‘New Game / Options / Quit’ by Claire Watson

There is nothing. It’s the body without being, and being without a body the nothing is limitless. Flesh turned to pixels, being is malleable. You can begin by forgetting yourself. Discard the name, the feel of blood around bones under skin, the sound of your voice still lingering on your lips. We’ll find a new one for you, don’t you worry. Stare at your reflection on the black screen. Unfocus your eyes until they are unravelling this known world. We’ll find a new one for you, don’t you worry. Here in this nothingness, you can become anything. There is the whirr of a fan, chip-tunes rustling through your speakers, the sweat gluing your palm to a mouse or controller. You can empty your mind to ingest the opening world.

Here, you will play as a child of the 21st century. Born into the chaos of the digital age, this is your player character. You will be known as a fragment of the generation that saw computers shrink and morph their sizes, names changing from family to personal. You’ve grown playing on gaming consoles that took bites out of your living room, that had thick controllers with cables twisting through the scene, connecting little you to the big TV. You have seen these controllers disappear, then be reborn, then disappear again. Always you’ve had technology pulsating at the edge of your fingertips. Always, you’ve been staring into a screen.

You are always being and you are always changing. You may not change your name. The body grows but it remains. Try to discard it. Press start, and begin again.

*

You begin without a story, a blank slate intaking the world with gulping eyes. For a moment, you are nameless. There’s a time where you don’t know the colour of your hair or the moles on your skin. Your body feels blank, unimportant, it’s not yet yours to customize. It’s a while before you learn the mounds of fat on your chest or the gap between your legs should bear meaning. Your hip bones are still narrow, aligned with your feet in your small hit box.

This is just the beginning, and in the beginning, you watch as your brother scales a slab of rock. White lines of mineral run like code through the rock’s chest, lines where the ground tried to sketch the tree-tipped skyline into its issue 18.indd 13 15/10/2024 12:56 14 CLAIRE WATSON skin. The rubber soles of your brother’s runners slip and squeak against the purplish grit. A wordless prompt tells you to follow him – the first step is always forward. You meet him at the rock’s tip and look down around the surrounding world. You are on a large hill, looking down a sheer drop into an abandoned quarry that is full of blackberries, torn kites and wildflowers. Beyond the flowers are campervans with rainbow striped awnings tucked beneath the shade of thick trees. Behind the trees, there is a stream, and on the border of the stream there are dock leaves. Beside you, there is a playground, shielded by stone and rubber fencing. Behind you and your brother is a dusty trail that encircles the quarry as it leads down to where your parents are sitting inside the caravan. The sunlight feels wet on your faces. Midges swarm. You feel so small in this immense, secluded scene.

In your mind, however, is a different world altogether. Your brotheris here too, and he brings a finger to his lips, signalling for you to be quiet. There are no people here. The rock becomes the edge of a cliff, the playground a tangle of trees. You press your bodies, no longer small but tall and strong, against the stone. You listen. In the real world, a bee hums in the air. In your mind, there is the piercing shriek of a monster tearing through the landscape. Your eyes dart down the quarry, and where there were once campervans there is now a gorgeous sea. Epioths, long-necked herbivores, bask in the waves. You watch them roll their large bellies towards the sun, grey scales turning golden. Your attention is yanked back by the chaos of tree trunks snapping, torn apart by claws and bark picked apart by a ferocious beak. The monster shrieks once more. Guttural, sharp, a mockery of the sounds of destruction it has wrought. Qurupeco, a bird-like monster with a throbbing vocal sac that allows it to imitate the calls of other monsters. You grip the hilt of your greatsword, thumb on the pommel. Your brother’s hand darts to the paint bombs strapped around his waist.

In real life, you descend into the playground, but in your minds you are rushing through the Deserted Island. The dusty trail is a waterfall crashing into a fast flowing stream. The rocks bend overhead, forming cave mouths where the deer-like Kelbi are galloping for cover. In the opening, in the remains of a large, crushed nest, the Qurupeco is opening its lime-green and purple wings and rearing back its neck. Its heart-shaped vocal sac pulses – its weak spot. You unsheathe your greatsword and run forward. Toward the swing set, towards your prey.

*

Look at the TV screen. See how strong you are. You’ve spent what feels like hours designing the perfect character, cycling through every hairstyle and face type until you find the ones that feel not like you, but an extension of you. You listen to the preset voices, shrill squeaks and deep grunts. You lend your character your name, and the game asks if you are happy.

You arrive at the quaint yet bustling Moga Village. Less a village and more a large piece of driftwood suspended off the coast of a grassy island teeming with monsters. But as you touch down on the water-logged planks, the village’s busy whimsy is fractured as the waves turn dark and ferocious, threatening to sink Moga Village in one swipe. You hear belches of thunder, but look up to see a clear, sunny sky. When the commotion dies down, the Chief pulls you aside and tells you the tale of the Lagiacrus, an electricity-breathing leviathan that stalks the waters of the Deserted Island. As the only monster hunter the village has, you make a promise to protect its people and to slay the Lagiacrus. The Chief laughs and smacks you on the back, his wiry arms still managing to knock the wind from you. You’re not strong enough, he tells you. Not yet.

In reality, you are weak. As the shortest in your school, the boys take pleasure in gathering around you, their navy Gaelscoil jumpers blotting out the schoolyard, intimidating you and making jeers about your body. The girls are somewhat better, but enjoy treating you as some toddler that stumbled through the school gates. For a while, you treat them like games in a CD tower, moving from group to group with ease, until you realize that they all see you the same, more a toy than a child.

One day you find a girl sitting on her own in the yard. She’s from the opposite class, and so you don’t know her very well. You don’t even learn her name, but you go to her. Your rubber Mary Janes slip across the copper leaves as you run with her across the yard. She has a colourful braid in her hair that she says she got while in Spain. She’s tall too, much taller than the other kids in her class. When the bell rings you walk together to your class lines, agreeing to meet at the same time the following day. You’re happy to finally have a friend.

You spend the week playing with her, until lunch break she catches you from behind and squeezes her arms across your chest. She pulls you up, and screams to a boy that’s now walking over, ‘I’ve got her!’ Your reflexes, the ones you’ve honed while playing Monster Hunter kick in. She’s no longer a girl, but a beast – a green Rathian – that’s caught you in her maw. You wriggle back and forth, elbows pushing against her, until finally she drops you. You hit the tarmac running. Like a game, you’ve suddenly realized the rules of this world. You won’t play with her again, and as a sticky feeling crawls up your skin, you resign to being on your own.

After school, you’ll stay inside. You’ll finish your homework and drop your school bag beside the couch. The disc is already in the Wii. First you hear the waves, then the folk soundtrack that permeates Moga Village, and soon you start to feel better.

As you get older, you take up taekwondo. When you lean backwards into kicks and raise your fists in front of your face you imagine you’re facing off monsters the size of houses. You pretend that your weapon has been knocked from your grasp, and that you’re almost too sore to stand, but you know that you’re strong enough to keep fighting. You continue playing Monster Hunter, levelling up and taking on bigger monsters and unlocking new settings. Eventually you take down the Lagiacrus and save Moga Village. You should feel happy, but somehow it’s you that feels defeated.

There’ll only ever be a controller in your hand, a piece of chunky plastic, a sad excuse for a sword. You watch your monster hunter tumble across the screen, her high-pitched grunts sound deranged suddenly. You’ve been spending more and more time in the character customization menu, rebuilding the person you want to be. Nothing feels right. You try different hairstyles, lingering a moment on the pixie cut, the only short style afforded to the female body type, but quickly move on. You try on different armours, opting for the less revealing options, hiding your hunter’s perky cleavage. As you exit, the screen briefly turns black and you see yourself in the TV. Your body still feels blank, not yet your own. You wonder if it ever will be.

*

You hold a new controller, sweaty in your palms. Growing up, you have the fear that you’re on the precipice of exploding. As a child, you believe that there is electricity in your hands. You feel it pooling in your fingertips, making the skin on your palms feel tight. You’re so scared that one night you’ll eventually pop that you beg your parents to take you to the doctor. She tells you to suck on a hard sweet. Years later, a counsellor diagnoses you with anxiety.

You feel a different sort of electricity when you grip the controller and feel the game sending vibrations into your hands. The vibrations follow the clash of your sword, the roar of dragons, the shudder of your shield. There’s no time to be anxious while playing video games. There are dragons that need slaying. What does it matter that you’re sweaty and all your friends hate you? You smash your fingers against the buttons. Get a move on, Dragonborn! You drive the joysticks forward, landing hit after hit, until finally, you exhale with a cheer. When you play video games, you allow your body to feel each emotion as they come. There’s no space for the electricity to start building up. You are a steady flow of energy. There is only release.

The guard calls on you. Overhead, a dragon screeches. ‘It’s nothing. Carry on,’ he says. You step forward, dry earth crunching beneath your bare feet. The guard asks for your name and for you to customize your character. You’re twelve years old and the controller grows cold in your hands. You switch between the male and female options, the game letting out a thunk each time. You are your parents’ daughter, your brother’s sister and you play camogie. You sit alone in the playroom, in the corner of that couch, and stare at the distant screen. There’s a discomfort that you feel only in female spaces, like the locker room before a match. Your jersey sticks to your curving form, while your knickers itch as you change into blue, polyester shorts. You get dressed in a blur, refusing to acknowledge your physicality. At least in a video game, you know the graphics outlining your breasts aren’t real.

You like being out on the field, hearing your cleats bite the wet grass. On the pitch, you’re rendered androgynous, your ponytail hidden under your helmet. Your body aches on the pitch, but the cold air snapping at your throat is freeing. Silvery clouds fall from your lips, and you pretend that you’re breathing fire. All the players shout at each other, but you hang back and watch. The captain tells you to keep moving, be ready to strike. In Skyrim, the land is covered in meadows trodden by elks, and the snow-tipped peaks rise like brushes to paint auroras across the night sky. When you hold your hurl, you imagine it as a sword.

Squeeze the hot wood between your fists.

The excitement lasts until the final whistle is blown, and your team regathers to share praises of ‘Good game, girls,’ a reminder of what you’re supposed to be.

Customize your character and wish for a third choice.

You change back into your hoodie and leggings, knowing that there is more to you than the flesh lumped onto your chest. After your last camogie match, you find blood spreading across your shorts. This is natural. You inform your mother in a calm manner. It isn’t until your friend sits down beside you and whispers, ‘You’re a woman now,’ that you start to feel betrayed by nature, undone by the blood staining your thighs.

For the first few years of secondary school, periods ravage your body. Your stomach rips itself to shreds and your nerves are so frantic that you wonder if exploding is still a possibility. Worse, you have to deal with school. Where your body is ill-fitting, where you’re terribly self-conscious, and where a boy’s just reached his hand over your shoulder and squeezed your chest. Despite the pain, you’re happy to come home sick with cramps and boot up Skyrim. Your mom brings you almond ice-cream, and it helps.

The version of yourself that you see roaming the tundras of Skyrim gets you through these years. The strain on your shins as you dash across the field or hurry down the red hallways avoiding all conversation, is the same strain your character feels as they leap towards the dragon. Hold your hurl like a sword, and fight. You stop playing camogie, but never Skyrim. You’ll play it for years to come, and each time you play, you taste the sweet cream freezing your lips. You are the Dragonborn, and it doesn’t matter what goes on beneath your armour, or beyond your controller. What matters is your voice. Shout, and topple worlds.

*

You are spinning. The oxygen is rapidly hissing out of your suit. You watch as your crew’s escape pods grow smaller, white flecks falling towards the planet that at once seems below you and all around you. Your ship is space junk now. The attackers, satisfied with their destruction, are fleeing. In your final moments, you are alone in space. You begin to choke, your hands losing their grip as you try to cover the leak. Each second you are growing weaker, space is growing darker.

In every game you play, you make a promise that one day it will end. Inevitably, credits will roll and the music will play you out as the story comes to its close. You’re not great at endings. In all your years of playing Skyrim, you never reach the end. You break your promises, defy the game’s code, and put your controller down without ever completing your final quests. You exit, begin again, and once more the character customization screen is staring you down. You keep finding yourself back here, staring at a blank body. The body is malleable, you can morph it to look as close to you as you can but you’ll never be happy with it. After all these battles, all these moments, you still look exactly the same. Everyday you wake and stare into the mirror, finding the same parts staring back. Despite everything, it’s still you.

You abandon your quest to save Tamriel and choose a new game to play. You pillage your brother’s stack of Xbox 360 games and search for another story. You find Mass Effect 2 and skip the character customization, settling on the preset. You still pick the female option. Commander Shepard’s voice is deep, almost androgynous. The futuristic N7 armour hides her form, more protective than flattering. Her iconic red hair is a shorn and tangled bob, not too dissimilar from yours. She stares back at you, with calculating anger, her fist wrapped around her pistol. You can work with this.

Then, in the opening moments of the game, Commander Shepard is flung from her ship in a surprise attack, and suffocates in space.

The idea of endings nag at you, yet you beg for a do-over. Right now, everyone else your age is at school, but you sit in the doctor’s office staring at the floor. The irony of your thick pink sweater that reads, ‘Girl’s World,’ isn’t lost on you. You pull at your sleeves. Your doctor tells you that you can’t get stuck like this, that she has patients who are so sick they’re afraid to leave the house, that she doesn’t want to see you like that. You don’t know why it’s easier to be inside. You spend your teenage years stuck inside your head, imagining different realities, different stories you could’ve been born in. How do you tell your doctor that it’s not that you want everything to end, but you just wish you could exit and begin again?

Sleep becomes impossible, and at age seventeen you get a night-light. The dark feels too much like a ‘Game Over,’ and each night feels like it might last forever. Your heart feels taut in your chest, your body feels light, and so many times you worry that this will be it.

Commander Shepard wakes up. She is rebuilt, reborn, repaired. She gets another chance, and every day, so do you.

*

You can pause.

There’s nothing to do, no movement, just this ensnaring stasis. Your world is frozen, as a global pandemic shuts everything down, yet you feel more alive than you have in a long while. There is another chance. Another game. Another narrative beyond the end credits of a path that felt like it was spiralling to nowhere.

In the first weeks of the pandemic you buy a binder. It’s shiny and pink and flattens your breasts. When you wear t-shirts, it looks like there’s nothing there. You prop your phone against your windowsill and stare at yourself on the screen. You feel a little underwhelmed, not disappointed, but it’s just, this is how you’ve always looked inside your head. You’re not different, you’re not changed. You’re just happy.

In the first months of the pandemic, with the money you’ve been given as a congratulations for the Leaving Certificate that you didn’t do, you buy a Nintendo Switch Lite. It’s small and pink and comes with Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

If it weren’t for the world rolling to a halt, you don’t know how you would’ve made it out of secondary school. The pandemic ruptures normality, and when faced with the unknown, you turn to childhood comforts. On walks, you’d find parts of your town that you didn’t know could exist. Find leaves bending against country roads framed by stones; the view of your house through a cowgate, many miles away; a stream rippling beneath an old bridge in the dark.

There is no silver lining to the pandemic, but one day you’re sitting in the car with your mother, on the way to get your vaccine, and she tells you that more people seem to be coming out as queer than ever before. Though she is accepting, she wonders why that is, half-worried that the world is turning too online. You shake your head and reply, ‘People now just have the time to be alone with themselves and figure things out.’ You don’t say that people now have nothing else to do but to answer the questions they’ve long been ignoring, to finally let the eggshells break.

In this time, you find another game to play. Capcom releases Monster Hunter: Rise on the Nintendo Switch. Since leaving school you’ve been working in a pharmacy, and it feels rewarding using your wages to pick up this new title. You’re racing home, snapping off the surgical mask and landing yourself on the couch in the living room. After all these years, the room is laid out the same as it was when you were a kid. You’re quickly thrown into the character customization menu, and confronted by the game’s ‘types.’ In essence, your character is genderless. You are still given the choice between a masculine body and a feminine body, but otherwise your character is yours. You design your character to be as much like you as Capcom will allow – short green hair, smudged eyeliner and a shadow trailing around your lips. Being able to put facial hair on your character feels euphoric. Though it’s not something you strive for in your daily presentation, it puts an undeniably queer spin on your character, a little like drag. You pretend that this is the same hunter from all those years ago, who found a way to escape their small village and live as themselves. Later, your brother remarks, ‘I can’t believe how much your character looks like you.’ You’d never been able to do that in a game before.

*

You’re lying on the couch, you and the boy that you don’t speak to anymore. You play in the dark, the television filling your living room with pale blue light – the same shade as the stars outside. In your memory, you’re leaning against him, your cheek pressed against his arm. You’ve been pretending that you don’t mind his mistakes. You’ve been out since starting at university, and everyone else knows what to call you, but he tells you that everyone else doesn’t appreciate your time or space so maybe you let his mistakes slide as payment for his attention. Right now, it doesn’t matter what you are. You are a body, and that’s enough for him. His controller is in your hand and you’re lost in the TV screen. You’re Princess Leia – later you’ll beg to be Obi Wan Kenobi – and you’re finally playing Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. You’d both spent the summer saving for it, and you felt so young, like the time you convinced your classmates to save up for Minecraft, back when it only cost €10. He ended up surprising you with it. Now you’re playing, and he’s looping his arm around you, his forearm rubbing against your neck. You feel so tiny in his embrace, as fragile as the Lego figures running across the screen. He watches them too, the light catching in his stubble. It’s easier to pretend that you’re okay with this when the darkness makes your living room fade away, and you’re there, on the Death Star, constantly shooting his character in the back because you think that it’s funny.

The controller doesn’t feel right in your hands. Your fingers curve along its edge, tenderly resting on the back buttons as you thumb the joysticks. You take the controller away and your hand is a limp, half-opened fist. Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga hides in its box, wedged behind your bookshelf. It doesn’t feel right to sit on this couch anymore. You look at your reflection on the TV screen, and there you see what everyone else sees: a lonely girl with the light dimming in her eyes as she tries to play make-believe with herself.

There is nothing. The game sits in your library as though it had spawned there. You have been purposefully blotting over the past year, trying to forget how it felt to lose control over your body. But as you make the past into a big, blackened smear you forget important things too, like the days, feelings and how to control your mind. You press play and Disco Elysium begins to load. It opens onto a black screen and you converse with the different parts of yourself, their voices rising from the recesses of your mind. You wake from the darkness only to find you have lost everything. All you know is your body and how it aches. Narrative amnesia is a trope of many games, but here it’s the consequence of your character’s failed attempt at ending everything. As you play, you feel more here than anywhere else. You want to care for your character, to pull him back from the edge. You build a character that wants to forgive himself, that wants to be kind, that wants one more chance to find the beauty in this world. So you spend the game marvelling at the snow falling across the broken city, listening to and answering the wind’s whispers, whistling on ice-cloaked lakes. You find parts of yourself and parts of the world that you never thought you could’ve loved. You love so much. As you lie on your bedroom floor, your body drained dry and staring at the bright ceiling lights, you repeat the words of your character and say to yourself, ‘I don’t want to be this kind of animal anymore.’

You stare at your reflection. In yourself you’ll build a character that you like. You’ll bind your chest and learn how to cut your own hair, watching as your portrait changes and grows into something more lifelike. Sometimes the smile will fade and you’ll mourn the person you once were, but then with red-rimmed eyes you’ll realize that nothing has changed at all. Your body has grown only at your hands.

The body is a weightless vessel of limbs both sinking and floating – loading. In Monster Hunter Tri, you plunge into the turquoise expanse and the body becomes miniscule. At the edge of the map, the Lagiacrus sleeps, curled up in a ball like a cat, snoring as she floats. Pixels whirl around. White dots that could be flecks of sand or microorganisms but always look like stars. The sea caverns expand around you, sucking you into their darkness. Stone pillars rise from the ocean floor, and in this enclosed space you are confronted by the sheer greatness of this world. You enjoy watching the monster sleep. You zoom out until you are two indigo specks. Zoom out, until it feels like the sea is gushing from the television screen. Your body is sinking, down to where the light can’t penetrate. There are bones here, in piles where the pillars disappear into the sand. There are minerals here, crystallized with salt and sparkling gold like loot. In the game, there is nothing you can do but stare down at the waterlogged bones. You imagine your character offering up their prayers, their stomach twisting at the knowledge that this could be them. As you stare, you feel yourself grow weightless, your legs unfolding and the controller drifting from your grip. There is a whole world down here, and you are so infinitesimal. Images of coral wave in repeated animation. Schools of two-dimensional fish drift past. There is no you anymore, just turquoise waters flooding your living room. The body disappears and you are staring at the bodies encased in sand. You are nothing but an indigo speck, no greater than the white pixels whirling around.

But here in the ocean you are a body, and this body matters. You should play and you should live. You should be the body that is being. You should experience this world, feel wild sea-spray on your face as you would the vibrations from controller to hand. Spread your arms, become a star floating on the ocean’s face. You should look to the real and blue sky and the sun that is setting beneath the ocean’s edge. Here the sea is a murky grey and you can hardly make out your own legs floating beneath you. There are people tumbling down the beach, their feet rolling over the stones, their fingers picking out shells from the silty sand. These experiences, virtual or not, are all you have and despite all the pain that is in fact wonderful. Here, your skin is turning red as your muscles start to freeze.

*

You are staring down at a cardboard box. Your childhood Wii games, your brother’s old Xbox games, your own Switch games all stand side by side, caked in the same dust. There are wires and plastic stuffed into a Fruitania box. ‘From our orchards,’ the label on the side reads, as if video games grow on trees. In your move across the sea you have decided to take these games with you. The box sits among the bags of clothes, the towers of books and the useless trinkets you still feel are important enough to keep. And here, rifling through the different pieces of you, you find the body with being, their hand reaching for their collector’s copy of Mass Effect.

From issue 18: autumn/winter 2024

About the Author
Claire Watson is an Irish writer with an MA in Creative Writing from University College Cork. Lover of the queer and the quare, their short fiction has appeared in Trans_Muted and they are currently a writer for the Butch Fairy Zine.