Princess in Another Castle

By Christine H. Tran

Games are fake and so are Girls
who double-save
Just in Case.
 
This bed has occupied
her Family Inventory for
5 generations
—if she Deletes It to afford
a Computer w/ Environment stats,
can she re-buy the Object
after she gets enough Logic
​to win the Promotion?
 
Overwrite, regardless
as a Quit Screen once said:
“Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost.”

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You Rendered Me Thusly

By Christine H. Tran

8-bit is
          Nostalgia, uncancelled efforts,
          Eternal easy mode
          concept over context
          Sharp lines, rough edges, building blocks of anti-life
                    Flesh rendered cute and almost-soft
enough to run your tongue
          along the steps of Yoshi’s shell.
Third-generation consolers in
          the beginning of a techno-orientalist imaginary
          “where the barbarians are now robots” (Morley & Robins, 1995)
A max. of 256 colours
          to juxtapose a place where just 1 mattered.

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Pixelating Nude Patch

By Christine H. Tran

It’s cool to play Sims in your 20s now. Such
memes metastasize from dreams of a
world where Needs are born to be histogrammed
                                                  and met.
 
Before, you might admit to Original Sim
but watch the light scatter in your
pals’ eye, pupils dilating, as they
quantified, fretted, internally sweated:
               “Have you remade me? If so, was it to
               watch me kiss and piss? If so, with which of
                                                  our mutual friends?”
 
To own your owning of Sims, post-puberty,
is to have your Wednesdays dreamt thus, in their
minds, forever: slick fingers, printed
Facebook screenshots & dotted lines drawn across
a forehead on cork board; you squint &
puncture my cheeks in the machinima,
carving the dip of my nose just right.
               All the better for nesting in the crook
              Of Joe from running club’s neck?
 
To address this nightmare of Maxis doppelgangers:
               No, I was too busy reifying Shakespeare characters (or
               anime protags) as suburban alternatives.
               You’re not there, but would you like to be?
 
Richard III’s horse for IRL “motherlode”
and—while we’re here— 
a tree of social interactions
to be performed, prescribed only according with our historic disposition
to each other.
               That public transit system, too: free taxies; point and click to
               where you’d care to go, walk to the middle of the road,
               and vanish until load-screen.

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Cheat Bar

By Christine H. Tran

My Mood is at Yellow, but I can’t Use
the Toilet because I Sold our bathroom door
three Saves ago to escape the
                              Repo Man.
 
Until 2011, I’m playing a white red-haired
Man and his wife. I—my wife— 
have nowhere to go. My Bladder drops
                              to Red;
 
puddles bloom at the grids of my feet. Weep-
ing inside the nursery of my own drinking; I
—as husband—get low in the Fun Bar.
          I relent, and Ctrl+Shift + C
 
+ “testingcheatsenabled true” + Teleport Here
myself to a girlfriend’s villa for WooHoo and
maybe, time permitting, a Delete Pool Ladder
with my wife’s
                              step-kids.
 
Ten generations later, The Game ends. My adult-
erous upload is smote. The browser opens
to Everyone in Town—that is, me—subletting the
same sidewalk slab. We’ve glitched:
                              a family
 
sandwich, folding into one happy posthuman
accordion. Pause, pls, because Mom says it’s
my turn to be the hair, skins, skulls, eyes,
                              and unused
​                              Aspiration Points.

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Christine H. Tran was born to Vietnamese refugees in Scarborough, Ontario. Her poetry, criticism, and research often explore the interplay between games, literary culture, and the history of labour. She is a Helper Elf at Brick: A Literary Journal, a PhD student at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Information, and a Resident Junior Fellow at Massey College. Her work has been published by untethered, Half A Grapefruit, Train, alt.theatre, and other journals. Find her tweets at @thechristinet.