A Little More Poison in Your System

At Remap, we've never tried to separate politics from video games. It goes all the way back to the earliest days of Waypoint, which itself as born out of Austin and Patrick's previous experiences at places like Giant Bomb, wherein they encountered friction while keeping the two top of mind.

Depending on how you experienced Summer Game Fest last weekend, it either felt like equal parts ominous and impressive or merely a slideshow of trailers that blurred into nonsense. Patrick was playing games while helicopters circled, while Rob probably went on a long dog walk.

But while only one of them was in Los Angeles, both of them have actually lived in the city at different times. It is hardly the city portrayed on TV, even at its worst. To characterize "Los Angeles" with a broad brush reveals you've never spent meaningful time there. That is true of many cities, but especially true of one as sprawling as Los Angeles.

Which brings us to this week's letter series, as Rob and Patrick the strangeness of the past week and what it was like from both perspectives.

Patrick: Finding your way to Sega’s section at Summer Game Fest requires you to briefly head outdoors. It’s a nice and semi-open space that made for an awfully comfortable way to play one of my favorite games at the show, a deliciously slick updated take on Sega’s Shinobi series called Art of Vengeance. The game rules. But in the opening moments, your clan is invaded, and in the background, you can faintly see tanks rolling through. I slowly blinked, and that’s when I realized I could also hear the soft hum of helicopters circling overhead, related to the ongoing anti-ICE protests that kicked off around the same time as Summer Game Fest itself. 

(Just days prior, ICE raids had taken place in a notable LA area called the Fashion District that surrounds Summer Game Fest. Elements of the protest even began blocks from the event.)

I took a deep breath in-between my admiration for Art of Vengeance’s ugly beauty, a kinetic and satisfying mess of grace and violence, and tried to ignore my stomach turning into knots. When I left the demo, forcing me outside for a moment, the helicopters were closer, the buzzing louder. You could always look around and catch someone looking into the sky and trying to shake it off.

Moments later, tucked back inside with endless kiosks running a parade of different games, the aerial white noise disappeared. Here, I could be a gamer. I don’t even mean that as a joke, really. It was a welcomed relief from wondering whether I should just head back to the airport, a notion that was affirmed whenever my phone would buzz with a new alarming push notification.

“Trump is…”

“Trump announced..”

I flicked my notifications off 24 hours, shuffled over to an appointment for a game called Relooted, where a group of thieves decide to reclaim stolen African artifacts from Western museums. The game’s made (largely) in South Africa, and when I ask for an interview, the game’s (white) creative director sighs and informs me the other (black) members of his team that were supposed to be in attendance had their travel visa applications immediately denied.

The game—think Mirror’s Edge meets Ocean’s 11 with a little sci-fi—is looking cool, though.

Little moments like this were everywhere at Summer Game Fest. One team couldn’t have their planned dinner because part of the highway was shut down. Another developer asked to cut our interview time in half because they were afraid to stick around and wanted to head to the airport. Our server for dinner on Monday offered a heartfelt apology for departing halfway through the meal because the overzealous march of the police was reportedly gathering around their home.

We’ve joked in the past at the awkward ways Geoff Keighley tries to dance around politics, industry controversies, and the steady beat of crisis layoffs amidst what’s essentially a big ass marketing event. But what made this year’s Summer Game Fest notable, at least to the people who were attending in person, was how the outside world’s events became utterly inescapable. 

I do not know how much that came through, or was felt, to outsiders. What was it like for you?

Rob: Far more normal, because news is covered as a series of discrete topics rather than events happening in a place where the rest of life is happening alongside the major news story. So “LA protests” are a thing that were all over my news pages, but not electronics or culture pages. I was startled every time I saw someone at SGF post about hearing the discharge of crowd control munitions of passing by a police rally point on their way to a hotel, because it served as such a vivid reminder that the neat division of subject matter that exists in how we consume news media is entirely artificial.

That feeling is probably amplified a bit by the New York and D.C. bias that exists in a lot of mainstream media, where LA is especially poorly understood because it’s so different from eastern cities. Janet talked a bit about this on the podcast, but I think you and I have both experienced it ourselves: we went to live in LA with a set of expectations for the city, and then found it mocked those expectations and generalizations. But in a moment like this, living outside LA, you see the city as it is so often depicted: flattened by a high-angle helicopter shot through clouds of tear gas, portraying acres of concrete covered in riot police and protestors.