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t five out of ten thought beyond play t pledge Five out of Ten is now on Patreon! We’re the magazine for people who love videogames and demand the best in inde- pendent writing. We want to be the New Yorker of games jour- nalism and criticism: no reviews, no reheated press releases, just the best in long-form features. This special issue features five of our best essays from our first two years. Here’s the deal: if you like these features, please pledge your support to our Patreon and we’ll make be able to make more! We’d much rather be making things than market- ing them. Patreon gives us the chance to build a sustainable future for Five out of Ten, to pay our contributors a better wage - including cover artists and copy editors. If we reach our fund- ing goals, we’ll be able to make new issues free for everyone. For now, please enjoy this small sample of Five out of Ten - thank you for reading, and thank you for your support. #P: Patreon Power Pack Editor-in-Chief: Alan Williamson five Managing Editor: Lindsey Joyce Design Editor: Craig Wilson Copy Editor: Robbie Pickles Tech Wizard: Marko Jung out of Special Thanks: Kaitlin Tremblay Email: [email protected] ten Twitter, Facebook: @fiveoutoftenmag t contents Going Stealth 4 Hitman: Blood Money and Gender Passing. When life becomes a game of stealth. #4: Storytellers Lost 10 What’s it like to be truly lost in a game, trapped in a dungeon with your own internal compass broken? #7: Power Under the Radar 19 Metal Gear Solid is about seeing and being seen, until Solid Snake stands against Vulcan Raven. #10: Heart Wanderer in a Sea of Stars 26 Space exploration games like Out There are a unique way to experience the sublime. #9: Time Keep the Scandal for the End 35 One man, one copy of Commandos, fourteen years later. Can he finish the mission? #8: Space © 2015 Five out of Ten. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without explicit permission is prohibited. Products named in these pages are trade names, or trademarks, of their respective companies. She’s reading me Going Stealth Hitman: Blood Money and Gender Passing. When life becomes a game of stealth. #4: Storytellers Going Stealth Hitman: Blood Money and Gender Passing Samantha Allen he mirror seems to scream my artifice. I can I know how she feels. When I enter a restroom, I Tsee every telling detail: the small outcropping immediately take stock of the situation. Is there a of flesh-coloured lace beneath the hairline of my queue? I don’t like to stand around; it gives people wig, the tiny spot on my chin that I didn’t shave more time to examine me. Are there parents with perfectly, the peculiar prominence of my brow line. kids in here? Mothers are often the most insistent police. The whole affair feels sadly, uncannily like I look down at the sink and try to focus on the a stealth game. frothy lather that’s building in my hands, but I can feel her staring at me. She’s washing her hands, The affinities between stealth games and too, but she’s stopped all of a sudden. I steal a transgender experience run deep. In the transgen- sideways glance through the mirror and notice der community, we even use the phrase ‘going her eyes moving up and down with a character- stealth’ to describe living full-time without most istic rapidity and intensity. She’s reading me. She people being aware of our transgender status or knows I’m transgender. our identities prior to transition. We also talk about ‘passing’, a term we use to describe successfully “You shouldn’t be in here,” she insists forcefully interacting with others without being ‘read’ as and, when I protest, she threatens to call security. transgender. Or maybe she starts to hit me with her purse. Or maybe her overzealous boyfriend is in the men’s For trans* folks though, the consequences of room. I’ve had nightmares about this scenario; it failure are more dire than a Game Over screen. plays in my head every time I walk through a door If the wrong people catch us we can be humili- that says ‘Women’. It will happen to me someday, ated, detained, beaten, or murdered. A stream but up to this point, I’ve been lucky. of heart-breaking headlines threatens to erode our already fragile foundations. For us, visibility In her game dys4ia, Anna Anthropy wrote, “I feel all too often means violence. Not everyone can like a spy whenever I use the women’s bathroom.” pass successfully; not everyone wants to. Yet when I enter the women’s restroom, Agent 47 is never far from my mind. He has a specific objective, usually murder; my goal is the much more peaceful one of urination. He dons various disguises to move through restricted areas; while do not mean to suggest that passing is as incon- I wait for my hair to grow, I use a long blond wig I sequential as playing a videogame for entertain- to send an unmistakable signal of femininity to ment; rather, passing and stealth games occupy my peers. His disguise must pass muster with a shared mechanical territory and they operate various security personnel; my appearance has on similar principles. It is because of this curious to satisfy gender-policing women in the restroom affinity between stealth games and transgender who stare at me too long. experience that I find myself identifying with some unlikely heroes. Hitman: Blood Money is a game about a guy who kills boatloads of people – sometimes liter- Agent 47 of the Hitman franchise might seem to ally - and I’m painfully aware of the fact that the be a counter-intuitive role model for a transgen- marketing for the Hitman franchise is irredeem- der woman like myself. He has no hair; I’m trying ably sexist. Approaching videogames as a primar- to grow mine out. He’s built like a Mack truck; ily representational medium makes it easy for us oestrogen is fast depleting what little muscle to dismiss games like Hitman as culturally irrel- mass I had pre-transition. In recent trailers, he’s evant experiences: in this mindset, games like been known to perpetrate horrific acts of violence Anna Anthropy’s dys4ia, Mattie Brice’s Mainichi against women; I’m the kind of feminist killjoy who and Merritt Kopas’ Lim seem far better suited to bristles at such advertising. represent a marginalized transgender experience. ithout dismissing the worth of these queer Wgames, on a mechanical level Hitman: Blood Money is a profoundly queer game about the struggle of moving through policed spaces and the risky politics of recognition that occur within them. We can have our queer cake and eat it too: we can play and make queer games, but we can also ‘queer up’ games that might seem, at first blush, to have nothing to say about life in the margins. Agent 47 is by no means a perfect chameleon. In fact, his character design is so nondescript that it loops back around into conspicuousness. When I play the “Flatline” mission disguised as a doctor, I am bewildered by the doctors’ failure to realize that a perfectly bald man with a comically square build has replaced their fellow MD. “There’s even a barcode on his neck!” I yell at them, through my monitor. But ‘Dr. 47’ never seems to betray his nervous- ness about being noticed, if he feels any at all. He walks confidently through security choke- points and into restricted areas. He shrugs off his conspicuousness, ignores the barcode and embraces the disguise. What if acting like he belongs is precisely what gives him the edge he needs to slip through space unrecognized? Gender attribution, the form of interpersonal recognition that matters most to me, is a fast and imprecise process. It is, as Kate Bornstein describes it, the moment in which “we look at somebody and say ‘that’s a man,’ or ‘that’s a woman.’” Gender attribution is, for me, a loom- ing storm cloud that hangs over all of my interac- tions. I feel conspicuous everywhere because I’m 5’10” and I struggle to produce a believable female voice. 25 15 21 1 18 5 2 20 9 6 21 12 These are my barcodes. ost observers don’t think too hard Mabout gender attribution and, like Agent 47, I’m fortunate enough to benefit from their inat- tention. As Bornstein observes, people make gender attributions “all the time without think- As I approach a new public environment, I imagine ing about it.” Passing in public, as Bornstein and a tiny suspicion meter in the corner of my vision. others note, is about lining up enough of the right I move slowly, not just because women tend to kinds of physical and behavioural ‘cues’. In my take smaller strides, but because faster movement case, as a transgender woman who attempts to would cause more people to notice me. I’m acutely approximate a more-or-less-normative feminine aware of my noise level: unless I’m at a gay bar or appearance, those cues are breasts, long hair, a a Women’s Studies conference, I follow a strict “no close gait and a shaky attempt at a female voice. talking in bathrooms” rule. Like Agent 47, I identify potential troublemakers in advance and try to skirt Most people take note of these cues in less than around them.