Choose Your Character

My ambitions have changed.

I doubt I’m the only one. Many people come out of the educational system with a desire to do good in the world. Making society better, building an interesting career, earning wealth that can be shared with others through philanthropy. Inclusion. Kindness. Progress.

Tutorial: We Have a Dream

My plans for this year – and the future in general – aren’t straightforward. Easy mode would have been, “Just write a blog.”

Achievement Unlocked: Shortest Vocal Challenge Submission Ever.

I’ve talked about my previous ambitions and what they meant to me in my entry to the Sleep Resolution Challenge, Our Glass. What’s changed is that I just don’t have the luxury of infinite time. I can no longer tell myself that I’ll learn a bunch of languages and invent my own “sometime down the road.” I’m approaching 40. It’s time to focus.

The biggest change in my ambitions is to step down the scale of how I’d hoped to make the world a better place. Instead of instituting national and global educational reform, improving information literacy throughout the Internet, and moving society out of our capitalist dystopian nightmare, I’m going to start with kindness. It’ll begin with myself and move outward. Small. Simple. Down to earth.

Inclusion is a part of that value (and attitude) of compassion. If you’re only nice to people like yourself, and dismissive or straight-up harmful to those who are different, then you don’t have the kindness or moral high ground you think you do.

Choose Your Character

I’m going to couch most of this in terms of a personal project I’ve had in mind for some time called Choose Your Character.

This phrase is common in video games; the player often chooses who they play as, such as the soldier the player controls in a war game. Usually the choice comes with considerations, like what kinds of weapons or special skills the character might have.

Choose Your Character came partly from my interest in language. Every writing system has characters, such as kanji, hieroglyphics, or an alphabet. My plans for this project include examining the use of language in video games, yes, but it’s more than that. Languages have different assumptions, underlying beliefs, and connections based on the speakers and their location, heritage, culture, and so on. Even something as simple as colour can be handled so differently between languages that you might wonder if the other speakers see something you don’t!

What does this have to do with kindness and inclusion?

Communication, for one.

I plan to look at language, and connect it to something as popular as gaming, as a way to show people that diversity is a reality. This reality can present challenges, true, but they’re worth it. Diversity in how we name, describe, phrase, and sort our observations, experiences, and ideas can lead to community, connection, and creativity. All kinds of interesting things can come for this. Speed runners, for instance, will play their games in Japanese because the text boxes clear faster.

Posts and blog-like commentary as part of Choose Your Character may be entirely on Vocal, or might be split between different platforms with my own website as a unifier. Regardless, the language part of what I’m describing is partly about fun and wordplay. But it’s also about raising awareness of issues like language loss in minority groups, code switching, and accessibility.

For instance, I might post about endangered languages and modern efforts to preserve them. Preservationists have been creating words in Indigenous languages for modern concepts like “computer” -- which the Mohawk language translated as “lightning brain box.” If these efforts get the time and resources they need, we could see waves of gamers, game developers, and even whole new genres come from Indigenous tribes.

Accents are another part of that. Never let anyone apologise for their accent! Variety in how we speak is musical and beautiful. It also represents heritage, culture, and a sense of identity and belonging. I love accents. One of those small acts of kindness I aim to do more this year is to tell people when I appreciate their accent. When a person can speak more than one language, that’s awesome, and they should never be shamed for it.

Starting with being kind to myself, one of my aims for this year is not to beat myself up so much for the fact that I haven’t even become fluent in my second language yet. I can work on my French whenever I have the time and energy, but I’m an adult with a day job and many goals. I can’t drop everything and move to France for a year!

Level 1: Story

Obviously, writing is connected with language. I’m laying the groundwork for the Choose Your Character project this year, but it is not my only writing project. I’m currently a published author with Engen Books. With them I am writing a series of novels, set in their universe, called Knives of Engen. In a few weeks, they'll release my first anthology of short fiction, Interstitches: Worlds Sewn Together.

In the spirit of the video game theme, Choose Your Character will include fiction in the LitRPG genre. If you’ve ever encountered the anime Sword Art Online, you’ve seen a LitRPG story. For those of you who are unfamiliar, the genre blends video game mechanics with the reality of the story in a direct and literal way. For example, characters may be able to see others’ health bars above their heads. They may even be able to “reload” from a save point if they die.

It’s much more in-depth than the related genre of game lit in that LitRPG gives full details of a character’s statistics (which improve as the story progresses), resources, abilities and powers, and so on. Game lit just uses video game motifs, like leveling up or having a HUD (heads-up display), without getting too much into the nitty-gritty. A popular example is the recent movie Free Guy.

What does this have to do with kindness and inclusion?

LitRPG is traditionally about cishet white male characters who save the day and get the girl. My aim is to preserve the important parts of the genre – like the game mechanics and the fantasy/ science fiction adventure – while crafting more diverse stories that touch on real world issues.

In fact, my writing in general will be much in that vein. As a cishet white man myself, I acknowledge my privilege and the limits my perspective may have. I want to celebrate the differences others overlook, like language groups, non-traditional families and relationships, and neurodivergence. Research will be a big part of my goals to increase awareness of diversity and capture the realities of characters and their stories.

Level 2: Research

I enjoy research. Not the unsourced, poorly-thought-out videos of ranting Youtubers, and not the unskilled stumbling through Google for some confirmation bias. I mean actually digging up information.

I’ll share what I learn with my fellow nerds through Choose Your Character by compiling literature reviews. A literature review isn’t like the reviews for movies you might see on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s the collection, with notes and descriptions, of literature on a subject. For example, consider the debate on whether or not video games are art. A literature review on that subject would put together the articles, websites, books, and so on I’ve found about video games as art and lay out what you get from each of those items.

It paints the picture in broad stroke.

Kindness and inclusion comes from being part of an online culture of sharing information. It’s about engaging with the issues, such as accessibility in gaming. Poverty, racial disparities, and quality of life can all come into play. For example, gold farming is the use of digital sweatshops in less-developed nations where people spend all day building characters or collecting in-game resources to be sold for real-world money to players on the Internet around the world.

I can’t fix that.

Not by myself.

We can make information multi-player, though. Stop misinformation and disinformation, like the messages of flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers, and share a love of video games while doing it. That’s what I have in mind.

Level 3: The Compass of Compassion

Cheesy section title is cheesy.

When I discovered video games and fantasy stories, it was like I’d found the magic compass in the dungeon. In Metroid, our heroine Samus Aran prevails over the isolation of an alien world where even the air is acidic. In The Lord of the Rings, the terror and power of the Dark Lord Sauron are thwarted by bare-footed Hobbits with bread in their pockets.

Fantasy and games are framed by exploration, self-improvement, finding the tools to grow and survive, slaying demons, and searching for places of safety and peace. They are about imagination, possibility, and understanding.

They are about hope.

There’s hope in kindness, inclusion, learning, information, and research.

This year, I aim to be kinder to myself by writing and pursuing stories about which I am passionate. That means less “will this story fix society?” and more “will people connect with what I like and maybe talk values?” Hopefully, that spirit of kindness will get some conversations going in a vaguely positive direction.

If I can’t re-map the controllers of society, I can at least get players signing into more inclusive lobbies.

Post-Game

That’s the main story for this little quest I’ve written. Just for fun, here are some additional features.

Late-Stage Capitalism, Reviewed like a Video Game

Playability 2/10

We need to say “No hax!” to the billionaires who twist the rules for their own gain.

Controls 3/10

It’s like those in power made the game for us to watch, but most players keep running into frustrations like impassable knee-high fences. The “Up” button doesn’t seem to work very well.

Graphics 4/10

Very samey. Just dollar signs, punch clocks, and something about a better life in the future. Draw distance is short, though -- and it’s hard to look to the horizon when Rent Demons are giving you frame rate issues.

Roll Credits

The real drive of the project is not just my own love of learning and desire to make sense of the world, it’s the building of community. It’s the use of an accessible medium and a common set of interests to unite a wide and wild variety of humans.

Choose to be a learner and a listener. Choose to play not just for the game itself, but for what the game will teach you. Choose to engage in conversations, powered by inspired language, while changing the language we use to be more inclusive. Choose to break down needless barriers like poverty or prejudice. Choose community and compassion.

Choose your character.