American Spaces, American Burdens

Act IV of Kentucky Route Zero finally, finally came out this week. I’ve been waiting for it for over two years but perhaps it’s fitting that it came out the same week that the Republican National Convention happened, at a time when I have been feeling particularly afraid and America has seemed particularly adrift. I grieve for this country and Kentucky Route Zero helps me do that.

The game seems especially relevant right now, as a demagogue appeals to the anger of those for whom neoliberalism has bottomed out, because it confronts the predatory nature of American capitalism. It acknowledges that capitalism chews people up and spits them out. 

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SIGN: WE CLAIM THESE HELMETS IN THE NAMES OF THE FOLKS WHO WORE THEM AND WE PLACE THEM HERE IN THEIR MEMORY BUT ALSO AS A SPIT IN THE GREEDY GREEN EYE OF THAT POWER COMPANY WHO BOUGHT UP OUR OLD MINE AND TRADED OUR BROTHERS’ AND SISTERS’ SAFETY FOR A LITTLE MORE YIELD BUT ONLY YIELDED TWENTY-EIGHT GOOD MEN AND WOMEN DEAD WHEN THE WALLS COLLAPSED AND THE TUNNELS FLOODED WITH WATER

It acknowledges that people are being disenfranchised, that entire livelihoods are being wiped out by corporations and advances in technology. This is part of the crisis we find ourselves in now. This is part of why millennials are right to be angry and scared.

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POPPY: I mourn the Echo River Central Exchange, and I’ll carry a torch for the voice with a smile. But at least I’m keeping some part of it human, right? Even if it’s not the best part.

What makes Kentucky Route Zero’s concerns with labor and debt so heartbreaking to me is the way in which Conway, finding himself later in life with a massive new financial burden and employment obligation, buys into his own exploitation by the system as part of something just and noble.

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CONWAY: I’ve got to repay my debt. Well, I should be grateful for the opportunity - if you want to die with any dignity you’ve got to settle up. That’s why it’s such a damned shame when people go sudden.

Reading Conway say these things–that he’s grateful for the fucking opportunity, that the shame of sudden death is that people haven’t settled up–tapped so effectively into a long-standing anger I hold that I was caught off guard as the rage erupted inside me. Debt is not some righteous fucking burden. 

I’ve always appreciated the mindset with which Conway approached his work as a delivery driver for Lysette’s Antiques. My review of Act II for GameSpot three years ago began, “Conway delivers antiques. That’s his job, and there’s something noble, something sacred, about doing the job you’re given to do, even in a world that often offers little reward for good, honest work.” But now that I see that the endpoint to this mindset for Conway is a willingness, an eagerness even to have his own identity be wholly consumed by the machinery of the system, I don’t think there’s anything noble about it at all. I think he’s bought in to some of the worst parts of the American mythos. And it makes me want to smash the whole fucking thing with a wrecking ball.

The erosion of Conway’s individual identity is powerfully visualized as he is consumed by his manufactured obligations to the machinery of the capitalist system, first piece by piece and then entirely, and when he sails off with the other spectres who, like him, are now entirely defined by their obligations to the Hard Times Distillery, I couldn’t be angry anymore. I could only grieve.

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I thought about my own mother, working nights for meager wages doing data entry at a faceless corporate medical lab to support us as we lived paycheck to paycheck just struggling to pay the mortgage on the small Reseda house my grandmother had once lived in alone. How her identity was eroded too. How she slept through the days, how she was almost always tired, how she had to spend so much time working just so she and the rest of us could exist that she rarely got to actually live.

I grieve for America, but I grieve for myself, too. In the years before that was our situation, my family and I took lots of road trips. America to me then was as much defined by roadside motels in Texas and small-town gas stations in Missouri as it was by the Chicago suburb where we lived when I was very young. In that regard, at least, I was lucky. And I miss it sometimes. Being on the road. Feeling free to come and go across this country. I was a kid. I didn’t realize how privileged I was, and that so many Americans for so many reasons never feel this kind of freedom in their own country. Experiencing Kentucky Route Zero’s road trip, burdensome as it is in some ways, is as close as I’ve come in years to feeling the kind of freedom that comes from having the rhythm of the road under your wheels for hundreds of miles.

Now that I’m living life as the woman I am–a visibly transgender woman–I find that my whole relationship with America is more uncertain. For the past several years, my experience of America has been entirely coastal–up and down the West Coast with the occasional trip to New York. And I wonder to what extent I’ve lost the places in between. Even in these coastal cities, I don’t always feel grounded and whole. I feel a bit like a spectre myself, sometimes trying to make myself invisible, to avoid calling attention to myself because too often when I am seen, I’m misgendered, and on occasion, I’m insulted or harassed. So I don’t always inhabit myself fully. I make myself small. Out of fear, and because I’ve internalized the ways in which the world has taught me not to walk around as someone valuable and desirable and deserving of full existence and participation in human life, I instead, not unlike Conway, participate in the erosion of my own identity. 

I don’t know if the places in between San Francisco and New York will ever feel as open to me as they once did. I think it may depend on whether or not I’m traveling alone.

This past week, I also played Danielle Riendeau’s I <3 San Francisco, a short game about her life and her move last year from San Francisco to Brooklyn. Another game concerned with geography, with the emotional pull of places–not just San Francisco as a whole but the specific bars and alleys and murals and movie theaters of neighborhoods like the Mission, places I walk by every day and see in one way, and Riendeau sees in another. It’s a sliver of her own American odyssey. 

At one point in the game, you see the Statue of Liberty in the distance…

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…and I was reminded of the rainy night in 1987 when I got Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! for the NES, and how surprised and excited I was by the cinematic drama of this simple sequence that played after I’d won the game’s first championship bout:

It was specifically the appearance of the Statue of Liberty at the end that made it so exciting to me, establishing this not as a generic city but as New York. At the time, most games I played took place in fantasy realms or abstract, undefined locations–Hyrule or the Mushroom Kingdom, in deep space or on a generic baseball diamond. Seeing Little Mac training in an actual place felt like the tearing down of a barrier between the game’s world and mine, a barrier that KR0, with its America that is simultaneously fantastical and entirely recognizable, constantly permeates. And things can cross the barrier in both ways; the game space seems to emerge into reality but reality also seems to cross back over into the game space. When I saw the shot in I <3 San Francisco of Danielle walking along the same stretch of road where Little Mac would have trained, I immediately imagined a sprite of her, now something of a New York boxer herself, taking on opponents three times her size, sometimes getting knocked down but not giving up, the crowd cheering as she mashes those buttons with all the determination she can muster, gets back on her feet, keeps fighting, and wins it all.

Games often let us spend a whole lot of time talking to people but they so rarely offer anything to me that feels like real perspective, honesty, and connection. But honesty, and a chance to see these places from Riendeau’s perspective, is all that I <3 San Francisco is. It’s one from the <3, open and unguarded. An earnest little connection of a game, and one that, like Kentucky Route Zero (which, as I wrote about for VICE last year, never lets you settle into one perspective and feel like the center of the story), it’s a game that asks you (or at least me) to look at things a little differently.

Riendeau is honest about leaving San Francisco…

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…but she left because she met someone who makes things make sense.

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Someone worth staying or going for. And I don’t know anymore if any place, on its own, can ever feel like home to me. I think if I ever find home, home will be a person who makes things make sense to me, or at least a person who herself makes some sense to me in a world that otherwise doesn’t. It will be the person who brings places to life for me, who makes the places we share mean something, whether the place is San Francisco or New York or a roadside motel in Texas. A person who makes me feel like inhabiting myself fully, who makes me want to be visible, and who engages in a process of mutual exploration with me, figuring out who we are together.

This is exactly what Johnny and Junebug are doing in Kentucky Route Zero. While Conway’s identity is being eroded, these two former mining robots are going the other way. They’re getting specific, together. They’re exploring. They’re playing.

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You and me, we’re good together. Safe. Free. You know what I mean? We can try stuff out – change our clothes, swap parts around. Just … play.

Now there’s the question of them taking on the child Ezra, going from being two to being three.

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JUNEBUG: If I sound hesitant or something, it’s just…

When I met you – when we met, we were nothing. Just these little gray shadows. And we grew, and filled in, and…but we did all that together. Ezra, sure, he’s just a kid, but he’s already a person. 

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What would that do to our system? Our chemistry?

Many of my friends already have children. Some that don’t are at the point where they are seriously considering having children and feeling like they need to act soon if they’re going to. But I’m like Junebug. In some ways I barely feel like a person because I haven’t had a person to figure out who I am with. And so I still have a teenage heart. If and when I find a person, I want years for us to play together, to specify together, to figure out who we are. 

I feel at home with the travelers of Kentucky Route Zero because I’m looking for something and so are they. The beautiful thing for them is that they’re looking for it together. In Act 1, the Bedquilt Ramblers sing…

You’ve got to walk that lonesome valley
You’ve got to walk it by yourself
There’s no one here that can go there with you
You’ve got to go there by yourself

But the characters of Kentucky Route Zero don’t have to go it alone. They get to witness things together. They get to rely on each other. They get to make each other’s burdens just a little lighter.

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SHANNON: He’s my friend. He needs my help to finish his job.

JUNEBUG: That’s right. He’s our friend too – Johnny and I will help you unload when we get there.

It’s one of the many ways in which Kentucky Route Zero occupies the space between the myth and the reality of America. The idea of America as a nation of wanderers and dreamers, united in the fellowship of seeking a better life for themselves and for each other, is in opposition to the reality of America as a place in which so many of us are trapped in our situations. And yet here they both are. Don’t many of us feel that contradiction in our own lives? I know I do.

The future is uncertain. Terrifyingly so. But so much less scary if you don’t have to face it alone. 

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(JOHNNY) …you need help figuring out your next move, you can always talk to me and Miss Junebug. I just wanted to make sure you know that.

EZRA: I don’t know what I’m going to do.

JOHNNY: Me neither. You’re in good company!

Like these characters, I feel a little lost in America. Still lost and looking after all this time. Looking for a home, a sense of belonging. And I don’t know if I’ll find what–who–I’m looking for in San Francisco or in New York, on subterranean waterways or a highway you can only find by tuning to the frequency of horses.

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It’s really not how I want to be feeling or what I want to be doing anymore, but Kentucky Route Zero makes me feel just a little more okay about it, I guess.

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SHANNON: You want to know where we’re going.

WILL: Oh, no. I don’t really think about that kind of thing. But I see you have a purpose. Well, the Echo carries pilgrims as well as drifters. I think you’ll get to wherever you’re going.

May we all get where we’re going, sooner or later. Or at least find someone to make the long journey with, which may, in fact, be what the journey is really all about.