Winston Churchill was a racist asshole but he was also neurodivergent as hell. He spent his nights during the blitz rehearsing strategies over and over of how he would leave the building if it was bombed or taken by nazi troops. He had contingency plans for his contingency plans. He was a ruminator, and he was wracked by what could happen and how he might be responsible. When he was seven years old his father let him borrow his gold pocket watch, and a school bully threw it in the river. Winston paid his own money to have six men from the village divert the river so he could search for the watch in the mud. He did not find it and his strict, emotionally distant father made him pay for the lost watch. Sometimes ruminators are built from trying to stop their parents withholding their love. They live in the “if only”, forever.

When my grandfather was 19 years old the nazis invaded his home country of the Netherlands. Resistance immediately began. One day, after the assassination of a leading figure, the nazis marched into the middle of the town square and randomly grabbed fifty men. They put the men in the middle of the square and then they gunned them down. They knew that people were helping the resistance, so they made sure everyone knew the price of that help. My grandfather was standing near a younger boy who screamed and yelled when they took his father and then when his father fell, the boy stopped screaming, and went into a kind of catatonia. My grandfather was looking at the boy, and he never, ever forgot that look. 

My grandfather survived the occupation, just barely. Once he was rounded up by soldiers who intended to have him shipped to the work camps in Germany. One soldier left to get back up, and he and his two friends rushed at the nazi. My father grabbed the guard’s gun and hit him in the stomach hard, and he never forgot the look of pain on the man’s face as all the wind was knocked out of him. My grandfather survived, and left his homeland and had four children and eleven grandchildren and dozens of great grandchildren. He raised a dairy farm out of nothing but dirt and built a life. Sixty five years later, I visited him in hospital when he was quite sick. It was the first time I had been alone with him in my whole life. I held his hand and I saw fear in his eyes, the fear of dying. I held his hand and I comforted him as best I could.

Last week someone died while I was performing CPR on them. 

For a long time as a young boy and young man I was terrified that when the time came to save people, I would falter and not be strong. I lived in a permanent rumination of what I would do when the time came. In my autistic fashion I would listen to The Impression That I Get over and over and over, because I was so worried that when I was tested I would fail. Turns out I shouldn’t have worried. I have carried people out of danger. I have given my last bit of food to feed another. When my grandfather was afraid I held his hand despite my fear. When my friend was dying I didn’t panic. I pulled her onto the floor and I did everything I could to save her life. But the worry goes on. I live in the perpetual fear of failure. Trying to make myself into something that cannot fail. That will not fail. And that will stop the bad things from happening. If only I had concentrated, listened, paid attention, they told me as a boy, then the silly thing would not have happened. I had to pay attention. I had to stop it before it happened. I have to stop it.

This is a blog about games. Bear with me.

I don’t watch horror movies much. I have enough horror of my own. But I keep making them. My latest game I have just announced, and it is dark. As dark as it gets. It’s called Five Years After and it’s about the apocalypse, and the nature of how we self-destruct. It’s based in part on the post-apocalyptic fears of my youth: movies like The Day After and Threads and When The Wind Blows. The nature of the game is that we begin five years after a terrible apocalypse, and then we wind the clock back and back and back, to find out how the terrible events took everything from you. Bit by bit, the things that kept you safe and happy in the world before the zombies, those things are stripped away. The fun of the game, the power of the game, is discovery: the random nature of which things you lose when tells a unique story that cannot happen any other way, and reveals things to you that you did not know about your character and could not know without playing. I think it is fun and beautiful, but it is also very bleak, because there is no happy ending. You are left with one attribute that you keep, but that is often bitter sweet or darkly ironic. The world ended and so did you.

My great colleague and co-developer Peter asked me what the game was for, then, if it was so bleak. I think it’s a fair question. I have always believed that everything we do echoes unto eternity, that small things matter and that my games and my art can and will change others. That’s why we make art, really: to take our thoughts and struggles out of ourselves with the hope that it connects with other people. I also believe that art isn’t always just a good thing, and that we should justify what we put into the world, as opposed to flippantly believing that art has no power and can’t affect anyone. I keep making grim, dark games and I think I should justify that, even if I find myself unable to make anything else. Peter thought the game’s message was that you cannot change your fate, and therefore the game was defeatist and nihilistic. The game might even be adding to the wickedness of the world, then.

I think sometimes there are people who give up, who see a wicked world and decide that it’s not their job to clean it up and they might take fatalism as an easy excuse to justify that. But I think there are also people like me who think the opposite, who think that everything is their responsibility and their fault, and if they try hard enough, if they work hard enough, then nothing bad will happen, and that everything bad that does happen must be because they didn’t work hard enough or love well enough or think things through. This has only gotten worse in a world of advertising that desperately makes you feel insufficient, and the panopticon of social media, where everyone is judging you, all of the time.

Terrible things have happened to me. Things that I cannot tell you and might never speak of. Things that defy belief in the suffering they have inflicted, and the cruelty of their shape, and the callousness of those who inflicted them or let them continue. These things took things from me and they took things from the people I love and those things will never heal. Or rather, healing will not make them back to where they were, back to good as new. And yet I persist. I grieve for what I have lost but I remain and that is worth something. What I lost in the fire, I find in the ashes. Like the phoenix I was burned but did not die; I was reborn.

And there is nothing I could have done to stop this things from happening to me, and these parts of myself being taken from me. They were not my fault.

The fascists are rising over my friends in the USA. Their gestapo is snatching people off the streets and killing them in death camps. Israel is conducting genocide. The world is full of monsters and people are dying and in a way, maybe, all my games are about all of this. Relics is about how we can believe in our own potential to be good. Partners is about trusting one another. The Score is about how security is all theatre and the most powerful forces are much, much weaker than they look.

And Five Years After is a reminder that terrible things are happening and you must be brave and you must fight hard and it will cost you. But none of this is your fault. In their panic, people will blame you and tell you you should have done more to stop it. But there is always more we could have done, and more we could do. Blaming ourselves is not going to help. They did this to us. It is their fault. And now we have to be brave, and we will survive – but it is not our fault.

I don’t know if Five Years After can help us deal with the apocalypse on our doorsteps, but maybe it can, and even if it can’t, it’s what I feel and think. It’s what I want to say. It’s what my heart aches to speak of. And I hope that someone out there finds something in it for themselves.