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Meanwhile, the demos of the Bronx was finding voices. One voice was the explosion of graffiti on our subways. I loved it! The kids who made it were thrown into a public transit system that was far more broken down than today’s. They told the world, “We are not helpless; we can make this world colorful, exuberant, exciting.” I was thrilled. I took my mother to the 149th Street subway stop, near where we had lived, with a good view of the trains. She was a very reserved woman, but she said, “It’s a rainbow, in a place where who would expect one?”

Almost as a counterweight to the lawmakers and media personalities that use a single clinical trial to prove games are fundamentally evil, the evangelists use a single clinical trial to prove that games are fundamentally benevolent. “Play, don’t Replay!” is just another example of games evangelists twisting a study into a nail to advance their own hammer under the guise of saving the world, and it’s something that people should be cynical about. If being a games naysayer means thinking critically about the place of games in society and not overreaching the findings of individual studies, I for one will gladly be a games naysayer.

As Jeppe sniffed from a bag of Sorachi Ace hops and tasted a new beet-and-licorice-infused beer straight from the fermenting vat, my mind flashed to Mikkel doing the exact same thing across the world, at de Proef — the twins mirroring each other, with an ocean of resentments and recriminations between them.

When the men with guns can’t tell the difference between you and your social security number, the mechanisms of power have lost vital critical thinking. The IC has become out of touch with lived experience.

New Yorkers first have to stop deluding themselves into believing that today’s hyper-gentrification is the same old thing. We all have to stop saying, “New York always changes, so this is normal.” This is not normal. This is state sponsored, corporate driven, turbo charged, far flung, and impossible to stop in its current form.

We can continue in today’s mode of treating disconnection as a way to recharge and regain productivity, or we can view it as a way to sabotage the addiction tactics of the acceleration-distraction complex that is Silicon Valley. The former approach is reactionary but the latter can lead to emancipation, especially if such acts of refusal give rise to genuine social movements that will make problems of time and attention part of their political agendas—and not just the subject of hand-wringing by the Davos-based spirituality brigades.

Nguyen wanted to make games for people like himself: busy, harried, always on the move. “I pictured how people play,” he says, as he taps his iPhone and reaches his other hand in the air. “One hand holding the train strap.” He’d make a game for them.

And the very idea of games criticism risks balkanizing games writing from other writing, severing it from the rivers and fields that would sustain it. Games criticism is subsistence criticism. There’s not enough land to till in games alone. Nor in literature alone, nor in toasters alone. God save us from a future of games critics, gnawing on scraps like the zombies that fester in our objects of study.