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Have surrealist video game critique of identity politics, will travel

It’s overcast in Kensington.

No grumbles of thunder, but the welding shop next to Videofag is sparking some Frankenstein-style lighting behind a lurched yellow van camped on the sidewalk. Painted with Sally Cruikshank-ian fanged red lips, cat stickers, a stick-thin barbarian woman on one side and “Your flesh is the disease” scrawled goofily across the other, the parked vehicle is a menacing site to behold. But few of Kensington’s many passersby realize that housed within digital artist Hannah Epstein’s bizarre van is an even more surreal video game.

The words “Don’t Worry Kids! It’s Only A Game” written on the inside of the open back door is unlikely to add much more reassurance.

“It’s immersive, it’s an arcade,” says Epstein, who created PsXXYborg (pronounced zee-borg) along with animator Sagan Yee and coder Alex Leitch. “You’re kind of uncomfortable at some points playing, hopefully.”

PsXXYborg served as a centerpiece for Vector’s Queer Arcade, accumulating games which address gender in a variety of ways, from Robert Yang’s sublime Radiator series to Anna Anthropy’s retro Lesbian Spider Queens Of Mars to Leo Heath’s DDR mod where you play as a fish in heels. Crawling into the PsXXYborg-mobile, one of the curators hands you a tablet, synched to a projection shot from your left flank against a veil before you. It’s moody: the van’s innards are draped with sheets, chili lights that resemble candles behind draped cloth, and a neutral cyborg mask resting dead center. Thankfully the Queer Arcade wasn’t on a hotter weekend.

Inspired halfway by Donna Harraway’s famous feminist critique, A Cyborg Manifesto, and Erik Davis’ cult loved Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism In The Age of Information, PsXXYborg is a dual screened psychedelic choose-your-own-adversity simulator. The game asks you, or demands you, to answer a series of questions. PsXXXYborg’s “intention” is to take a digital imprint of your true identity, transcending the physical into the virtual think of some of Ray Kurzweil’s starry-eyed theories. All which would seem more studious and data savvy if the inquiries weren’t total nonsense.

“What animal is your mom?”

“What land mass has the most irritating contours?”

“Which of these women are on their period? “

The game will not proceed until you, somehow, prod the tablet to give an answer. There are segments where you must navigate a space with arrows, though the options are frankly directionless. But that’s not to say it is randomized. Certain routes can stretch the experience onward to 20 minutes.

Claustrophobic, trippy, upsetting, absurd and disorienting, PsXXYborg is a scratchy claw at our intimacy with virtual reality. How sad it is many of today’s cyber-denizens feel defined by their Facebook updates and OKCupid surveys. This is our future, after all. With you in the van, it is game without any avatar, a format Epstein thinks is sublime for criticism and engagement.

“It’s not just you being voyeuristic,” says Epstein. “You’re being talked to. You’re being personally directed the whole time. Your personal psychology is pertinent to the game. It destroys the idea of your projecting yourself into another character. It addresses you, the player.”

Epstein’s games are typically abrasive. Her last work, Mc Mickey & Air Jordan’s Hyperspace Safari, was an attempt to get shut down for flagrant copyright abuse. When she first applied for the Feminists in Games grant over a year ago, she had little experience and less of an idea of what she’d put together, but her whirlwind attitude dragged in Yee, who ends up playing a school girl cyborg queen within the game, as well as TIFF Nexus assistant Peter Kuplowsky, who plays a morphing cult leader. Her games attack contemporary digital culture with the vibe and mentality of an acid-damp zine.

“I’m not an academic, but I wanted to do a lot of research into this one aspect of psycho-cyber-spiritualism,” says Epstein. “The ultimate answer to all feminist gameplay is psychedelic, because there’s no body involved, it only requires a mind to be meeting a mind.”

Sadly, PsXXYborg’s current van-body is scheduled for impound. No licence, no insurance, Hannah knew this incarnation of PsXXYborg would be short lived when she bought the vehicle on Craigslist, from a man who gave her a discount for letting him complain about his wife.

The immediate fallback is a fake-confessional, another small, intimate boxy space to interact with the dripping game. But the team’s ideal for PsXXYborg is something truly road worthy, fit for touring around to other events. Epstein, Yee and Leitch hope to raise more funds for a healthier automobile, so PsXXYborg can maximize its potential landing in strip mall parking lots, allowing Walmart customers to lose their minds, and possibly bodies, for 10 to 20 minutes.

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