The Lessons Robin Bea Learned From Two Great Games In a Terrible Year | Winter Spectacular 2023
It has been, to put it mildly, a dogshit year to work in and around games. In my own life, the dogshit manifested as an email dropping into my inbox at the start of a writing shift telling me not to bother, that I didn’t work for Inverse anymore. I was lucky enough to get hired back in October, after eight agonizing months of mid-day crying spells and uncertainty and self-medication. But by then a handful of other writers — people who I used to look forward to seeing in pitch meetings and now missed daily — had also been laid off and didn’t get the chance to return.
That’s how I know it’s luck that decides who gets to keep their jobs and who doesn’t. If it were about deserving it, they’d still be there.
It’s why, as a person fortunate enough to have a job in games media that I enjoy very much, I struggle to imagine what advice I could possibly offer to people trying to get into the industry themselves. Despite being “in the industry,” I still usually feel like I’m just looking in on it from the other side of the fence — a feeling that I suspect many of us never get rid of. I also know that I could find myself on the outside in a literal sense again with a single email.
Maybe that’s also why I’ve leaned toward games that don’t offer easy answers this year, games that deal with messy emotions, have untidy endings, and tangle players up in the often painful business of human relationships.
As the year ends, one I find myself thinking about more and more is Slay the Princess.
I came to Slay the Princess at least in part to luxuriate in the bad vibes. A grim story about — you guessed it — killing a princess felt like a great Halloween story to cap off a rather hellish year, and since it’s a visual novel, my normal cowardice around horror games probably wouldn’t stop me from completing it. I wasn’t ready for what I found.
Yes, Slay the Princess gave me the pit-in-my-stomach thrill I was looking for, but I didn’t expect it to be a moving story of self-discovery at the same time.
The loop of Slay the Princess is simple. You, the hero of the story, wake up in a forest with a voice called the Narrator in your head. The Narrator tells you there’s a princess chained up in a shack nearby, and if you don’t kill her, she’ll bring about the apocalypse.
There’s a lot to explore in how Slay the Princess pushes against expectations and tests your freedom in how you’re able to respond to the Narrator, but in the end, you need to march your ass into that cabin to either kill the princess or let her kill you.
Then you wake up in the forest again with a new voice in your head expressing another side of your personality.
What unfolds is an unavoidably fatal loop — you go to the cabin, you talk to a different version of the princess, and one of you dies at the other’s hand. But between those deadly encounters, something else starts to develop. This isn’t just meaningless slaughter, and it’s more complicated than a resetting time loop.
As you slowly learn, each version of you and the princess is both a fully developed person and a shard of something greater. Your actions, your choices to kill or be killed, they aren’t erased just because you wake up in the same place you started the next day. Those lives lost are real, even if they represent just fractions of a person. Ultimately, both you and the Princess need to live out every possibility that exists between you to be made whole.
We tend to look at time loops the way Groundhog Day taught us to. Since everything goes back to normal each morning, those individual days don’t count. They may as well not have happened, for all the future cares. As long as you get the last one right, no one was really murdered, and you’re still a good person no matter how much carnage you caused to get there. Slay the Princess gives us another model — one where everything matters.
I found myself thinking a lot about that in light of the year I had. To be laid off then hired again felt a bit like being caught in a loop of my own. A metaphorical death followed by another chance. But to look at it only as a fresh start doesn’t feel honest to my experience.
My sense of self has been thrown around like a ragdoll this year, as I spent a few long months unemployed, a few more working at a coffee shop (something I have far more experience with than being a journalist), and finding myself right back where I started at Inverse. To just forget all of that to fit a simplistic linear narrative feels wrong. I made friends in that period. I moved apartments. I went to therapy and did a lot of soul-searching and spent bleary-eyed nights wondering if I should be doing something else with my life.
It’s tempting to see our lives and our careers as essentially linear stories with a few setbacks that it’s best not to think about. I’m not sure I believe in setbacks anymore.
When we refuse to consider how uncomfortable parts of our journey shaped us, we reduce ourselves to something much smaller than we actually are. It takes a lot to make up a full person. For me that includes a lot of regret. Painful jobless periods, not getting my first media job until my thirties — hell, not realizing I’m trans until my thirties — are grief-inducing things I’d rather change but nonetheless are part of me.
Slay the Princess feels like it actively resists simplistic readings, but if I can pull some reductive advice out of it, it’s this: Remember that you are a complicated, multifaceted person before you are a writer (or whatever it is you want to see yourself as). Remember that the path is always winding, and every step matters.
Maybe it’s because the year left me feeling like a wrung-out sponge, emotionally speaking, but there’s really only one other game that hit me quite as hard this year, back in March.
The first game to get its hooks into me was the concluding DLC chapter of Citizen Sleeper, titled Purge. The original game puts you in the shoes of a robot with a cloned human consciousness used for slave labour by an evil conglomerate. After escaping from the corp, you wash up all alone on Erlin’s Eye, an independent space station, where you’re forced to scrape by on odd jobs and the kindness of strangers.
By the time Citizen Sleeper’s DLC comes around, you’re more established, able to keep a roof over your head and pay for the medication that keeps your engineered body from crumbling. So when a humanitarian crisis and a mysterious technology-destroying wave head for the Eye at the same time, you’re in a position to offer the station some help in return, even if you’re not quite sure how to do it.
Taken as a whole, Citizen Sleeper and its DLC tell a story of what it means to live in a community. On the Eye or on Earth, there’s simply no such thing as making it on your own. We count on each other for everything from basic survival to all the things that make life worth living. Capitalist society tries its hardest to make us forget that, to trick us into seeing each other as competition rather than part of a community.
In the sense that we do compete for a limited number of jobs, that’s true. But it’s hard to imagine there’s anyone foolish enough to come to journalism or criticism looking for a steady job. We do this because we care about the work, whether it’s offering a new perspective on a particular game or shining a light on the working conditions of the people who made it. That work is always part of a larger conversation, even when it feels like you’re only writing for yourself.
I still remember that February morning, the professionally phrased email tearing my self-image and ability to pay my bills to shreds. In an instant, it seemed, my career was over. Losing your job hurts no matter what.
But as the day wore on, I saw more and more messages of support, some from writers I’d long respected, who I would never imagine even know I existed, wishing me well and assuring me that I would be ok. I can’t say that I necessarily believed them, but just the fact that they’d reached out was a reminder that I wasn’t alone.
More concrete assurance of that fact came from my friend Willa, a fellow writer at Inverse and contributor to this very Winter Spectacular. We got along well in the short time when we overlapped at Inverse and started a podcast mostly as an excuse to talk to each other more. Having a way to keep thinking and talking about games while I was unemployed kept me from feeling like I’d been cast aside entirely and reminded me that it was still something I loved for its own sake, even without a paycheck attached.
If there’s any advice I feel qualified to give it’s this: Value your work above any one job, and your community above that. The community will outlive the rest.
Even before this year, it’s been a common refrain for some time that getting into games media just isn’t worth it. Doing this work means being underpaid and overworked forever, probably without ever seeing a full-time job or health insurance. One of the most common pieces of advice for how to get into doing this work is, “Don’t.”
I get where that comes from; I’ve felt it myself. But I’ve had plenty of more stable jobs than this (even being a barista is more stable in the end) and so I know that for people like me, the pain of layoffs and all the other shit we have to deal with is less than the pain of staring at the clock, wishing you were doing anything else with your life.
For some of us (maybe the most gullible or hopeless or unreasonable of us), just being part of this community is a goal in itself. Instead of “find a better job,” our answer to people looking to break in has to be “make this a better job” by unionizing your workplace, by sticking up for each other, by any means you can to claw back a little control from the people who’ve turned media into such a hellscape.
At the end of Purge, you’re left with a choice: escape the Eye before a megacorp takes everything you’ve worked for from you, or stay and fight back however you can. I chose, maybe foolishly, to stay. That led to an ending scene describing how the people of the Eye band together to help each other survive in an increasingly hostile and unpredictable place. After a long description of the hard times ahead, the pain caused by heartless corporate greed, and the sacrifices it takes just to hold on, this is how Purge ends:
“And in this frozen moment you focus only on the next step, because that is the only way you have learnt to persist.
And to persist is to believe that a future, any future at all, is possible.”
