A Game About Slugs
note from the developer
What's the deal with snail shells, anyway?
I crafted this metaphor during the early days of my gender exploration. When I was female-to-male, I wanted to communicate to the world that my identity was as if I was a snail that didn't always have its shell. That it was simple. That it could easily be explained away and I wasn't as weird and complicated as I felt deep down.
When I started trying to make this sequel I wanted to correct that story. The one that had been so expressive for me back then but had now felt wrong.
For a while I wrestled with it. Couldn't figure out what to do. I was in a slump because I needed to answer to this body of work I had made as if I was answering to the years I spent trying to be something I wasn't.
First drafts came out raw, angry, and ugly. I was grieving because I was told that was how I should be feeling. I was taught that I should hate myself. I was an experiment gone wrong. Microwave nachos of what could have been a normal person.
It was essentially "I ruined my life, I'm damaged, I'm Slime Tony and everything is awful."
No matter what, the story wasn't coming out right. Looking back on it now, I see that this was because there simply was no story to tell. It wasn't done yet. I still needed time. I realized that I didn't pick the wrong metaphor, it's that the metaphor came true. It was accurate in ways I couldn't see yet because I was still living inside it.
Sorry, it was never about gastropods
Being a girl was like I'd been dealt the shittiest hand in the deck. Even when I was safe, I was never free, because a man could take whatever he wanted if he wanted it. Because he had the power. Because he was a man and I was just a girl. Even when people said I had a choice it was an illusion because that "choice" was contingent on those stronger than me giving any weight to it.
That was my reality. That's the reality of the slug — the creature without a shell, without protection from within, who can be squashed at any moment.
And I hate that. I hate that so much.
My old identity started out as freedom, as power, as confidence, as this feeling that nothing could hurt me. But it turned into armor I couldn't take off. It became a shell I couldn't remove. It stopped me from being stepped on, but it also kept me from knowing myself directly.
It just wasn't who I was anymore. My whole life I had been dismissing my womanhood on the basis of it being an inferior mode of existence. I've since learned that even if a state of being blows in some ways, it's still valuable. There has to be beauty in it. I'm still searching, but it must be out there somewhere.
What it means to live
The shell got me through those years and hurt me. Yes, I'm marked by it, but I'm also actually okay. It doesn't need to be discarded. It's a part of me. It has a place in my garden.
That's what makes A Game About Slugs so much more powerful than just a "correction" of the first game. I'm not disavowing the shell metaphor — I'm completing it. It's an exploration of what it actually meant all along. What it was always going to mean once I'd lived through enough of the experience to see the full picture. Which is much more honest and complete than the angry, damaged version I was trying to force at first. That version wouldn't have been mine anyways, it would have been someone else's.
The anger I felt at my past self was actually grief over the fact that the protection I needed so badly came with a cost I couldn't have anticipated. But my past self wasn't wrong to reach for that shell. She was doing what she felt she needed to do to survive. That doesn't mean that my current self is wrong to take it off and feel the rain, either.
This body of work only became possible when I stopped needing it to be an apology or a confession or a cautionary tale, and let it be what it actually is: a meditation on the things we do to survive, what survival costs us, and why it's worth it anyway.
To those that found this and read this far, thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I hope you enjoyed.