Hello!

Hi. Thanks for being here. It means the world to me. I'm still figuring out what this will be; I'm hoping we'll figure it out together.

It's definitely going to be writing. I know that for sure. Writing about games, sports, film, etc. Writing that prioritizes race and class as those are the only lens I have. Some of it will be well-thought-out pieces that I should be pitching but alas. Others will be back of the napkin scratch that gets lost in your bag after you pick up the cheque at your 2nd favourite restaurant. Ideally, one of those throw-away thoughts will become a bigger, fleshed-out thing.

It's a thinly veiled accountability project -- men would rather start an internet newsletter than go to therapy after all. Writing makes me happy, but I struggle to do any of it unless there are 5 hours until a deadline. Here's hoping this gives me the structure to tap into that happiness regularly. Plus, I get to flex a muscle regularly. Gains!

Why a newsletter? A few reasons. I loathe backends. Tinkering with a blog, code, themes, it's not for me. I get panic attacks, I forget semicolons; it's a bad time. Next, Medium is hell. The recommendation algorithm churns out articles with headlines that read like male enhancement ads for your portfolio -- "You Won't Believe How I Grew My 401k with This One Trick." It's daft.

Enough about that. I'd be glad if you also got something out of this. And I appreciate all feedback. Just don't be mean to me, I'll cry.

I wrote the following in….March, and published it on Medium in April. If you haven’t seen it, I’m still very proud of it.

Your Apocalypse is Bad and Wrong and I would Know.

It all feels wrong. I’ve never been to Boston. Here, its hollowed buildings that jut out from the land towards the sky, like a carcass picked dry, feel dead like they’ve never been alive. I can’t comment on the topography or the placement of the streets; I don’t know where the turnpike should be. But I know this isn’t what people are like. They’re never this cruel. A world can never be this sterile.

The paragraph above is about Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us. A game heralded for its storytelling, its fidelity, and frustratingly, its grim realism. Another work in the long list of Post Apocalyptic Science Fiction media that posits cruelty as a foundational building block of humanity. Another game that’s set in the wrong place. Another game that cannot see the opportunity at The End.

My mother would sometimes wish for the world to end. She wasn’t serious, at least, not in the doomsday cult way. She’d shake her head, disappointed, exhausted, hands on her hips, and mutter “I can’t wait for God to come for his world.”

It wasn’t an uncommon thought. Jamaica has finished in the top 10 in murder per capita for the last 10 years. We’re besieged by corruption in our public offices. Debt looms over many Jamaicans who first have to meet the most stringent conditions to establish a line of credit. The list goes on. For my mother, it was impossible to imagine a world where we don’t suffer under the heel of oppressive institutions that are so omnipresent they feel as natural as gravity.

So one possible view of the post-apocalypse is salvation — undoing the maligned histories and realities that hold back BIPOC people and the citizens of the Global South. In many digital Western Apocalypses, the dissolution of these institutions is temporary. Developers re-imagine currency in much the same way it existed before, but instead of fiat paper, there are bottlecaps. In the absence of policing, the player is given a gun and a slap on the ass and told to make things right as they see fit. The power fantasy that’s become the default experience in many video games intersects with the power fantasy that pulls people into Law Enforcement.

However, it’s not these games fail to consider the post-apocalypse as possibly emancipatory, they do, but they scorn and fear those emancipated. Without societal rules, and the agents to enforce them, the post-apocalypse becomes a wasteland, and those who cling to this freedom have either made a poor ethical choice or are deeply unhinged.

A lot of this is rooted in fear. Arguably, the entire genre is. Interplay’s Wasteland, which would, in turn, inspire the popular Fallout series, extrapolated a fear and paranoia that festered during the US-Russia Cold War. The smaller-scale paranoia in the aftermath of these fictional disasters illustrates a similar ‘fear of neighbor’ that’s consistent with a celebration of individualism and exceptionalism. One has to look no further than the nuclear family and its mythic position within Western cultural ideals. Core to the concept of the nuclear family is intimacy with those immediately around you and rigid enforcement of barriers to restrict that intimacy and connection. Everyone outside of those four walls and white picket fence is a danger. Extrapolating that further, those outside of your district or scheme are threatening. Then finally, those outside your country.

Most of these apocalypses depict the horror of strangers. Communities cannot form or they cannot last as the individual’s ego supersedes the collective. These stories lean into the same power fantasy as the impromptu police officer mentioned earlier. The patriarch, stink with fear and excitement, grips his weapon so tight that his knuckles try to escape his flesh. He’s cocked and ready to protect what is his — his family.

But even this excitement is contained and dishonest. To reveal it for what it is — wishful escapism — would denigrate our protagonist, maybe even the player, to the role of the “savages” he has to defeat. And they are “savages.” From Telltale’s Walking Dead to Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us, and many many others, video game developers deploy ‘the cannibal.’ This monstrous individual has reverted to animal instincts in the absence of rules and norms to guide them otherwise. Christopher Columbus used the same tactic to justify the enslavement, murder, rape, and genocide of indigenous people in the Americas. There is a clear parallel — without the guiding presence of Western Civilisation to elevate these people out of ferality, they pose a danger to themselves and more importantly, to “civilization.”

At the mention of civilization, we should address the use of “reversion” and “regression” in this piece. These concepts are exclusively White and Western. In Audra Mitchell and Aadita Chaudhury’s research article ‘Worlding beyond ‘the’ ‘end’ of ‘the world’: white apocalyptic visions and BIPOC futurisms’ there is a coined phrase “the linear myth of time.” “At stake, these discourses (Western Post Apocalyptic Fiction) claim, is the ‘progress’ of humans and other life forms toward greater complexity and perfection,” or to paraphrase, the histories that led to our modern-day and then the fictional apocalypse were immutable, and ultimately constructive, regardless of the cost. Be it pollution into global warming, World Wars, or the Slave Trade.

As such the apocalyptic ‘regression’ represents a return to the conditions that Western Civilization ‘rescued’ us from. The predominantly white and affluent heads of AAA development studios cannot fathom a world of divergent timelines. In their fiction, history is re-traced, ignoring the possibility of exploring ‘what could have been.’ — the technologies that BIPOC people could have developed free from the ongoing trauma of genocide and forced migration.

The exclusive focus on what is lost not only results in worlds that are tired and unimaginative, but also empty and lifeless. Culture cannot progress because there is no eye to what’s changed in these artificial worlds, much less any consideration for a possible future.

By these works’ own admission, apocalypses are happening right now.

The metallic structures grafted onto the European City 17 during the Combine occupation is not unlike the US army bases found in the Philippines. The architecture is distinct from the occupied, imperialist in its very structure. To date, Japan is the only nation to have experienced fallout from a nuclear attack. In both examples culture proves amorphous, incorporating these “apocalypses” into the art and music of the people.

Jamaican reggae comments on abusive policing and the residual effects of chattel slavery to this day. But in these worlds, culture festers. Fathers teach their daughters Pearl Jam. There are no new songs. The art on the walls screams in easy-to-read text, pulling from a shortlist of tropes, “man is the real monster”, or maybe “history is doomed to repeat itself,” or something to that effect. The color of culture is washed out as it is subsumed into a blasé whiteness.

Finally, there’s the apocalypse as a metaphor and allegory. Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us franchise provides a unique example for analysis. The original game can be read as the apocalypse as a metaphor for grief. At the beginning of the game, protagonist Joel Miller loses his daughter to an instance of state violence. There’s a fungal (zombie) pandemic, humanity falters, infrastructure turns decrepit, and he grows hostile to life. The setting of the Last Of Us becomes the emotional landscape of Joel.

The violence he enacts to protect and then rescue his surrogate daughter Ellie is vengeful, not just for her, but for his dead daughter. There’s no healing for Joel. He doesn’t find community, at least not until he rescues Ellie. He leans into the common machismo power fantasy afforded by the apocalypse and protects what is his by force. In the end, he’s rewarded with said replacement daughter, fulfilling his wants. Even here the apocalypse is about reclamation and regeneration. The game never draws any parallels with real-life state violence, at least not until its sequel, where it does to harrowing ends. Instead, it individualizes Joel’s grief and his absolution.

The Last of Us was not the progenitor of this piece. These ideas were crystallized while taking pictures in Origame Digital’s near-future Tauranga in their stellar work Umurangi Generation. The player is cast as a Maori photographer taking pictures of graffiti, friends, strangers, whatever a bullet list instructs of you. Across the various levels, you get a grasp on the life people lead and the conflicts they face. We see UN soldiers who alternate between lazy and brutal. We see mechs gearing up to face horrifying kaiju, climate change given horrifying form. We see posters for missing children and memorials for dead pilots. We see protestors brutalized by an occupying force for voicing their dissent.

And we see a rooftop party. We see art plastered on walls. We see people determined to serve looks. We hear music blaring from diegetic speakers, teeming with energy.

For me, this was the first game that understood something that I’ve never articulated and that none of these Western apocalypses seem to understand — the suffering does not exclusively suffer. Cruelty does not manifest in the absence of Western institutions, but often because of them. And in the face of great suffering, people often band together.

In 2004 Jamaica was hit by the first Category 5 hurricane in my lifetime — Hurricane Ivan. The vicious storm pulled up trees and light posts non-discriminantly. Rivers because indistinguishable from roads and yet the pipes ran dry. We lived beside a gully, a smaller tributary to a larger trench. At 9 years old, it was deeper than I was tall. My family made a decision, that was foolish in hindsight, to cover the gully with these large concrete slabs. That’s thick lines of metal bent into the frame of a square, then coated in layers of cement. They were heavy. An aesthetic solution to an eyesore during our home renovations.

During the storm with no efficient runoffs into our gully, water began pooling in our yard. It reached my father’s waist. He waded to the slabs and tried to haul them up. He screamed for me to help. He was desperate, but I was 9. My head couldn’t reach his waist.

So he just started yelling. At me, my stepmother, maybe God, I don’t know. But outran our neighbor, Andrew. Barely dressed, in a fucking hurricane. Our families were not close. We were polite enough for good mornings and conversations about inept politicians. But with barely an exchange of words, my father and my neighbor lifted slab after slab, draining our yard.

We don’t fucking kill each other when shit goes bad. We don’t leave each other to die.

To live in the Global South is to brave apocalyptic conditions enacted by the West. They appropriate our stories, but they change the setting, they make up a villain, and then they cast themselves as the hero. Their empty dioramas are filled with caricatures of cruelty and sadism. Their “reality” is voyeuristic and escapist. After all, they’re only tourists here.