3XXX: NAKED HUMAN BOMBS

[Mild ending spoilers below.]

It feels like this story wasn't planned out in intricate detail, and the author wrote it off the cuff. As a result, there are many wonderful and blackly comedic bits of worldbuilding that feel like they were tossed in almost arbitrarily: the fact that people only become legal adults at 43 and aren't allowed to see other human beings before then for fear that they'll have s*x; the fact that every body part, from thro*t to bre*st to sal*va, is censored; the fact that using a bathroom requires your genit*lia to be scanned by a government employee beforehand, to verify you have the "correct" ones. But the details didn't quite cohere for me, and the overall effect is rather slapdash. The story doesn't take itself that seriously, which made it difficult for me to take it that seriously.

With the major exception of the last section, which doubles as an author's note. In this way, 3XXX reminds me of a short story by David Foster Wallce called Octet, in the collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (found here, page 52). Both stories begin normally, but suddenly end with an author's note speaking directly to the reader about the story, reflecting on the experience of writing it. These author's notes have a deflationary quality, revealing the artifice of the story as what it is, just something made up in someone's head. Here, the main plot of 3XXX is explicitly addressed as just a fantasy where the tides of censorship and repressive moral puritanism are easily turned back. Can they be stopped so easily in real life? Will they be stopped at all? Is intimacy possible in this world?

Art is communication is intimacy: you bare your heart when you write, trying to make the audience understand you. The struggle to write a story is the struggle to connect intimately to someone, anyone, out there. Censorship of art is censorship of intimacy, ruling out a vast range of possible human connection, and on the personal level, a failure to write the perfect story is a failure of intimacy. A failure to make yourself understood.

David Foster Wallace's note at the end of Octet, and a lot of his writing in general, is characterized by an extreme anxiety over whether this intimacy is being practiced correctly, whether he's been successful in connecting to the audience, whether he's liked. From Octet:

‘This thing I feel, I can’t name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?’—this sort of direct question is not for the squeamish. For one thing, it’s perilously close to ‘Do you like me? Please like me,’ which you know quite well that 99% of all the interhuman manipulation and bullshit gamesmanship that goes on goes on precisely because the idea of saying this sort of thing straight out is regarded as somehow obscene.

Meanwhile in 3XXX, a character writes: "I don't want to hurt anyone, so I avoid getting close to people. What if I desire them in the wrong way? What are the right thoughts to have? How do I expel the bad thoughts? Is there a way to distinguish between good and evil thoughts? If I don't know, should I be allowed out of school?"

And in the 3XXX author's note, the author, reflecting on how it feels like they're saying the wrong things, says: "I guess it's just making me realize that I don't know how to be intimate with other people."

In all cases there is a deep fear of what happens if your attempt at intimacy fails, if your communication comes off wrong, if society rejects you for trying to reach out. The brand of moral puritanism being addressed here, which runs through society as an undercurrent, is deeply afraid of naked desire and harshly punishes "incorrect" forms of intimacy. It can lead to an omnipresent anxiety and shame over human connection, whether you're worthy of it, whether you're doing it wrong. The desire for intimacy is eternal, but a world that represses it is a world where everyone is anxious and alone.

Quotes:

And to be T*rned On (TO) is a sign of moral weakness. You have succumbed to the temptation of the outlets laid out by the terrorists and become a walking human bomb. Your g*nitalia, meant only for the toilet, have become a parasite that will devour you and your loved ones alive.

The Gentle Healthy Fashion Mall, a concrete building painted green, is located just three blocks away from your apartment. Many young people love shopping there because the clothes are inexpensive and have enough pro-abstinence messaging to fulfill the patriotic fashion quota.

After handing in the report yesterday, nothing came up that needed your attention -- petty crimes like looking anywhere but someone's face without a certified license, not covering up your skin properly, and forgetting to check in with your appointed neurohygiene therapist are on the rise. Thankfully, though, the police force wants to save your energy for the bomb cases.

3XXX: NAKED HUMAN BOMBS takes place in an over-the-top dystopian future in which sex has been so thoroughly banned that any amount of seeing or touching another person’s skin is taboo. The age of majority seems to be about 40—we’ve got to protect those 35-year-old minors!—and the useless asterisk censorship that you see people use for “s*x” or “p*rn” has extended to any word that could conceivably be used in a slightly lascivious context, like “m*sculature” and “mo*th”. The sexual repression all of this creates causes people to literally explode as soon as they experience arousal for the first time.

It’s an unsubtle send-up of the bizarre censorship era we’ve ended up in through a combination of poorly-conceived and messily-implemented legislation, corporate algorithmic social media, squeamish payment processors and credit card companies, and “think of the children” advocacy groups. This, of course, disproportionately affects queer people, as our lives are inherently considered unsafe for the children (or the corporations)—worse yet should we actually talk about sex at the level that cishet people do all the time, and anything more than that is just unimaginable. Alongside that, it’s also an explicitly transgender take on the kind of gender-bender anime scenarios beloved of many trans people. The PC, a 40-something police officer tasked with protecting the populace from the evils of sex, transforms instantaneously into a hot young woman—and in this new, strangely more comfortable body, she suddenly finds an interest in being desired and connecting to others sexually that she never thought she’d have.

Taura, as she begins calling herself, is soon enticed to join an underground resistance group, and there she falls for Ollie, a leader of the movement. He is also interested in her, but his own dysphoria and struggles with repression cause difficulties between them. But this isn’t dwelt on much, as the plot moves along at a breakneck pace through political twists and turns, culminating with Taura’s not-really-premeditated assassination of the prime minister.

Where things really get interesting, though, is the epilogue, which takes the form of diary entries by the author. (Exactly how fictionalized these are is unclear, and I make no assumptions one way or another. When I refer to "the author" in the following paragraphs, I mean the persona depicted by the diary entries.) These discuss the author’s original plans for the ending, in which Taura and Ollie manage to overcome their respective hangups enough to share a tender moment that is physically and emotionally intimate. But that doesn’t feel right to the author; it doesn’t ring true. They wonder whether they truly understand intimacy; they’ve never been comfortable enough in their own skin to really open up to another person. Thus, instead, the ending we’ve just read.

And to me, this is 3XXX’s most striking condemnation of the social strictures that it satirizes: that they’ve created a world in which the fantasy of blowing up the prime minister by performing sex acts on live TV feels more achievable, less hollow, than the fantasy of achieving a moment of mostly-comfortable intimacy with another human being.

(I beta tested this game)

3XXX is not a subtle game. From the moment you enter its hyperrepressed world, where tough-as-nails cops clean up the pieces after infantilized, sex-starved people literally combust when their lust inevitably boils over, it’s clear that the agenda here is to take an axe to the censors and bullies currently trying to enforce heteronormativity and sexual continence at the barrel of a gun. But while it absolutely telegraphs its concerns, it still very much retains the capacity to surprise: I congratulated myself on twigging to where the story was going early on, only to have the rug pulled out from under me when what I’d clocked as the final twist actually happened before the end of Act One. And that same dynamic played out twice more, because while each segment of the game is very clear in its themes and they all mesh together quite neatly, the narrative manages to swerve as much as it escalates, broadening and complicating its dialectics at the same time it keeps its high cards for last.

Indeed, what makes 3XXX more interesting than a latter-day Stiffy Makane game is that it doesn’t simply counterpose fascist repression against libertine indulgence. Sure, the cop protagonist inevitably crosses to the over side of the law, and the community of people trying to imagine a different future understand that a healthier relationship to sex is a key part of the puzzle. But this isn’t a wish-fulfillment fantasy – although they can see the ways the society in which they were brought up has harmed them, the scars linger, and it takes concerted effort to learn to speak without self-censorship, much less act on their desires. For that matter, those desires are by no means identikit; some characters are farther along in one aspect of their liberation than others, and the sensitively-drawn give and take of who’s teaching and who’s learning shifts from scene to scene.

As a game, 3XXX is assured enough to know where it’s headed. There are choices, but they’re mostly there to keep the player engaged and push you to think about what you’re reading instead of mindlessly lawnmowering on – this isn’t a game that needs branching though, no one is thinking “hey, what if I could keep working for the Nazis instead?” And there’s a lot to think about, as this is a provocation that resists supplying easy answers to the dilemmas it creates. This extends to the prose, which is direct enough on a sentence by sentence basis but preserves its ambiguity; there are jokes (funny ones!) but even the winks to the camera can’t always be taken at face value. It all adds up to a compelling experience that’s as personal as it is political, as outrageous as it is empathetic.