Internalized Escapism

The Black Panthers/GTA game idea at Token Minorities is awesome.

It’s also a game we’ll never see, despite the fact that we have endless games about US military action in the Mideast, fighting games about rappers beating the shit out of each other or even a videogame about the Columbine shootings, if only because white on brown, brown on brown, or white on white violence doesn’t upset status quos like brown on white violence would, even if it’s “just a videogame”.

But this also got me thinking about why I, personally, avoid history in my games. It’s that history holds too much for me, on an emotional level. I mean, for a lot of folks the BPP is an inspiration, but for me, it stands as a reminder of how far people will go to put down folks for putting up stop signs and making soup lines. Growing up, someone I knew, his father was a BPP member… until they found him decapitated by a lake, cause of death, “suicide”…

It’s shit like that, which makes our history generally too raw for me to even play with. I can’t have escapism with it.

So I wonder how many of us escape into comic books, The Matrix films, Star Wars, Halo, anything to basically avoid looking at our ugly history, full of sorrow and martyrs more than heroes.

And then I wonder what we’re really escaping?