Most Media Memory-Holed the Pandemic. Not 1000XRESIST
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #177. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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What’s left when we’ve moved on.
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Remember the COVID-19 pandemic? That’s a trick question – of course you do. But I’ll put it another way: remember how it made you feel at the start? Powerless, anxious, disconnected. Like the world was ending, maybe? Like yours was, definitely.
1000xRESIST remembers. Playing it means stepping into the shoes of an observer to millions of people finding out in real time they’ve been exposed to a disease there’s no way to stop. The main character of the game is a clone of a young woman named Iris, who is the only survivor of a disease brought by aliens called the Occupants. In the first chapter, everyone but her and a team of scientists succumbs to it, leaving her alone except those testing her for immunity. These events are replayed for the army of clones Iris eventually builds, including your protagonist, who sees them from the distance of memory – and while wearing a mask, since even though Iris is immune to the disease, her clones aren’t.
In exploring this virus plot, 1000xResist explores the terror of living through such an event – which we’re all now familiar with. Except, looking at almost all media that’s been published in the four years since, you wouldn’t know it. Masks were removed from film crews later than average, but what’s on TV, in novels and certainly in games has no representation of the epidemic that has changed all our lives so much.
This phenomenon is even more surreal when you know that the pandemic never ended – not practically, but also not even officially. Living in real life with this understanding is a trip in a thousand ways. But one of those ways is looking at every piece of media and seeing none of them reflect the grief and uncertainty that gripped, still grips, the whole world. Media is meant to reflect reality in order to help us understand it. It’s another level of loneliness when it fails at that task.
So, when I say 1000xRESIST remembers the pandemic, and wants you to remember it too, that’s not a small thing. It shows how taking the time to confront moments of extreme societal trauma can be part of processing, and furthermore how that processing requires acknowledging reality – including uncomfortable truths.
One reason no one represents COVID-19 in fiction is that people are sick of hearing about it. Underlying this, I think, is that representations of Covid as over and done with tend to ring hollow when we haven’t worked through our feelings about it. One of the worst offenders is the end of Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World Where Are You?, which turns from a book I otherwise liked into a too-sweet letter series about how the pandemic changed lives as it came and went (the book came out in 2021, so this part has aged like milk). The other option is no acknowledgement at all. The absence of representing Covid in media is more like a swerve away from an unseeable, invisible thing. I’d argue that this absence actually reveals a presence. If the pandemic were really over, it would be everywhere in representation. We don’t talk about it because talking about it uncovers the truth – there was no end.
Julie Muncy, who was a consultant on 1000xRESIST, adds that a concern with being too current has contributed to the pandemic’s absence in games. “It’s hard to make media about such an intense thing without immediately dating yourself. It can really hurt the longevity of a piece of art.” 1000xRESIST avoids this by telling the truth at an angle, representing a fictional pandemic that also feels immediately recognizable. “It couches those authentic experiences within a framework that is just fictionalized enough to feel familiar without directly calling to real events. It’s clearly, transparently, fully the COVID-19 pandemic. But also it’s not.”
The game’s creative director Remy Siu said that the team wanted to give players a sense of familiarity when they encountered the Occupant disease. “[The pandemic] was something we all went through. That’s pretty rare. To say that almost every human on this planet went through this together at the same time.” Another goal was to encourage players not just to recognize the pandemic, but to remember it. “Our hope was to be able to give space for people to think about those things again, now with a bit of distance. We knew probably (and desperately hoped) that by the time 1000xRESIST released, things would have improved regarding survival outcomes. So, it would come as a reminder – Hey! We went through this thing together. We’re maybe still going through it. We maybe haven’t even really come to understand the fallout. Let’s not forget it happened, even though we just want to ‘get back to it.’ How do we reconcile the memories that we had before, to the memories we are making now (if we can at all)?”
Memory is a recurrent theme in the game. The protagonist remembers not just Iris’s memories, which are full of resentment toward her parents and classmates as well as dreams for her future, but her parents’ memories of the 2019 Hong Kong protests. We track through their memories and see them helping each other run from the police and eventually falling in love. This experience becomes what they reach back to years later as they’re holed up in their apartment to avoid the disease. Siu noted in our conversation that not only is the Occupant disease inspired by COVID, it was also inspired by the effects of tear gas in those very same protests – after all, the disease’s main symptom is crying. “The Occupant disease mimicking tear gas symptoms, that definitely does leak into other themes in the game. Getting tear gassed through time and space.”
Later, other characters experience your protagonist’s memories and search for more information to understand them. In the middle of the game, a clone called The Unlucky Shell, who’s been promoted to be in charge of informational distribution, speaks with your character about the library the clones have built. She tells you that information from the past– some of which you’ve experienced firsthand – is not just inaccurate, but morally unfit to exist. “What use is such nostalgia?” she asks. “Better to see our world for what it is today, and build it anew.” Such an answer is chilling in context, and not just because the clones’ previous library burned down under mysterious circumstances. The librarian’s commitment to erasing the past hits differently when she’s telling you, the player, that what you witnessed with your own eyes was wrong.
Speaking about the rupture the pandemic created in the Vancouver performing arts community, out of which 1000xResist’s studio sunset visitor 斜陽過客 was born, Siu also speaks about nostalgia. “It was the pandemic that really ruptured my perception of time – what was the past, what was the present. All of this time perception, era-ending feeling flowed into the game and led to the time-changing mechanic, and the non-linear style of presentation. Feeling deep nostalgia for something that was not long ago.”
For Muncy the game also brought up memories of how the pandemic changed the flow of time. “It captures an extremely specific pandemic phenomenon – the last normal day. I think most of us remember at least a bit of what that was like, in those days when it was obvious that this was a going threat but before it directly impacted us, causing lockdowns, etc. I personally remember going to an appointment a few days before and sitting in the waiting room with this lingering sense of unease, this heightened awareness of my surroundings and their potential to hurt me.” She says the game’s recognition of the pandemic is welcome given the pop cultural silence in the intervening years. “For me and my partner, Covid is still a pretty serious consideration for us, a danger that shapes a lot of our lives. So that recognition is really special, at a time where I think it’s very easy to try to sweep the ongoing circumstances under the rug.”
I felt similarly when I realized what 1000xResist was trying to do. Seeing the game’s narrative call back to that universal experience – a horrible one, but like Siu said, one we all went through together – made me remember the brief amount of time when we broadly recognized the importance of community care. In her 2021 essay about the coronavirus, Leslie Jamison argues that when Americans feel nostalgia for the Before Times, “we aren’t nostalgic for a time before a disease crisis, but nostalgic for a time when that crisis was largely happening elsewhere.” She continues: “The [George Floyd] protests – many of them committed to taking down monuments – asked us to turn our pandemic nostalgia away from restoration and toward reflection and remaking.” Three years on, it seems like we’ve forgotten this lesson, if we learned it the first time. We can explain that Covid was revelatory of other crises, but the collective will to deal with what was revealed has evaporated. There are exceptions, of course. Right now, I’m thinking about the Palestine protestors in medical-grade masks who exemplified how to fight for collective liberation while also protecting each other from disease (and who are now being targeted across the country by mask bans). But for the most part, rather than create nostalgia that remakes, we’ve just tried to go back to 2019.
This is another way of distending time, or believing that you can. Living like we’re in the past is a futile effort, yet moving forward without resolving the crises of the past will doom us to repeating the same cycle over and over. These are the extremes 1000X Resist lives between. As a rare text that acknowledges and shares the pain, suffering, and abandonment of the past four years, it stands as an example of a kind of story that will hopefully become more widespread. Representing reality isn’t enough to stop a disease; wearing a mask is a practical way to do that instead. But in representation’s absence, it’s emotional to see a game turn transparent with recognition, to watch it become clear that the people who made it experienced the same crisis we all are, and that they are choosing to remember.
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Emily Price is a freelance writer and PhD candidate in literature based in Brooklyn, NY.
