WILLIAM: ’Bout fell off my corner with that shit. Left me like Malcolm where X marks my grave. It’s wild, right? I did not come to a Pusha T album for content range, but he still droppin’ that kind of shit in there? Your boy is a fuckin’ weapon, man. You just gotta point him at some shit that needs to be destroyed and let him do his damn thing. I mean, he might leave a crack epidemic in his wake, but whatever you wanted extinguished gonna be fuckin’ gone.
OMAR: Yo, I feel like I gotta dye my hair black, change my name to something hard enough for white people to mispronounce but yet still say it’s exotic, and head for Mexico, ’cause listening to this album clearly makes me guilty by association. The feds watching and listening through our webcams are petty enough to bust the doors down and try and make the charge stick. In nerd layman’s terms tho? Pusha T makes that Attack on Titan music that makes you wanna join the Survey Corps so you can see what lies beyond the wall… so you can expand your drug ring.
WILLIAM: Every time Pusha drop some new shit, I look at this life in the suburbs with my family and cut lawn and pretty mailbox and be like, “But is this really what I want tho?” I mean, it’s a good life, but is this some kingpin shit? But then I remember that Pusha went at Drake on the “Infrared” record. And then I listen to Drake’s “Duppy Freestyle” going back at Pusha and be like, you know what, I’ll take my beef in the nerd journalism field. Cuz ain’t nobody gonna be talkin’ about “Will be talkin’ that nerd shit, but I heard he ain’t even read a comic book till 2016. Like, Will aiight, but he ain’t even top ten on his own site” to a smoothed-out jazz beat. I mean, they could do that. Maybe that’s what the nerd journalism game been missing. But they better come for me after the holiday. King Push got me way too motivated right now.
Killing Floor: Navigating Real-World Gun Violence as a Hardcore Gamer
WILLIAM EVANS, aka Luke Cage’s Overqualified Intern
HERE IS A simple truth when it comes to me: I think guns are cool. I think guns are cool in the way that I think an electric toothbrush is cool. Or a V-8 engine is cool. I think guns are cool in the way I think it’s cool that my daughter looks like both my wife and me or the way that aloe seems to heal everything. To paraphrase Walter White, sometimes it really is about the science, and there is no denying the technological marvel that is the firearm for what it is capable of, regardless of intent or result. That’s a huge, unfair regardless there, but we’ll circle back to that. And as cool as guns are in that modern invention kind of way, it’s only half the story. The more nefarious side is that I enjoy what guns can do in the fictional abstract. It isn’t really honest to say that I think an AK-47 with a ridiculous high rate of fire is cool and divorce that from the sheer violence of its bullets ripping through something with furious tenacity. So yes, that means that it isn’t honest for me to say that I enjoy Rick Grimes spraying automatic vengeance without the people of Terminus being the bullet sponges. Admitting I enjoy watching violent ballistic death as entertainment (example: my many repeat viewings of John Wick) doesn’t make me a sociopath (I don’t think), because it is so wildly enjoyed by others, but it is a bit alarming to say it out loud like that. Even then, that’s watching gun violence, that’s not the act of doing it, so that adds another level between what we would start to consider problematic, right?
Well, what about video games? I game. Hard. I’ve logged hundreds of hours of Destiny and its sequel, Destiny 2, a first-person shooter from developer Bungie, famous for the Halo franchise. Like most FPS games, you play 85 percent of your time in the game aiming down the sights, killing everything unlucky enough to have hit points and be in your path. Like most shooters, Destiny rewards you for being precise. Shoot a Cabal enemy in the head and watch it explode into gas and toxins as its body limply hits the ground, possibly rewarding you with another weapon or more ammo for your current one. It is satisfying and only feeds your hunger to keep doing it. But to be fair, these are aliens you’re shooting, a fictional genocide to take part in. It’s not like they are human or anything. Not like you can do that…
The first time I saw a real gun was probably when I was about twelve or thirteen. The first person I remember knowing that lost their life to a bullet was the summer before my fourteenth birthday, though I expect it may have happened before that, but I just didn’t know any better and nobody bothered to sully me with the truth. I’d love to say that was the last time I lost a friend to the barrel, but it wasn’t and it didn’t necessarily slow down as I grew up either, except the number of “eligible” friends for such violence began to narrow itself. Thirty years later, I have collected a small society of men and women that I once spoke with, embraced, played ball with, went to parties with, attended homeroom with, and loved that no longer walk among us, specifically because their bodies were not stronger than the lead that invaded them. Some of them were innocent law-abiding citizens, some of them were less so. For those reasons, I don’t own a gun now and never plan to.
Plenty of men like me, family men who feel responsible for their family’s protection, have elected to invest in weaponry or carry one themselves, and I get it. Ultimately, it feels like a flawed premise to me when you calculate the number of home invasions compared to the number of accidental shootings in the home, but that’s not really the point. For some men and women, a gun makes them feel safer, and provided that it doesn’t mean that fear spills over to the innocent people (which, sadly, it does all the time), then I could at least see the premise, even if the follow-through is seldom that innocent. I still believe that 80 percent of gun advocate arguments are really just “because I want to,” not “because I need to,” but I can’t always fault the possibility of protecting one’s self in its purest intent.
In 2010, a guy I had known for almost ten years was gunned down in front of his family because he got into an argument with a guy at the movies the week prior. Three days after the funeral, I played Call of Duty: Black Ops with his younger brother. We spent two hours shooting fifty times more bullets into faceless fictional terrorists than were thrown into his older brother. And we did it in silence, focused and unyielding. Video game killing sometimes isn’t always a zero-sum game. Characters appear, you kill them, and they disappear. You stand up from your chair having killed everyone and no one simultaneously. But that doesn’t mean that the bodies don’t go somewhere.
Is it as easy as saying, “Well, that’s fiction”? I tend to think so. I become bothered, actually angered, whenever some young guy goes on a shooting spree and the first thing they do is see what music he listened to and what video games he played. Maybe that started with Columbine and followed many years later by Virginia Tech, where video games became a punching bag for every disturbed and fatally violent kid under thirty-five who became synonymous with tragedy. FPS games and GTA are always the first dartboards raised when politicians want to plant their flag with their solution for curbing youth violence (something my Democratic bones still hold firmly against Hillary Rodham to this day). I am old enough to remember when Hillary Clinton introduced a legislative bill in 2005 that sought to limit the sales of Mature video games to minors with this quote: “If you put it just really simply, these violent video games are stealing the innocence of our children.” Yeah, I never believed that. The same way that political cartoons didn’t “create” the murders in the Charlie Hebdo shooting in 2015 but served as their excuse or muse, Rockstar Games doesn’t “create” murderers as much as gives every schmoe like myself a playground to run around in with no limits whatsoever. Still, somehow, I believe the rhetoric of people motivates people more than stand-alone media does.
And yet, that doesn’t mean I spend time with my daughter showing her around Grand Theft Auto’s Liberty City while I mow down civilians in a sports car while spraying a Tec-9 out of the window. There is a judgment there, on myself, to be so wantonly violent in her presence. That doesn’t prove a counter to my defense that games aren’t a deadly conduit in school shootings or the like, it’s just common sense of
letting my daughter stumble onto complex subject matters organically or at a time when she can navigate the issues of violence and at her own pace, not at mine. I wouldn’t sit her down in front of Californication either. Narrowing down video games or most mainstream media as a cause for behaviors that seem extreme or outside of societal norms also ignores mental health and real-world environments, both of which are becoming more prevalent in explaining shooting tragedies.
And yet, it is still hard to ignore just the sheer amount of violence I consume in my media without flinching as some real-world gun deaths cost me sleep. I think about the Gubio massacre in Nigeria that killed eighty-one people in 2020, how men marched into town, killing innocent civilians, and how sick that makes me. There’s a level in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 called “No Russian” where you play as a double agent participating in a terrorist attack in an airport where you and your comrades fill the terminal with M60 rounds. The level was so controversial because you were tasked with killing civilians, and the game actually lets you skip the level if you want to. A friend of mine still gives me grief because I didn’t hesitate whatsoever, marching from hall to hall killing and killing.
I think this is where games are going and, to be fair, have been going for a while. There are the BioWare franchises like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect, where the game responds to your moral choices. The Dishonored franchise takes a unique approach, giving you the option to subdue enemies or kill them. But the more killing you do, the more the world changes (for the worse) around you and drastically changes the conclusion of your game. Or the BioShock franchise where you are kind of cartoonishly choosing between saving little abducted girls or *shudder* harvesting them (!?) for more power. But you are at least influencing the world, and the quest for more destructive power has a consequence on the world. Weirdly though, these don’t end up being meditations on how the player navigates these worlds as much as foster repeat playthroughs. If you meet a Mass Effect fan, they will surely tell you about their experience and also their “Renegade” campaign where they made every demonstrative choice possible just to see what happens.
Perhaps the most interesting games that play with morality are the ones that don’t give you a choice. The ones that set you on a path, have you maximize the carnage by design, and then leave you to face the consequences. This is the Naughty Dog approach, or specifically the Last of Us franchise. You don’t get to make these big moral decisions, but you do have to live with the consequences of your character’s actions. Realizing that playing as Joel in the first Last of Us game, that I was the Monster at the End of This Book, grounded me more than most games where the decisions were left to me.
On most days, it doesn’t matter to me. I’m grown and mature enough to never mix Payday 2 with my weekly visit to the bank. But I have more days than I used to where it all feels a bit much, and my appetite for gaming has me sideline the shooters for long stretches in favor of strategy games or something lacking combat at all like racing games. Maybe it’s just me getting older, maybe there’s a cumulative effect. Or maybe how we digest violence, realistic or not, is more complicated than we want to admit. The rise of a present morality in games has helped though. For narrative reasons or for game design choices, having my actions in a video game be given more weight helps me feel less detached from the violence I’m experiencing. Going from kill room to kill room can admittedly be cathartic. We all have long days. We all have days where we kind of just want to burn it down. And I think there are games that can fulfill that task nicely. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with asking for more. To look at your virtual body count and reconcile that with the values you hold in reality. And I hope to maintain that. I still want to provide a safe and nonhostile environment for my family. And I still plan to play Cyberpunk 2077 half a dozen times.
Hamilton and the Case of Historical Fanfics
OMAR HOLMON, aka Dutty Boukman’s Side-Eye
LEMME PAINT THE picture real quick. The year was 2016, I was invited over to watch the Tony Awards with two friends of mine, Cristin and Sarah. These two are performers, writers, and grew up as theater kids. Now, I don’t know much about the Tony Awards ’cause I’m a hood nigga I’m a nerd nigga that survived in a hood nigga environment. All I knew was that the Tony Awards are a big deal for actors. I was warned beforehand by them that there was going to be a range of emotions on their part. I came prepared and even brought an apple parfait to show that a dude knows how to be civilized and shit. I learned three things that night. One, apple parfaits don’t need to be heated up, you can eat it cold. Two, the Tony Awards are like Source Awards for theater kids. Three, they were happy for all the shows that won, but they really wanted this play called Hamilton to take home all the awards and flowers.
As the show came to a close and I’d watched them sing a bunch of songs, Cristin turned to me and said, “Fam, I noticed you not singing along to Hamilton tracks.” Sarah chimed in with a “Yeah, I peeped that too. What’s good with that? WHAT’S REALLY GOOD WITH THAT?” (Neither of them actually talks like that, this is how I translate tone and intent in my head.) The next like half hour was them telling me I should really check out the Hamilton soundtrack (“cast album,” if you theater-kid initiated). Let it be known I agreed to do so out of fear from having seen them both throw up theater-kid gang signs the entire night. It felt like I was jumped into the Hamilton fandom with the way I listened to that soundtrack for weeks. Hamilton tells the story of founding father Alexander Hamilton from his time fighting in the American Revolution and building the government’s Treasury department for America, along with his family life. It’s a journey, and we meet a lot of other historical figures along the way. Those historical figures are all played by people of color. The play was written and composed by Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Man, I listened to that soundtrack while I was writing, while I was reading, and even when working out. I ain’t ever worked out to a play soundtrack before, but there the fuck I was, running three miles listening to Aaron Burr go from R&B crooning to power ballad bravado in his song “Wait for It.” I jogged through Queens shouting, “Life doesn’t discriminate / Between the sinners and the saints / It takes and it takes and it takes.” I dunno what y’all call a line like that in your walk of life, but where I’m from that’s called muthafucking bars. You know an album is good when you’re on Rap Genius’s website looking up the lyrics and their meanings. I really enjoyed how Lin-Manuel Miranda weaved in historical events, conversations, and letters to craft the dialogue and music. To this day I still believe Angelica Schuyler’s song “Satisfied” cleaned everyone the fuck up on the soundtrack.
Hamilton hit Broadway with the hype of Dr. Dre’s Detox album or maybe Beyoncé’s Lemonade album and became the Wrestle-Mania of Broadway. Keeping in mind how Broadway is mad upper echelon. So, Hamilton’s success made it inaccessible for most to see with ticket prices in the PS5 range (we talking $500+). With prices that high, the majority of the audience seeing the show were upper-class white folks. It’s ironic seeing how the culture of hip-hop and rap are what separates Hamilton from the pack. Placing the crown on the musical as the “it” play but then the people part of that very culture that made it a success don’t get access to it and aren’t the ones reviewing it. In 2016, I knew I was never going to see Hamilton. I was content with seeing the musical as a historical fan fiction musical. When I think of Hamilton as a historical fanfic, I can enjoy it in that capacity. Which is funny because four years later, in 2020, Hamilton became accessible to everyone. Well, everyone with a subscription to Disney+ who was streaming the play on their platform. I remember the internet being excited for this. I, however, was not.
Lemme explain, there’s an episode of Community called “Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking” where Pierce Hawthorne fakes being on his deathbed to get revenge on his study group for leaving him out of things and making fun of him. Pierce gives Troy Barnes the “gift” of meeting LeVar Burton, who he is a fan o
f, knowing Troy will freeze up and be unable to interact back with LeVar. In a cutscene we see Troy in a room shouting that he never wanted to meet LeVar Burton in person. He just wanted a photograph because “You can’t disappoint a picture! I HATE YOU, PIERCE! *screams*” That’s how I felt about seeing Hamilton. I am glad those of us who’d have to put up rent money for a Hamilton ticket would be able to see it via Disney+, but I was good on it. At the root of the issue, knowing the cast were people of color playing the parts of the founding fathers was fine because I wasn’t physically seeing it. Now having the option to, I didn’t wanna see people of color humanizing these founding fathers that owned slaves, man. Again, I know this is a historical fanfic, but man, seeing Thomas Jefferson’s character moving about, singing and being charming, I knew my initial thought would be “Fuck that dude for life.”
At the time Hamilton was coming out, I was living in Crown Heights right by the Eastern Parkway. Damn near every day there was a protest happening right in the middle of that parkway. These protests and marches were against police brutality, Black trans women being murdered, Breonna Taylor’s death, George Floyd’s death, and the death of Black folk from police that didn’t make news headlines outside of social media. I could see the protests all from my bedroom window. I’d go to the living room to tell my wife one was happening and see she was already getting dressed and putting her mask on to go outside and join. This was another factor in me not wanting to see people of color cosplaying as these slave-owning hypocrites. I eventually did watch Hamilton with a friend on Disney+. It was nice to see how certain scenes played out, the choreography, as well as the set designs. Having seen all that, my initial thought while watching was “Yeah, fuck these founding fathers for life, yo.” Alexander Hamilton is shown to be very against slavery in the play, which he was in real life. However, he was also complicit with elements of slavery in order to rise up in politics. He voted in favor of the three-fifths compromise, he married into a slave-owning family in the Schuylers, he bought and sold slaves for his father-in-law, and it’s still debatable on if he actually owned slaves. Again, but I know the play is fanfic tho. The truth can only make appearances where it lifts our protagonist Alexander Hamilton up.
Black Nerd Problems Page 20