Where I live, buying a house is more affordable than renting. Not because houses are cheaper to buy, come on. Like everywhere else you heard about, the cost of buying a house has risen astronomically here. But rents have risen even more so. These pungent tradewinds blow too hard at a dream friends and I have shared all misty-eyed for years, one now so close to permanently out of reach it barely threatens to graze the fingertips.
Years ago, many years ago, before 2016 even, if such a time can be believed to have existed, it became clear that the global financial crisis wasn't a bump in the road towards promise as much as it was the unbuilt freeway at the midpoint of Speed. Unlike at the movies, those of us coming of age at the time clung to our seats, unbelted and afraid, as the bus plummeted into a freefall. The detonation has yet to come, but it also feels like it's been happening in slow motion. While terms like "crisis" used to suggest a situation in need of immediate resolution, the term "housing crisis" feels less urgent than ever. Downright banal, even, from sheer repetition. The notion that help is on the way feels like a vague fantasy, meaning it's probably up to us to radically reorient how we see ourselves in housing over the remaining decades of our life. And back then, when these poisonous seeds began to sprout and strangle our verdant hopes for security, friends and I started talking options. A new dream began to emerge. The big gay mansion.
Most often, these conversations happened with other queer arty types. Staring out across the vista of a future where children, home ownership, financial stability and other options of conventional cis-heteronormative living were absent, the idea was this: when we got old, we'd all move in together, into a big gay mansion, a dozen or more people working and supporting our decrepitudinous bodies through our silvered years of making music writing, theatre, etc. Where a capitalist society failed to allow space for us, we'd make our space for each other. Well, this is all beginning to sound a lot like a commune isn't it?
The longer this crisis goes on as an immovable fact of modern life, the more real the need for the big gay mansion becomes. It is totemic: with hope evaporated that anything will change, envisioning a future feels hopeless. This new hope is a comforting amulet to hold to one's chest. Well, whatever happens, I know I might have the big gay mansion waiting for me.
I don't live in a big gay mansion yet, but my current living situation is not so grim as to meet the reaches of midnight dread. Before the lockdowns, I saw the writing on the wall after my previous profession all but totally collapsed and I watched friends at the peak of their form left totally jobless. I went back to school for four years. Then I landed a new career I'm kind of okay at with a salary potential more resilient to the fires of our fresh hell. Selling out -- heard of it? Pretty good stuff. Although both an enormous endeavour as well as the greatest favour I ever did myself, it was floated on a stack of privileges not available to a lot of the people I shared those ancient dreams with. Now I rent an apartment that's only a palatable 35% of my income. For some of those old friends, that figure is more like 60-80%. For others, they're buying second properties. It could be a lot worse for me, but it could also get a lot worse. I clutch that amulet as tightly as ever. If you ever need to deafen these thoughts, might I suggest video games?
If you ever need to deafen these thoughts, might I suggest video games?
When Palworld came out at the start of the year, the most appealing part was its base building. Staking a spot in the wilderness, one could use its tiles of varying materials to build houses, fortifications, and tools in familiar shapes. I built a small cabin on a cliff. Then I built a bigger, stronger cabin. Then I upped roots. Cliffside with a skyline of trees and mountains, I built luxurious dwellings for my Pals and a vast, stony castle. I planted seeds for harvest, oriented a spa towards the sunset, and made sure soft beds and warmth were provided for everyone inside. This took days - actual, real-life days - of plotting and tinkering with virtually no in-game benefit, but I needed a great, safe haven where we could all happily work and live together.
Palworld will frequently spawn raids on a player's base. Other inhabitants of the island, human and Pal alike, will come try to blow you the hell up. When they get close enough, the Pals in your base gear up to defend their home. Afterwards, they're left with various status afflictions, like broken bones and depression. But when I was done building, the game's frequently spawned raids would fall against my fortified paradise with my Pals none the wiser. I was privy to countless attempts to sploosh us all into charred cutlets, but my Pals kept on in total peace, their happiness at an all time, perpetual high.
I imagine they're still there, living in bliss and safety, but I haven't checked in for a while. Another game called Enshrouded came out shortly after, an action/surivival game set in a dark medieval fantasy world where just about all human life had been eliminated by an insidious, toxic disease called the Shroud. Only a few survived and they could be brought to live, again, in a player's base. You can find the parallels to The Shroud in plenty of our present real-world circumstances from the more tangible (the climate crisis, infectious outbreaks like COVID etc) to the less (the steady but likewise toxic encroachment of late stage capitalism and inequality.) And much like Palworld, the main stage for me was the base-building.
Here, you can also build structures using various pre-designed tiles of different materials. You build your wood house, your stone house, your nicer stone house, etc. Only Enshrouded offers a lot more control. It hands you a plate of dozens of basic shapes: foundations, walls, ceilings and floors, staircases, triangularly prismatic rooves, walls with a gap for a window, walls with a gap for a door, etc. But in addition, you can also remove small cubes of matter from any of these shapes; the game might not have a shape to build a completely cylindrical home, but with a bit of work you can by chipping away at, say, a cubic one.. Structures are not just produced but reduced -- carved and sculpted from their larger pre-fabricated designs. You can also place these cubes in the material of your choice, effectively creating something Minecraft-like. This permits a lot of freedom.
On top of this, while you play through the game you discover and unlock dozens more materials than the rudimentary ones you start with. You also discover the means to build a massive set of furniture and decoration. You can plant bushes and herbs, but also towering evergreen trees, and cultivate various types of soil to help their growth. Creating the seeds for these endeavours requires using some of the plant itself, incentivising a subsistence lifestyle. Where you might plant a bunch of something to later harvest once it's grown and spin into cloth for gear, you're encouraged like this to save some of the harvest to turn into more seeds and replenish the life you've taken. Where in other games a rapacious attitude towards the land is optimal, here the land is encouraged to flourish.
A lot of players had finished the game by the time I was emerging from its earliest levels. I was fixated on finding ways to cultivate my home and it was only once I realised there were more materials and furnishings to discover that I upped my exploration. Then, the fixation fixated all the more fixatedly.
First, I built a small stone dwelling. Then I added a floor as the number of NPCs I could house increased. I planted a small garden once a farmer who'd moved in told me where I could find her old almanac. I dug intricate tunnels beneath my home secured behind hidden entrances, each marked by lamps lit by captured fireflies. The subterranean space grew bigger than my above-ground structures, so I started building up. I built massive earthen, serpentine sculptures twisting around two gigantic pines and planted bright blue and red flowers along their paths and when the sunrise caught just right they looked like skyward rivers of blood and magic. I built an imposing tower all the way to the roof of the world from which I could jump off, pull out my glider, and soar over half the map. I built a floating island of rock to its right, lit by glowing luminous growth, and put a small cottage on it with a front garden and a wooden bench. At night, the cottage glowed with torch-warmth, all-inviting, but from below the glowing growth cast a distant blue light on the darker parts of the earth beneath it. Overlooking a cliff, I put in an open-air bath house. Whether a bug or feature, a certain type of tile emitted a faint fog, so I carved out the space below the bath house floor to put these tiles. Now, opening the door of its privacy wall, one is greeted by a comforting simulacrum of steam and a view of the world.
The more I explored, the more I found those in need of refuge. The main house was getting cramped and I needed to extend. I doubled the ground floor, then put in a mezzanine with a balcony planted with cerulean flowers. A staircase led up again to a tavern. Indoor dining was naturally lit by windows spanning two storeys and led to an even bigger balcony, this time ringed by lavender plants and an outlook with a bench flanked by towering trees. This is the state of the home right now. How it will develop, who knows.
This is just one person's effort and it was the culmination of 60+ hours of playing. How long it actually took is hard to guess: I spent a lot of my playtime running and jumping around the home, watching how the game's early and late sun, its scarlet dusk and cobalt night, transformed each of these features. Like Palworld, this effort offers very little gameplay benefit beyond the intrinsic motivation of doing it. But Enshrouded is also a multiplayer game and its subreddit is full of gargantuan efforts of friends working together to build everything from cozy hobbit holes to cavernous dwarven empires. I've seen hundreds of these posts at this point but my favourite is one player showing off the work of his 69-year old father, a former architect. The village is a work of art and an incredible demonstration of just how much one can do with this system.
Building - and collaborating to build - elaborate homes is not new to video games. Have you ever met someone who doesn't know the thrill of pulling the pool ladder out from a Sim? Minecraft has dominated the last decade of gaming for this exact reason. But what took me with Palworld and then Enshrouded where Minecraft didn't was its situating in a meaningful context. Minecraft's world is a nearly blank slate. A close look reveals it's not totally blank, its parameters present and easily understood, but its simplicity makes it feel almost limitless. That same lack of limits, though, without belonging to a place with history and lore, makes it feel like drawing one's dream house on a bit of graph paper. Only restricted by imagination, but of no consequence. In Palworld and Enshrouded, a danger is present, and with it, risk, therefore stakes. And more, a feeling of statement: among this hellworld, I have built a place of safety. I have made somewhere, for someone, where that place would not previously permit them.
Some of the reasons one might feel compelled to spend so much time building in a game like this are easily understood. For one, freedom. I can't add a lavender al fresco to my suburban apartment any more than I can add a floating island cottage like I can in Enshrouded. But the omnipresent crises deepen the impact of this activity. Telling some of this to a friend, they suggested these kinds of play evoke a desire to construct the third place that has fallen out of modern society. Sociology kids shout out: where the first place is where you live and the second place is where you work, the third place is where you build your relationships, share and challenge your values, and create community. The concept of a third place has been identified before in the context of video games, but it's typically discussed as a place you go: somewhere provided by state entities or institutions like libraries, public squares, pubs, and other recreational spaces. In the years following the COVID outbreak, my city faced the most severe lockdowns in the world, where physical third places were removed entirely. To be clear, I supported those lockdowns at the time, and still do, despite the persistence of the virus. But it's no coincidence that during those years, I kept in touch with some of my closest friends by playing multiplayer video games like PUBG.
This was a recognition of what makes the multiplayer agency of virtual third places so meaningful: that what you own cannot be taken away without you allowing it.
However, while those third places are invoked as places you go, they're rarely considered places that you build. On the other hand, Palworld and Enshrouded provide that agency. And with that agency comes a sense of permanency, or at least control, that provided third places do not. When beloved pubs shut down in this city, they're often mourned, and sometimes literally protested against, for the imagined loss. There is a recognition that something valuable is being taken away from the people who care about it. The last time this happened, a community effort was made to establish a trust to maintain it as a music venue resistant to redevelopment by that same community. This was a recognition of what makes the multiplayer agency of virtual third places so meaningful: that what you own cannot be taken away without you allowing it.
The caveat to this in the case of these games is that I'm not entirely clear on how far the level of a player's control actually stretches. I was delighted when Palworld and then Enshrouded launched with the ability to self-host servers for yourself and other players. This kind of thing has fallen out of tradition since the earlier days of Counter-Strike in favour of using cloud infrastructure or ad-hoc peer-to-peer multiplayer connections which require nothing of the player to set up because it's all handled (by the developer and its distribution platform, like Steam, Xbox, etc) but also offers no agency. The result is beloved games like Halo 3 no longer allow multiplayer access because the people in charge turned the servers off. On the other hand, even though I host my own Enshrouded server, could I still play with my friends if Enshrouded was abandoned tomorrow? Or would it still require some level of cooperation and mediation by Keen Games and Steam? And even if not, there are more abstract considerations: hosting your own server depends on your ISP permitting it and your operating system continuing backwards compatibility long enough to run a however-old game. This control is always contingent.
Where I started thinking about this, though, was not as a third place, but in its relation to the first place: a home. As my virtual home expanded, I wondered if I was practicing for the big gay mansion. Affirmed that the dream was still alive in me and not totally kicked in by present circumstances, I felt a duty to address the comfort and safety of my companions, as illusory as they were. Meanwhile, my real-world bedroom remained stark and unfurnished, despite receiving some beautiful paintings from some creative friends. The Andrews government in 2021 passed a law that allowed renters to make minor modifications to a house, like planting a garden or putting a nail in a wall to hang something. It was also made illegal to increase the rent more than once a year. Since the law passed, landlords have made it their mission to increase rent by absurd amounts whenever that occasion permits. These increases feel both retributive, judgemental, and calculated in pursuit of other aims. The result is that these moments loom in one's calendar like the solar eclipse must have in ancient history, praying that one has sufficiently appeased their gods with obtuse rituals and penance that the powers that be don't completely fuck up one's whole life.
My rent increased last year and it seems like everyone's did. If I dare to put up a picture, will the capricious whims of real estate deem the additional cost too high? There's no doubt my rent will go up again this year. There's no doubt it will go up every year. But will it go up so much in an attempt to push me out for a meeker tenant? Or just enough to punish me for daring to stamp my place in the apartment? I suspect a large reason my landlords don't sell is there's a titanic construction project happening next door, a new high-rise that means opening my doors or windows during the day is rendered virtually impossible to all but the most industrial of industrial music fans. Is a pixel-sized indent in the plaster the difference between deciding, when construction is complete, whether to sell it for a massive payout, or allowing me to keep living in a place I really like because I pay them on time and basically don't cause a fuss? I would like to say, "Obviously not, you psycho, what the fuck are you talking about?" But then, one hears stories.
And it's precisely the sources of those stories which splash watercolour-vivid dreams of the big gay mansion across one's lids in those eyes-rolled-back seizures of dread that accompany renting in the rental crisis. That no matter one's current level of comfort, the ability to simply go to bed at the same latitude and longitude each night is thrown into question. In the dimming light of these suspicions that, following the trend, Things are about to Get A Lot Worse, the capacity to build a place of peace and security, in a desolated and violent world, is the supreme form of escapism. How beautiful and bleak, to only live one's dreams virtually, but hopeful that it may one day make a home for the rest of us.