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[suhfee]

Afghan Dungeons and Dragons

the following was written as part of an Afghan-American scholarship application. some parts were cut and word count had to be kept low.

I pursued a Game Design minor during my time at NYU. My focus was on programming for games you’d play on your video-game consoles, but the program made students learn their fundamentals with analogue gaming. Board, card, and tabletop role-playing games took up most of my time there. I scoffed at the idea; why would I, a programmer, want to play around with little cards and folding paper boards?

I was proven wrong fast. The creativity flowing in each class led to some of the most fun and novel social experiences I’ve ever had. My definition of ‘play’ was changed, and I had a better outlook on games development as a whole. I managed to use my engineering background to help laser-cut game boards for students. I managed to make some easy-to-use prototypes on digital board game software. My skill set didn’t set me apart from my peers; it made me fit in even better.

What my background didn’t prepare me for was a lab where my professor Dungeon-Mastered a session of Dungeons & Dragons for some classmates and myself. DnD is a framework for live tabletop roleplay. Players create characters and begin acting out their characters in real time, with the Dungeon Master playing the role of everyone else, carving out a story for the party. You don’t play as yourself; you play Farquad the Orc, Big-Hat Logan the Warlock, little Kendra, spry Tiefling thief, or whatever your imagination leads you to.

The session itself was a disaster. We managed to completely derail the plot the professor had made for us; instead of fighting the evil vampire at the top of the castle, we got into a philosophical debate with his skeleton henchman over the nature of violence and why we even had to fight in the first place. The professor wasn’t mad. If anything he was proud. We laughed and talked the night away, and left with a good grade and an even better idea of what games really could be.

Ever since, I’ve found myself drawn to more nonviolent  games. RPGs are still my favorite, but adventures, mysteries, and puzzle games take the lionshare of my time now. I grew up in the Call of Duty generation. My antagonists were from vaguely Middle-Eastern countries, although the Afghan architecture in the maps players were shooting each other in was undeniable. The battle-cries in Farsi did not help. I was a naive child who was not aware of the harm these games were doing to my people. The extremist stereotypes, the violent western-image of the Afghan, both flew over my head. As an aspiring game developer, I hope to work on games that show our people in a truer light. If I could have a night of gaming where Orcs, Wizards, and Tieflings could avoid fighting in pursuit of a greater, nonviolent good, why can’t Afghans have the same? What would a game that showed our own character, our struggles, our dreams, look like? I don’t know yet, but I’m sure it looks more like Dungeons and Dragons than Medal of Honor or Call of Duty.

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Disco Elysium's Piecemeal Past

the following is a short piece about the history of the main character in disco elysium. everything mentioned about him can be found playing the game, but they're still technically spoilers. nothing about the main plot is mentioned. i recommend playing the game first.

An amnesiac drug-and-alcohol addicted police officer wakes up in a trashed hotel room. He has no discernable past other than the disco clothing strewn about the room neighboring empty bottles of cheap wine and a destroyed cassette player. The bathroom sink is broken, the tub full of beer cans, and the mirror reflects a terrifying visage of who he really was. With enough composure, dictated by an abstract number on the stat screen, you can try to force the cop’s ugly mug into something less terrifyingly flirty. It becomes a stoic, sad face, more fitting of the man who owns it.

The set-up fits the standard amnesiac trope where you, the player, are left to fill in the blanks yourself and make the character your own. Disco Elysium has been lauded for its impressive breadth and depth in its choices. The marketing carries this in stride, proudly asking “What kind of cop are you?” in every piece of its promotional material.

And, to an extent, this is true. You can be a fascist cop, a sorry cop, a communism-obsessed cop, the apoco-cop, or a ‘regular’ cop. There are more copotypes I haven’t mentioned, and an even wider variety of character traits that fill in even more gaps as to who you were. Do you sober up? Do you become obsessed with finger-guns at inappropriate times? This wide range of choice is what drew me in at first. A mutable character, who has the largest variety of dialogue interaction opportunities that I’ve ever seen, made this game my Holy Grail, so to speak. It was what I had always wanted from a game and I ate it up.

I’m on my third playthrough of the game right now and I’m only finally realizing that all of that isn’t really true. The beautiful disaster that is the main character of Disco Elysium, Harry Du Bois, has a backstory. He is a person that has lived an entire life, and every statistic that chimes in through dialogue claws you back towards his past at every possible moment. The smell of apricots on the wind, the beauty in a deity, and the quiet loneliness of a restless-sleep all remind the man of his past failures, regrets, and losses. It’s only really one loss that spiraled into a cacophony of pain and sorrow for him; his wife left him. His impulsiveness and brash appearance probably pushed her away. Or maybe it was his obsession with communism? What about his disgusting taste in facial hair, or lack thereof? Could’ve also been his obsession with Revacholian Nationalism too. That stuff isn’t well liked at all, mostly at least.

There is the beauty of Disco Elysium. The power of head-cannon is what made the game so compelling for me. It made sense that his wife left him knowing how his simplistic political ideology oozes out of his mouth at every opportunity. “Eat the rich! Turn everyone who owns money into a puree!” or something along those lines. The erratic running detective in Martinaise is a beautiful walking monument to his past, piecing things together as they come. How those pieces fit, what colors fill the gaps, and what edges stay unlinked are all for the player to decide. The mural that is Harry’s past is everyone’s to make. Even the unofficial fan-wiki of the game only mentions the empirical facts about him; age, history in the force, and his wife leaving him. Nothing else is mentioned on who he really was, because that’s for you to figure out.

I’ve spent the last week in a spiral of sleepy procrastination pale-aged like a nice Revacholian wine. The sounds of the Whirling have featured many times as the soundtrack to my daily goings on. Wandering thoughts lead me back to the detective case in my sleep, just as they do to Harry when he tries, and fails, to rest his head. I may not be in a depressive drug binge but it’s definitely a downward turn. I like to think I’ll be on the up soon.

The hardest thing about Disco Elysium isn’t the dice rolls or the dense story or the abstract concepts like the pale or infra-materialism. It’s talking about it. Whenever I speak with someone about the game I go on and on about the interesting and novel systems and breadth of choice. I focus on the tangible facts about the game, when really the game doesn't seem all too interested in the facts at all. You could go the entire game without learning anything substantial about the world, because that version of Harry doesn’t care for it. Harry is where the discussion-wall begins for me. How could I even start to get across what my character thinks and why he thinks like that? The reasons behind the choices are entirely my own, and I wouldn’t want anyone else’s experiences to be dulled by my Harry’s.

And that’s why I love this game. Harry’s story is relatable to a point; who hasn’t been heartbroken? The catastrophe that has led him to the first day of Disco Elysium is written as you go along, with each day adding more steps leading to the past. That part is not relatable. It is Harry’s truth imprinted on a save file, ever changing with each piece of dialogue. No one can relate to that. We know what we’ve done and we’re stuck with it. Harry doesn’t. He’s lucky. He can live with his past and build his own reality to explain why he’s there. And to an extent, it will always be true. If only we were so lucky.

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created as my final project for representation in games at nyu tisch. i played through the campaign of call of duty: modern warfare (2019) and critiqued its representation of the middle east live on twitch, taking questions from viewers along the way.

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a piece i wrote for the Queer Futures course at NYU Tandon discussing what queer representation is and what it should be

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an academic piece i wrote discussing lesser-known queer characters and experiences in games, alongside what queer representation was in the past and will be moving forward

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animal crossing in a pandemic

the following is a critique of animal crossing: new horizon’s social features and how people found community with them during the covid pandemic. thank you to rami ismail for the opportunity to interview him!

My friends and I spent our days outside during school breaks laying in the grass reading, painting, talking, or posing for my camera. We would wander around town to find things to do with no particular goal in mind. Last Spring, when the Coronavirus lockdown was put in place, we couldn’t see each other at all. We couldn’t risk it. When Animal Crossing: New Horizons came out, we all started playing and quickly started visiting each other’s islands. What we couldn’t get through Zoom hangouts we found in Animal Crossing. We would meander throughout the islands, catching bugs and talking to villagers. The museum on the island, a gorgeous display of bugs and fish, would soon be the new backdrop for our photos. We’d pose together, emote, and do our best to be cute for the screenshot. It felt comfortable. It felt ordinary during such an extraordinary time.

Most of my friends weren’t into gaming at the time. They were still able to pour hours into the game, creating a small island paradise for themselves and the people they cared about. Whenever we were able to get together, our avatars would run around with huge smiles on their faces, constantly emoting or trying to hit someone with a bug net. Even without voice chat, we’d be able to communicate with each other. Whenever I saw a set of furniture I was jealous of, my avatar would react shocked. One friend in particular would always creep up in the back of photos with a sly grin on their face. It was the closest we could get to being together. It was our only form of community.

My experience with the game isn’t solitary. Any online space during the first month of the game’s release was flooded with people sharing their island’s codes, creative build ideas, and aesthetically pleasing screenshots. For a while, it felt like everyone was part of a collective experience without ever seeing each other in person while apart in our homes. Rami Ismail, an independent game developer, was one of the people who shared their island online. The release’s time-frame coincided with the month of Ramadan, and he wanted to invite people to his island for iftar, or the nightly dinner when Muslims break their fast. In an interview I had with him, he called Ramadan “a full month of Christmas,” where he’d spend days with friends and family in the communal act of fasting. During a pandemic, that isn’t possible. His island quickly gained traction and soon he had a waitlist for people to join. Even with a few trolls trying to ruin the experience and the game’s unfriendly online architecture, he recalled it as the only way for him to find community during this past Ramadan. Others were inspired by his idea, and soon, Muslim communities all over the world were hosting nightly iftars. Rami considered this an expression of culture. Various international communities inspired each other and brought something to the table to create a communal experience. 

What Animal Crossing offers is a playground where social interactions can blossom. While the systems and mechanics of the game may not be the most intricate or complex, the simplicity of the tools given allows for incredible player expression amongst players of all skill levels. The flaws in the game’s online components were even surprisingly immersive as a social experience. While other games have much faster lobby systems, Animal Crossing’s feels like a commute with its cutscenes, many dialogue boxes, and loading times. While I couldn’t hop in my car and see my friends, I could have my character dress up, hop on a plane, and meet up with them in an online paradise. It would take a strenuous amount of time to get to someone’s island, but it was just enough of the tedium of real life to make it all the more engaging. Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ release during the pandemic allowed its systems and outlets for creativity to be utilized to their fullest potential, creating and maintaining a sense of community during a time where many can’t have one.