or: A version of a Letter I Wish I Could Send to Video Game Voice Actor Billy Kametz
Marlin M. Jenkins
I didn’t know——because how could I?——how desperately I’d need to cling to the fictional worlds of video games to hold onto sanity, to reality, the summer after I moved to Minnesota. But before we get there, first: the lead-up to that summer of despair. My family didn’t know——because I didn’t tell them——the real reason I decided to fly home for Christmas in 2019. My family didn’t need any explanation other than that I had quit the retail job that had scheduled me to work on Christmas Eve. That’s true enough, if incomplete.
Another version is to say both the job quitting and the trip home were because of suicidal ideation. It feels less avoidant to be painfully direct: I was planning to kill myself. But that still doesn’t feel quite right. The “I” there feels to me like what Toi Dericotte describes in her poem “Speculations about ‘I’”: “I am not the ‘I’ / in my poems. ‘I’ / is the net I try to pull me in with.” There were selves who refused to be reconciled. No active part of me wanted to die, let alone to be the cause of that death. I had been in that particular dark before; this wasn’t that. I was trying desperately to pull myself back to myself. I felt like I was being controlled by joystick drift: no matter my efforts to course-correct, some broken mechanism kept moving me in a direction I didn’t intend to go.
After a work shift that was not worse than any other, I sat in my car in a parking garage, neck-deep in the quicksand of a full-tilt panic attack. I knew I couldn’t drive; it was enough effort to just keep breathing. I only had one option——I was fully convinced of this, even though I knew it wasn’t what I really wanted——and that option was to walk until I found an overpass and let gravity seduce me over the railing.
I managed, after who knows how long, to text into a crisis hotline, and waited for someone to be available. I felt a solidarity with the others in the queue with me, and maybe it was that knowing that helped calm me, the technology between us connecting our crises.
Any one of them could have exited the chat with no progress, could have thrown their phone to the wall, could have done the deed while the other person was, to them, just an ellipsis of nothing-yet-said. But perhaps there was another truth: each time someone opened a space for the next in line, that person had gotten what they needed, had found a way to stay the course, whether that was by talking with someone or, as I did, by leaving the queue comforted enough just knowing people were there to help. I held that thought long enough to move my arms, to clean the tears from my glasses, to turn the lever that would light the way home.
I never went back to that job. I became underemployed, racking up credit card debt, relying on financial help from my parents. I had no schedule tethering me to the day. And I had that old friend: intrusive thoughts. Christmas was soon, and a thought bubbled up, spoken from both inside and beyond me: on Christmas, I would be alone; why not make it my last day alive?
A countdown began to something I felt I couldn’t escape. I knew that one of the best methods to prevent self-harm is to be around other people constantly. If part of me had decided Christmas was the day, I just had to make it to the 26th. And I did: despite the anxiety of booking a last-minute flight, despite the time at my grandmother’s during which my aunt defended traumatic conversion therapy camps and my mother obliviously joked about crazy people calling crisis lines, I made it. I had beaten this round of the thoughts.
*
The easiest way I’ve found to quell these thoughts is playing video games. Two of my good friends in Minnesota bought me a Nintendo Switch that Christmas. When I couldn’t muster the focus or will to apply for jobs, I would fill the days with Untitled Goose Game and Super Smash Bros.
The summer of 2020 was filled with anticipatory new job anxiety and many attempts to find the right medications for my depression, anxiety, and OCD. It didn’t help my mental health that my grandmother was dying back in Michigan, or that this new city I was just starting to get used to before the COVID-19 pandemic was the heart of that summer’s political action and upheaval. But when I was playing a game the anxious thoughts would quiet. I could then transition to something else——eating, reading news (briefly), writing social media posts or comments that could at least make me feel like I was doing something, especially because I was usually much too anxious and depressed to attend protests or keep up regular communication with friends. If I was talking about what was happening, how I understood it, how to go beyond this moment, I could try to trick myself into optimism that the change of this moment would stick, that this wouldn’t just morph into a wave of well-intended white people saying “what can I do to help” and reading half a book while preparing to go back to a status quo.
But I had to be focused on something. Otherwise I’d become stuck in a noise only the intrusive thoughts could break through. Much of my days were spent visiting the worlds of Persona 5 Royal and Fire Emblem Three Houses; when I played I felt I was somewhere almost safe, somewhere worth looking forward to, worth fighting for.
Part of what’s appealing to me about games like Persona 5 is how they ask what we can do to intervene in a broken world. The protagonist and his growing team of companions are able to infiltrate the subconscious worlds of people in power and “change their heart,” after which they acknowledge and take responsibility for the harm they’ve caused. In one case, the change of heart helps a peer untangle the distorted narrative she had been made to believe about her mother’s death, which had pushed her into suicidal ideation.
It’s a comforting idea, that those who abuse power——whose “hearts” are “warped by their desires”——can turn around, not only stop their destructive behavior but publicly apologize and accept consequence. (Imagine it: Derek Chauvin, George Floyd’s murderer, having a radical shift in understanding, apologizing, trying to lead a way into a different life, becoming invested in rebuilding and repair.) Or that mental health conditions can be snipped at the root. But even without the pseudoscience I appreciate that the changes of heart don’t fix everything. There is still reckoning and healing and growth to be achieved. In Persona 5 Royal, the expanded rerelease of the game, we lean further into topics of trauma and mental health through new characters, including Dr. Takuto Maruki. Dr. Maruki, voiced in English by Billy Kametz, is hired by the school as a mental health counselor in the wake of a student’s suicide attempt and a teacher’s post-change-of-heart profession of guilt for physical abuse and sexual harassment. As you speak with him and express interest in his research, you learn he has been exploring nontraditional methods of mental health care. What do we do when the conventional methods can’t achieve what we need them to, can’t help who we need to help? “I think our current way of doing things,” he concludes, “just isn’t enough.”
When his appointment at Shujin Academy is over, he announces in an assembly: “I don’t want a single one of you to think that an unfair reality you’ve been forced into is the only one that you have to live.” Later he proclaims: “If we can change the cognition of trauma victims, their suffering could be eliminated . . . So I’m going to rescue everyone from their pain.”
As we already know from the adventures of the protagonists, the potential for altering another’s cognition in the world of Persona 5 is far-reaching and tangible, but Maruki goes past even that. Soon our heroes have, ostensibly seamlessly, stepped into a reality in which their most central desires come true, which in a few cases means someone returning from the dead. Having realized the dream of his research, Maruki presents us with a quandary: “I’ve gained the power to alter reality——to make it whatever the people wish for. . . . [Y]ou’ll need to choose between the two realities: the merciless one, or the one I’ve formed.”
Do you accept Maruki’s proposal and keep living in his altered world? To accept the offer is to accept a fabrication, to cede your agency to one person’s idea of utopia. If you do accept, the game ends, and the credits roll is populated by some of the most joyful images in the game——each central character’s pain and setbacks erased. Usually in games, an early credits roll is the “bad” ending, but it’s tempting to consider this the “good” ending; who wouldn’t be tempted to remove the origins of our pain and trauma, remove the world’s ills?
It’s easy to see how Maruki arrived at this solution. In a memory the protagonists observe in Maruki’s subconscious, he is sitting by his girlfriend’s hospital bed as she lies in a post-traumatic stupor. As he updates her about his research, about the man who broke into her home being apprehended, she is unable to speak. Maruki’s optimism warps into despair as progress and healing feel more and more unlikely.
When the conventional methods are not enough, who can blame anyone who desires the power to realize mercy? I’ve spent too much time knowing this world is not enough, is perhaps broken beyond repair, is carelessly sick, and that any road forward is slow and arduous and can maybe only take us so far. What if we could pluck trauma out like a rotten tooth?
While we will never live in such a world——the world of what the game calls “cognitive psience” nor the fantasy within a fantasy of the utopian Maruki ending——I can’t blame myself for spending dozens and dozens of hours immersed in such worlds, worlds in which I unequivocally want to be alive and present, knowing there’s always agency and joy there for me. The escape makes the return to reality more bearable.
Fire Emblem Three Houses is also a game of versions. As a teacher at a monastery-affiliated military officers academy you choose one of——you guessed it!——three houses to teach and mentor, each aligned with one of the continent’s three nations. Because of this structure, you have to play the game at least three times to know the full story and all the characters. The result is a lot of emotional investment and therefore a lot of heartbreak. In many cases you have to strike down former students who you grew close with either in years before at the monastery or in the alternate timeline of another playthrough.
The counterpart to that heartbreak is joy——the realization of ideals, triumph. I feel seen by so many Fire Emblem characters, but most of all Marianne, an anxious, depressed magic user who spends lots of time isolated, especially in her days as a student. In a conversation after the time jump, she shares with Byleth, the protagonist: “Do you remember the time you asked me what it was I prayed for? . . . In truth, I was begging the Goddess to take me to her. . . . [But] I’ve decided to live. I’m sorry to have worried you but I’m alright now.” If Marianne, who doubted herself at every turn and worried she had inherited a curse that would turn her into a literal monster, could rise from her lowest points of mental health, there was hope for me yet.
Even outside of the uplifting moments, there’s comfort in knowing that a tragic chain of events is not the only reality, not the only story we have to accept. There is no canon route or ending, no timeline you are trapped in. For every decision, there’s another potential decision. For every direction, another path.
Further comfort came through familiarity and continuity; there’s so much overlap between the voice actors in Persona 5 and Fire Emblem Three Houses. Marianne, for example, is voiced by Xanthe Huynh——the voice of Persona 5’s Haru. Robbie Daymond voices both Persona 5 antagonist Goro Akechi and Hubert——the terrifying loyal right hand to Adrestia’s emperor, Edelgard. And Billy Kametz, who gives voice to Dr. Takuto Maruki, goes from troubled psychologist with a noble cause to noble with sometimes-clueless charm in Ferdinand Von Aegir, whose constant repetition of his own name has turned into a meme and one of the game’s most memorable and iconic quotes, a spark of life in a pained and painful world.
I wanted to write a fan letter to Billy Kametz to say thank you for being a literal voice goading me toward hoping for a better world, one in which we can heal beyond the conventional methods of care. But the real world, once again, proved not as hopeful as the game world. In the interim between the announcement and release of Three Hopes——a reimagined version of Three Houses——I learned that Billy Kametz was sick with colon cancer. And before I could finish my letter, he passed. Still, I haven’t forgotten what I wanted that never-finished letter to say: When I hear the voice saying this is not enough, we must find a way to make a better version of this world, it’s your voice. Thank you for narrating so much of what got me through the summer of 2020, for giving voice to hope when I had so little of it.
I keep returning to an Ursula K. Le Guin speech in which she critiques profit motives being valued over art, over resistance, over freedom, over hope. “I think hard times are coming,” she begins, “when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society . . . [a]nd even imagine some real grounds for hope. . . . Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art.”
The hope I found in the art of games helped carry me through the summer, but I only made it three days into the fall semester before a trip to the ER, dysregulated from an interrupted meds schedule, plagued by intrusive thoughts of self-harm, and so anxious I couldn’t speak or steady my breathing. But I went to the hospital not because I wanted to die, but because I wanted to live, and I needed help to make it through to the next day. I was trying to live a life I’d be happy to live——and, frankly, able to live. I was learning to believe the voice that said “an unfair reality you’ve been forced into is[n’t] the only one you have to live.” And now I hope to be that voice, too. I want to live into a rejection of that feeling of impossibility.
Marlin M. Jenkins was born and raised in Detroit. The author of the poetry chapbook Capable Monsters (Bull City Press, 2020) and a graduate of University of Michigan’s MFA program, their poems, stories, and essays have found lots of good homes online and in print. They currently live and teach in Minnesota.