Performative Wokeness

I don’t like when the performance of adherence to ideologies related to social justice is used as a mask to disguise and justify discrimination.

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What I’m trying to say is that it’s been my experience that, more often than not, the aggressive performance of social justice is used as a mask to disguise behavior that only benefits entrenched and deeply unjust systems of power and privilege, and I hate it.

I wish I had a better way to refer to this than “performative wokeness,” though, because it makes me sound like someone’s gross Republican grandpa.

Re: Performative Wokeness

God, writing all of this reminds me of this time back in 2017 when I was trying to set up a partnership with a Japanese university for a study abroad program, and the officer from the Global Education Office who I was working with was really confused about whether Japan is a European country.

I was like, Well, that's an interesting question, isn't it? I mean, for the past two hundred years or so, many prominent Japanese politicians and intellectuals have been arguing that Japan is more European than East Asian, and I suppose it's true that a lot of people in Japan feel more of an affinity with Germany and France than they do with, say, China or Korea. But that's extremely complicated, and I don't think I'm in a position to make an argument one way or the other.

It turned out that the guy just didn't know where Japan was on a map and didn't want to google it.

Hades

I sat down with Hades for about an hour and a half yesterday. I was in a good headspace, properly caffeinated, and extremely hyped to play the game…

…and it is tedious as fuck.

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And this is really sad, because I get the feeling that I might have enjoyed Hades if it made an attempt to actually be more accessible and appealing to people who aren’t already hardcore Rougelike fans. This brings me back, in a somewhat roundabout way, to the trickiness surrounding the concept of “representation” in gaming. Like, if you have an interesting and diverse cast of characters, but they’re created by a homogenous dev staff within the context of a genre shaped and dominated by the sort of “git gud” gamers who actively despise diversity, then what’s the point of this representation, and who is it benefitting?

Idk, Hades isn’t bad, necessarily; it’s just somewhat boring to me as someone who’s not a fan of the Rougelike genre. Then again, I didn’t really understand what Breath of the Wild (or Pyre) was trying to do for the first few hours either, so it might be worth having a few more sessions with Hades before I give up on it entirely. If nothing else, you die so frequently that you can pick up the game and put it down again after ten to fifteen minutes, so it might become a nice alternative to Animal Crossing if I can manage to get used to it.

The Last Campfire

The Last Campfire is a puzzle-centric exploration game with no combat or danger that should take most players between three to five hours to finish.

If we can posit that there are three main genres of video games – shooting, it’s about depression, and Nintendo – The Last Campfire is definitely about depression. You play as a childlike little creature called an “ember” (who are like the red-robed creatures in Journey, but baby) that is either dying or already dead, and your goal is to move on to the afterlife. Along the way, you’re tasked with helping other embers that have gotten psychologically stuck and are unable to complete the journey on their own.

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The Last Campfire isn’t as chill and relaxing as it seems to want to be, and most people are probably going to have to play it at least partially with a walkthrough; not because it’s actually difficult, but rather because of what I think it’s fair to call a certain immaturity of game design. Still, it’s an interesting little game, especially during the periods when it’s better about subtly guiding the player forward.

In a lot of ways, The Last Campfire reminds me of a 1992 Super Nintendo game called Soul Blazer, which was a very simple and sweet game about freeing the souls of a cursed world’s inhabitants by entering the dungeonlike spaces of their minds. It’s a neat concept, especially in the visual contrast both games display between the lush natural spaces of the outer world and the barren and overly complicated spaces of the inner worlds of individual minds. I also appreciate that both games acknowledge and respect the fact that not everyone wants to be “saved” by a hero. As one ember in The Last Campfire puts it: Not every problem is a puzzle to be solved.

More than anything, it’s the visual landscape of The Last Campfire that appealed to me, especially in combination with the atmospheric ambient music and the crisp sound design. I think that, if you enjoy this sort of game, the merits of The Last Campfire outweigh its flaws. I also think it has a decent replay value, if only in the sense that it may be more enjoyable to play for the second time once you know where everything is and what you’re supposed to do.

Almost everyone who’s written about The Last Campfire has mentioned encountering a few glitches and frame rate issues. I played the game on the Nintendo Switch Lite and had no problems with that sort of thing at all. The game can easily be divided into short sessions (and its autosave feature is completely unobtrusive and stress-free), so I think it may be better suited to a small-screen portable experience.