Temporary Resistance to Abnormal State

 [[Okay I dug up this old thing from May 2020, about 8 weeks into COVID lockdown. It is a ramble that I lost the reigns on and never finished but I thought it might be informative to get feedback on a piece that is 1) an extremely rough draft and 2) a different style from my other submissions. I never really figured out who the audience was supposed to be, so sometimes I use gamer speak and sometimes I translate. Could be fun to write a version with a glossary. But also this little guy prob lost all relevance a long time ago and has no home in this world anymore, so maybe this is just a death rattle. But it's all I've got this week so... read at your own risk / enjoy!]]

TEMPORARY RESISTANCE TO ABNORMAL STATE

In battle, character is temporarily immune to all status effects (ex. poison, slow, blindness, silence, confusion, etc.)

 

CONFESSION: Other than Super Nintendo's Donkey Kong Country series, I had absolutely zero interest in video games until my partner and I started living together a year and a half ago. At first my interests were incredibly specific -- I want good dialogue and interesting characters, I want my choices to have an impact on the story, and I don't want to feel like I am battling a machine hellbent on making me seasick as I drunk-walk through a 3D nightmare world. We started with narrative driven, queer or queer-adjacent, indie titles like Gone Home, 2064, and Life is Strange. Night in the Woods, be still my heart, rekindled my love of "JUMPING ACROSS THE SCREEN!" (otherwise known as a side-scrolling platformer) and meanwhile held my queer, adult-adjacent attention with clever, poignant storytelling and all the NPC dialogue a pal could ask for. 

 

HOWEVER. 

That jumpy bug bit me. The whole deal bit me. Sick in bed after a bizarre fainting episode last year, I played my first RPGa cloyingly sweet (the whole thing was written in RHYMING POETRY help me) E-for-Everyone game called Child of Light. At first I was confounded by the turn-based battle sequences, which produced in me an enormous amount of stress, until my honey finally convinced me that I could consider about my choices rather than my THE WORLD WILL ALL EXPLODE IF I AM NOT MASHING BUTTONS approach. The bug bit me bigger when I won the final battle (the titular character vs. a shapeshifting DRAGON) with next to no health and only one ally still standing by the end, ENTIRELY DISMANTLING my honey's expectations. "This doesn't look good, Baba. You might want to...." Of course they gave me some reasonable advice, of which I took no notice, and rather ploughed ahead on my course to TOTAL VICTORY. 

The bug had won. I was got.

Still, until recently, I felt like I had pretty specific tastes for what would actually engage my interest enough to play. Certainly I can't handle any kind of blatant racism or sexism, let alone cis-heteronormativity, and I couldn't care less about a gun or a punch. In fact, any kind of violence would make my skin crawl, and the one time I tried to play a "horror" game, I shrieked and threw the controller across the room... So that was never going to happen again. 

 

HOWEVER. 

 

You may recall that currently we, all of humanity, are attempting to survive a global shutdown due to a deadly virus, of which we know next to nothing about, full stop. Like I suspect you might be, I am fully boxed up, a sardine in its tin, stewing in its juices and growing ever stinkier. At the start of this thing, I was full of plans to "make the most of it." Or even, to attempt my flailing, artist-adjacent version of "helping." Ho ho wouldn't it be fun to post a video to the instant internet every day. Oh ho ho no it would not you could not be more wrong. 

 

So we are gonna play games. We even splurged on a second controller (aka PS4 DualShock aka that buttons thing) and purchased some games from a suspiciously timed "spring!" sale. We are gonna play some games and listen to some new music and hear some people talk on podcasts and watch some shows and try to make the best of it, and maybe even do some productive stuff with the time, why not. 

 

And then I come in there and honey says "Hey honey I downloaded a couple new games and thought you might like to check them out, and this one is free and probably bad lol but w/e we can check it out or not, it's w/e we can also just delete it, but idk, what do you wanna play honey?" I'm looking at it–you know, the menu picture, basically a VHS box cover, and it's some blonde anime lady in an armor shirt and idk i'm like, let's just see, let's just get it overwith now and then we can move onto the next one, i am genuinely curious about this multitude of new games we have to try out!

 

The beginning is not promising. Is this a phone game? we think aloud to each other. Ha look at these cheap graphics. What is this long narrated “world building” history lesson at the start, that is our least favorite thing in all of storytelling. Now I have to pick what "race" I want to be? Orc, obviously, because obviously all I want to be is someone who gets to see a giant woman, a giant woman. And so it starts with fighting and it's boring and bad but for some reason we are sticking it out because we want to see what the gameplay is like.

 

I don't know about y'all, but this is how it went for me–over a week or two, my normals were disappeared one by one, roughly in this order: public-facing job, seeing friends, seeing family, gigging job, regular check, leaving the house at all, wearing anything other than pajamas, not turning very nearly fully feral. (I mean, who wasn't at least slightly excited for that part?)

 

It's not like it came out of nowhere. I had gotten back in the habit of listening to Democracy Now! every day, which always feels very smart and politically important at first, but after awhile ends up making me feel helpless and small.

 

My anxiety was becoming unbearable. Even though I was no longer going to work, I could not shake the feeling of being constantly at risk. Every time I left the house, to walk a dog for a client, or pick up prescriptions, I spiraled into a sea of unshakeable panic. Shallow breath, tight chest, prickly skin, out of body experience of daily living. I felt like I couldn't leave the house anymore at all, not in a safe way. I was afraid for myself, but I was more afraid for everyone else–what if I've already got the bug, and I'm bringing it wherever I go? There were fewer and fewer reasons to leave the house. 

 

I never expected this outcome. I'm fully addicted to a real dumb MMORPG. What started out as a 5-minute "okay let's see what it is, have a laugh, and never think about it again" joke has turned into an all day every day habit. And I have no intention of stopping. In normal circumstances, this would be a problem for me. Then again, in normal circumstances, this wouldn't happen. But in this reality, this timeline, Caravan Stories is the only thing staving off a constant state of panic and anxiety, and I will thank the gods that I am lucky enough to have access to such silliness in my increasingly tiny world. (And increasingly embiggening on-screen world!)