and broken open. But something about this 2D game and this strung-up dead anthropomorphic dog-child hit something awful in me. Not for the first time this year. Not for the last time this year. 

In Laika, you ride a motorcycle through a beautiful wasteland, and you murder a lot of Birds. The Birds are armed and so are you, and you both die from one shot. The undercarriage of your bike is bulletproof, so you'll be flipping through the air to block shots while lining up your own. And there's bullet time, and there's parries. You reload with flips, a front flip to reload your parry, a backflip to reload your gun. Encounters are fast and short, and you're gonna die a lot figuring out just how you want to go about this.

I ride up on five birds, I catch air and pick off two. I backflip to reload and block their first synchronized rebuttal. A straggler shoots off rhythm and I parry sending his bullet back at him. That's two left, easy picking as I line up my shot and... no I didn't complete my flip and I land on my head, we gotta do that over. It's a game that feels good when a plan comes together and maybe feels better when it falls apart, when you make it through by the skin of your teeth. It's fun.

Violence is at the core of this world and death defines everything. Laika is worried about how all of this will affect her daughter but she never questions the necessity of killing. Violent occupation begets violent resistance and the occupation is barbaric. Every frame and every bit of dialogue reinforces, or should you need it convinces, you that there's no peaceful solution. You eventually catch up to Jakob. He's dying, riddled with bullets, he doesn't get checkpoints. He tells you what they did to Poochie, "They cut off his ears. His tongue. They ripped his nails and stuck them in his eyes. One by one." You have to get it by now. His dying words "Who will play with Puppy now?"

Premature death is a normal part of life in Laika’s village.

Cards on the table, I haven't finished Laika: Aged Through Blood. It came out October 19th and I started it shortly afterwards, I'm at the part with the boat and I'll probably start over when I get back to it. It's a hard game and a hard game to play at the best of times but right now, when I can't look at my phone without seeing an endless stream of murdered and displaced Palestinians, it's too much. 

It has to be this overwhelming. Many of us are watching what's happening in Palestine in real time and I've seen more dead people in the last month than the last 10 years. Laika didn't change the way I think about conflict or resistance. What pushes people to violently resist an oppressor that can realistically threaten their annihilation? What breaking point do you have to hit? How many avenues do you exhaust? How long must you suffer? How do you reason with those who don't see you as a person? There comes a point where all you can do is fight.

A Tiny Bit on the Game awards...

In an open letter to "The Game Awards", the Game Awards' Future Class urged the organisers to allow for a statement to be read out in support of Palestinian human rights, a ceasefire, and a call for the multi-billion-dollar games industry to invest in work against the dehumanisation and exploitation of SWANA people. This comes after Meghna Jayanth was prevented from issuing a political statement at the Golden Joysticks before presenting the Best Storytelling Award. Troy Baker, in an apolitical poppy pin, replaced her. There are close to 3000 signatures on the letter.

So why is this important? Because games are political (and not just games like Laika), and The Game Awards are political, and this has always been the case whether Keighley or anyone wants it to be. This an industry that creates and celebrates the Call of Duty franchise which worships the US, and NATO, military and reinforces decades of Islamophobia. TLOU2, a game almost explicitly from an Israeli settler perspective, will most likely have a trailer for the upcoming remaster. To say nothing of organisations speaking out against the Russian invasion or Ukraine or that games are made by real people with ties to the real world.  They're about the real world. There's no neutrality when you tell people that they need to be silent when their people are dying, and their people are dying. You should stand in solidarity with the oppressed; the Palestinian plight echoes around the world and throughout history. It is the plight of Caribbean people, the plight of African people, the plight of all indigenous people, and it should be your plight as well.