I Was a Teenage Exocolonist
by Northway Games
Released on Steam in August 2022
Growing up, my sister used to call herself mestiza (or more often, a halfie). Both our parents are from the Philippines, but our mother looks white. Her mother was half Spanish, and her father was a white American Air Force pilot who bounced before she was born. With fraught glee, my proud, dark-skinned father once calculated his children’s whiteness to be somewhere around 33%, which my sister’s 23andMe profile largely corroborated.
But, I mean, fuck that. Any politics of purity will lead us nowhere. It’s not like I was ever granted 33% access to white privilege (though we can talk about how my family, with their inherently anti-Black bootstrap respectability politics, vied for proximity to whiteness). I know I can’t untangle my identity from the history of colonialism, from its construction and development vis-a-vis whiteness. Can I claim any sort of Filipina identity that exists on its own? There are superficial markers: I love rice and lechon and ube; I danced the tinikling when I was a kid; I wore a barong to my sister’s wedding. But I don’t speak Tagalog or Illocano or Cebuano. Sunlight brings out the reddish-browns of my not-quite-black hair. There are parts of the culture I gravitate toward that I’ve only read about, like the enduring history of queerness that existed before and alongside Catholicism–a history my parents seem utterly oblivious to. When I last visited the Philippines in 2019, I expected—or maybe just wanted so badly—to feel an immediate connection to the motherland or whatever. And I was welcomed unequivocally wherever I went. But just the way I carried myself gave me away as a foreigner, an outsider, an American.
My thirteen-year-old nephew, who inherited many of his features from his white father, proudly asserts his Asian heritage, much to the confusion, I’m told, of his Asian friends. And I honestly have no idea how to feel about any of that. But I like any refusal to submit to the American white-supremacist demand that culture be flattened, that difference be exchanged for provisional, tenuous acceptance.
Early in the game, we learn that the fragile utopia of I Was a Teenage Exocolonist was founded in part on the abdication of cultural differences in favor of a new, communally negotiated society. This world brought gender liberation, romantic and sexual diversity, disability rights, and a rejection of scarcity economics. Yet some kids still felt alienated. Some developed quasi-capitalist ambitions. Some flirted with eugenics. Some were just assholes.
I Was a Teenage Exocolonist–part deck-builder, part relationship simulator–is as concerned with the confusion of adolescence as it is the tug-of-war between liberalism and transformative radical politics. I’ve been consuming a lot of media about high school kids lately, I think because my current bewilderment echoes the bewilderment I felt as a young person. The future is scary and uncertain, especially when our present is so fucked, with the widespread acceptance and tacit endorsement of Palestinian genocide, the continuing tide of anti-trans legislation, the further consolidation of wealth. Systems of power feel more entrenched, more resistant to resistance.
There are twenty-nine possible endings featuring various romantic combinations and glimpses into whether or not the new society prospers, fails, or something in between (I saw three of them before calling it quits). In a game that invites multiple playthroughs, you have the chance to course correct, see the world through different lenses, consider alternate realities. You can hope for more and better than what the previous generation carved out for you. Real life also offers myriad endings, but I only have so many more chances to get the best one.