This move we're in the middle of delayed me from writing a piece that I've had in my queue for a while – I wanted to talk about Night in the Woods, a video game I recently returned to that was part of the crop of amazing games that came out of 2017 (see also: Persona 5 [previously mentioned here], and Where the Water Tastes Like Wine [which came out while we were working on Perdition's Teeth, and which made me sweat bullets due to some similarities – a fear that was unfounded.])

This delay featured three important news items that were related to this game. First, co-creator Alec Holowka – who composed the music and played a major role in coding and developing the game – was accused by Zoe Quinn and several other women of emotionally and sexually abusive behavior; the other members of the creative team cut ties with him because of this – potentially also related to their foundation of the creator-owned video game studio “The Glory Society”; and finally, Holowka passed away, suggested from the context to be a case of suicide.

I do not know anything about Holowka's situation, and I do not intend to do a deep dive into this story beyond the next paragraph; if you wish to skip to the one after that, feel free. I'll be doing actual media criticism there, and not discussing the situation around the game other than a brief mention at the very end.

The reports I saw were vague, so I cannot comment too much on the particulars. Essentially, Holowka's sister suggested that he was in therapy and making a recovery from abuse he suffered as a child. While we should – and personally (as little as it matters,) I do, including this case – believe victims when they make a report, in assessing things after the fact we need to take a more holistic approach and try to understand the parties involved. That does not mean giving a pass to abusers who say that they were abused: trauma can explain but not excuse this sort of behavior. The abuse was wrong, and it is tragic that these women and non-binary people suffered that. It can be – and is – also true that it is tragic that Alec Holowka died. The suggestion from the comments his sister made was that he was in recovery and trying to be a better person, which is good, but the victim of a wrongdoing has no duty to forgive their victimizer. If that recovery and self improvement does happen, and the forgiveness doesn't, then it is an unfortunate situation, but it is not a moral failing on the part of the victim.

Now that that's out of the way, I wish to make an argument for why I'm writing this piece.

Three things have consistently come up in my writing for this website – nostalgia, trauma, and masculinity. Due to recent events, all three come together in this game and around it. Nostalgia and trauma are both present to the text itself, and the recent news around it brings up the gender performance issue.

So, for those who are unfamiliar, what is Night in the Woods? Quite simply, it is an adventure/platformer game that was released in 2017. The player avatar is Mae Borowski, a young woman rendered in the game as an anthropomorphic cat (there is, in my mind, open questions about whether the characters are actually intended to be anthropomorphic animals within the text of the game or if that is Mae's perspective – the presence of non-anthropomorphic cats, dogs, and birds suggests that it's a perspective issue for me, similar to Scott Pilgrim's use of video game mechanics in its text.) As the player, you walk Mae around, make her jump and climb, and talk to people. Occasionally, there will be a mini-game, possibly related to shoplifting or playing bass or any number of other things (of these, the music mini-games are my least favorite – my reflexes are terrible.) In the story of the game, Mae has just dropped out of college and returned to her Appalachian hometown, Possum Springs, which is deep in the rust belt. She reconnects with her old friends and makes acquaintances with a number of new friends, refuses to get a job, suffers from nightmares, and investigates what turns out to be a cult.

From the text of the game, it is obvious that Mae is a deeply traumatized young person. She had a violent incident in school where she suffered from a dissociative episode and beat another child with a baseball bat, and her family went into debt getting her the appropriate treatment, taking care of the other child, and trying to ensure that Mae could go to college and had the chance to leave Possum Springs. This is contrasted with the character of Bea, one of Mae's friends and valedictorian of their high school class, who had to forsake her dreams of college to run the family business. Another contrast is the character of Casey, a cipher of a character who only appears in the background materials – a friend of Mae and the other major characters who hopped a train at 18 and left town with no safety net. At points throughout the game, Mae can ask questions after him, and receive no information. He has vanished.

The majority of the game is spent wandering the town of Possum Springs, and the creators of the game lavished loving detail on every aspect of it. The characters who live in the town actually seem to live there – they have their own lives and Mae's path can intersect with them and she can form friendships with them based on the player's choices. But none of this stops Possum Springs from being a dying town in the dust belt.

There is a bit of generational discourse that forms the backbone of the plot. The older generation knew prosperity, they knew the value of a hard day's work and that if you put in your time you should get what is due to you. The younger generation knew only the loss of that prosperity, a town where local institutions close down (a familiar feeling for me,) where jobs are few and far between. This conflict is given nuance by the creative team – Mae and her parents have a very different understanding of the world, but they very much love each other and want what is good for one another.

Absence makes employment notable — a familiar feeling for me, circa 2009-2011.

But this leads to the nostalgia issue I noted above: in a town where everything is dying off, where businesses close and the only ones that seem to be working fine are the pawn shop and the telemarketer, nostalgia is unavoidable. It's even written write into the games DNA – from the very beginning, to progress the game, you have to move from right to left instead of left to right. Instead of proceeding into the future, as in almost every other platform game, you have to recede into the past. And its a past that's being hollowed out and pauperized: you move from Mae's relatively affluent neighborhood, to a line of town houses, to the commercial district where everything is in the process of collapsing in on itself, to two apartment buildings – one of which is derelict, and the other of which is falling apart, – and finally out to the abandoned grocery store and the train tracks, and the woods beyond.

But the regression into the past has problems of its own: just as I talked about nostalgia, the uncanny, and camp forming an unstable constellation of tendencies, so to on another level is nostalgia almost always paired with trauma. The traumatic is what nostalgia disavows, what the return to the past is intended to erase, and in its silence it becomes the poison that makes nostalgia a kind of sickness. The villains of Night in the Woods are motivated by nostalgia, they are trying to return to a dignified, Fordist past and erase the trauma of economic shock; the heroes of the game wish to confront their trauma and put an end to it.

This tension, between trying to renegotiate the past and trying to navigate the future, is what the game is fundamentally about. I also feel that it is what makes it so relatable.

I graduated from college into the worst financial crisis in generations. I remember, shortly after it hitting, an older acquaintance beginning to cry over the news. He expressed sorrow that I and my classmates had our futures stolen from us, and there was some suggestion that he held his generation partially to blame. He wished to redress the wrong by dwelling on past misdeeds and sorting blame. To manage the situation, myself, I had to comfort him and tell him that everything was going to be fine.

This is not what I wanted to do. I wanted to lower my eyes from the horizon, and focus on where I was placing my feet. So, in the lead characters of this game, I recognize some of myself. I see the same attitude of oscillation between despair and making-do that I see in my own demographic cohort.

For this reason, if for none other, I feel that this makes the game a valuable experience. The metatextual relationship to the recent stories about Alec Holowka make things a bit more complicated, but that doesn't change the fact that it is a worthwhile game.

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Die Anywhere Else: On Night In the Woods, the Nostalgic and the Traumatic