Does this make me a murderer? Did I kill Jamal?
I'm pretty sure the guy who shot him did that. Wait, no, you are definitely a stochastic terrorist, and need to be deplatformed and rendered a social outlaw. Sorry, but I don't make the rules.
Anubis is standing in front of me. I found him on the top floor of an adobe in the Desert, where he has a bed, a nightstand, and a shelf full of armor, exactly where his human—Jamal—left him. His head is that of a short-haired black dog with a long, strong nose and glowing white eyes, and his blinding-white robe and gold sash make him look misplaced in the humble clay house.
See, there's actually something I find potentially poingant about this setup: examining someone's player-character--the way they chose to represent themselves in a space that was unreal, but important to them--after their death.
He’s moving slightly, swaying slowly from side to side as if he’s real.
This is a nice touch, too. I feel like you could write a pretty interesting murder-mystery centred around an MMORPG, it'd just need to be... about that instead of a long, racist screed.
Have I killed him? Was it me? It feels so painfully real now to remember there are actual people behind the characters I see in my headset. This Egyptian god of a character that stands before me, who’s an epic warrior here in the SLAY universe, is just a kid in the real world—around my age. Was a kid. I can’t stop shaking. This is my fault. I should’ve been more careful. I should’ve included in the list of game rules that you can’t trade real money for SLAY coins. Maybe then, Jamal wouldn’t have tried to hold his tribe’s SLAY coins for ransom once they pooled them into his account. Not like it would’ve done anything. People do what people do. But . . . I can’t shake this feeling, tight in the pit of my stomach, that I could’ve done something.
I'm pretty sure most live-service games have rules like that (hell, the reason in game currencies are a thing is to circumvent gambling laws) and it's never stopped anyone. Kiera's clearly gotten "doing something" confused with "covering her arse."
I think back to that day I came home from Harper’s house three years ago, when we both played Legacy of Planets—it was the very first time I was called a nigger.
I'm pretty sure anyone who's ever played an online-game for more than an hour has been called a nigger. Honestly, the holy taboo around the word nigger in modern America is increasingly mystifying. Like, I get it, slurs are less hurtful when they come from one of your own. But like, imagine if Jewish people had a genre of music that became the most popular in America, to the point of often eclipsing the mainstream pop-format. Now imagine they used the word "kike" like Smurfs do. It expresses anything from contempt, hate, or bemusement, to affection or straight up admiration. They put in the verses and choruses of all their songs. Now imagine they got really mad when Gentiles sang along.
Nigger is like that: utterly neutered of shock or power in most contexts, but we pretend it isn't because... I don't know, we still need an easy way to establish characters are racist on TV shows? Only the priestly caste may utter the name of God?
After I had finally customized my character, who had to be a dwarf if I wanted to make her skin tone as dark as mine is in real life, I went to the first character I saw on the map
Huh. I thought from the name
Legacy of Planets would be a sci-fi thing like
EVO Online, or maybe
Warframe, but this sounds more like straight fantasy. Is it like
Spelljammer or
Pathfinder, where the lines are deliberately blured? Also, I thought the point of fantasy was
escapism.
This actually reminds me of one of the broader ironies of the push for "diversity" in fiction: it actually makes settings
less diverse. Let me use two contrasting examples from the same franchise. So, in very old, pre-
Crisis on Infinite Earths stories, the only black Kryptonians were not part of the world-state that ran the rest of the planet, instead choosing to dwell in their own "highly advanced" society on Valtho Island. Yes, Krypton had its own Wakanda. So, in pretty every scene set on Krypton, all the extras were white. Also, because there weren't any Valthoians in Argo or Kandor, and presumably the Phantom-Zone, we can probably assume all surviving Kryptonians in the universe are white.
Based.
Anyway, eventually, writers decided that bit of worldbuilding was a bit weird, so you started seeing more non-white Kryptonians. This to me makes sense. Krypton was a big-ass planet that presumably had all sorts of climates, and probably had advanced transportation infrastructure that could lead to demographics getting as mixed-up as they do on Earth. Kansas meanwhile, is a real place. We know what kind of people live there, and in what proprotions. So it's kind of weird in
Superman and Lois that Smallville--meant to be an archetypical small Midwestern town--seems to have the same demographics as say, Los Angelas.
But hey, that's not
too outlandish. Americans of all colours do enjoy freedom of movement, so maybe Smallville just happens to be more diverse than its neighbours.
So, about
Rings of Power. Tolkien's Middle-Earth is meant to be a prehistoric version of Western Europe, without the benefits of easy sea or air-travel. Why does everyone seem to have the same population breakdown as New York? Why do the Hobbits--a clannish, insular people, who've been reproductively isolated from the rest of mankind so long they might not even be
Homo Sapiens anymore--have the mix of racial phenotypes as modern day America? Even if a Southron with a thing for shortstacks married into them at some point, their genetics would've been subsumed within a few generations.
For all we know, there's a well-detailed reason dwarves are the only dark-skinned race in the game. Maybe they're immigrants from a more tropical part of the setting, a literal example of island dwarfism. But no, that kind of worldbuilding isn't allowed, because Keira can't step outside her own head long enough to play a game. Woke types don't actually care about diversity, they just want to project the conditions of coastal American cities in the 21st century across all space, time, and imagination.
I don’t even remember his username—and he took one look at my character and whipped out that word. I never told Harper or Wyatt because I didn’t want to ruin the game for them. In fact, I kept playing that day. I kept playing that week, that month, and the rest of that year. I wanted so badly to love Legacy of Planets, because who doesn’t love the idea of having a virtual miniature them who can go on campaigns and fight dragons and gorgons with no stakes except for virtual character damage and loss of items or coins?
Who doesn't want to explain the appeal of RPGs to the reader like Commander Data trying to understand milkshakes?
Who doesn’t want to have a world at their fingertips—where you can do whatever you want within the limits of the game, where your actions have no consequences, and where you can hide behind a keyboard without being held accountable for what you say and do? Everyone wants that freedom. And whenever I played Legacy, I’d hear all the things that people wish they could say to people in real life.
Even when I played as an elven princess with snow-white skin, I’d encounter parties in the woods with red armbands threatening to lynch the dwarves, the only dark-skinned characters in the game. Behavior like that goes unregulated, and I can’t blame the developers. With a game as big as Legacy, with millions of players worldwide, it’s impossible to police the words exchanged between characters. The most they can do is encourage users to report abusive behavior, but by the time anything happens to the troll, they’ve either vanished or created a new account altogether. And this problem isn’t just in Legacy of Planets—it’s symptomatic of the whole online multiplayer universe.
This is just a long way of saying freedom of expression online is bad, isn't it?
I once tried playing Mummy, a game similar to Legacy except that instead of a Lord of the Rings high-fantasy world with dragons and elves, it takes place in ancient Egypt and you can actually play as a dark-skinned character. Things were going fine for days. I had acquired basic armor, basic weapons, and a few spells. Then, one day, well after I should’ve quit, I tried to intervene in a creepy séance in the woods when the campaign leader invited me to join their ritual, and I said no, and that they should probably disband before they got in trouble. That was back when I was fourteen and thought saying “please” and “thank you” would actually get me anywhere in an MMORPG like Mummy. That asshole—who could very well have been an eight-year-old in real life—and his gang attacked my character and stripped me of every item I had in my inventory. My armor, my shields, my potions, my Diamond Gauntlet that I’d been saving up coins for since day one. Gone.
I don't even get the point of this story. So, Kiera stumbled onto some players doing some silly Bohemian Grove shit, threatened to narc on them for... something, so they beat up her character and took her stuff, as often happens in these sort of games? To me it just sounds like she got merc'd for trying to be the fun police.
That was the last I ever played Legacy or Mummy, and the day I downloaded the Voyage engine and googled how to add my first skybox.
And it pissed her off so much she had to build a game she could never lose. And then she discovered coding was hard so she resorted to literal black magic.
I remember creating Emerald, making her skin my shade, just a few shades shy of passing the paper bag test.
Keira being well-off and light-skinned explains everything, doesn't it?
I designed her clothes and built her a house, wondering how I could share her with everyone I knew who needed a world like this. I created a Twitter account under a fake name and sent links to every Black person I followed, urging them to join me on the forum I called SLAY. I never thought the game would get this big, this time-consuming, or this dangerous. I never thought a boy would lose his life because of me. I stare at Anubis, still swaying slightly in this little clay adobe, looking directly at me. I hold out my hands and look down at them, at Emerald’s hands. Would I still have created her if I had known? A message from Cicada appears in the corner of my screen and I navigate to it.
Yes, leave the details of how this thing developed as vague as possible, because there's no possible way a middle-schooler could've built this in her spare time.
Cicada: This is my fault.
Me: How?
Cicada: If I hadn’t been late coming back from class, I could have noticed Anubis was offline sooner. I could have reached out to him. I could have made sure he was okay. And maybe if I’d named myself Nubia to begin with, we might have become friends and I would’ve known even sooner that something was wrong. . . .
God, now I'm imagining if the
Dead by Daylight devs baggered me everytime I took a break.
All her logic is ridiculous, but I can’t tell her this.
This is part of who Cicada is. She blames herself for just about everything that goes wrong in the game. When we opened up the Swamp region a few months ago, she fell through a hole in the terrain and apologized for unearthing the hole, even though the terrain was my design and the hole was my fault.
And who supplies the thousands of dollars for the servers?
I take one last look at Anubis’s face and slide the SLAY chat panel out from the right side of my screen until it completely covers his face. I click Cicada’s name, and the game shoots me at light speed over the Desert, over the dunes and the caravans and the yurts and cacti and houses and camels and the occasional oasis. I fly over the grasslands, where I spy a herd of hippos splashing through river water, a pack of hyenas close behind them, and I keep flying until the snow begins to swirl around my face and I’m looking at white mountain peaks in the distance.
If you're "flying at lightspeed" how the fuck can you see any of this impossible-for-a-two-girl-team scenery?
Cicada: Can I tell you something?
I type of course but then delete it as those three dots pop up, indicating she’s still typing.
Cicada: I know we never really talk about personal stuff, but Jamal’s death made me realize that life is too short to miss getting to know someone like you. So here goes.
Cicada: I live in Paris.
Oh God, that’s personal. What if I were a serial killer or something? What if news of where she lives got out into the SLAY universe?
For Claire is the only black woman in all of Paris, famously small village.
Cicada: You know I go to school, but you don’t know that I’m in my second year of college at the École normale supérieure, a Paris Sciences et Lettres institution. They take only 200 students every year.
Cicada: I love school, but my parents love it more.
"But I'm an outsider in Paris because an old lady complimented my French."
Wow, she’s a sophomore in college! Why did I think she was my age? I reread her messages as I descend and my feet land in the snow. I begin to walk, my socks silent against the carpet in my room, and the snow crunches with each step I take up to Cicada’s white cube of a house, camouflaged among the snowy hillsides.
I bet the age-gap discourse evaporates instantly when the lovers are gay. But then, one of them is French...
Cicada: I’ve never dated anyone.
Cicada: I’ve never traveled outside Europe.
Cicada: I love Vegemite.
Cicada: I’m a Cancer.
I still want to know if Aboriginals are allowed to play
SLAY. Also, good to know Keira's inevitable love interest is virginal.
Cicada: I’ve never played Candy Crush, and I think I was the only person in the world to hate “Gangnam Style” and “Nyan Cat.” I’m not on social media, and I only recognize a handful of memes. In fact, I’m just generally bad at the Internet.
Wow, someone who doesn't like "Gangnam Style!" Also, someone who puts quotation marks around "Nyan Cat." I'm relatively anal about using proper formatting for work-titles in posts, but I don't think I've ever seen that before. Especially in what's meant to be an in-universe IM message.
I’m smiling now as I knock on her virtual door. It swings open and there she is, still wearing her white gown. She did a fantastic job creating a white gown that somehow doesn’t look like a wedding dress. The fluffy black fur-lined cloak helps. It looks editorial, very high fashion. Very Parisian. Her text appears above her head now.
"Editorial"? So, she looks like it's her job to divorce Spider-Man and keep Jon Kent a boring bisexual college kid?
“It’s rude to come over unexpected,” she says with a grin, “but I’ve been expecting you.”
So not only does this amatuer game have realistic physics for clothing, it also has has real-time mo-cap for facial expressions? It's like Morris watched that episode of
American Dad! where they play a MMORPG, and didn't realise the anime-looking parts that took place in the game were using artistic license. No, your video game avatar won't emote and move in synch with you, even if you're playing VR.
The video-game aspect of this story is so shallow. Morris is basically writing this scene like Kiera and Claire have met as themselves in another dimension, when there's so many ways you could use the medium for drama and general storytelling. The disconnect between what's being said and the limited facial expressions, the lack of body-language, that kind of thing.
“It’s rude to come over unexpected,” she says with a grin, “but I’ve been expecting you.”
She turns and welcomes me into her house. I’ve only been here a few times. In her living room, she’s arranged just about every yellow item that exists in the game. Yellow sofa, yellow chairs, yellow rug, creamy yellow carpet, yellow drapes, yellow dishes, yellow vases and sunflowers—everything in the room is some variation of yellow.
Ironically, high-yellow people are not allowed to play
SLAY.
Cicada: So you’re not mad at me?
Me: For what?
Cicada: The whole Candy Crush thing. You’re not going to take away my mod rights for being unqualified to run a video game, are you?
Me: If I hired you knowing only your name and credentials, how am I going to fire you for never having played Candy Crush? If I didn’t bother to ask, that’s on me. But had I known . . .
Because if hardcore gamers love one thing, it's freemium mobile games.
I take a look around the living room just as a loud ding! rings out from the kitchen. She seems to float to the oven, from which she pulls out a huge loaf of bread—bigger than the oven, actually. Why did we make it that big? It’s comically huge. We did make it look good, though. I can see the steam rising from it, and I take a big deep breath, wishing I could smell it. My room smells instead like lavender and shea butter.
Think she got the lavender from Granny Redbird? Also, I guess
SLAY is also
The Sims. Next chapter I assume we discover it's also a jumpscare simulator.
Cicada: It’s on the news here in Paris, too.
Yeah, I totally see the Parisian press giving a shit about a black kid in America shooting another black kid over stupid shit. Because that's so rare.
She holds out a piece of bread to me and I take it and eat and watch Emerald’s energy meter tick up and up, even though Cicada’s message exhausts the real me.
At this point I'm stunned she can't taste the bread.
Me: I haven’t turned on the news since. I don’t know if I can.
Cicada: Jamal Rice was only sixteen. God, I’ve been crying all afternoon. Why can’t I stop crying?!
Only sixteen. A year younger than me.
Cicada: Can I tell you something that might ACTUALLY get me fired?
Let me go first: the Racnoss Queen is fucking great.
I hear a doorbell ring. As Emerald, I turn around to look at Cicada’s yellow door, which is closed, and then I remember she doesn’t have a doorbell. I rip off my headset, gloves, and socks and hear the faint creak of our front door, and my mom’s voice following shortly after with, “Hey, Harper, how’re you doing, baby? It’s good to see you.”
Shit!
I glance at my clock: 8:05 p.m. I forgot to tell Harper not to come over tonight to study. I need time to process this—all of it—Jamal, the news, what to do with his character, Anubis, all these messages in my inbox. Careless, so careless of me! I yank the headset back onto my head, my thumb accidentally catching and ripping out a few hairs right at my temple. I wince and crank out the message:
Me: I’m SO sorry g2g a friend came over uninvited. B back latr.
Well, technically she's just here for the meeting you arranged.
Eyes still teary, I rip off the headset again and throw it, the gloves, and the socks back into my bottom drawer and run to my door just as it swings open and Harper’s face appears before me. At first she looks happy to see me, and then she looks confused.
“What the hell happened to you?” she asks, stepping past me into my room and making herself comfortable on the sofa under my elevated bunk bed.
“Nothing, why?” I ask, focusing on catching my breath.
She’s wearing a smug grin. “You look like you just got some some-some with Malcolm, except I don’t see Malcolm anywhere.”
Does sex with Malcolm usually leave Kiera looking like she's in the grip of absolute despair?
I roll my eyes at her use of “some-some,” whatever that is. I think she meant some’m-some’m, but I let it go. I’m not in the mood to correct her pronunciation any more than Harper’s ever in the mood for correction. She’s on her phone now, her thumb scrolling, meaning she’s not really looking for an explanation into why I’m so sweaty. I can throw some BS at her and change the subject.
Remember when Kiera basically called her mum a coconut for correcting
her speaking?
“I was practicing my dancing,” I say. A story she’ll buy. “You know I still can’t do the Running Man?”
It may sound unbelievable, but it’s the truth. I really can’t dance. Mom can, and Steph can, but while Black Jesus was kissing the foreheads of other Black babies and bestowing upon them the gift of happy feet, he somehow missed me and my dad.
Jesus Christ! I'm sorry but--wow. That's some old white grandma levels of racism. It's like if a minstrel-show character escaped the stage and wrote a YA book.
“No, but seriously,” Harper says. “If Malcolm is here, let me know. I won’t care, but things might get weird if Wyatt comes in here.”
“Wait, is Wyatt here?”
She looks up at me and shrugs one shoulder. “Of course he’s here. He said he’d be here. He’s out in the hall, waiting for permission to enter the girls-only zone. I told him to be polite and ask first—”
As if on cue, a knock sounds at my bedroom door, and before I can protest, Harper replies, “Permission granted!” I’m not prepared for his interview questions. I’m not prepared for him.
Kiera, be real. If Wyatt didn't periodically appear so you could rail against him, you'd evaporate.
“Yes, come in.” I shoot Harper a look for bringing him into my house. The door swings open, and I’ve never been so relieved to see my little sister in my life, still wearing her shoes and backpack. She smiles at me and then notices Harper.
Again, why are these people "friends."
“We were talking about that kid, Jamal, who was killed over a video game,” says Steph. “Did you hear about that?”
I look up at them, now trying not to look too interested. My hands are getting clammy as I pull my shirtsleeves over my palms.
“Yeah, it was on the news today.”
Harper’s eyes get huge. “Isn’t it so sad?” she asks. “I can’t believe how selfish humans are sometimes. We as a species should be past this.”
Why is it that whenever something like this appears on the news, people want to zoom out to the species level? People who want to get to the root of a problem, the source of the cancer—don’t they zoom farther in?
So, rather than the universial nature of human greed, vanity, and evil, Kiera wants us to focus on the fact the kids were both black.
Okay.
nother knock echoes from my door, and my parents don’t knock, leaving the only person left in the house. Again, Harper shouts, “Permission granted!” But this time when the door opens, an impish face with a huge, mischievous smile appears, and I take a long, deep breath.
“Hey, ladies,” he says, shutting the door a little too hard and glancing at me apologetically. “Hey, Kiers.”
He’s holding a notebook, already prepared to begin the interview. On one hand, I’m glad to be done talking about the game, but on the other hand, I’m dreading having to answer questions about whether white people are allowed to wear dreadlocks, as if there aren’t thousands of Black professors who teach the nuances of this stuff every day. I wonder what he thinks his article will be contributing to the conversation.
The fuck you need a professer to tell you how to do your hair? Here's an idea, if you don't want to talk about this shit, don't agree to an interview about it, and don't make other people's grooming your problem!
“Shoot, I forgot my pen,” he says, feeling around in his pockets.
I’m relieved but only for a moment, right up until Steph says, “We were just talking about the SLAY murder.”
My chest tightens. That’s what they’ve nicknamed it? The SLAY murder? That would make Jamal the SLAY victim—the victim of my creation. To think that if it weren’t for me, Jamal would be alive—it washes over me like a wave, the weight of it sinking into my chest. Jamal had a family, he had friends, and all those people on TV are now missing a piece of their lives, their futures, because of what I did.
If it's any comfort, if he was stupid enough to get into a life-or-death conflict over video-game coins, it probably would've been something else.
I suddenly feel nauseated, and I want to leave the room and lock myself in the bathroom until they leave. Cicada would cry if she could hear this.
“Oh, the kid who was shot over that racist game?” asks Wyatt.
Did he just call SLAY racist?
At the beginning of time, God cursed bad YA characters so that their strawmen would be their most legit characters.
I turn and catch him rummaging around in my desk with his arm in my bottom drawer, and panic grips me. I forgot to lock it!
“No, no, what are you doing?” I demand, jumping up and running at him. He yanks his fingers out of the way of the drawer just as I slam it shut and pull the key from my pocket to lock it. “Do you keep pens in your bottom drawer? They’re in the pencil cup on the desk!”
My hands are trembling as I turn the key and hear the click, and then I glare up at him the hardest I’ve ever glared at him.
“Do you keep your tampons in there or something?” he says with a smirk.
My chest pounds, and I feel that sickening rage boil up inside me.
At this point I'm wondering if Wyatt isn't a tulpa Kiera conjured to justify all her racism towards whites, and the fact he keeps making good points means even she knows she's full of shit.
Behind me, Steph clears her throat and changes the subject with what might have been my follow-up question, had I not had the first layer of my biggest secret almost exposed to the world.
“You said the game is racist?” she asks. “How?”
Because you literally don't let anyone who's not black play. Easy.
The room is silent, and I turn around to observe the answers from the two kids in the room who didn’t think they’d be getting interviewed today. Harper goes first.
I love how Keira doesn't realise they've been handed the easiest question in the world.
“I mean, they said on the news that you have to have a passcode to get in, and only Black people have the passcode, and only Black people are given passcodes. Sure sounds like the game excludes people based on race. That’s the definition of racist.”
“How is it even legal?” asks Wyatt. “If I made a video game and said it’s only for white people, I’d be publicly ostracized, expelled, and probably fired from my job.”
Yes, that's exactly what would happen. Hell, it'd probably happen if he suggested a character who was white in the source material should be played by a white person, even if the "source material" is
real life.
Harper shrugs. “First of all, what job? Second, it isn’t legal. There are laws against that kind of discrimination. Right, Steph?”
Steph sits there with the smuggest grin and says, “It’s not racist.”
Morris really has a habit for writing truly punchable characters. Sadly, they're the heroes.
Harper and Wyatt look at each other in surprise, but I just smile. I’ve seen that smile of hers before—the one that always appears right before she drops knowledge on somebody. Her debate face. She stands up and makes her way to the middle of the room, and I get ready to watch the show.
Whenever someone says they're about to "drop knowledge on you" prepare to get a firehose of ignorance blasted in your face.
“I want you to imagine for a minute,” she begins. “I know it’s going to be hard for both of you, but just imagine—that literally nothing was made for you.
Yes, literally nothing. Please don't look at the front-page of Netflix, or the YA section of your local library, or the many, many black-led shows and movies that have come out over the decades.
Your parents were denied a house because of their skin color
"Which is why me and Keira live in a slum, and not one of the nicest neighbourhoods in town."
your grandparents were sprayed with fire hoses and ripped apart by dogs in the streets
It'd be really funny if Harper or Wyatt were descended from Holocaust survivors.
your great-grandparents were housemaids and mammies and barely paid entertainers
You ever notice it's not considered as nearly as big a deal when white people have ancestors who were poor or blue-collar?
and your great-great-grandparents were slaves.
So, not just people you've never know, but people your
grandparents probably never, ever met. I can see why this book isn't set in the future, the grievences would only be further and further in the past. This whole paragraph is just Stephanie listing things that happened to other people, in a desperate attempt to erase the fact that her and Keira's life is probably more like Harper's than any poor black kid.
Every movie in your life is majority Black, all the characters in your favorite books have been cast darker in the movie adaptation for no reason
This might've been a valid complaint from a black teen in 2008. One of the frustrating things about woke-types is that they refuse to acknowledge any of their cultural gains. Yeah,
The Sandman show may have turned a ton of major characters black, but do you remember when some people were shitty about Rue being played by a black girl in the first
Hunger Games?
and every mistake you make is because of your skin color and because of “your background” and because of the music you listen to.
Yeah, people like me can't know what's like to have the media we like be hyper-scrutinised for reasons of political correctness.
You are the only white kids at a school of five hundred Blacks, and every Black person at that school asks you to weigh in on what it’s like to be white, or what white people think about this or that. It’s not fun.”
So you wouldn't care if Harper just went and got dreads without asking you, eh, Steph?
Holy shit, I’ve never seen Steph talk to Harper and Wyatt like this before, but her voice is impressively calm as she says all this, and apparently she’s not done!
Because this section of the book is basically a handbook to make any kid reading this the most insufferable person you know.
I’ve lived my entire life like this. Kiera has lived her entire life like this.
This is how you talk when you grew up picking cocco beans for Nestlé, not had to wait a while for them to make
Black Panther.
If Black gamers want their own space online away from the eyes of the majority, let them have it. Y’all have Mummy and Legacy of Planets. Do you need to have everything?”
That's a complete false equivelancy. Yeah, in a majority-white country, most art is produced by white people, with mostly white characters. But they don't
bar black people from watching or playing it! This would be like if the MCU posted guards outside every one of their films until
Black Panther. Also, notice when most people from minority-groups make stuff, they don't feel the need to keep others from enjoying it, because most people who aren't neurotic ghouls actually
like sharing their culture with people!
I’m smiling so big and my heart is so full. Steph has never sounded more grown-up than she does right now, standing in the middle of my room in jeans and a high-school sorority T-shirt.
"You can't play with my toys!"
Harper clears her throat and says, “It’s not about needing their own space, Steph.”
I don’t like the way she says the word “their,”
Why? You clearly see yourself as a breed apart.
but I stay silent because I want to hear how she could possibly refute the magic that my sister just spoke.
Do you think Morris wrote this in a spacesuit full of her own flatulence?
“It’s about the principle of exclusion,” she continues. “Haven’t we all been working toward desegregation for decades now? Haven’t we already determined that separate is not equal?”
“Forget all that,” says Wyatt. His face is pink, and his eyes are wild. “It’s about fairness. This is a free country. We can’t exclude them, and they can’t exclude us. The playing field stays level.”
I fold my arms and take a deep breath to calm my nerves. I’m shaking as I speak. “Video games do exclude us,” I say, finally. I can’t take being silent anymore. “Weren’t you listening? Haven’t you been paying attention? Think about the character selection in Legacy. The only way to play as a character with dark skin is to be a dwarf—an ugly, hog-nosed troll with big floppy ears and an underbite. That doesn’t count.”
I honestly doubt a modern studio would be stupid (or ballsy) enough to make an entire player-race the lovechild of Sambo and Le Happy Merchant. Even if they did, how does that erase the many games that
do let you customise your skin colour however you want. Actually, I wonder what Steph and Keira would make of the second
South Park game, where you can have dark skin, but it's also the difficulty slider.
“Oh, this is about skin color now, Kiers?” he hisses. “You’re going to stir up all this hate because you can’t play as a character with dark skin? Is that it?”
Also, again, false equivelence. Keira is complaining about not being able to play a black or brown character in a video game, Wyatt's complaining about not being able to play a game
at all. It's like these characters got hypocrisy lessons from
Dreadnought.
“No, Wyatt, that’s not it,” I snap. The rage is bubbling up in me like hot oil and if I don’t let off some steam, I’m bound to burn everyone in the room. “Most fantasy games are also Eurocentric. Castles, dragons, princesses, elves, Greek and Roman gods—all of that is your history—”
As opposed to
SLAY, which totally doesn't centre American experiences at all, or treat the many cultures of Africa as interchangeable aesthetic shit.
“Whatever,” he says. “That stuff is universal. Everyone knows European fairy tales, and game developers make what people know and want more of. Wasn’t Mummy Black enough? It’s set in Egypt, for God’s sake—the whole point was to defeat the gods and escape the pyramids with the Sun Ruby, remember?”
Obviously at this point Morris is just having Wyatt set-up easy pins for the girls to bowl, but I do find it funny everyone in this conversation just takes it as a given that was Egypt a "black country".
Our mistake for asking that Black people—12 percent of the American population—get a little more than that, maybe something about what it’s like to be Black in America? Specifically, what it’s like to be Black in America if you’re not dealing drugs, soliciting sex workers, or breaking out of prison?
Insert cringey
Forspoken clip here. Also, people do make that sort of thing, but people like you call it "respectability politics" because you need poor black people to act out your lumpenprole fantasies.
Wyatt keeps talking as if he hasn’t heard a word of what Steph and I just said.
“Whatever. If the developers really wanted to show us what it’s like to be Black in America, they wouldn’t have hung a big sign on the log-in screen that says ‘No whites allowed,’ ”
Also, they probably wouldn't make a high fantasy
Yu-Gi-Oh rip-off.
he grumbles. “And it’s a video game, not Area 51. It’s only a matter of time before someone hacks in, tracks down the developers, and sues the shit out of them.”
The room goes dead silent. Wyatt is a bit redder in the face than he was when he walked in here. Harper is staring uneasily at her brother, and Steph is looking at me like, Do you see this mess?
Okay, I somehow missed that Wyatt and Harper are brother and sister. This does make Keira associating with him make more sense, but in my experience, teenage girls aren't super fond of their younger brothers tagging along with their friends all the time.
I must be giving her the same look, because she clasps her hands together and asks, “Who wants a snack? Let’s all go to the kitchen. Kiera, want to meet us there in a few?”
I nod as she swings open the door and ushers Harper and Wyatt out of my space just before I hear Wyatt’s voice fade down the hallway, saying, “But seriously, when Dad comes home, I’m going to ask him about talking to Duncan.”
I don’t have the energy to even care who Duncan is—probably one of their dad’s rich coworkers.
Your mother's a dentist, shut up.
But all I can think about is Jamal. What do I do? A boy is dead because of me. His friend has announced on national news that our beloved world, the SLAY universe, exists.
That's such a weird, stiff sentence. "The SLAY Universe." Does SLAY even have a coherent setting? It's a magical world built out of reference to African-American pop-culture with the odd sarong or lip-disc thrown in.
My game has been called racist. I, by extension, have been called racist.
White kids are told racism is basically baked into their character, and if they're upset or disagree with that assesement, they're fragile. Keira makes a giant segregation game, gets called racist, and she acts like she's been stabbed in the arsehole.
My sister is the only one who has my back, but she doesn’t even know I’m the developer. I have a friend in Paris I know nothing about, who is probably sick and tired of me being unreliable. Spelman is already disappointing me, and I don’t know why, and if I don’t go, I’ll be disappointing my sister and my boyfriend, the two most important people in my life.
You have a choice between two well-regarded colleges, and money doesn't seem to enter into the equation. My heart bleeds.
I open my phone, take to Google, and search his name—Jamal Rice—which brings up dozens of photos of the same Black boy with narrow eyes and a button nose. Most of them are the same grainy photo of him standing on one side of a Ping-Pong table in front of a faded yellow wall with yellow lighting that makes it look like he might be at a gym or a Boys & Girls Club. He’s staring piercingly at the camera with a Ping-Pong paddle in one hand, making a peace sign with the other. I have to look away for fear of crying, but I can almost feel his eyes still on me. Without me, he would’ve had a chance to grow up.
Not that I think Keira wouldn't be deeply upset by all this, but this doesn't read like a teenager talking about a peer, it reads like an adult woman (or as adult as anyone who wrote this can be) talking about a much younger person.
I slip my phone into my back pocket, lock my door, unlock my bottom drawer, don my VR gear, and dive into the game. My inbox has burgeoned from six hundred messages to over sixty thousand, and I already know it’s going to be full of stress. The subject lines confirm my suspicions.
ANUBIS IS DEAD??
WHERE’S ANUBIS????
WAS THE BOY ANUBIS?
Anubis = Jamal?? Domino = Jeremiah??
Vigil for Anubis @ Desert arena #BlackLivesMatter
#Justice4Anubis
#Justice4Jamal
Orisha Tribe Forever
Jamal Rice—Never forget
Ban Domino!
To be fair, Domino's luck powers do make it very unfair.
My eyes are getting cloudy with tears again and I close out of my inbox, but not before one message catches my eye. I reopen the inbox and find it again. The subject is simple and soothing, like medicine.
Wanna battle?
I click on it. It’s from a player named Q.Diamond. I can’t reply yes fast enough. I need a break. I need to pretend for a few hours that everything is back to normal, that Jamal is still alive, that Harper and Wyatt won’t be back at my door soon asking why I haven’t joined them for snacks
Q.Diamond is totally a fifth-collumnist, right?
I decide to send a follow-up message to Q.Diamond.
Me: I’ll battle you on one condition. Promise not to ask questions. Especially about Anubis. I need a break for a while.
Q.Diamond: You need a vacation. I get it. I won’t ask questions, but I will say this isn’t your fault and I know you’ll get us through this. You’ve gotten us through a lot.
Either that or we're getting a love-quadrangle.
It melts me. The you’ve gotten us through a lot part. And the us part. Who is us exactly? I know they’re probably talking about everyone who SLAYs. But I hope they don’t also mean us as in, the Black community. My throat closes at the thought. I’m just a game developer. I’m no pioneer. I’m certainly not qualified to lead the global crusade of Black people to victory.
...No one was saying you were, Keira. Also, what would this "global crusade" entail? Are we getting Total White-Death in this book afterall?
Me: Where to?
Q.Diamond: You pick.
Me: No preference. I know them all.
Q.Diamond: Swamp region. It’s my home.
Me: Done.
I scroll through the list of all six regions, ranked by popularity—Tundra, Desert, Savanna, Forest, Rain Forest, and finally, the Swamp. My heart begins to pound as I click on it, and the three Swamp arenas appear in a drop-down menu—Beyoncé Bayou, Bluegrass Basin, and Drinking Gourd. I select Beyoncé Bayou, and the trees spring up in the murky water around me. An alligator swims across the screen behind Q.Diamond, but it’s just a shell—not dangerous if you fall into the water during a match. Mosquitoes buzz in my ear. Cicada has made them sound a little too real, but I guess nothing can really be too real in a VR game. I have to remember to compliment her when she’s online later.
"Beyoncé Bayou." Truly,
SLAY is a triumph of worldbuilding.
The square dueling ring rises up from the water under me, and then Q.Diamond appears. Their face is covered up with a jet-black mask. They have two long, dark elf ears and bright red deer antlers, and their hair is long, pin-straight, and paper-white. Their eyes are sky blue, they have the muzzle of a dog, their arms are purple tentacles, and they stand upright, balancing on a hot-pink-and-green mermaid tail.
This is why all the based furries ban miscengeration. And surely "dark elf" is a distinction without a meaning in this game.
They’re truly a sight. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a character so . . . unique. Not what I would’ve chosen, but it’s somehow a relief to see the really out-there characters show what they can do and let their imaginations run hog wild.
Unless you want to be white. That's just a step too far. Actually, I wonder if you can be a black albino in
SLAY. I bet that's how all the secret whiteys identify each other.
Although I can’t imagine why a character this magnificent would want to live in the Swamp region. Most characters who live in the Swamp are beginners, because it’s an easy place to start the game. Anyone can find fish bones and turn them into arrowheads. It’s a great way for novices to make fast money. Most of the more advanced characters who make their homes here weave baskets from vines and turn the sturdy wood from these trees into canoes to sell to those who live near water in other regions. They almost always wear browns and greens to blend in with their surroundings, as many aren’t in the game to duel, but to make a virtual life for themselves, like you can do in Legacy of Planets. But I don’t know what Q.Diamond is doing living in the Swamp. They have absolutely no camouflage.
So, are there enemies in
SLAY? Are they AI opponents you dual with your cards, or is there an entirely seperate combat system for random encounters?
They reach up and remove the black mask, and I realize their face is painted in vertical rainbow stripes, a design I released for Pride Month last year. It didn’t cause as much of an uproar as I suspected it might, which was a pleasant surprise. I’m happy it made Q.Diamond happy. I’m grateful for little reminders like this, reminders that this game wasn’t a mistake.
Heh, is Keira trying to dance around how many black people are pretty homophobic? Also, watch as she's cancelled for not making it a Progress flag.
The deck of golden cards shuffles itself in the air between us before distributing our six cards, and then the timer begins counting down from ten seconds. I click and drag my cards into pairs at random without really looking at them, since I know all the cards and I want Q. to have a fair shot. I reach up and stretch my arms high above my head and yawn.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, and since Q. is still sorting their cards, I slip the goggles up onto my forehead, take out my phone, and unlock it. I expect it to be a text from Steph asking if I’m okay, but it’s from Malcolm. My throat closes as I read it.
Malcolm: I better not find out you play that shit.
By mediating on the power of melanin, Malcolm has unlocked the psychic powers inherent in all black folks. I know Malcolm would probably hate me if we met, but I have a hard time returning the sentiment when he hates
SLAY as much as I do.
Malcolm is a lot of things, moody being the most annoying, but he’s never aimed his raw anger directly at me before, and my blood is jumping. I reread his text. I better not find out you play that shit . . . or what? I think of Atlanta. I think of our life together at Spelman and Morehouse and all the nights we’ve spent in each other’s arms, dreaming of a future in which we can live surrounded by people who won’t treat us differently because of how we look, and I wonder if Malcolm would give all that up if he found out I play video games.
I wonder if the author thinks there's no white people in Atlanta.
All our plans, gone? Just like that? I glance at my door as if I half expect him to be standing right there. It suddenly feels colder in my room, and I toss my phone on the soft carpet and try to focus on the match.
But I can’t stop imagining what Malcolm would say if he knew I SLAY—or what he might do if he finds out I created this.
He'd definitely laugh at you for saying "I SLAY" once he realises you're not hunting vampires like a sensible person.
