Julie Muncy | The Verge

This queer horror game forces you to literally tear yourself apart

2018-11-08T10:00:03-05:00

Early on in The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories, the heroine dies. For video games, this isn’t that unusual. What is unusual is what happens afterward: she picks herself up, snaps her bones back into place, and keeps going. J.J., a college student with flowing blonde hair, has a missing friend to find, and if she has to tear her body apart to get where she’s going, she will.

The Missing is not the game it appears to be. The sidescrolling platformer initially seems like the sort of quirky, inventive, and slightly clumsy game we’ve come to expect from its lauded Japanese writer and director, Swery. In reality, The Missing is a stunning queer narrative about the brutality of trying to become who you are, and an argument for why painful, violent stories about queer existence matter. I expected an off-beat romp; I found a broken mirror, instead.

The Missing’s story looks fairly typical for a video game at first, albeit with more gay representation. J.J. is camping when Emily, the woman who appears to be her lover, goes missing. In the classic video game tradition, J.J. has to find and save the damsel in distress, and naturally, she does it by running to the right. J.J. begins dying again and again, but unlike most platformers, she doesn’t just reappear at the beginning of the level, happy and whole.

Instead, as the landscape around her grows more surreal, she discovers she has gained the ability to regenerate from almost any horror, and must use her own physical suffering to progress. She tears off her own legs and arms to solve simple physics puzzles; she immolates herself to break through flammable barriers and carries the fire on her own flesh. She throws her body at her obstacles, again and again, screaming and writhing in pain as she moves forward.

As the horror of J.J.’s suffering slowly fades from startling to mundane — just another weird game conceit in a weird game — the rest of her story begins to reveal itself through cryptic phone calls, archived text messages, and the appearance of a pursuing monster that looks eerily like J.J. (Major spoilers to follow, including the ending of the game. You’ve been warned.)

J.J. refers to having a secret throughout her text conversations with Emily, but the secret she’s harboring is not that she’s gay. It’s that she’s transgender. J.J. is a woman, but her family, her friends — they don’t know that. It seems that only Emily knows.

As J.J. grows closer to finding her best friend and lover, the backstory becomes clearer: J.J.’s mother discovered women’s clothes in her closet, and figured out what was going on. Terrified and in agony over her closeted life, J.J. attempted suicide, and the entire game is a sort of near-death fever dream where J.J.’s identity swims between liminal spaces — closeted and out, alive and dead, whole and in literal pieces.

In the end, J.J. survives. She finds meaning in her own identity, and ultimately reunites with Emily. But even with that ending, this is a queer horror story about a woman unable to fully reckon with her own identity and desires, forced to face them as violent grotesqueries, as frightening and harsh metaphors made real.

It’s easy to imagine that a story like this would be an abject disaster. Media about trans people, and queer people in general, is drowning in trauma porn, stories that dehumanize us and turn us into nothing but vectors for suffering, to be seen and enjoyed by straight, cisgender consumers. These stories are tragedies in the classical sense, with transgender subjects as objects of tragic pity, suffering for the fatal flaw of not being “normal.”

Within that landscape, it’s easy, then, to imagine that tragic or grotesque stories about queer people are best avoided by those interested in treating our stories respectfully. There are regular debates in the LGBTQ communities I’ve been a part of about what stories we should and shouldn’t be telling, and what value they have. I frequently see people who, if they don’t outright condemn dark, sad stories about us, at least prefer to avoid them.

‘The Missing’ argues in favor of queer tragedy

There are understandable reasons for this. Stories about trauma can easily evoke our own trauma, and that’s not always desirable. And there’s no shame in avoiding types of storytelling that don’t suit you. But that avoidance can often calcify into an argument that no one should be telling stories like this, period. That queer stories should be soft, and optimistic, and kind. After all, the world is so cruel already, isn’t it?

But The Missing argues in favor of queer tragedy, or at least queer pain as a locus of storytelling. The central metaphor of the game — J.J.’s constant, deliberate self-mutilation —is a lens that reveals the pain she has experienced as a closeted trans woman. It’s the constant humiliation of playing a role you know isn’t yours. It’s the terror of not being seen as “man enough” by your supposed peers. It’s the silent ache of hearing your parents and friends casually make comments that are insensitive or worse about the kind of person you secretly are. It’s the pain of secrets, of systemic oppression, of a society stacked against you discovering the truth about yourself.

Through the journey of The Missing, J.J. finds power in her experience of this suffering — hate and rage and bravery. She discovers, within the ugliness, the power to fight. Not that this redeems the pain or makes it, somehow, good. It doesn’t. But it allows that pain to be more than just misery porn.

To make stories out of that type of pain is to accept them as true, and important, because they’re ours. Swery is not an openly queer creator, but through consultation and work with various queer people and a desire to tell a story that accepts people where they are, he and White Owls Inc. have crafted an experience that encapsulates everything I find valuable about depicting queer pain. This is not to praise Swery, exactly, or to elevate his work above the countless queer creators working in the same spaces with powerful intimacy. It’s simply to recognize when a story flirts so close to the mainstream while retaining these transgressive, powerful themes, whether those themes are broached on purpose or not.

In an essay on the David Lynch film Mulholland Drive, critic Heather K. Love writes that the desire to avoid tragic or horrific queer subjects in fiction can be an ultimately harmful one.

”According to this view, ‘homosexual tragedy belongs to a different era,” she writes, “to a time when living as a homosexual was nearly impossible. Given that social circumstances have changed so profoundly in the last thirty years, they argue for the need to get over this past, not eroticize it.”

She goes on to say that this view, while understandable, erases those of us still suffering: “Such forward thinking, however, cannot address structural inequalities or the real complexities of desire. Instead, we need a politics that goes ‘all the way down,’ that is attentive to the dark places of affective and erotic life.”

I never had a queer youth. J.J. didn’t either. Both of us spent our bright, optimistic college years pretending to be different people while knowing, deep down, that it wasn’t right. J.J. knew who she was supposed to be; I didn’t. I just knew that the role I was playing was wrong, somehow, in some horrific alien way that I could barely touch. At one point late in the story, J.J. reflects on how much suffering she’s gone through to get to where she is.

“Do you know how it feels to have your body ripped apart?” she asks. “Have you ever lost an arm? First, you feel the skin snapping and ripping off. Then your muscles split apart.”

For J.J., this is the pain of having to hide who she is, and it’s just one of the many pains laid at the feet of queer people. The Missing, by looking that pain dead in the eye, legitimizes it. That’s what queer horror, even queer tragedy, can do. It can let us take that pain and hold it just close enough to touch it, to mark its shape, without fully diving in. There’s freedom in being recognized like that. It gives us power. It can let us snap our bones back into place, brush the fire off our skin, and keep going. Because our pain is a part of us. It doesn’t have to define us, but it shouldn’t be ignored, either.

The Missing is available now on PS4, XBox One, Nintendo Switch, and Steam.

Steam’s capricious pornography rules hurt small game creators the most

2018-06-01T15:47:14-04:00

Drawing clear lines and definitions around obscenity, pornographic content, and art has always been a complicated business. The current guidance from US Supreme Court on the matter of obscenity is “I know it when I see it,” a standard that relies more on intuition than specificity. For online platforms and distributors, it’s equally murky territory — and one where ambiguity can have real consequences, particularly for smaller creators.

Steam, the largest online distributor of video games on the planet (which puts it in the running for largest distributor, period), is no stranger to these concerns. While nudity is seemingly permitted on the service, pornography is not — a fuzzy distinction that has led to confusion and inconsistent enforcement of their rules for years, particularly around smaller games that feature sexual content.

The latest development came last Friday, when several developers of visual novels, along with similarly aesthetically themed anime games, said they had received email notices from Steam that their games had been reported for pornographic content, and they had two weeks to remove it or the games would be removed from the platform entirely. Several developers expressed surprise, particularly because they considered their games to be sexy, but not pornographic.

The notices only raised more questions about Steam’s irregular application of vague rules

Two days later, the same creators received another email, equally as baffling: their content would not be removed after all. Have a nice day. Which raises the question: what exactly is going on over at Steam? (Valve has not responded to multiple requests for comment by The Verge.) The notices and their retraction not only raised more questions about Steam’s irregular application of vague rules, but about their particular focus on visual novels, a genre that is especially vulnerable to this sort of content-based censorship.

Originating in Japan during the mid to late 1980s, visual novels are interactive experiences created from static images and written narrative, often offering choices to the player that shape how the story goes. They are typically focused on interpersonal dynamics, which has made them one of the few places in games where complex romantic and sexual narratives have been able to flourish.

This is a double-edged sword, however, particularly in relation to Steam’s rules and the current perception of visual novels within the games industry. The genre is still very niche in the West, with large-scale localization only beginning in the past few years. Before that, most titles that did come out — largely simple, easy-to-translate visual novels with heavy sexual content — weren’t necessarily representative of the genre as a whole, which also deals in drama, romance, science fiction, horror and many other kinds of storytelling. Because of the erotic bent of the offerings made available in the West, however, the whole genre is often perceived as pornography and not much else.

”There’s a stigma that we’re growing out of,” says Peter “Taosym” Rasmussen, an artist and the owner of Lupiesoft, a Western visual novel development team whose game Mutiny!! received a takedown notice from Valve. “It’s based on what gets translated into English from Japan. Typically those are the games that they expect to sell the best, that have extremely high niche appeal. And porn has extremely high niche appeal.”

The pigeonholing of visual novels as porn isn’t the only perceptual issue they face; because of their limited gameplay, visual novels are also often dismissed as “not real games” by mainstream gaming fans, an assessment some developers say has been echoed by Steam itself.

“I’m honestly not sure how much Steam knows or cares about visual novels”

“I’m honestly not sure how much Steam knows or cares about visual novels,” says John Pickett, director of public relations for MangaGamer, a publisher of localized visual novels that also received a takedown notice. He says that when MangaGamer first approached Steam to get the company’s products listed — prior to the now-defunct Steam Greenlight system that put indie games on the service up to community vote — their visual novels were rejected “because ‘they aren’t games.’” After Steam Greenlight launched and MangaGamer reentered its titles, “they passed through to full approval relatively quickly (within a year),” says Pickett. “Valve did express their surprise to us when they saw that our visual novels had passed — they never expected people to be interested in them at all.”

While the market for visual novels remains small in United States, with only a marginal sampling of Japanese VNs getting localized, a burgeoning indie scene has emerged in the West over the past few years. In particular, LGBT creators and audiences have been drawn to the genre, seeing it as a space to explore romantic and social dynamics in a non-heteronormative setting.

”The LGBT scene has really latched onto this genre really strongly,” says Rasmussen. “That’s probably the best thing about visual novels. They’re difficult to make — they require writing, and music, and all that stuff to come together — but technically they’re not hard to start. You can make an absurdly cheap visual novel.”

But getting games on Steam and keeping them there has been a long-running issue for creators of visual novels and other games with sexual content. When Steam launched Steam Greenlight in 2012, a pipeline theoretically designed to let creators put their games on Steam with little friction, some games were pulled from the platform with little notice or clarity about what sexual content had been deemed pornographic. In subsequent years, developers found ways around these restrictions by censoring their material, often with additional downloadable patches that removed the censorship after the game was installed — though Steam later banned this practice as well. In 2017, prominent visual novel developer Christine Love had significant difficulty finding a home on Steam for the BDSM-themed visual novel Ladykiller in a Bind, which did eventually make it to the platform, though not without significant back and forth between Love and Steam.

Part of what makes it so frustrating for creators who want to avoid takedowns are Steam’s guidelines for sexual content, which are vague and often difficult to parse. According to the Steam partner rules provided to developers, the related restrictions are “pornography,” “content that is patently offensive or intended to shock or disgust viewers,” as well as adult content that is inappropriately labeled and age-gated.

Exactly what this means — and what triggered the recent takedown notices for visual novels, or their retraction — remains ambiguous. And for creators, this uncertainty and inconsistency can create the impression that any sexual content is potentially a problem. While porn is notoriously hard to define, for the Supreme Court or anyone else, that’s not a clear standard for creators to rely on, especially when crossing the invisible line means potentially losing one of the most lucrative revenue streams in the gaming world. It’s the sort of hit that could spell financial doom for any small creator, regardless of genre.

The newest batch of takedown notices from Valve still came as a surprise, especially for Pickett, who had recently spoken to representatives of Valve at the Steam offices on behalf of MangaGamer and visual novel developers in general. Pickett hoped to clarify the content issues on the platform, specifically to prevent their visual novels from receiving unexpected or avoidable takedowns.

“We stand by our assertion then that content of [our] game is not pornographic, but an earnest and tasteful exploration of sexuality,” wrote a representative on the MangaGamer website. “We went to great pains to run the game’s content by Valve representatives —including sending along every potentially questionable graphical asset along with advanced builds of the title — to ensure that that feeling was mutual. The game would have never appeared on the platform if we had not confirmed with Valve representatives that they did not feel the content was pornographic and was appropriate for the platform.”

Then about two months later, “they backtracked on that completely” with the recent takedown notices, says Rasmussen, who has several games represented by MangaGamer. And while the notices were retracted and didn’t result in the removal of any games, Rasmussen says it still felt like a betrayal. He also worries that it might drive some developers to avoid expressions of sexuality in their work altogether. “I know a lot of people who have said, ‘maybe we’re just not going to make sexy games anymore.’”

“They directly promised our community one thing and then contradicted that”

MangaGamer has since sought additional distribution platforms for its work, and plans to sell its visual novels through GOG. “We have to diversify the platforms that we’re using out of necessity, because we know now that Valve cannot be trusted because they went back on their word,” says Pickett. “They directly promised our community one thing and then… contradicted that. They’ve actively hurt us when we were acting in good faith towards them.”

Part of the issue may lie in the history of Valve itself. The company began in the mid-‘90s as a video game developer, and moved into the content distribution game when its distribution platform, Steam, became a major success on the PC. But Valve’s transition from primarily a developer to primarily a distributor — one so successful that it has become one of the most significant gatekeepers in the industry — has not always been an easy one, and the things that made the company successful at the former aren’t always an advantage for the latter.

Valve is a famously opaque company, whose corporate structure is often described as being “flat”, without traditional hierarchies or team organizations. Valve says this fosters creativity and innovation, but the lack of traditional management can make it difficult to get answers out of the company and find information on who is responsible for what, or how decisions are made internally. In addition, many of Steam’s curatorial processes are algorithmic or community based, meaning that it’s rarely clear who or what within Valve or the Steam system is making any given decision.

This offers little insight into why Steam decided to threaten these games in particular with removal, or why it subsequently changed course. Regardless of the intentions or motivations at the company, however, its takedown notices were read as affirmations by opponents of sexual content. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation, which spends much of its time lobbying against sex work, the “public health crisis of pornography,” and art it deems “pornographic,” celebrated the news of the takedown notices on Twitter, declaring them a ”victory” for the organization.

This sort of unpredictable enforcement threatens the most vulnerable creators

Valve’s behavior is reminiscent of similar moves by Apple, whose vague guidelines and capricious censorship around “pornographic content” — they once temporarily banned seminal indie game Papers, Please from their store for nudity, as well as the award-winning indie comic book Sex Criminals — have made the App Store a precarious place for smaller game developers and creators working with sensitive or mature content. That’s what’s most disturbing about this sort of unpredictable enforcement: Not only that it threatens the finances and artistic expression of creators, but it threatens the most vulnerable creators, especially those trying to make a living through small audiences in niche and misunderstood genres. “Visual novels are the easy target,” says Pickett.

Compared to larger studios who have more regular communication with Steam and large, vocal audiences for their products, smaller independent creators are far more vulnerable — and working with any erotic context under these conditions can feel like risking their livelihood. This sort of chilling effect can impact the entire industry by narrowing the diversity of titles available to the average player, and limiting the innovative and storytelling potential for small, independent games that dabble in any depiction of human sexuality to find their way to audiences.

”The issue is, [Valve] isn’t going to remove The Witcher or Grand Theft Auto or anything like that from Steam [despite their sexual content],” says Rasmussen. “We’re the smallest kind of demographic without any kind of lobbying power. We can’t influence Valve to leave us alone.” While we still don’t (and may never) know exactly why Steam sent and then retracted those takedown notices, it has left many visual novel creators even less confident about what sexual content is acceptable on the platform, and more concerned that their work will unexpectedly be categorized as pornography. That’s going to hurt visual novel developers the most, but it’s going to make things worse for the vitality and diversity of gaming at large, too.

Far Cry 5 is the most frustrating game I’ve played this year, but it has one brilliant mission

2018-05-10T13:56:47-04:00

The fifth numbered entry in the broad series of nature-and-tourism themed open-world shooters, Far Cry 5 is a mess. Its story doesn’t make sense, its themes don’t cohere, and it fails to do any justice to its real-world setting, Montana, or the politics and people that comprise it. It does not, in any sense, represent progress for the world of big, expensive video games.

Except for one moment. There’s a single mission that is everything Far Cry 5 isn’t — warm, humanistic, real. And it’s a mission that makes me think that, perhaps at the margins, this messy game has something to offer to gaming’s future.

It occurs at what will be, for most players, roughly a third of the way through the game, as they start to wrap up the siege on John Seed, the first of three cult lieutenants in Hope County, Montana. Earlier, you can undertake a mission to help Nick Rye, a local pilot, liberate his plane from the cultists. During that mission, you briefly meet his wife, Kim, who is pregnant with the couple’s first child. It’s the typical Far Cry 5 mission, starting with glib irony and ending in a cacophony of explosions. But after that, you have the opportunity to do another mission for the Ryes.

When you arrive at the Rye house, Nick is frantic. Kim is going into labor, and the couple needs someone to drive them to their doula, halfway across the map. You’re led to a truck and get behind the wheel, and the couple enters the backseat, Kim narrating her mounting pain as they stumble into the car.

The rest of the mission is simple: you drive. It’s not an easy drive, but it’s also suspiciously devoid of the violence that suffuses most moments of Far Cry 5. There are some car wrecks and explosions nearby, to provide obstacles and ratchet up tension during the driving. But no one shoots at you. There are, so far as I could tell, no fatalities. Just a tense drive, and a loving couple in the back, talking about contractions, navigating the stress and terror of labor as Nick tries to give you directions to the doula while out of his mind with nerves.

Big-budget games don’t normally do things like this. Their mechanics and worlds are usually marshalled purely toward the goal of escapism. Emotional resonance is valuable, sure, but only insofar as it serves the ultimate goals of the title. And if it doesn’t end in a climactic gunfight or other setpiece, it’s not valuable to the goals of triple-A games, where character and plot are so often beside the point. The feeling of power, and the joy of discharging it. That’s what these games are for. And when they do reach to broader plains of human experience, it’s typically through that lens: meditations on the abuse of power, warnings against violence, considerations of freedom and will.

It gestures, not toward violence past or present, but toward the warm commonality of human experience.

But this one mission in Far Cry 5 points in a different direction. It gestures, not toward violence past or present, but toward the warm commonality of human experience. It captures the pleasure of good family and the simple, low-stakes emotional experiences of its characters. It reminded me of the opening of 2014’s Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, which used a quiet scene of romance to teach the player the game’s systems before the carnage kicked off. But this moment isn’t a tutorial. It doesn’t lead to anything, except an unlockable t-shirt for your in-game avatar (some trappings of triple-A are, indeed, inescapable). It’s just there, in its own right, because someone somewhere in Ubisoft’s development pipeline thought it was fun, and sweet.

This drive is also the only moment in Far Cry 5 to remind me of something from my own life. When I was 11, my sister gave birth to her first child. I remember my dad getting the call, late at night, while we were watching game shows on some lazy summer Sunday. My dad, my mom, and I piled into the car on the way to the hospital. Against advice, Dad insisted on driving, and the entire trip was perilous. He could barely remember how to work the car, or where to go, his nerves were so shot. He was going to have a grandchild. How could he possibly think about anything else? Nearly two decades later, I’m still amazed we didn’t crash.

Driving Nick and Kim to their own future, I thought of that moment, and how easily Far Cry 5 conjured it when it tried. With the violence peeled away for just a moment, with the plot sidelined, this game managed to deliver something that felt like it was made — unlike the rest of the game — by and for real people, to touch some part of their authentic emotional experience. There’s a lesson in that, if other games care enough to look.