Written for Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, She Keeps Me Damn Alive, exhibition, London

On 9th December 1993 at 11:59pm, hundreds of people awaited the release of a free two-megabyte file uploaded to the internet by id Software. At midnight, as everyone tried to initiate the same file transfers, the server crashed. The Doom1_0.zip spread quickly across other servers and bulletin boards (BBS) meaning hundreds more were able to download Doom as quickly as their 1990's internet connection would allow. Although preceded by id's other attempts at First Person Shooter games, including the acclaimed Wolfenstein 3D and Commander Keen, Doom was the one that changed gameplay forever. With its networked multiplayer functions and its 3D graphics engine supporting features that hadn't been seen before in PC gaming - like lighting and full texture mapping - Doom was made more visceral and more real to play. The maps, characters, and effects were all built-in 2D, but ID Software tricked the player into believing they were playing in three dimensions. Scoping through the corridors in search of demons to kill, a glimpse of the weapon in your hand and the amount of ammo and life you have left shown side-by-side, your mission in the game is to save planet Earth in the year 2500 BC.

With its early popularity and fame amongst teens and tech-savvy adults alike - Doom was played by an estimated 15-20 million people within two years of its release[1]- the game was played the world over and used an interesting model to keep its players playing. id Software's lead programmer and co-founder, John Carmack handed the players a chance to make Doom truly their own; Doom was fully opened up to modding, or WAD-ing, meaning Where's all the data?[2]. Players could replace the existing textures, characters, sound effects, cursors, and landscape to create an entirely new game - like Pirate Doom, or Brutal Doom, and many others which added hundreds of animations, death poses, and even finishing moves to the original. In time, people started to make new weapons, enemies and levels, as well as new ways to play the game including campaigns like deathmatch which all continue to keep the Doom community thriving into its third decade.

As well as the possibility for modding the game, the internal structure of the gamer experience in First Person Shooter games is an important tool used by developers to insight various play tactics and behavioural modes. This finely tuned fight for survival is veiled in a complex mix of game elements that all interrelate and depend upon each other; each enemy has variables that determine its power, behaviour and damage per second, and each enemy represents a distinct, consistent and discernible behaviour that can be learned by the player over time[3]. FPSs allow the player to embody the protagonist, to see through their eyes as a passive voyeur. Doom utilises this along with a balance of different enemies, with varying move sets and abilities, to force the player to evaluate the landscape moment to moment and prioritise how they might use weapons, body position, and movement to better their chance of survival.

In Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley's FPS game, SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE, we see this common narrative turned on its head. The player is now an active participant within the experience, not a witness to a fictional narrative but an activist of their opinions which become superimposed onto the protagonist through every gameplay move. Players either choose to protect Black Trans lives by carefully shooting at dangers around them, or they adopt a trigger- happy approach of shooting at everything in their way to reach the end of the level unharmed. This proposition of empathy intentionally questions how the player's choices and actions in digital space might affect others directly in physical space. Will you risk your own life by protecting others?

At their core, FPSs are all about actions, choice and survival, where players must take an active role amidst the continual struggle in order to live. This is also the case for SKMDA: it too is about the choice to preserve life. The protagonist is placed at the forefront of ensuring the survival of the Black Trans community; the duty of care for these lives is in whoever chooses to pick up the gun. This makes the game more akin to a cooperative game as opposed to a non-cooperative game, where a consensus must be reached by all parties playing the game to validate the result. We see this in SKMDA where players must play alone, but a conceptual consensus is reached among all parties who choose to protect Black Trans Lives throughout the game's playable lifespan. Crucially the game invokes the urgency needed in this protection, and it affords the player no middle ground or second attempts at undoing the action. Rather than encapsulating patriarchal or heroic survival in FPS, the survival mode* in SKMDA is cumulative. Although playing individually, through the collective action of fighting for black trans lives the players of SKMDA highlight that collective preservation and care is a necessary measure to preserve the Black Trans experience and the Black Trans life. This shared form of survival is reached through the collective, albeit disconnected, action of all players across all instances of gameplay. All occurrences of the online battle for the protection of Black Trans Lives feed into the hope of affecting change for Black Trans Lives away from the keyboard.

"This survival mode that defines games like Doom is engaged with what games designer Matthias Worch described as Orthogonal Unit Differentiation at a 2013 Games Developer Conference, the world's largest and longest-running professionals-only game industry event. Orthogonal Unit Differentiation gives game-makers and game players a way to preempt how game systems are manipulated to meaningfully differentiate player and character abilities and behaviours. This usage of OUD determines an expressive possibility state in the player and can be attributed to more "expressive games", over "serious" games, or "persuasive" games as described by professor of games studies Gabrille Trépanier-Jobin. Expressive games explore cultural, social, and psychological issues through an individual's perspective, in order to foster empathy, encourage reflection, and raise questions, while entertaining. Expressive games confront the players with the difficulties, dilemmas, and consequences faced by the game's character without the intention of persuading, prescribing attitudes, provoking specific effects or achieving particular goals. The more expressive a player feels they can be, the more priority they may give to the instances in the game which allow them to survive for longer: more kills, more consideration of position and timing, and more motivation to get to further levels, and so on. These occasions for choice allow for multiple different versions of the game to be played dependent upon which choices the player makes. At a systematic level within the game, these types of priority affect gameplay at various points, with new tactics and strategies in the choice of weaponry, types of enemy dismemberment, and moments of stasis. This is what is also called the possibility space of the game - how players prioritise and play with the affordances given to them.

[1]Doom Wiki. (n.d.). Doom. [online] Available at: https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Doom.
[2]Hall, Tom (1992). "Doom Bible." Doomworld. Retrieved 19 October 2021.
[3]In Doom these are commonly attributed as aggression, passivity, projectile (projectile weapons have a travel time on their shots, making it slightly more difficult to score successful hits) and hitscan (where the programming system determines where the gun/object is pointing).