The Hero’s Quest

Gaming in Immigrant Communities

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to belong. To make one’s home in unfamiliar places. This essay, written three years ago, presses on the beat of these questions. A special thanks to the Center for American Progress and my wonderful editor, Mara Pellittieri, for commissioning this piece. They’ve graciously granted permission for me to reprint it here on Wallflower Chats.

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Image by allinonemovie

There are three warp whistles hidden inside the landscape of the original NES Super Mario Bros. 3 video game. The whistles transport players to an island of magic pipes, which will let you leapfrog into different worlds, like a treacherous underwater kingdom, the ochre-toned Desert Land, and—my favorite—a world where everything is comically oversized. Players can only complete Super Mario Bros. 3 in record time with the aid of these warp whistles.

I can’t overstate the triumph of finding your first warp whistle. It feels like peeling back the layers of (virtual) existence and finding a secret gift from the game creators, who are, after all, the world creators. With a warp whistle, you’re no longer just a cog of goomba-stomping and pipe-climbing, forced to contend with the realities of linear gameplay. A whistle gives you the power to travel at light speed. To transform your surroundings. It maximizes your experience in a game that doesn’t allow save-states. And a whistle does what all good game features should—it surprises the player.

I’m not sure how I stumbled across my first whistle. Back in the ‘90s, when I first started playing video games, there weren’t as many online forums dedicated to cheats and shortcuts. I don’t recall talking to friends about Super Mario Bros. 3 or playing with anyone. But it’s implausible that I would have had the spontaneous notion to force my avatar to kneel on a specific white block, then run beyond the limits of the first level to find a warp whistle. I wasn’t adventurous like that. But maybe this is the case of the whistle finding the player, rather than the other way around.

Over the years, the warp whistle has become a satisfying metaphor for my family’s immigration path to the States, though we were hopping across worlds to find safety and prosperity, rather than to rescue a princess. In 1990, we flew from Vietnam to Thailand for a layover before crossing the Pacific and landing somewhere off the white-sand shores of Florida. The journey had the trappings of a fantasy quest, especially for a wide-eyed kid who’d never been outside the radius of her small town. There were new landscapes to traverse, helpers to find, and enemies aplenty to defeat. With each arrival in a new place, we were once again pioneers, grasping for a rulebook even as we forged blindly ahead.

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Like many, I was introduced to video games through playing Oregon Trail at the school computer lab—and later, its less-popular cousin, Amazon Trail. The Oregon Trail graphics weren’t all that impressive, but I relished the clear-cut, immensely satisfying goal. You just had to survive. Isn’t that, really, the point of any game? I’ve always been drawn to the ones that plunk the protagonist in a new place, forcing them to use their wits to navigate novel challenges. Those are the games that seem to have the most staying power, because they prod at some innate, evolutionary urge to adapt and find our footing in a world unknown.

Such, of course, is the immigrant’s most prized survival tactic. Matt Ortile, author of The Groom Will Keep His Name, remembers his first experiences with gaming: “I grew up in a household where my parents should have been divorced. I also went to an all-boys school as a femme kid who would later grow up to be a queer adult. With games, I had my own little world wherein I could weather the storm of everything that was going on around me.”

During my own summers as a kid, I stayed at a daycare with one Nintendo set that all the kids crowded around. I couldn’t get enough of Super Mario Brothers and Donkey Kong. The sounds of the falling barrels still remind me of afternoons sprawled on the rug of a sunny playroom, cheering my fellow players on. Once, while the other daycare kids gathered outside for drippy popsicles by the playground, I begged to be allowed to stay inside, playing Nintendo in blessed solitude. I’d transpose myself into another world, where life could be as simple as jumping for a glowing star that would make you invincible.

In video games, I saw myself as a hero, a conqueror with agency. About gamers, Dino Roman says, “We know how to celebrate the victories, but we also know how to handle defeat. We understand the formula: If life gets tough, go out and grind some more. Recruit some help and come back for the win.” There’s something so matter-of-fact yet empowering about that statement. “Coming back for the win” hints at a sense of persistence in the face of the impossible.

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When my mother remarried, we moved into a new house with my stepfather. It was rough going, merging three disparate personalities into one small household. I stayed in my room a lot. But one summer, my mother bought me my own Nintendo set from a garage sale down the street. She paid $20 for the console, plus the Duck Hunt shooters, and a cardboard box full of games, like Super Mario Brothers, Kirby’s Adventure, and Mega Man, along with a bunch of sports games that I never touched. She installed an old boxy television in my room and allowed me to hook the console up to it.

It was an unexpected gift from my tired, generally undemonstrative mother. We saved our gift-giving for birthdays and Christmas, and she had never given me any indication that she was listening when I rambled about the video games I played at daycare. Games as a whole just weren’t part of our vernacular as a family; there were no board game nights, no hands of cards played after dinner. Unlike my American-born stepfather, who made time for hunting and fishing, I’d never truly seen the adults in my immigrant family engaging with hobbies. I’d never seen them play.

That day, though, my mother watched me defeat a few levels of Mario before disappearing back into the kitchen. I couldn’t believe that she would allow me to spend time playing games, when I knew she preferred me to study or practice the violin. I’d grown up with the weight of my family’s yearning for a better life, which usually boiled down to some instruction to “study harder.” Try harder, be more than the sum of your parts.

Video games seemed a categorical waste. There was nothing educational about them. I couldn’t add my high score to a college application. They didn’t even make for great dinner table conversation. My grandparents were highly disapproving of the whole thing, warning my mother about the dangers of screens and violence (a cautionary tale echoed through the annals of video game discourse). But, in an unexpected act of rebellion, she let me play on, into bedtime, through long weekend afternoons. After that first day, she never again sat down to watch me play. But she didn’t stop me, either.

In retrospect, I think she was trying to give me something of my own. Within a video game is the promise of space. They’re designed to simulate escape. My family’s lives, at that point, were tightly prescribed around school and work. Games provided me with something outside of my typical routine. A chance to sink into imagination, without worrying about a tangible, real-world end goal. To exist outside of myself and the urge to perform in the world, as a straight-A student or a dutiful daughter. What my mom was giving me was permission to play, like any other kid.

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Over the years, I’ve dipped back into gaming a few times. In college, a friend taught me how to install a simulator on my computer that replicated the NES experience, though it lagged horribly and I could never get used to the computer commands. Later, I got on the Atari Flashback train, though I’d never played Atari as a kid. When Animal Crossing became the most popular cozy game a few years ago, a coworker raved about the meditative quality of diving for pearls on her virtual island each morning before work. She gifted me a Nintendo Switch for Christmas, and it soon became a standby in our household.

Unlike in my own childhood gaming days, my husband, daughter, and I all played games regularly on the Switch together, particularly during the first winters of the pandemic. My friend gave us a copy of Mario Odyssey, and I watched as my six-year-old daughter’s eyes widened at the beautifully rendered opening—much more complex than any of the graphics from her favorite television shows, and a far cry from the Super Mario Bros. of yore. She wanted to spend hours watching us play, though she had no desire to play herself, calling the challenges “too scary.” Her fists clenched, squat-bouncing from the sheer adrenaline rush, she’d cheer, “Go, Mario, go!”

I think about how differently her childhood looks from mine. She has a thousand extracurriculars and a full calendar of playdates. Her rooms are stacked with toys, some of which she routinely forgets about. We are privileged now to have a surplus of time on our hands, and many options with which to fill that time. Play is a regular part of our vocabulary, and as such, my daughter is distanced from much of the struggle my family went through as immigrants in a new country. That was, after all, the goal: to make a life of broader possibility for our children. And yet, the guilt never quite leaves you.

Gaming has always been a site of joy and escape for me, but when I escaped into a virtual world, I couldn’t help thinking about the people I left behind—people who never had the option of play themselves. My mother showering late at night after a shift, then falling into bed quickly after. My grandparents’ cabinet of portable massagers, meant to soothe their limbs from standing at a factory throughout the day. Even now, far removed from those early days in America, leisure will always feel to me like a kind of cheat; a gift from the game gods or, more accurately, an unearned warp whistle bestowed by another player.

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These days, I’m less drawn to games of constant action; the ones where you must fly to avoid balls of lava or rain lasers on a slew of robots. At night, while watching TV with my husband, I play Dr. Mario on the Switch, lulling myself with the simple task of matching colors on the screen. I stop after the first loss, never bothering to retry a level. What draws me to gaming is no longer adventure, or mystery, as when I was a kid. Now, my life open to more possibility than ever, what I crave is the routine of the play. The tidiness of clearing a board. As far as I can tell, you can play Dr. Mario indefinitely, as long as your fingers are deft enough to control the falling blocks.

There’s no glory in a game like that, perhaps. But there is a satisfying pace, a kind of relentless momentum that promises everlasting play. There is no damsel to save. You don’t return to a home planet after the last level. You just keep going. And sometimes, when life crowds with responsibilities and worries, that sense of moving forward is its own quiet reward.