A You That Remains and Doesn't Fit: Trauma Exploration and 1000xRESIST

I want to talk about another one of my favourite pieces of media: 1000xRESIST. This 2024 video game is a lot to discuss. It’s a sci-fi story about clones, revolution, the Asian diaspora, the effects of the pandemic, and a giant pigeon. I hesitate to call it a video game. It’s incredibly light on controls, being more of a walking simulation, and is frankly closer to an interactive theatre experience than it is to a stereotypical video game. In many ways, it emulates an incredibly human experience: one in which there is no set meaning, no way to do so well you succeed or do so poorly you fail. You simply exist in the moment with these characters and experience whatever emotions come along. However, despite there being no set objective within the story (apart from experiencing it), there are still messages and lessons that can be learned, especially relating to how we experience, process, and ultimately learn to live with trauma.

In 1000xRESIST, we play as Watcher, the clone offspring of a Chinese-Canadian woman named Iris Kwan, worshipped by the clones as the Allmother (ALLMO for short). The clones are separated into six different groups, organized and named by function. Watcher’s function is the ability to enter Communions, experiencing Iris’s memories in real-time. Through this mechanic, we travel to the past of ~2040 — Watcher lives 1000 years later, roughly in the year 3000 — to learn more about who Iris is and was. Spoilers: She was kind of a bad person. We start with Iris as a typical teenager; sullen and on the cusp of adulthood, burdened by adult responsibility without the maturity to handle it. She’s intentionally cruel to another character, Jiao, who is a recent and less acculturated Chinese immigrant with a burgeoning sapphic crush on Iris. Then the aliens come.

Without getting too deep in the weeds, the aliens, named Occupants, arrive on Earth in 2047 and create a global pandemic. Iris happens to be immune and chooses to abandon her parents, moving to a special military research base. A lot happens in these intervening 1000 years, but generally, Iris continues her maladaptive and antisocial patterns. She commits a mass casualty event, deifies herself, and becomes the cold and distant ALLMO, progenitor to all the clones in the game. More happens beyond this point, but I’d like to pause here and explore Iris as a person, as she is exemplary of an important therapeutic concept: intergenerational trauma and patterns.

Why is Iris the way she is? We could chalk her patterns up to her being a bratty perpetual teenager, even throughout the 1000 years she spends as ALLMO. However, this conclusion would be a disservice to what we see in game and not reflective of the human condition at all. People tend to have reasons for what they do, even if they aren’t rational justifications or even consciously recognized. 1000xRESIST argues that to understand Iris, we need to understand her parents. Iris’s parents fled Hong Kong during the 2019-2020 protests, in which they were both beaten and traumatized by the police. The lingering effects of these protests and the flight away from their homeland are felt throughout the game; Iris’s mother is closed off but suffers from night terrors and Iris’s father is constantly in a mediating role, trying to protect himself, his wife, and his daughter. The relationship between Iris and her mother is a large aspect of what we view as Watcher; this complex relationship between a traumatized mother who lost everything and her daughter who yearns for a homeland she never truly knew, as these characteristics intertwine and amplify the common struggles of adolescence and motherhood.

Even though we all exist in our own unique ways, our actions often reflect themes across generations. Using a cursory example, while the dishes I cook may be richer and heavier on seasoning than my mother’s, the base dish is influenced by what I was taught growing up. My mother follows the same pattern such that we – my grandmother, my mother, and me – are all cooking the same dish with slight variations. Iris and her mother also reflect the same patterns in their ways of being. Iris is a maternal deity to her clones, and her cold and distant nature reflects the restrictive defensiveness that her own mother displayed. Even without having experienced the trauma of police brutality herself, Iris still experiences the after-effects, which often become a distressing experience in and of themselves. Then when faced with this distress, she reacts similarly to her mother, the learned behaviours and patterns repeating themselves time and again.

This is one conceptualization of intergenerational trauma, or the idea that one generation experience often impact following generations. Intergenerational trauma is a well documented phenomenon, most often explored through collective trauma, or large-scale disasters or atrocities experienced by a community. However, it exists on an individual scale as well, and exploring these patterns in therapy can often bear fruit. These explorations don’t even always involve you, the client, directly. One common practice, mapping out a genogram, may ask you to go back generations with people who you may have had little to no direct contact with. However, how these people treated one another, and especially their offspring, may reveal patterns and explanations as to where your behaviour comes from. A repeated phrase throughout 1000xRESIST sums up this idea: “There is a you that remains and remains”.

Yet even as things remain, others change still. We are not our parents nor our ancestors, not fully at least. Even Watcher, despite being a direct clone of Iris, is not her. When viewing the memories of ALLMO, she’s shocked and horrified at what Iris did. So, what allows us to change? Or more accurately, what forces us to change? There is another quote, spoken in game about a whale plushie, that I really like as the beginning of an answer to this question: “Sometimes, you just don’t fit in the backpack”. We are constantly moving creatures. Time pushes us forward, inch by inch. Much of the time, that’s fine. We can handle that movement; we constantly rearrange the backpack of our lives, and sometimes little things fall out and are forgotten, but for the most part, our backpack remains the same. But sometimes, something big happens. Our backpack shrinks or we’re forced to move in a hurry and must leave things behind or maybe we realize an item is simply just too big. Sometimes, you don’t fit in the backpack. What do we do when this happens? How do we learn to let go? I don’t think there’s one answer to these questions, but the recognition of a backpack and the items you keep is a good start.

1000xRESIST is a story about the past. It asks us to question how much our upbringings influence who and how we are, both as individuals and as a society. 1000xRESIST is also a story about the future. It asks us who we should become, about what we need to leave behind. Most importantly, 1000xRESIST is a story about balancing those two forces to exist in the present. I find that much of the work in therapy is in exploring those forces as well, often seeking to adjust one end of the equation or the other. Even without attending therapy, it is worth wondering: what parts of you remain and remain and what parts of you simply don’t fit in the backpack anymore?