By Way Of An Explanation

The nearest galaxy to the Milky Way, our nearest interstellar neighbor, is Andromeda. At 2.5 million light years away, everything we see of it, even with the most powerful telescopes available, comes to us from a dead state, a permutation already reconfigured. Even though it is currently hurtling towards us from distant places and scales difficult to recon with, I recently spent somewhere between 60-80 hours of my life there between my household catching COVID-19 in November and days-off from work I had for the New Year. While quarantining here on earth, I played the 2017 video game Mass Effect: Andromeda and it just might be why I started a lit mag.

My life is a busy one, like most people in their mid-thirties, It’s not unique or surprising but it is a very real factor. I’ve worked almost 13 years at the same steel factory here in Warren, Ohio. I have two daughters, one of which will also be 13 years old this year. I raise them with their mother in a modest house, surrounded by another post-industrial town in the rust belt. I don’t have a lot of time to play video games, though, when I was a teenager, I could sit down and sink a whole weekend into my X-Box without even thinking about it, coming up only for air (read as cheap dominos pizza) when absolutely needed.

On top of this, of course, I write. And then for the past 6 years I’ve been coordinating a monthly open poetry reading at a local cigar bar called Havana House. Somewhere in the midst of all that, I volunteered at a few other literary magazines, trying to gain some experience. Listed out like this, all the barriers to entry here start to feel a bit like the boundaries of galactic space travel. In the midst of all this chaos, periodically, I’ve managed the odd video game here or there, but the kinds of games that let me sit for 15-20 minute stints after my kids have gone to bed and before I am too tired to keep my eyes open. The kinds of games that don’t require twitchy thumbs and a high tolerance for motion sickness. I haven’t done multiplayer since Halo 2. Not surprisingly, I lean into games that can pull me in with its story. 

This brings me to Mass Effect: Andromeda. A 4 year old game. A story already played by millions, reviewed, maligned by bugs and bad buzz. Online servers abandoned. Planned DLC cancelled. A financial bust for its parent company Bioware. On the surface, however, it ticks just about every box for me. Science fiction setting? Check. Ancient lost civilizations you learn about through the ruins they’ve left behind? Check. Roleplaying? Check. Tedious resource management and collection? CHECK! All the things I love! What’s not to love here? It was just sitting there, essentially “free” on the X-BoxOne Gamepass store. There were newer games, ones with better reviews, but two days after the first day of the election, when my family had to go into Covid protocols, I decided to install the game.

You see, I’m not from Ohio. All my extended family lives here and always has, but I was born in the south. Well—Florida. Most people have told me that Florida isn’t the south. Others will tell me that I don’t have an accent, which is true, but the majority of kids I grew up with did. My dad was a pastor in a charismatic, pentecostal evangelical organization. He still is actually. That’s how I grew up. One of those gawd-awful pastor’s kids. One of those brats who steal communion wafers, or in my case, pretended to be drunk after doing shots of Welch’s grape juice, lips and fingers faintly stained in burgundy. In this world, I would eventually discover, I was not welcome. They don’t see it that way, but it doesn’t matter.

Also, it may not seem like it, but it’s important to know that this game, Mass Effect: Andromeda, is the FOURTH installment in a series of similarly titled sci-fi action games in which you create a character (named “Shepard”) that traverses our home galaxy from one end to the other, putting together a rag-tag team of disparate and sometimes unsavory characters in order to save galactic civilization from an existential threat. I managed to play all those games too, over the many years they were spread out, I got to them in as timely a manner as I got to this one. One of the core dynamics here is that, despite being a single-player game, you do not play the story “alone”. These other characters you recruit have rich back stories, personalities, feelings, all scripted of course, but I spend as much time standing around talking to the other characters, trying to squeeze every bit of storytelling out of them—to the point of ignoring or delaying the “main quest”. You don’t have to do any of that. You can ignore all of it in order to get back to shooting evil robots and blowing shit up. I mean—that can be fun too, no judgment, it’s all escapism. It’s just that when I was escaping COVID symptoms, and sitting in the same pajamas for 4 days while everyone in the house is sleeping it off, I thought about those other 3 games as this new one loaded up on the screen before the sun had even hit the blinds of my window. 

I spent too much time building my virtual self. I always play as women in games where it’s an option. My older daughter Raina picked up on this once, and asked me why I played as girls. I told her that I spend my whole regular life playing as a man, and so I don’t see the fun in playing a man when given the choice. Do with that what you will. Silver hair. Purple eyes. Tattoos. A new galaxy was waiting. The least shocking thing was that I quickly discovered that a fair amount of those criticisms and critiques of the game from 4 years ago were warranted. The controls didn’t feel right, like running in someone else’s shoes. The animations—the character facial expressions specifically—were a constant source of amusement and/or nightmare fuel. However, what I came for, I was happy to discover was still wonderfully intact, if with a slight twist.

I didn’t set out to write a review for a video game. This was me trying to figure out a way to explain why I did this thing. Why start another Literary Magazine? Why embark on another project? Why add another categorical hue to my effusive rainbow of iCalendars? Why spend that measly $600 stimulus money on a domain registration, trademark filing, incorporation, non-profit status, and a small myriad of other things instead of paying down one of my credit cards? I didn’t mean for this to turn into like 70% a video game review, but, look—here we are.

The first story twist in Andromeda is that you aren’t the powerful, cunning hero type that came in the previous entries in this series. When the game opens, that type is present, sure—but it’s your dad. Weird. He’s the “Pathfinder”. The person tasked with leading the human colonists, who’ve spent 600 years in a faster-than-light ship, asleep in hibernation, to a “Golden World”, to a promised land you might say. The only hiccup there is that he dies. Like, right away. In the opening segment of the game, he dies, and then he does something that everyone else in the story hates and thinks is wildly misguided. He makes you his replacement. 

This is one of the key aspects of this game. You’re not qualified for the task ahead of you and everyone knows it. They can’t do anything about it, but they don’t hide their dubiousness. A large portion of the game centers on making choices to inspire confidence in the people you are now haphazardly leading into the uncertainty of an uncharted galaxy. Once again, you are given the option to put together a small team around you, ferry out across the stars, while still trying to kill a few hundred evil robots.

I told myself not to try and overthink this. Many time when I’m writing I am tracking “where the piece is going”, quietly in my brain, looking for the little crumbs of ideas that I might try and roll up into a neat little ball of dough at the end. Put a nice little bow on top and punch up the final paragraphs with emotional details referenced at the start. I told myself just to try to offer by way of an explanation, how this happened. I mean, it happens all the time. New journals or magazines pop up and ones that have been around evaporate. They shutter their digital doors for one reason or another. The money ran out. The labor of love was no longer so lovely. Outside life events, trauma or stress became too much. 

The first journal that ever published one of my poems was called Ink&Nebula. I found out earlier today that they no longer exist. The domain is currently available for purchase. I used the Wayback Machine, and was shocked to find out that they had just started in February of 2018. They were based in Columbus, Ohio. Just a few hours away from where I live. They had a team of readers. The founder and EIC was named Fayce Hammond who describes herself on her website as “a fat, queer, Chickasaw poet”, and they had two cats named Furryosa and Martini Steve. 

The last post to their Twitter account was September 19, 2019. I tried reaching out to them tonight, because I wanted them to know how much I appreciate them. I’ve been writing my whole life. I had self-published two collections of poetry. I had been running an open reading for years. But Ink&Nebula was the first time I had sent a little ship out into the wide world and someone affirmed it, someone who didn’t know me beyond the words in the poem alone, and they affirmed it. It felt different. 

I want Olney to do that. I want Olney to be that. I want to affirm people’s stories. I want to affirm them here, hold them up—high over our heads—riding on a cosmic ray. I want to shrink the distance between the ground and the sky. I want to bottle some of both, and give every one of them away. And as for me, I want to disappear like an alley cat at the creak of a back kitchen door. Green eyed. Quiet as a fence post. A squatter without the rights.

There’s no guarantee we will last even as long as others have. It’s a chaotic universe we live in. I know that the team volunteering their time here at Olney is a special group of very talented people. Their excitement and their belief in this idea is what is pushing me to work hard on this every day. I want them to be rewarded with being apart of something they can be proud of, even beyond the time when it eventually ends.