Life Simulators and Self-Care

By Jessie Brooks

For the last…we’ll go with ten summers, life simulator games have been one of my favorite seasonal hobbies to relax into. Even now when the concept of “summer vacation” technically doesn’t apply to me, I still find the yearly habit so relaxing.

As many people no doubt agree, the Sims, over its nearly 20 years of existence, has become one of the most popular life simulators in the game industry, and that, of course, is where I started. But since then I have branched out to other games of that type and I’ve found that there’s often more to them than there appears.

Animal Crossing, for example, became an intense comfort to me, played on a DS under covers at night when I was in high school.

The reason, I think, that life simulator games have held such a place in my heart is because they often hold such a high emphasis on self-care.

We’ll start with The Sims. Every character has six basic needs: Hunger, Bladder, Sleep, Food, Social and Fun. These last two are treated as being just as important as the first four– no Maslow’s Hierarchy here. While you won’t necessarily die from a lack of social interaction or a lack of fun (though, to be fair, I haven’t tried), but there are consequences for your Sims if these things are ignored. On top of that, the act of taking care of these small absent-minded people can provide self-care in and of itself for highly empathetic individuals.

Animal Crossing is a little less like real life than the Sims is capable of being, considering your neighbors are cute anthropomorphic animals and you spend your time trying to pay off a massive home loan (though I suppose that might be the most realistic thing about the game). But what truly makes this game a champion for self-care is its emphasis on community. Your neighbors miss you when you don’t play for a while, but are happy when you return. They write you letters, invite you to their birthdays, and give you gifts just because they want to. Some of the things they say to you can be surprisingly insightful, and sometimes they even encourage you to turn the game off and rest a while. (I realize many contemporary Nintendo games have features that encourage you to stop playing and take a break, but it’s really adorable to have a little cat in a Sentai helmet tell you to take care of yourself.)

The domestic activities both of these games feature have actually come in handy in my real life, as I’ve moved into a new home. It’s small but perfectly cozy, and years of virtual house-decorating have armed me with lots of ideas. While I’m a sucker for fantasy RPGs, there’s still something wonderful about games that allow me to explore what my real life could be like in the future, and as a fiction writer, games like these where I have more control over the direction of my character’s life have also been useful in a creative sense.

Maybe I’m going to too great a length to convince myself that the countless hours I’ve poured into these two games have been worth it, but sometimes I also look at it in this way: if picturing the little green skill bar above my head filling up motivates me to keep trying to learn new skills, and keep going despite not being good at something at first, that’s tremendous. Trying something new can be an intensely powerful tool for personal growth, and if the media I’m consuming in my free time is encouraging that, and I’m actually acting on it, then I think forward progress is being made.

The bottom line here is this: don’t berate yourself if you spend what you perceive as too much time playing video games. Take what you’re learning from them, and apply it to the other aspects of your life. Unless you’re learning to hit people with swords. Maybe don’t do that.

 

A Case for Alpha Flight in MCU

By Regan Levitte

Okay, so, Marvel Comics is now a Disney property and is poised to take over media as we know it. Let’s count, we have:

• Eleven feature films crossing three phases with lots of witty dialogue that actually have started to protest the US Department of Defense by having fewer propaganda scenes using military funds and equipment (GOOD).
• Ten TV series crisscrossing Netflix, Hulu, and prime time television, two of which are female-led (ALSO GOOD).
• Two Awesome Mixes courtesy of Star-Lord (LET’S BOOGIE).
• Ten encounters where Black Widow is underestimated by her enemies–in other words, ten times that Natasha doesn’t need any man’s help (VERY GOOD).
• One new face of the MCU overtaking Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Tony Stark–Brie Larson as Captain Marvel (EXCELLENT).

With this universe of media in mind, it is not a far jump to get viewers to another country, with another team, that Marvel has lots of connections to, aside from the good ol’ USA and Wakanda, that being the land of maple syrup, a well-balanced Prime Minister’s cabinet, and Tim Horton’s: CANADA.

Alpha Flight is Marvel’s pan-Canadian team, with connections to the Great Lakes Avengers and to the X-Men, but run through the Canadian government instead of the independent Avengers Initiative. The team’s initial line-up in X-Men #120, the team I am proposing making a movie for, is Guardian, who is kind of like Steve Rogers wearing the Iron Man suit with a maple leaf logo, Sasquatch, who, like Bruce Banner, can transfer into an infinitely strong orange yeti (these powers are sometime very Banner-like with gamma rays and solar flares involved, but also sometimes mystical), the Beaubier twins from Montreal, Jean-Paul and Jeanne-Marie, who are mutants and we’ll come back to, Michael Twoyoungmen, code-named Shaman, and his ward, my fave, Snowbird.

This team is important, for multiple reasons. Sure, Guardian is not exciting (he’s from Ontario, so, whatever), Sasquatch, interesting enough, but when we get to the twins, Michael, and Snowbird, there is an absolutely crucial set of representations we just don’t see enough of. 

Jean-Paul Beaubier, code-named Northstar, and his sister have pretty similar powers (super-speed, flight, light generation, and molecular generation), but Jean-Paul is canonically Marvel’s first openly gay character, and the first to come out publicly in Alpha Flight #106. Jeanne-Marie, code-named Aurora, has Dissociative Identity Disorder, brought on by her separation from her brother at a young age (as infants, the twins’ parents died, and a family friend took in Jean-Paul, but could afford to keep Jeanne-Marie, so she was raised in a nearby Catholic convent), but her DID makes her powers much, much stronger than Jean-Paul’s, to the point of where she thinks there is divine intervention involved. Honestly, I would love to the see the twins have their own movie about their origins, because it would a story about broken foster systems, religion, mental health, overcoming adversity, and family. It would be frankly refreshing to see a story about DID that separates the condition from Sally Field’s Sybil and empowers the character more than we saw in United States of Tara. Who wouldn’t want to see this?!

Snowbird and Michael Twoyoungmen’s journey together is worth its own movie too. Michael and Narya (Snowbird’s civilian identity) are both First Nations people, though sometimes Narya is specifically referred to as Inuk and Michael as Tsuu T’ina. When the Inuit goddess Nelvana bargains with the malevolent spirit of the Tundra to strip away her godly powers, she chooses to have a child with a mortal, and that child, Narya, receives some of Nelvanna’s powers. Newly-minted shaman and former surgeon Michael Twoyoungmen is then chosen by Nelvanna to be her midwife, and he raises Narya in the Canadian wilderness. Taking the identity of Snowbird, the half-goddess gains all of her powers from Canada itself. She can transform into any animal native to her country, and even when in human shape, she has super-human strength, stamina, reflexes, and agility, in addition to mystical abilities she has learned from Michael Twoyoungmen. Plus, as a day job, Narya is a Mountie.

Frankly, I really want to see this super-powerful First Nations woman who is a member of law enforcement, who has a strong, rewarding relationship with a father figure, and whose mother is a literal goddess. Marvel, I have even researched a Canadian Inuk producer that y’all can contact to start negotiations–Zacharias Kunuk who directed the first feature film in Inukitut, Atanajuat: The Fast Runner. I’d definitely suggest, if putting Michael Twoyoungmen into a movie, updating and improving his team uniform to something more accurate to the Tsuu T’ina. Even if Kunuk doesn’t direct or write, Feige et. al, surely you can reach out to him to find an appropriate production crew.

“Harry Potter and the Sacred Text” and the Catholic School Survivor

By Regan Levitte

Imagine this: a grad student cracks open a can of La Croix, settles down at her desk, and selects a podcast to listen to, because what else do grad students do? This grad student is a lapsed Catholic, having rebelliously done the Catholic school schtick, has stopped going to church, and doesn’t profess to even be religious anymore, so I was a little skeptical of John Green’s recommendation in his video “This Video is about Red-Eyed Tree Frogs.” I was expecting something more like reading theology into Harry Potter or discussing the spirituality characters should or shouldn’t have, not the intellectual, heartwarming, and personal podcast I’m now hooked on.

Vanessa Zoltan and Caspar ter Kuile, the hosts of “Sacred Text,” are two Harvard Divinity School graduates, but they are not the Ralph Waldo Emerson-type. I love learning more about their friendship, which they refer to as “semi-romantic.” Both are hilarious, have excellent voices to listen to, and bring nuance and experience into my favorite series in a mature, insightful way, treating Harry Potter as a sacred text that teaches lessons in the same way the Torah or the Bible might.

Each week, Vanessa and Caspar re-read a chapter of the books (they are just beginning Order of the Phoenix now) through a theme they agree upon after they have finished the previous chapter—some themes have been white privilege, commitment, guilt, inspiration, and the theme of my favorite episode, beauty (examining the seventh chapter of Goblet of Fire, “Bagman and Crouch”). Sometimes, I find myself boggled by how Vanessa and Caspar will find the theme in a chapter—imagine reading about the Chamber of Secrets through the lens of grace! Episodes start off with a story from Vanessa, Caspar, or a guest host, and then there’s the Thirty-Second Recap Contest, in case listeners aren’t re-reading in sequence. Our hosts use reading techniques from various practices in order to further make meaning of the chapter during the discussion segment–my personal favorites are Lectio Divina and Floralegium (both are the two Catholic practices they use, ironically). This is usually my favorite part of the episode, where a sentence or two of JK Rowling’s rhetorical practices are examined closely for meaning.

You definitely don’t need to be religious to listen and enjoy “Harry Potter and the Sacred Text”—even Vanessa professes to be a Jewish atheist! This podcast is all about meaning-making and interpreting, and more importantly, opening a conversation about big themes through something incredibly relatable.

“Harry Potter and the Sacred Text” can be downloaded on Apple Podcasts, and their website (harrypottersacredtext.com).

Ready Player One, Review

By Leslie Smith

*This is not a spoiler free review*

Ready Player One is a novel read at the insistence of my elder sister, who claimed it was a “nerdgasm.” This initially told me that it would be something out of my interest, because while my sister is still a part of nerd culture, it’s something I have mostly moved away from. I say this because I have a lot of fondness for my sibling, as well as the enjoyment I found while binge watching “Doctor Who,” “Supernatural,” and “Star Trek.” However, undergrad only allows for so much, and priorities had to be made, which is what largely led to my exiting of conventions and cosplays for the apathetic world of academia.

While there is a fascinating premise within this novel, a dystopian future basically owned by an evil Microsoft that still worships someone who totally isn’t Steve Jobs, and a classic video game style competition for ultimate dominance over the OASIS (a virtual reality that has basically become something like another dimension) it still falls utterly, embarrassingly flat.

One of the main reasons, besides the demands of school, that I abandoned my days of geekdom, is because I was exhausted of catering to the mouth-breathing geek boys who claimed that this was the only solace they had in a cruel, cruel world that hated them and sought to bully them at every turn for liking Dragonball Z and NES games. All the while claiming all women who didn’t immediately know every designer of Space Invaders and John Hughes entire retail pattern are “fake fans,” fetishizing Asian women and culture at literally every waking moment, and outright abusing Black fans of the same metal.

Which is why I was disappointed, but not surprised, with this book. Cline creates a compelling world, one where characters can be anyone they wish to be on the OASIS platform. With enough hard-earned levels and credits, characters have a chance at winning the virtual lottery and being set for life. However, this actually translates into a 385-page wank session over 80s nerd culture, including obscure classics and stereotypes galore.

What was worse to me than the 80s pop culture references shoved into every paragraph was the token jokes that are the supporting cast. Art3mis is the quintessential “geek girl,” conventionally attractive, gamer, but not better than the protagonist. She is knowledgeable about James Halliday (the fake Steve Jobs character), but not more knowledgeable than the boys. Perhaps the most annoying part of her characterization is how Wade, or Parzival while in OASIS, basically ignores her when she tells him to leave her alone after he professes his love for someone whom he’s never met and bombards her with messages, gifts, and even went as far as to stand outside her virtual window with a boombox over his head, Lloyd Dobler style. Wade eventually gets the girl by the end of the novel, after he proves he’s such a good guy for thinking she’s just as beautiful in real life. Because in order for women to find themselves beautiful, they need a man’s validation first.

Initially, I was led to believe that Art3mis was the sole female character in this work. However, approximately 50 pages from the end of the narrative readers discover Aech, Wade’s longtime friend and geeky buddy, is actually a plus size black lesbian named Helen Harris. While this is a wonderful identity to showcase in a story about gaming and nerd culture and giving a focus to all the actual Black women, both LGBT+ and not, who love these things, I feel like Helen’s story is more of an afterthought. The explanation for her portrayal as a white man in the OASIS is solid, it is easier to navigate geek space and employment as a white male. However, this true statement is not acknowledged or explored past a paragraph, and Aech is referred to as a “he” for the rest of the book, because that’s the gender of her OASIS character. My main disappointment with this is that her character reads more like a gimmick than an actual, believable character.

 

Finally, the representation of the two Asian characters, Shoto and Daito, was actually the most orientalist representation I have seen since I read Pride Prejudice and Zombies (a whole other fish in need of frying). The pair have cringe worthy dialogue such as “‘The Sixers have no honor,’ Shoto said, scowling.”, “‘Parzival-san,’ he said, bowing low.”, “He sat seiza-style, folding his legs under his thighs.”, and, after Daito was falsely reported to have jumped off a roof: “‘No,’ Shoto said. ‘Daito did not commit seppuku.’” Cline seems to have just set up a board and thrown darts at Kung Fu movie dialogue to have them speak in the rare moments they were actually present in the story.

What is most disheartening to me is the ways that these characters have to sacrifice and be sacrificed for Wade to succeed. Daito dies, Shoto forgoes entering into the final level to fight the man who killed his brother, and naturally both girls cannot continue to the end. Because even in cyberspace, it is still a white man’s game.

 

Nix Hydra’s The Arcana, Review

 

By Jessie Brooks

Everyone has daily rituals. Some drink coffee in the morning, some have a skincare regimen. My daily routine, as geeky as it may sound, involves checking a phone game. The Arcana, developed by Nix Hydra, is a free dating sim available for iOS and Android phones.

There’s a few different aspects to the game so far. Common to phone games, there’s a wheel of fortune, which you can spin once free daily, and can spin again for 20 coins a go. On this spinner, you either get coins, or trinkets, little items associated with each character that unlock bonus cut scenes.

There’s a Tarot reading feature, which is my favorite part. Here, you can pay coins to get readings done. But if saving your coin for what matters is more your style, never fear! If you check in with the app every day, making sure to click on the Tarot tab, you can get a free past-present-future reading every week. Doing this also nets you a few coins a day. More experienced readers might feel limited by the small amount of possible spreads. That said, it is a great tool for people who want to learn more about the cards. (Or, people who don’t like to shuffle their decks…like me.)

A recent update added a new mini-game called “Heart Hunter,” consisting of chasing around the love interests in a board game. If you collect four hearts from a character before your turns are up, you get a postcard from that character. Then, if you collect all the postcards in a specific category, you get –I’m sure you get the idea by now –coins! You also get keys to use in the main game and/or power-ups to make “Heart Hunter” easier.

The main attraction is the story mode. This is a chaptered visual novel with short sections, jam-packed with content. The first six chapters cover the basics of the situation. You’re an apprentice to a magician, the enigmatic Asra. One night, you find a mysterious man breaking into the shop, and later you meet the empress of your city, Nadia. She confides in you that she is looking for said mysterious man, Julian, on suspicion of murdering the late emperor.

After you complete the initial six chapters, you pick one of these three characters, and continue the story. From here, though the plot continues, there’s emphasis on building a friendship. Since this is a dating sim, of course, it blossoms into a romantic attachment. To play a section from a character’s plot-line costs one key, and you regenerate a new key every 8 hours. So, if you don’t feel like spending real money, you can play three sections, or one chapter, every 24 hours. (You get to play the first six chapters as many times as you need – no coins required.) You can use coins to unlock bonus scenes, but coins are never necessary to steer or progress the plot.

The characters are surprisingly well-fleshed out for such a small-scale game. Julian’s plot, especially, has a lot of depth in its treatment of guilt. Nadia’s plot-line deals with impostor syndrome and court intrigue. As far as Asra goes, there is still much about him that has yet to come to light, so I’m excited to hear the rest of his story.

Oh, and did I mention the game is (or can be) queer. You don’t have a character sprite, but you get to choose your apprentice’s name, and select their pronouns. You can also change this at any time if you want to imagine a different character for each plot.

People who aren’t fans of mobile games or dating sims may not love this one, but it’s become a favorite of mine. One thing I appreciate is that there’s no need for micro-transactions. Of course, since the game is free, they offer you the chance to pay for coins or keys, but the game doesn’t force these things. It’s perfectly possible to save up coins by playing “Heart Hunter,” checking the Tarot tab, and using your free spin each day. (That said, I love this game a lot, so I do spring for coins once in a while to support the dev team.)

Another great thing about the game is that it’s always evolving. As I’m writing this, there is still one chapter left in the main stories for Asra, Nadia, and Julian. The menu screen implies that three more characters that appear in the story will get plot arcs of their own. “Heart Hunter” has only been a feature in the game for a few weeks and was retooled and improved mere days ago. It’s clear that the dev team is hard at work giving the fans more content, which is what has kept me from deleting this app to save room on my phone. Ultimately, I’m looking forward to the next chapter, and excited to see what’s in the cards for this game.

 

 

Big Red Racing Deserves All Your Love

By Sam Estall 

It might seem that, to those that don’t know me very well, that I really like racing games. Especially so after reading this article. It’ll seem like I’m the sort of gamer that has Dirt 2 posters plentily plastered over my study walls whilst I write the article you’re reading now with a force feedback steering wheel, watching episode after episode of Gran Turismo 6 Let’s Plays on a second monitor. There’s the fallacy. I don’t particularly like racing games. I can’t even claim to currently own one outside of Rocket League. However — I really love Big Red Racing.

Big Red Racing was released in 1996 on DOS systems to what I can only assume was a collective “ooh that was a fun play,” followed by each and every gamer forgetting they owned it in the first place. One destined for the platinum collection this ain’t.

It’s what could only be described as a no-frills arcade game. No bells and whistles, just what it says on the tin- Big Red Racing. The locations were big. The cars were red. You raced. To win? You win the race. No points, no leaderboards, no eSports competitiveness. It was pure fun, through and through. I’m going to give you a rundown of the game as best as I can, describing why 4-year-old me loved this game so much when he discovered it sneakily installed on his Grandmother’s computer back in the 90s.

Like most games, you start at the menu, and that was an experience. The fit-inducing mania of the menu, fonts shifting and cycling on fraction-of-second intervals can easily be described, yet probably not understood, in the below picture.

Every choice is as shitty as the next and I love every part of it. Even the cursor, more similar in shape to a hang glider than your typical pointer, was bizarre. Each and every click of the mouse was accompanied by the same soprano pitch ‘WOOHOO!’ But it captured the insanity that was due to follow and so it worked. Oh, and the insanity to follow.

Load up a map, choose your car, race. That was how simple it was. Once the race loaded? How about a questionably racist commentator (The 1990s, where we didn’t realise casual racism wasn’t okay) shouting at you, followed by the most drum-synth-heavy soundtrack that would assault the eardrums for the next 3-5-minute race. The map that looked as if it had been drawn in MS Paint, the odd blades of grass on the track that were absolutely bigger than the tiny men driving your car. But you didn’t mind, because even for DOS, these locations and sounds were astonishing. Broken, dry dirt races, lush vistas… Mars[1]… you name it, they had charm and boy, did they have it where it counted.

Every race was a little different. There were no power ups, no breakages on the car to look out for, yet each race was unique. For example, take the Germany-based ‘Sound of Munich;’ in this you’re about to race without a track, so the game offers you helicopters. Of course, this being Big Red Racing, you have no choice but to say yes and accept the egregious amounts of fun you’ve just been spoon fed. Unwieldy to control and sound effects that sounded like a small child flapping a sheet of A4 in your ears for slightly-too-long, they were insane, yet weirdly fun. Like mastering the controls actually gave you a reason to replay the levels until you’d perfected them.

And there lies the thing I remember so fondly about Big Red Racing. When I was four, I didn’t care about prizes, progress or sequels. I cared about instant gratification – was I having fun? With Big Red Racing, I certainly was. It was arcade-style in the truest sense of the phrase. You opt-in and just play. No progress, no ‘finish first to unlock hard mode’- just good, old fashioned play. That’s why I’d call it an ‘old game done good.’ Because maybe it wasn’t done well- it didn’t really warrant replay ability or satisfaction to a more hardcore gamer, but it was done GOOD. A solid game that I’ve got fond memories of to this day.[2]

Notes

[1] To those that are wondering, some of the final levels in the game involve racing levitating rovers on Mars, which is an entirely separate article in itself, introducing some of the weirdest and most memorable gameplay I’d ever experienced as a child.

[2] Big Red Racing is available online. (Through certain sites which at the time of writing I’m not totally sure are legitimate or not.)

American Girl, Feminist Toys? It’s More Likely Than You Think.

By Jessie Brooks

If there’s one thing I remember getting excited about as a wee one, it was the arrival of the American Girl catalogue. These things were huge and packed with information, containing hundreds of product photos of their dolls. Unlike Barbies or Bratz dolls, which I also loved, these dolls looked like I did. They weren’t teenagers with flat tummies and over-lined lips, they were kids—like me. And they weren’t limited to dolls, they had stories. Their main series had books telling their tales. Each of them, though they hailed from different time periods and walks of life, overcame adversities, learned to speak up for themselves, and experienced personal growth.

It may sound hilarious to say, but the American Girl doll line was my first exposure to feminist media.

By the time I found out about American Girl dolls, I was already eight or nine years old. I read all kinds of books, watched TV shows geared towards children, but this was the first piece of media I had found that spoke of the power that young girls had to improve our circumstances. As a kid with a disintegrating home life, this shred of power and affirmation meant the world to me.

I couldn’t afford a doll for a long time, but I read as many of the books as I could get my hands on. The first one I grew to love was Molly, who was growing up during the peak of World War II. She learns to value her family and to find the balance between self and others. Some of the other characters I loved include Addy, who escaped slavery to find freedom and a sense of home in Philadelphia, Kaya, a First Nations girl of the Nez Perce tribe in the Northwest, and Josefina, a Mexican-American girl in 1820s Santa Fe.

I don’t know if these stories could be considered perfect representation today. Though the authors of the stories tried to refrain from stereotyping, each girl was a product of her time. Not to mention, when Pleasant Company started the line in 1986, the only three dolls available were Samantha, Kirsten, and Molly—all three of them white. The first doll of color, Addy, was not released until seven years later, in 1993. Now that I’m older, I also have mixed feelings about the patriotic overtones of some of the stories. Molly’s stories, especially, were very gung-ho about loving America and supporting the troops, which tastes funny to me now that I’m older. There’s also the high price point, which many defend because of the quality of the dolls, but does alienate many potential fans of the series.

However, the series does seem to be purposefully striving for diversity. Molly, for example, was retired in 2013 and the current World War II era character is Nanea Mitchell, a Hawaiian girl who was living during the events of Pearl Harbor. Outside of the historical dolls, there have also been many options over the years for kids to choose a doll that looked like them. The most recent iteration of this is the “Create Your Own” doll, which includes many options for skin tone, face mold, hair style and hair color. It’s notable for even offering bald dolls and dolls with hearing aids, allowing disabled kids to feel empowered and appreciated.

Even with flaw, this was the first empowering children’s media I encountered. As a result, even though I’m a young adult, the series still means a lot to me. (PS: If you’re wondering which doll I chose when I finally got one, it was Addy. I couldn’t afford one until I was almost 15, and though there were a lot of new characters out by that time, I wanted to choose one that I remembered from my time reading the books as a kid.)

In the years since, children’s media has come a long way. One example of good representation for children that springs to mind is Steven Universe, a Cartoon Network show created by a bisexual woman. But American Girl is where my story starts. I think many of us have a moment like that, the first piece of media that told us what we could be. If you’re having a bad day, take a moment to reflect on that today, even if you’re well into adulthood. Remember where your journey of self-love and self-belief started, and where you’ve traveled since then. Know that it isn’t over yet.