But there were very, very few games available, let alone games with manuals, let alone games with high-quality full-color comic books explaining the story. Yars' Revenge had all of these, and it was a space game to boot, so, for perhaps the first time, I fully envisioned myself as something non-humnaoid in taking on the role of an electronic game protagonist. Maybe I could have ignored it, gone with an alternate interpretation that I was simply flying some kind of insect-shaped spacecraft, but the comic (and the map at the back) were simply too cool for that. It gave me a weird feeling, what I now know to be called "cognitive dissonance," but I accepted that slapping that cartridge into the Atari 2600 and flipping the "on" switch meant becoming, for however long I'd be playing, something very different.
It's not like I wasn't already in love with the cavalcade of alien creatures in Star Wars, nor were my previous experiences with games based around realistic depictions of humans. (What even is Pac-Man, anyway?) But Yars' Revenge simply provided too much detail to overlook, especially in those early days when worldbuilding required extensive investment in the offscreen art appearing on arcade cabinets, game boxes, and manual covers. To be fair, that detail did include the fact that the Yars weren't entirely extraterrestrial, but rather the descendants of houseflies that had inadvertently stowed away on an Earth colony ship and hyper-evolved by cosmic radiation following the ship's destruction (possibly by the same force you'll be fighting during the game). In a way, though, this made the Yars even more alien - even as a kid, I recognized that insect life was very, very different from our own, and any intelligent beings evolving from them can only exist even further from my own experience. But, within the tiny world of the TV screen and the corresponding, if more elaborate, diorama in my head, that's who I had to be, furiously beating my wings as I pushed through the hard vacuum of space (this makes less sense now that I write it out), avoiding powerful and lethal weaponry in a final effort to save my threatened, unique race from oblivion. The label on the cartridge may say "Revenge," but this was a battle for survival. No matter how strange a creature I was inhabiting, it was my duty to protect it and all its... my kind.
Games can do all that, even on primitive hardware and requiring a multimedia assist or two. After all, isn't that what tabletop RPG source material is for? We're given the material, the reference points, but that actual perspective comes from us, the participants. And that's something unique to games, whether or not they choose to take advantage of it. Of course, I didn't feel like I was experiencing the world as a homesteading amphibian in Frogger or an an ever-growing reptile in Snake Byte, but those game didn't ask me to in the way Yars' Revenge did. And, of course, those weren't aliens, and there's the rub. (I'm still counting the Yars as aliens, not only because most of their development took place far from Earth, but because they became sentient in the depths of space.)
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There's another word that, for a long time, tended to follow "alien" in sci-fi contexts: "invader." In 1938, Orson Welles updated and adapted for radio H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, a work that (to borrow a phrase from Alan Moore) pondered what would happen if someone else did to Victorian Britain what Britain had already done to the rest of the world. Welles' version played on the fears of a world on the brink of a massive and terrifying war, one that would employ new technologies and put civilian populations in the same crosshairs as their militaries. While many of the stories of the general public's overreactions are merely legend, there's a reason they're legendary - not only was Welles' work very, very good (I can still quote sections from memory, despite not having heard it for decades), it hit at just the right time. The invading Martians were huge and near-incomprehensible, utterly disinterested in communication or even subjugation. They were an undeniable threat, an undeniable other... undeniably alien, and a blueprint for invasion stories for decades to come.
Six months after the War of the Worlds broadcast, the news was dominated with a different kind of "alien" - the ship MS St. Louis, carrying over 900 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, was struggling to find a country willing to take its passengers. As they went from country to country, they were eventually able to discharge everyone, but many ended up in places that would be overrun by the Nazis, and ultimately murdered in the Holocaust. After the St. Louis had left its original destination of Cuba, who had changed their policies while the ship was underway making nearly all the passengers ineligible for entry, it headed for the US, where a back-and-forth had already begun about whether to allow refugees entry. The government, however, never made any effort to circumvent the bureaucratic emigration process despite a system already being in place for refugees fleeing Nazi persecution, and even (allegedly) sent the Coast Guard to prevent the ship from landing in Florida. (The Coast Guard denies this, but their argument seems suspiciously technical, based on assumptions rather than actual records.) The Nazi-aligned "America First" movement was still going strong, and pressing to make sure the words "Jew" and "Communist" would be closely aligned in the public consciousness. Meanwhile, groups like the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee were pressing the Roosevelt administration to allow entry. Rather than come down on one side or the other, the government chose to ignore the situation - a policy they would follow until the start of the war, leading to many, many preventable deaths. Canada's leadership, on the other hand, was openly hostile to the concept of Jewish immigration. There's a reason the St. Louis' journey has since been called "the Voyage of the Damned."
One power of fiction, of genre fiction and games in particular, is its ability to convey the experience of being another person, of being another kind of person. I believe, passionately, that this kind of understanding is the antidote to hate, to the persecution that requires ignorance and distrust to function. But we need to be open to understanding this, to appreciating the experience of the Other, rather than simply accepting it as genre convention that can be easily ignored. It's on us, the audiences and the creators, to make, share, and experience stories that center experiences of those different to us, whether those are the experiences of people alive on this world or those existing only in the imagination. When you're choosing what to play, what to read, what to write, take the need for that perspective into consideration. Sometimes, that will to connection, to building bridges and making lasting friendships. And sometimes, that even means imagining what it's like to be a space bug for a little while.
- B
Send questions, comments, and Yar's Revenge-themed music to neversaydice20@gmail.com, because we found out about this and desperately need more.
