Octavia Butler's futurism, 1000(xRESIST) years later

The Destiny of Earthseed
Is to take root among the stars.
It is to live and to thrive
On new earths.
It is to become new beings
And to consider new questions.
It is to leap into the heavens
Again and again.
It is to explore the vastness
Of heaven.
It is to explore the vastness
Of ourselves.

- The Book of the Living, Parable of the Sower 

"Do you think we can really do it? Live on the surface again?"

- Fixer, 1000xRESIST

(This post contains spoilers for Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Sunset Visitor's 1000xRESIST. It is not necessary to have read Parable, but I highly recommend playing 1KxR first.)

I finished 1000xRESIST a few weeks ago and I'm still turning it over in my mind. One of the strands I've been following is its theme of futurism (and its roots of speculation, desire, and hope). 1000xRESIST is a game filled with regret, nostalgia, and ghosts. It also carries a longing for change, for a future that can either exist in spite of the past or because of it. It is a game that requires you to move on, because there is nothing else you can do.

1000xRESIST is a monument to science fiction's ability to speculate. It is the ludonarrative analogue to Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, dreaming not of an end to the apocalypse but the beginning of something new. Speculative fiction does not claim to predict the future, and I would argue that it doesn't even posit a possible future (regardless of how possible their worlds may seem to us; the world may burn, but it will not be by fire). We cannot possibly predict the future, but we can imagine what it would be like to be comfortable with uncertainty, and we can imagine a present that works for a uncertain future.

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1000xRESIST imagines a subterranean society of clones, over a thousand years after the Occupants came to Earth, bringing with them a disease that killed nearly all humans. You play as Watcher, one of six "shapen sisters" each with a "function" to serve your creator, the ALLMOTHER, who carries immunity to the Occupants' disease. You dream to join the ALLMOTHER on the "other side", where she will grant you immunity. This dream is never realized: the game cold opens with you, Watcher, murdering the ALLMOTHER.

In playing through the events leading up to the ALLMOTHER's death, I knew that our world was dystopic, and that the Sisters needed to shed their nostalgic, reactionary beliefs and traditions if they wanted to move on. But I never once considered what would happen after ALLMO's death, and the game never asked me this question either, until it was too late. The majority of 1000xRESIST's narrative weight derives from the baggage of a dead god, and a society that does its best to move on, and a dream of a new world (the other side; the surface; the Earth) that persists. 1000xRESIST's futurism is not focused on merely toppling tyrants, but one that forces you into the depths of the revolution; it is not post-apocalyptic, as much as it may seem to be. It is just apocalyptic, because the apocalypse never really ended.

We also cannot imagine an end to Parable of the Sower's apocalypse, in which the excesses of global warming, capitalism, and fascism have been pushed to their limits. In Parable, we will never know what it is like to kill President Donner, nor do we particularly care about him. Yet regardless of our ability to bring an "end" to the way things are, Parable's future is one rooted in change. Its protagonist, Lauren Olamina, spends the novel travelling across a ravaged California to spread her religion, Earthseed, and to find a suitable place to begin the first Earthseed community. The primary tenet of Earthseed is that "God is Change". Earthseed's dream is to "take root among the stars": it believes that, if we are to survive, we must change and be moved. Butler's futurism in Parable of the Sower is one centered on diaspora. As followers of Earthseed, we are migrants, both through space and time. We will live to see the other side, and we will build something new there.

1000xRESIST, like Parable of the Sower, imagines a diasporic future. A large portion of the game involves exploring ALLMO's memories, when she was a teenage girl named Iris in the 21st century. We see her trauma and the trauma of her parents. We see the apocalypses of the present, and we see what happens when we migrate away from them. Iris's parents met during the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests; though they live in Canada during Iris's lifetime, their loyalty to Hong Kong never wavers. They hold on to the dream of returning, even when they're sheltered in their apartment at the height of the Occupants' pandemic. In the end, they remained. But it does not have to be that way for us.

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Both Parable and 1KxR ask us to remember the past. But they do not ask us to be nostalgic. For you, playing Watcher, to remember is your function; it is who you are, it is the labor you perform, and it is a burden to you. The most difficult choice 1000xRESIST asks us to make is what to forget and what to remember. Diaspora does not exist without a homeland. We need to remember what we once were. Even among the stars, we still remember the Earth we came from; even under the oceans, we remember the city we were born in.

Speculative fiction may not be able to predict the future, but it can remember the present. Parable of the Sower and 1000xRESIST haunted me when I read and played them, because the things they were remembering were the same as what me, and everyone else on the planet, was living (Parable even begins in the year 2024!). It was a haunting of the past, of lost futures, and of an uncanny present. It reminded me of where I am now, and where I came from. The diasporic futures of speculative fiction do not ask us to carry the past. It's enough to know who you are, and to take that with you when you leave.

To survive,
Know the past.
Let it touch you.
Then let
The past
Go.

- The Book of the Living, Parable of the Sower 

"We have to go to the surface. There's nothing left for us down here. We'll die out."

- Fixer, 1000xRESIST 

Playing the Nonbinary Future in Citizen Sleeper (a short rambling)

(spoilers for Citizen Sleeper) 

What does the nonbinary utopia look like? What are the nonbinary futures we dream of? The central desire of the nonbinary identity is existence. What else could the nonbinary and transgender future be? We want nothing more than to exist, and to not be denied existence. Our futures are not near; we may not even see it in our lifetimes. It is a possible future, but an unsure one.

Citizen Sleeper is a sci-fi video game about roleplaying in the ruins of interplanetary capitalism. It imagines many futures, but the one I am most drawn to is the nonbinary future. In Citizen Sleeper you are a sleeper, not named after what you are but what you aren't: a human. You were once human, but you were also never human. Sleepers are emulated minds, built to pay off the debt of the human they may have once been. In CS, you have escaped this fate. You live on the outskirts of capitalism (the space station Erlin's Eye, long abandoned by its corporate founders), working to free yourself from the corp hunting you down. You also work to free yourself from your own body, designed to rely on the drug "stabilizer". Your life is precarious. Your body was created to kill you.

To be nonbinary in CS is a liability to yourself. You did not choose it. You were created to be nonbinary. Your gender is a technological invention; it is both your software and hardware. Your gender is violent. It is a miracle that you exist, when other nonbinary characters across the cyborg-machine spectrum struggle to do so. Most of those characters exist only within the digital "data cloud" of Erlin's Eye; the only character that physically manifests is a goddamn vending machine. The body exists as a technology and a tool; it would be incorrect to say that Neovend is a vending machine, but rather that they are hiding in one. I have a hard time figuring out where the body-as-technology begins and where the body-as-gender/gender-as-technology ends. Perhaps the nonbinary future of Citizen Sleeper is one in which technology is gender; the gender of the ghost in the machine is the machine itself. For Neovend, we can distinguish between the ghost and the machine; we cannot do so with the sleeper, trapped in their body.

Stabilizer is your HRT; it keeps you and your gender alive. In CS1, you are never free from stabilizer, but you might dream of not needing it. It is the one thing keeping you going, cycle after cycle. I think there's something appealing about living in a mechanical body, having a body that actually matches your gender and a gender that matches a body, but the trans futures of CS are not so much different from the present. Though you are born as a machine and born as nonbinary, you are still called a name that is not entirely yours; you live in spite of those who created you; you do not know nor care about what became of the person you once were. You cannot help but feel that you are human, when your creators tell you that you are not. You were designed with a dysphoria for something you have lost, or something that is out of reach. You are an emulation, you are not genuine, you are unnatural, constructed, a pretender.

The trans nonbinary utopian desires of Citizen Sleeper are of an inscrutable existence. Near the end of the game, you gain a new, sustainable source of stabilizer: mushrooms. Your body, however rigid it may be, is still an organic technology, one that grows and survives not just in spite of but because of the precariousness of capitalism. In its ruins on the Eye, you learn how to keep yourself alive.

Ramblings on making a tabletop roleplaying game

In June of 2024 I started working on a TTRPG with the working title Stella by Starlight. I was inspired by Blades in the Dark to make a high-stakes cyberpunk RPG set in space, but the game has gradually become something else. It’s still high-stakes cyberpunk in space, but I don’t think that’s really what the game is about. I think I’d describe Stella by Starlight as a post-cyberpunk game, because it’s not about what the players do as cyberpunks but rather what they are as cyberpunks.

In earlier drafts, this game was really about space: you have a ship, and you travel across the galaxy, risking your life in daring space battles. The other side of the game was dark and gritty: you put your life on the line for money, you fight against incomprehensibly powerful corps, and you kill because you like killing. All these aspects are still afforded to you by the game, but I think they interest me far less now. The main design question I’ve been grappling with recently is “how do I fill in the gaps?”. To answer that question, I have a tangent to go on: I’ve read a lot of games over the last 9 months that have made me realize that some of my favorite TTRPGs are not actually about what they are about.

At PAX Unplugged I managed to get a copy of Slugblaster and it’s such a joy to read (and to look at—gorgeous art and layout). To sum it up, Slugblaster is a game about multidimensional skateboarding (called “slugblasting”). It scratches the itch of roleplaying as teenagers totally out of their element, reminiscent of Kids on Bikes or even Sleepaway but with an added layer of psychedelic dimension-hopping shenanigans. But where I think the game really shines (and, as a disclaimer, the following is just me restating Quinns in his review of the game) is the beat system, a remake of Blades’ downtime rules. Your character doesn’t necessarily “develop” when they’re out exploring other dimensions—they change when they’re at home, processing their adventures and their life as not-quite-adults. With the beat system, you purchase literal character beats during downtime. Each playbook has their own “arc” of beats that must be purchased in order: in each beat of the Grit’s arc, they work towards a goal and repeatedly fail, before finally they persevere and succeed, and it’s cathartic. The narrative tension at the heart of Slugblaster isn’t saving the universe or whatever, it’s growing up. The game would still work without the eponymous slugblasting! It even recognizes this possibility in its “Change the Game” chapter. By this point it should be clear what I mean when I say “RPGs are not about what they are about”. But what does it even mean for a game to be “about” something?

In the first few months I spent writing Stella by Starlight I thought the “selling point” of the game would be the world; that in fact the game and its world were synonymous. I even named it after a place in the world: Stella (formally “the Stele”), the planetary spacecraft at the heart of the solar system the game takes place in. Sam Sorenson’s “In Praise of Legwork” makes the argument that games should provide legwork—it’s not enough to write systems or “play to find out”. Sam argues that RPG writers should be providing content: lists and tables and so on. If you want a city to feel real, you need to make the city. I think this “legwork” approach works well for some games (solo or other prompt-heavy games, or pick-up-and-play dungeon-delves), but Stella by Starlight is not a legwork game. How does one even go about making space feel real? I imagine designing cities is fairly straightforward: they can be represented two-dimensionally, and they have clear-cut boundaries (roads, buildings, and borders). Space is limitless. And so Stella by Starlight cannot really be “about” the world. Even if I could do so, I would not make its cities feel real.

OK, maybe instead of framing games as being “about” things, games “do” things. They provide content, rules, systems, ideas, whatever. What should Stella by Starlight accomplish? It’s a story-focused game, but how does it focus on the story? I can have locations, factions, and NPCs with their own goals, but that’s not the story the players are going to be telling.

I think it comes down to rules. The conventional wisdom might say that rules provide crunch, or to fill in the blanks when our imagination or improv skills need assistance. Brennan Lee Mulligan even says that he plays D&D not because it’s “combat-oriented”, but because it facilitates the parts of the game he’s least interested in simulating through improv, which is combat. For Brennan, rules do the dirty work: we don’t need rules for roleplaying because we can just do that ourselves. That makes sense intuitively. But what about Slugblaster, with its character arcs? Isn’t “railroading” bad? Why would I need rules for something I can do myself? Jay Dragon’s answer: you don’t.

Rules don’t have to do “dirty work”. If I hated simulating combat, I could play a game without combat, or one that “fades to black” when violence situations arise. I can hate combat but still have it as a “narrative possibility” through D&D, and I think that’s why rules exist. Jay says that rules are a cage—they get in the way of our roleplaying (usually by making us fail), and that’s a thing that we want! It’s fun to play with and around the rules, even if we don’t use them. The one rule that Wanderhome is committed to is the rule of no violence. This limits our agency, yes, but it also opens up possibilities when we see how far we can push that one rule. It creates narrative tension, because even if there’s no violence, that doesn’t mean there’s no conflict. The rule is there, taunting us. We could play a campaign of Wanderhome where violence is never even mentioned, or we could play a campaign of Wanderhome with the ghost of violence in every scene.

Slugblaster’s beats are limiting, but they’re also quite broad. They feel like a leash to me: they give you space to roam, but when you buy the last beat you can run wild. I feel similarly about Realis, a game which features a sort of subtractive character development where you start out as larger-than-life archetypes, eventually whittling down to something specific. Characters in Realis wield “Sentences” like “I always kill my foe”. Each class has a list of Sentences to start with. As you progress, your sentences rank up and you must change them to become more specific (e.g. “I always kill my foe when a friend is in trouble”). Realis is all about rules. Progression is literally restriction. We must give something up to become more powerful; we put ourselves in the cage. But there’s still plenty of room to move around, and I think Realis offers a lot of possibilities through its aspects of interpretation and negotiation (what does it mean to “kill” a “foe” when a “friend” is in “trouble”?). The rules limit us, but we decide what they mean.

I want to design rules that challenge players. I want rules that can create problems. I want rules that demand thought. Stella by Starlight is a mess right now. Its themes are all over the place, and the rules themselves are in different states of “completion”. I’ve been satisfied with my playtests but not with how the rules have responded to the narrative. All of this to say that this game needs a center to gravitate towards.

If I want to tell a story, then Stella by Starlight must care deeply about its player characters. In the game, you play as “hawkshaws”: post-cyberpunk freelancers that are some kind of mix between Uber drivers, shadowrunners, and whatever you’ve got going on in Citizen Sleeper. Hawkshaws are highly alienated, not just by the gig economy they work in but by the world as a whole. They are neither organism nor machine nor cyborg. The game never mentions the word “human” either. To get back to the point: hawkshaws are marginal. They may live in the center of the solar system but they never are the center. I’ve struggled to imagine what growing as a hawkshaw would look like. You can become better fighters or get new gear, but that’s not something to struggle over. I’m experimenting with rules that are a mix of Belonging Outside Belonging and Realis right now with the goal of developing characters by changing their beliefs and relationships with each other. We’ll see how those work in playtesting. What I really want are teleological rules of some sort, something that defines the characters not just in their own terms but as hawkshaws.

Part of my inspiration behind hawkshaws was China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station. There’s a character named Yagharek, a garuda (avian humanoid) who had his wings removed as punishment for committing “choice-theft in the second degree”. He commissions the protagonist, Isaac, to craft him new wings at the start of the novel. Perdido Street Station is quite long, and Isaac and his gang get into a lot of shenanigans (an understatement) throughout. Yagharek is nearly always there, tagging along and helping where he can. Eventually, Isaac has the time to make wings for Yagharek, but decides not to when he learns what “choice-theft” is. And so Yag remains wingless. He mutilates himself, pulling out his feathers and becoming bare. A contradiction of sorts, but also something completely different. PSS is a pretty dark and grim novel, and Yag’s ending is not a happy one. But there’s traces of a hawkshaw there, I think:

“I turn and walk into the city my home, not bird or garuda, not miserable crossbreed. I turn and walk into my home, the city, a man.”

Or maybe the hawkshaw is something Yag rejects. Criminals in the world of PSS have their bodies grotesquely altered to better perform whatever indentured labor is needed from them; they’re called the Remade. When Yag is offered a place in the “uncommunity” of the fReemade (escaped Remade), he turns away. Maybe the Remade are closer to hawkshaws. Yag believes himself to be the same as everyone else—a “man”. Perhaps he is delusional, or perhaps he can see that everyone is a paradox, a half-breed, a flightless bird. Is that the hawkshaw?

Postscript: The thing that sets hawkshaws apart from Yagharek is that hawkshaws are never alone. They are not the only ones in the margins. Like all of them, the hawkshaw cannot survive alone. They have a community, however that may manifest—I’m not sure yet. But I think about this moment from a Songs in the Dusk campaign I MCed a while ago. The community-building rules from Songs are excellent; I remember a downtime scene where the characters gathered with an NPC to watch the sun set over their desert community sheltered in the skeleton of some ancient leviathan, and I felt like that was the niche Songs filled. I think that’s pretty close to the life and world of hawkshaws.