On 1000xResist
“I suppose I really am my mother’s daughter.”
"Isn't it strange? I've never actually been here before. But everything in my body tells me...it's home."
My grandmother was born in Korea. She grew up under Japanese occupation, forced to take a Japanese name, and at the end of her life read and wrote their language better than her own. In the aftermath she saw her country torn in two before her, and lost her mother in the process. Eventually she met an American soldier, and moved to build a new life.
My mother was born in Korea, but largely grew up in America. She is her mother’s daughter, more like my grandmother than perhaps she fully realizes, and grew up with the specter of racism hanging over them both. That shaped her deeply, and bled into the way she raised me.
I am my mother’s daughter, descended from Korean women. I carry the lineage of their trauma inside me, passed down through generations. I have inherited a yearning to connect with my grandmother, who I loved dearly, via the country she left behind. I have inherited a rage at the crimes committed against that country, and the way they continue to echo through our lives and those of so many others.
1000xResist is, perhaps, the first video game I have felt in my soul. It understands me, and I understand it in turn. Mother, Iris, Watcher - I know these women, I am these women. I know the cycle of intergenerational trauma. I know how a mother’s love can stifle and cut like a knife, and I know how that knife can be turned to cut back, whether or not it is intentional. I know the wounds that are left, the gulf of resentment that forms. And I know the importance of the past, how understanding it can lead to forgiveness and a path forward.
1000xResist is many things, but at its heart it is a story of asian mothers and daughters as they circle each other with love and hurt and pass their trauma on to each other. It tackles its subject on a specific, personal level and also through the very foundations of the imaginative sci-fi world it builds. It’s about diaspora, and the weight of the past, what we choose to leave behind and what we choose to carry forward. It’s about the act of resistance but also the act of forgiveness and understanding. It’s raw, real, incisive, proudly political. It filters its broad set of influences, including dance and experimental theater, through the syntax of video games to create its own narrative language. It’s exquisite, ambitious and challenging art of a kind we see all too rarely in this medium. It made me want to call my mom and tell her I love her. It’s one of the most urgent and essential stories of the year, and if we’re lucky, if we let it, it could be one of the defining games of the 2020s. I love it dearly and I hope it finds the audience that needs it