I was watching a video essay recently on the complex gender & queer history of Nintendo, and it got me thinking – I was a teenager in the ’90s, yet I not only never really played much Nintendo… I also pretty actively disliked it. I was Too Cool for it.

I had often attributed that to being a Sega Kid. (The Sega marketing of the early to mid ’90s was aimed at kids of my age, and was based on showing Nintendo as childish and uncool.) I never got into really anything Nintendo – not even Pokemon, despite being envious of kid with Gameboys and being pretty close to the right age to be its target demographic.

But the more I think about it, I was primed to dislike Nintendo right from the outset, and even much of the gaming Sega offered. The reason? I think it has to do with a one-two-three punch of a Tim Burton I hadn’t seen, a yellow-hued monochrome off-brand IBM XT clone… and a tiny second-hand book shop in the middle of the city.

I was 7 when Tim Burton’s gothic grim-dark take on Batman released. As part of the truly enormous marketing campaign, an actual filming Batmobile was flown around the world, spending a week or so cordoned off in shopping centres. I went up to my local mall numerous times during that week, just staring at the thing’s sleek lines and wishing I could go for a drive in it.

The thing is, I wouldn’t watch Batman itself until I was quite a bit older. Kids at my school were obsessed with it, but my parents wouldn’t let us see something so ‘dark’, with my siblings being even younger again. But the aesthetics of it – the gothic style, the art deco, the shadows – spoke to me even without knowing much about the film itself.

Somehow, despite not having seen it and never having been particularly interested in comics or superheroes, Batman manage to affect my imagination. I read books and imagined their settings looking like this version of Gotham City, even if it was wholly inappropriate to do so. Fantasy novels I read became re-set in dark, rain-drenched cities full of graffiti and crime.

But the books I read were actually often more fitting of that kind of bleakness than you’d expect despite still being single-digits old – because I wasn’t reading kids books.

Because, well, while my parents were careful not to let my siblings or I see violent or dark media (if it was rated PG, we weren’t allowed to see it most of the time)… my dad owned a book store, and he did no vetting as to just what I was reading.

It was a small second-hand book store nestled in the underground shopping mall at Martin Place (an above ground pedestrian mall that’d later become famous as the venue for the Woman In Red test program in 1999’s The Matrix). When I was too sick for school, but not sick enough to need to lie in bed, I’d go to work with my father, hiding in the back, sitting in the employee nook reading whatever books I wanted from the countless piles he had there.

I had learned to read young, due in no small part to my father’s job. This was in the ’80s, when booksellers would go to conventions to get wooed by publishers, convincing them to stock whatever they hoped the latest successful paperback series would be. He’d often come back from these conventions (mostly in the United States) with whatever book stock was being given away for free as exhibitors shut up shop.

With (relatively) limited ability to watch movies and TV compared to most of my friends, books were my cinema. And even my TV – our local library kept a complete collection of the novelisation of the original 1960s Star Trek series by James Blish, so while I saw maybe only 2-3 full episodes of Kirk & Spock’s space adventures as a kid, I read all of them – three episodes or so to a novel. When I finally actually watched more Star Trek 1960s episodes later on in life… well, look, let me just say that my imagination created a very different world to the cardboard-budget world of the actual series.

A lot of the media I absorbed was also very much not aimed at tweens and teenagers like me. In fact, my favourite fantasy series was a trashy but enjoyable one which, years later, I realised didn’t just have lesbian subtext… but text. (I only realised this years later when my “I think the two women are into each other” memory was put to the test buying it on Kindle.)

Then there came video games.

In the late ’80s and early ’90s, my friends had Nintendo or Sega consoles, ageing Commodore 64s or even (if they were very lucky) Amigas. We had no such luck. Ironically, my parents refused to let us buy devices whose sole purpose was to let us play video games. (“There’s no future in playing video games” is a particular irony given 2/3rds of their kids now work as professional video game developers.)

As a result, I mostly played the odd game at friends’ places – Sonic at one friend’s, back-seat driving during adventure games on an Amiga at another, and even getting to see the latest Famicom and Super Famicom stuff with my Japanese friend whose dad brought the hardware home from his business trips back to Tokyo (more on that later – it’s important).

But my first at-home exposure to a computer came in the very late ’80s, when my father brought home one of the famous (but still extremely out of date) IBM XTs. This certainly wasn’t a gaming machine. Its principle purpose was to let him use a digital spreadsheet, to help manage his book store.

But, sometimes, I got to play on it. Maybe an hour every week. Of course, it had no real games on it – just a collection of BASIC games which were entirely text-driven and a far cry from Sonic the Hedgehog or The Legend of Zelda.

In fact, the one I remember spending the most time on was Wildcatter, a rudimentary business sim where you ran an oil drilling company. To make it feel more realistic, I used to take the monthly reports the game generated and print them out on the old tractor-feed dot matrix printers. I would file these away, doing a few turns a day, pretending I was running the business like my father. (Talk about a very ’80s Reaganesque indoctrination into capitalism.)

So when other kids were playing extremely fancy 16-bit games, I was pretending to be an oil tycoon or reading lesbian fantasy novels. That would all change soon enough… but not quite in the way past-me would have wanted.

When I did get to play Sega or Nintendo, being at friend’s places… time was limited. You can’t really get into a single-player RPG when you’ve got maybe 15 minutes pass-the-controller with school friends, meaning the only consoles I ever liked back then were Sega – the ones with the fastest, the fanciest, and the simplest games.

I was given, a little later, a hand-me-down computer – a Commodore knock-off of the IBM XT I had first used, without a hard drive but with an orange-hued display instead of a green one. Really, this shouldn’t have changed much. It was functionally the same out-of-date computer I’d been using for years.

What was different with this computer? Well, nothing. It had similar specs (actually, worse as it had no 20mb hard drive to install things on)… but it was in my room.

This meant I could play games without parental supervision. Getting blank 5.25″ disk packets, I would convince friends to copy me whatever games they had that would run on such an old computer. Which, in practice, meant two things – texture adventures, and early Sierra games that still ran on monochrome displays. I couldn’t find many of the latter, either. Early on, I think I had Space Quest 1 & 2, Leisure Suit Larry, and a copy of Police Quest with a bad sector on the second disk, meaning I could play perhaps only the first third of the game (the patron car section).

This fed into my sense of being too cool for the games my friends were playing. While they were bouncing Italian plumbers atop of cutesy turtles, I was pretending to be a police officer or an oil tycoon or playing bleak sci-fi Infocom text adventures.

Over the years, I would eventually drop out of high school, get a job, and buy my own computer hardware. Soon my room was full of PCs – at one point I had three in my room, just for me – and could even afford to buy my own quite-graphical PC games, including one of the first ones I ever purchased with my own money.

Even when I did get graphical PC games, I tended to gravitate towards the long, self-serious role-playing adventures that still impact my taste in games today – the day I got a machine fast enough to run Ultima VII in my room led to many late nights fighting the evil can’t-believe-it’s-not-Scientology cult in Ultima VII (the greatest RPG ever made).

But my sense of being an adult, not a child, persisted. I balked at Mario or Zelda, despite being quietly envious of my friends who grew up playing them.

The irony, of course, is that what I most wanted wanted was complex games – systemically and narratively, to match the adult, grim-dark media I’d been consuming in text form almost since I was old enough to do so.

If I’d actually gotten a Nintendo, I’d probably have loved them. Maybe not Pokemon so much, but I am quite sure that had past-me gotten past the chip-on-the-shoulder and envy… they’d have become as die-hard a Zelda or Final Fantasy fan as anyone else.

However, when your only exposure to Nintendo is in pockets of time at friend’s places – I don’t think it’s really ever possible to love the most complex games on the platforms.

As such, all I saw with Nintendo… was twee plumbers and other things teen-me rolled their eyes at.

So while I sometimes imagine what-if scenarios about my past, the thing I most think of as I now begin my slow collecting of retro gaming hardware… is what if I’d been a Nintendo Girl?

Yes, it’s a list. I’m doing a listicle… thing. In actuality, an expansion on a bunch of twitter threads. (I should really learn that if it’s more than a handful of tweets, it’s a blog, not a twitter thing.)

It all began when someone asked me what my favourite vampire film of the ’70s was. It feels like a very specific question, but the reason is that the ’70s was a weird decade filled with a surprising glut of lesbian vampire exploitation films. Which got me thinking about other decades… and here we are.

So the idea is that for each decade from the ’20s through to now, I will select a single vampire film (if I can) which I consider to either be incredibly important to the vampire genre, or at least one that resonated most with me out of all the other flicks that decade.

It’s worth noting as well that my choices here reflect my own tastes, and my own interests.

The reason I passionately love vampire stories is that they can be used so well to discuss gender and sexuality, oppression, power and even toxic relationships.

This is where my interest in vampire films lies, and for that reason I will probably often deviate from the really ‘important’ and popular vampire films of a decade, to discuss one that touches more on these subjects.

Without further ado, let’s begin…

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The Roaring ’20s

There’s no choice here. I mean… almost literally no choice. A handful of Russian and other European vampire films were made in this decade, but only one has truly stood the test of time to influence vampire lore (and cinematography) and it’s, of course, F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu.

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The “why” of this should be obvious. It does what every great vampire film does, and it essentially did it first. The vampire is truly monstrous-looking, yet we still find ourselves empathising with him. The imagery is gothic & beautiful, almost romantic in composition – and yet there are still some genuinely terrifying bits.

The use of editing to move Count Orlock down the corridor without seeing him move must have frightened audiences out of their seats in the ’20s, and to this day remains a deeply unsettling sequence.

When someone asked me, “What really old films do you re-watch often?” my first impulse is to think of Citizen Kane and maybe Casablanca or The Big Sleep.

Then I remember this one, and it’s definitely the answer.

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The Bloody ’30s

My winner here is Dracula’s Daughter, from 1936.

To me, this is actually more important than the original Lugosi Dracula film from 5 years before, though that is likely as I’m coming at it from an interest in queer stories. Being a ’30s film, it still obeys conservative morality, so she’s a villain who must get her comeuppance at the end.

Despite this, I love the film. In it the metaphor of vampires as queer people dealing with (or giving in to) sinister urges is as close to text as we’ll get in film for some years. In one particularly memorable scene where Countess Marya Zaleska, the titular “daughter” of Dracula, finds a young woman out at night alone and has her manservant invite her home for food and warmth.

“My mistress is an artist. She will pay you if you will pose for her tonight.”

And pose she does. The scene where she disrobes as the vampire looks on with pure hunger (or, lust) in her eyes is one of the queerest in cinema since Marlena Dietrich’s kiss with a woman in 1930’s Morocco.

It’s also worth noting an interesting irony with this film – that the first mainstream image of a lesbian vampire came in this cash-in sequel to a popular Dracula adaptation, rather than as a direct adaptation of Carmilla, the original lesbian vampire novella, pre-dating the original Dracula novel itself by 25 years.

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The Fighting ’40s

Now to the ’40s and here’s the twist: I haven’t seen any ’40s vampire films. I thought that seemed odd, so I looked it up. But, legit? Almost no vampire films were made in the ’40s. Weird, right? But then, horror was in a slump then… guess people weren’t up for much horror in a decade when so much real horror was happening around the world.

Fear not, though, the ’50s has our back!

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The Fangtastic ’50s

The 1950s, my choice has to be Horror of Dracula, Hammer Horror’s first Dracula outing. Christopher Lee’s grand entrance into vampiric canon is, to me, a work of art. It’s gaudy and colourful, but despite that Lee brought something to Dracula which built on what Lugosi did and made it… scarier. Much scarier.

He has Lugosi’s elegance and sexuality, but with a menace that for me always felt sort of missing in what Lugosi did. I’d be absolutely terrified if Christopher Lee’s Count Dracula appeared atop my stairwell at night; if Lugosi’s Dracula did I’d probably sit him down and have a polite chat about the etiquette of breaking into women’s houses in fancy capes.

And it’s quite a gorgeous film. More gothic shadows and the obligatory suite of pretty Hammer sets. (You’ll need to forgive the garishly bright blood, though.)

Beyond this, too, Horror of Dracula really kind of set the standard for future Dracula film in that the casting of Van Helsing was equally iconic. Who can even remember who played Van Helsing in the Lugosi Dracula?

Everyone remembers Peter Cushing.

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The Sordid ’60s

Now for the ’60s. This is a tough one, as honestly… while there are piles of vampire flicks this decade, not many appealed to me. So the winner has to be Blood and Roses, the 1960 French/Italian arthouse lesbian flick.

It’s… not great. But to its credit its imagery sticks with me.

This film is allegedly actually based off Le Fanu’s Carmilla, though to call the adaptation ‘loose’ would be an insult to badly-tied shoes. A few name remain the same – Karnstein and Carmilla herself – but that’s essentially where the similarities end.

This sort of set the tone for Carmilla adaptations, intentionally or not. Despite being adapted into film at least 15 times from the ’30s on, few have more than superficial connections to the source material.

The end result is a hard to follow story – a bizarre thing involving parties, a fireworks display involving undetonated WW2 bombs, catacombs, and one of the leads being seemingly possessed by a vampire.

This and the surprising glut of lesbian vampire films to follow (I’ll talk more about that in the next decade’s section) seem to have one thing in common – style over substance.

But despite the story being a mess losing all the texture of the original novella, the imagery is pretty consistently beautiful – enough for me to excuse the story being bland and, wait for it… [drum fill] lifeless.

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The Sapphic ’70s

The 1970s saw an absolute torrent of lesbian vampire exploitation and arthouse films, from the loosely connected “Karnstein Trilogy” Hammer did to several loosely based off the legend of the Countess Elizabeth Báthory, and a collection of surreal ones turned out by the French director Jean Rollin.

(Rollin directed something like 5 female-centred vampire films within a decade, though the one most people remember is Fascination, if only because of its iconic image of a woman in a cloak brandishing a scythe.)

My choice here though was actually quite easy, despite the number of vampire films to choose from – it’s the 1974 British-made, Spanish-directed lesbian vampire “erotic thriller”, Vampyres.

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In the film, men (mostly awful men) die horribly at the hands (literally) of a pair of lesbian vampires. They live in a castle, luring men in for threesomes before killing them brutally. Fran and Miriam, the titular vampires, don’t simply live together but seem to genuinely love each other, too – at least a partial contrast to the predatory-lesbian tropes which abound in many similar films of the era.

The threesome scenes are certainly explicit for the era, with lots of nudity and (slightly awkward) kissing, and it’s pretty clear that the ‘erotic’ part was more important to the film’s bottom line than the ‘thriller’ part, and there is a surprising amount of fairly realistic-looking blood as the men are used as some combination of food and sport by our women.

In most vampire films, someone being bitten or assaulted by a vampire is usually drawn to them – is compelled and perhaps even enjoys their own demise. That’s not the case here, at least once the hunted realise their threesome is about to get nasty.

The murder and assault scenes are quite graphic – one where the leads finally attack a young woman instead of a man is particularly unpleasant. Screaming, torn clothes… it’s hard to read as anything but actual rape.

The film isn’t quite as pretty as some of the European exploitation films, but there’s a very specific reason chose this film over the many other choices – and why I have copies of almost all the trashy posters for it (shown above) on my wall:

The women get away with it.

In the typical early-20th-century vampire movie, the film ends when the vampire is destroyed by a worthy adversary (or even a Final Girl if it’s from the Slasher period). In a lesbian vampire film, it’s usually a man who waltzes in looking all Van Helsing. If they’re going by conventional tropes, they probably also end the film with a hint that maybe the vampire isn’t entirely dead – or perhaps someone else got bit.

There are only a few exceptions to this, and when they do exist they tend to be “victory for the vampires; but at a cost”. In the problematic but memorable Belgian lesbian vampire flick Daughters of Darkness (try and say that three times fast), one of the handful based off the Countess Báthory legend, the original vampires are defeated, leaving only the newly created one (and even her in mortal danger) – the horror trope of the cycle beginning again.

Vampyres, meanwhile, almost treats its leads as the protagonists. The first few men we see them murder are nasty pieces of work, and it’s truly hard to feel sorry for the victims. It’s only when they attack a woman later on that the movie seems to truly turn on them – they lose their home, but not their lives.

They escape, while one of their victims survives. This film’s version of “Maybe the villain isn’t truly dead?” seems to be “They kept their lives, but perhaps their surviving victim will exact revenge later?”

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The Excessive ’80s

Now, given my real passion is lesbian vampire films, those of you who know vampire film history probably think you know what I’m going to pick -Tony Scott’s 1983 film The Hunger.

I mean, fuck, it’s sapphic as hell AND has David Bowie in it, right?

But no. It… never worked for me. Which isn’t to say I think it’s bad. It’s a worthwhile entry into the non-schlock vampire canon – I just didn’t really enjoy it.

See, the ’80s is when vampire films got truly fun. They got silly and weird in a way they hadn’t often been before – it’s when we had The Lost Boys and Fright Night.

My choice for an ’80s vampire film kinda fits in this vein (see what I did there?) but also does something else interesting – it merges genres. It’s not a lesbian film, but it is directed by a woman. My pick is Kathryn Bigelow’s 1987 neo-western vampire film, Near Dark.

It’s vampires not as elegant, charismatic creatures of the night but as a crude biker gang – a band of violent, motley Western-style outlaws.

Bigelow and her producer-husband James Cameron basically wholesale poached a lot of the cast of his earlier film Aliens, and brought their on-screen chemistry with them. So while the story isn’t exactly deep, the visuals and the amazing cast help make this unique take continue to have residence in my brain.

I feel like vampires are best when they’re used as subtext, or when genres blend to juxtapose with them other imagery, as Bigelow does here with Western and gang-movie tropes.

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The Introspective ’90s

Now onto the ’90s and, sorry but… I have to go with the obvious one here. Interview with the Vampire, the film and its source material, have probably had a greater impact on vampire lore than anything since Carmilla and Dracula.

It’s here, it’s queer, it’s set in New Orleans.

It is, of course, Interview with the Vampire.

Interview, the book and the movie, set the stage for the Sad Vampire Protagonist trope that’d continue on in various forms for decades after. From Twilight to the angsty, angry, sexual vampires in True Blood, it’s hard not to trace it all back here.

Previous films may have lightly implied we should maybe empathise a bit with the vampires, but with Interview we finally got a film truly about the vampires. Unlike Near Dark, here even the villainous vampire who ushers our point of view character into unlife is, if anything, famously more compelling to viewers than the actual lead.

The film knows it, too – it’s why my favourite part of this film is the ending, when we finally get a glimpse of Lestat’s point of view.

“Always WHINING, Louis! [pause] Are you done? [turns off the tape of Louis’ life story] I’ve had to listen to that for centuries!”

In that one moment the film pivots to show us not only the sad, lonely, self-loathing monster, but the one who takes joy in his monstrosity – something most films rarely do.

I have to say, though, picking this one out of the decent number of good vampire films from the ’90s is tough. The ’90s also saw yet another iconic re-imagining of Dracula, done with incredible style and a high budget by Francis Ford Coppola.

But one other ’90s vampire film is so important to me that I think I need to break my ‘one film’ rule and talk a bit about it.

It’s 1995’s The Addiction, a strange black & white arthouse film about a philosophy major in New York who’s bitten by a vampire and has to suffer her newfound addiction to blood while she philosophises and drifts aimlessly about the streets, feeding off people as she is able.

It’s vampirism as drug addiction, and is a film I’ve gone back to again and again, especially the uniquely unsettling scene where our lead is first stalked by (and bitten by) her vampire maker.

It’s also notable for giving us not only Lili Taylor as a truly unique vampire, but also Christopher Walken as a thoughtful but intimidating fellow blood-sucker she lucks upon during her travels – almost to her doom.

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The Naughty ’00s

From the late ’90s towards 2000 and beyond we got a truly staggering number of vampire films, and some of them were genuinely very good. We had vampires turn into action heroes with the Blade and Underworld franchises, we had problematic YA vampire romance making it into every second teen girl’s bedroom with Twilight, the creepy child vampire of Let The Right One In, and the interesting meta-textual story of Shadow of the Vampire.

My choice, though, my absolute favourite from the years 2000-2009, has to be 2001’s low-budget Canadian horror/action/comedy/musical masterpiece, Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter.

In it Jesus (pictured here beating up a clown-car full of atheists) is tasked by a mohawk-sporting Catholic priest to hunt down vampires who’re killing the city’s lesbians.

It’s indie. It’s budget. It’s fun. It’s a musical. But most importantly? It has a surprisingly great, progressive message taking it from good to amazing.

When he’s beaten and left for dead in a laneway, the priest won’t help Jesus. Nor the passing cop. But the drag queen? Fuck yeah she will!

Jesus says “LOVE IS LOVE!” (Literally, that’s a line in the movie when he’s asked why he’s saving these horrible sinning gays.)

Despite its kitsch, I do actually also find the take on vampirism it has quite interesting. In it mad scientists are grafting skin onto vampires so they can walk in the daylight, and the reason they choose lesbians as the involuntary skin-donors is, uh… well it’s very ’90s, but still funny.

The film revels in its absurdity and its love for all the weird, queer, alternative things in the world.

When the evil vampire henchwoman is all but defeated, rather than destroy her Jesus lays hands on her, heals her and lets her become human again so she can be with her lesbian lover.

In this film Jesus truly saves (and performs a few great musical numbers too).

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The Terrifying 2010s

The trashy vampires moved to the silver screen in 2010, giving us True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, The Originals. This move left room for the big screen to be dominated by indie films – especially a surprisingly large number of vampire films about or directed by women.

We had the arthouse American-made, Persian-language vampire film A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. We had The Moth Diaries, a meta-textual take on Carmilla by Mary Harron, the director of American Psycho. We had The Unwanted, a micro-budget modernised take on Carmilla which went interesting places until its fuck-awful ending ruined it. And, of course, we had What We Do In The Shadows, the fantastic vampire parody which takes every trope for a hundred years and plays them with love, spinning off into two TV series and counting.

We even had the brilliant Only Lovers Left Alive, Jim Jarmusch’s take on vampires, taking the Sad Vampire Protagonist trope and playing it on a knife’s edge between drama and farce.

But my choice is a 2010 German film.

In We Are The Night a young woman and petty criminal who falls in with a group of female-only vampires, working off an almost SCUM-Manifesto-like principle that men only bring trouble.

It’s almost a female-centered counterpoint to Near Dark, but this time out gang feed, drink, fuck, play and go shopping at hugely expensive fashion stores and with a few exceptions (including an unfortunate and literal use of the predatory lesbian trope) they do all care for each other.

Even the ending, despite coming very close to either a ‘downer ending’ like earlier lesbian vampire films, manages to do okay – far better than other female-only-vampire-coven films like Bit some years later.

It’s also absolutely jaw-droppingly gorgeous – and suitably queer.

Even its use of vampire tropes is visually unique. In the scene where Lena, our protagonist is bitten by Louise, the head vampire, Lena is staring into a mirror. She turns around to look at Louise, then back in the mirror and watches in horror as she sees the bite on her neck appear, the blood drip down… but not a single hint that the woman is there behind her.

Some of the subtext is good, too – being turned into a vampire causes Lena’s hair to shed its black dye, to grow thicker and longer, her piercings heal and tattoos fade away – by being taken in by this female vampire group, her body is forcibly turned into a manifestation of conventionally-attractive, conservative feminine style rather than one she chose for herself.

Flaws aside… it’s a favourite of mine. Probably actually my favourite vampire film of all time. Gorgeous, sexy, unique, monstrous, emotional and straight-up fun. It manages to do all the things other vampires do, but in one film.

…but I’m not done yet. One other film in the 2010s was so good I have to talk about it here as a runner-up.

Two years after We Are The Night the director of the original Interview With The Vampire came back to vampires with Byzantium, a unique female-perspective vampire film.

In We Are The Night, male vampires don’t exist (by design of the female vampires). But in 2012’s Byzantium, vampirism is a gift rich men give to each other to control the world…

…until women take it from them.

A sex worker steals the gift meant for her abusive partner, leaving him to die while she and her daughter eek out an existence on the fringes of society while male vampires hunt them down.

It’s vampires to discuss the patriarchy, which is great.

The tension is between the mother and daughter, about the ethics of feeding, and about their right to exist with the gift of immortality which men feel is their domain alone.

It’s also another bloody gorgeous film, rich with imagery and sumptuous deaths.

Choosing between We Are The Night and this, the former won – but only just.

And that’s the end – for now. The 2020s have just begun so here’s hoping that we see more vampire stories using the tropes to discuss gender, sexuality and oppression.

(And hopefully more written and directed by women.)

I want to start by mentioning two things:

Firstly: Context.

That I am writing this near the end of 2020 from Sydney, Australia. Our country has done a truly fantastic job of containing COVID-19. Our initial lockdown in March/April took us to what we call ‘donut days’ – days with 0 local transmissions in our state. When a sudden case of unknown origin on the Northern Beaches hit a few weeks ago and blew out to (at the time of writing) over a hundred cases, selective lockdowns and truly incredible contact tracing & testing has reduced that back to single digits per day, despite it happening over Christmas and New Years, a time when people are in the middle of serious partying.

It’s not over, of course. If we’re unlucky, despite intense restrictions on the size of indoor gatherings over New Years, we may get more clusters. If our so far incredibly effective tracing methods fail there and it came to the worst, we’d likely lock down again, same as we did in March – and same as Melbourne successfully did mid way through the year when they had a runaway hotspot. It’d suck, but I am sure we’d once more be back to gleefully declaring that we’d had “a week of donut days” or the like.

However, despite this being the case, in other parts of the world, more people are dying each day than have died in the entire of Australia from COVID, and while I talk about having gone through a single several-month lockdown in this, I’m only too aware that a lot of people have done it much tougher, and many are still locked down.

What I’m mostly talking about in this post are things related to the social effects I’ve seen in a place where the pandemic has begun to subside in most of the ways people like me notice on a day-to-day basis

So the context is this: immense privilege just living where I am, and where despite our federal government being awful, our state governments & state health departments are getting us through this.

Secondly: When It’s Over.

I’m going to talk about ‘when it’s over’ a bit here. Or even refer to it being ‘largely over’ for us here in Australia. This isn’t true, of course. Vaccines are just starting to roll out around the world, more people are dying now than ever before, and even in Australia it’s going to be many years yet before COVID-19 stops dominating our news cycles, political discourse and even our life decisions.

So, when I talk about it being “over”, what I am referring to is when the risk is low enough that for the most part our lives are going back to the same kind of routines we had before the pandemic.

This is important because, barring current hotspots like Avalon in the north-east of Sydney, this is how things are right now for most Australians.

And yet, at least from what I’ve seen… things are not the same as they were, and I’m not sure how long it will take for them to be so.

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In March, for a regular medical procedure I had to trek into the CBD for the first time since lockdown. A friend gave me a lift, as I did not want to risk public transport. Shops were shut, streets were empty and I saw almost nobody without a mask on.

It was a surreal thing to see. Before this I’d only seen empty streets like this in movies – you couldn’t clear out Sydney’s CBD during the day or evening like this if you tried.

Otherwise, having just moved into an apartment on my own for the first time in my life, and having the privilege of an office job I was easily able to start doing from home, my life became more or less the lockdown cliché.

I ordered local organic produce boxes.

I baked.

I learned to cook things I’d not made before.

I went stir-crazy, scared and unsure just how long this would last or even if somehow this would be the end of civilisation as I knew it (your brain goes to dark places when you see almost nobody for months at a time).

I tried to change up my routine by taking different morning walks around my suburb. I had my breakfasts on my balcony, so at least I wasn’t constantly inside my apartment.

But then the restrictions eased.

I had a friend over to watch movies. We made cocktails, and it was one of the most amazing nights of my life. I nearly cried.

My birthday came shortly there-after, and I had the truly amazing experience of seeing two of my friends at once, to show them one of my favourite recent films.

Perhaps it was because the pressure of organising a party wasn’t there, or perhaps it was just that I hadn’t seen two friends together like that in what felt like an eon, but it sticks in my mind as the best so far of my just over 3-dozen birthdays.

Then more restrictions were eased.

Bars opened up, dotted with gauche signs that made my skin crawl because all I could think of was people in other countries dying en masse.

I finally went to one, on a tinder date, somewhere in the middle of the year.

It felt… off. We may still have been able to go to bars, but the new “CovidSafe” restrictions businesses were required to abide by changed the experience of being in them. Fewer seats meaning far fewer patrons. Checking in and sanitising your hands before being seated. Table service only – no lining up to get the next around.

These are all good things, of course, but… the experience was more the awkwardness of a restaurant, not the laid back feeling I had missed from bars.

And even beyond that, many of my friends are immunocompromised and won’t be going out to bars or gigs again until a good percentage of our population is immunised – enough for them to feel safe in doing what I felt safe enough to do months ago.

That first experience going to a bar post-lockdown sticks in my mind because it was enough to make me not really want to do it again. It’s been more or less safe for us here to see some friends in bars all but a few months of this year, really – and yet I’ve been to a bar a grand total of 4 times since March.

In 2019, I almost used went to that number on a busy week.

As the year was drawing to a close, a friend came over who had been stuck in Melbourne during their second lockdown. As with most of the socialising my friends and I do these days, it was at one of our houses.

We sat on my balcony, drinking gin and catching up, and she said something that got me thinking: “I was looking forward to getting back to Sydney, because I’d get to see all my friends and socialise like normal. But it’s not like that.”

I used to see small groups of friends every weekend, and would catch up with people at bars or cinemas a few times a week after work.

As my friend put it, “You go out to a bar for a bit, then message friends to see who’s out, join up with them, and you keep going until the night’s done. But not now – nobody’s out, so you just see the one or two people you started the night with.”

In the months since it was more or less over, friendships had changed. Everyone had to pick who to spent time with. For those in nesting relationships, that usually meant their partner and, often, another couple they know who lives nearby. Or maybe a BFF.

My social circle went from many dozens I’d catch up with regularly, to seeing really only my closest friends – both in an emotional sense and a geographic one.

When travel feels like an additional risk, the people you can get to see most easily end up being the priority.

As a result, people I really do care about I’ve barely seen this year – the tyranny of distance just got even nastier. Other people I barely knew have become new BFFs, because they were there. They checked in on me when I was in lockdown alone.

I presumed that once things went ‘back to normal’ this would change – I’d start catching up with friends again in a more casual way, but the simple fact is that hasn’t happened.

Friendships have been irrevocably changed from this. I keep thinking of how a certain person didn’t reciprocate my desire to hang out with them earlier this year, and how much that stung. I was not part of their Covid Circle.

Then I think of people who reached out to me and… got the same reaction from me. I didn’t feel close enough to want them in my inner circle. So that sense of hurt I felt, they might well feel the same.

Even when things got slightly safer, those social changes seemed to stick. Instead of this enormous big queer bubble I felt like I lived in, I now live in a tiny one more or less of a combination of luck and my own devising.

When I decided to have a small gathering for drinks in November, and needed to pick 10 people to invite to stay at a nice low number… I realised this was very easy, as I didn’t really feel close to more people than that any more.

What’s missing is the people you liked, but maybe weren’t really close to. Those people you never spoke to outside of the times you happened to run into them at a party a mutual friend had, or because you ran into them at a bar in Newtown.

I haven’t met a single new person this year without intending to. Outside of tinder, there were no parties, so I didn’t make random new acquaintances.

Social circles are smaller, and largely stagnant.

Perhaps, by end of next year, when the bulk of our populace has been vaccinated, things will be more “normal”. Things will return a bit more to the way they used to be. But even then, the social fallout from all this likely won’t.

Social groups will be different. We’ll be more used to smaller cliques, and I’m just not even sure any more that everyone will go back to the way things were before.

After two years of not travelling much outside our suburbs, maybe some of us will be itching to do just that, and become travellers even around our own city in a way we hadn’t been before. Or perhaps we’ll just get used to things as they have been since the pandemic began and… just stick to it.

For a lot of us, the habits formed during this pandemic will result in ongoing changes in how we socialise, see friends and go about our lives, even once it’s over.

I’m just surprised how dramatic and immutable those changes already feel.

A few weeks ago, I got a Playstation 5.

One of the interesting things about getting a shiny new console on launch day is that the catalogue of games you can get on it are… minimal. The upshot of this is that rather than my usual trick of perhaps buying maybe 2-3 games a year, only in very specific subgenres that appeal to me, I find myself playing games that are far outside of what I would normally play.

The last time this happened was, unshockingly, when I got my brand new Playstation 4.

It’s usually an interesting time for me, forcing myself out of my comfort zone, seeing what there is to enjoy out in the wider planes of video game land. Hell, when I got my shiny new Xbox 360 I even played a few sports game – and I do so hate sports games.

This year, one of the shiny new games I tried is Demons’ Souls, the PS5 remake.

To say I bounce off souls-like games is… and understatement. I’ve tried Dark Souls 1 and Bloodborne before, and Demon’s Souls is… much the same for me (if many, many times prettier).

Within a week of trying this and a few other games, I found myself simply re-installing old favourites and using my blank new PS5 with no save games as a good excuse to re-play them from scratch.

Red Dead Redemption 2. Watch Dogs 2. I’ve even occasionally committed the horrible sin of letting my shiny new console sit idle while I go back to playing indie management sims on my desktop computer.

But going so far out of my comfort zone got me thinking – what exactly is it I like in a video game?

When people ask what I normally play, I usually reply with the most superficial of answers – I play open-world Action and RPG games, mostly, plus some management or construction games. And flight simulations, of course, though really for me the desire to jump in Microsoft Flight Sim and do a flight happens when I am in a different headspace to when I feel like playing a ‘real’ video game.

As I sat there, angrily cursing at Demon’s Souls and trying to find something other than the graphics I liked about it, I began to think more about my answer to that question. Because I don’t magically like all open-world Action or RPG games, of course. Who does? There are very specific titles I like.

I got Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla for my PS5, but lost interest in that game incredibly quickly – yet it, like all the previous AC games (some of which I’ve enjoyed immensely) still fits in a category that I usually enjoy.

An hour later, my PS5 was asleep in the corner of my room while I found myself diving back into Subnautica, one of my go-to games since I first discovered it way back in early access.

As I sat there in my observatory dome underneath the ocean, waiting for the sun to rise and plotting out my day’s expedition to the Mushroom Forests to collect the lead, lithium and quartz I’d need to begin my next base expansion, it finally hit me.

Why Subnautica appeals to me, yet Green Hell does not.

Why Red Dead Redemption 2 appeals to me, yet Far Cry 5 does not.

Why Airport CEO and Project Highrise appeal to me, while Two Point Hospital does not.

Why games I may have really liked in years past, such as Star Wars Squadrons or even Mafia (the remake) caused me to lose interest so fast.

Video games have different scales at which they function when you play them.

There’s the moment-to-moment gameplay, usually requiring some degree of tactical thinking and hand-eye co-ordination. Do you manage to get off that headshot in Red Dead, or do you miss and end up back in cover, suddenly surrounded by more Pinkertons and in a worse situation than if you’d made that initial shot? Do you manage manage to tale that Barque carrying a load of lumber as a prize in AC: Black Flag? How well do you nail the placement of the ammenities and offices you plan to lease out in Project Highrise?

Then there’s the larger, more strategic thinking that goes into them. What is your plan for your day in Red Dead 2 – do you go hunting in the morning so the camp has food, into town during afternoon to trade in some goods you stole during a recent robbery? Are you going to build a new hydroponics wing for your base in Subnautica, or perhaps clean up and improve the Moonpool and submarine docking area that you were never quite happy with?

The action in Red Dead Redemption 2 is, frankly, quite easy. I play enough third and first person action games that it’s quite rare I die Red Dead, and when I do it’s usually because I made quite a foolish mistake. The same is true in Mafia III and Watch Dogs 2. Subnautica may not be an -easy- game per se, but half the game is avoiding close encounters with horrifying sea monsters – not seeking them out to kill them, as you frankly cannot really do that in most cases.

What keeps me playing them is not the moment-to-moment challenge of gunplay or stealth in any of those games. I have no interest in playing a difficult game solely to get better at the combat mechanics. In the games I like, the combat is a small, momentary thing that rarely presents a huge challenge.

Will I successfully take out the six guys who ambushed me from behind the rocks on my way easy through the heartlands in Red Dead 2? Almost certainly yes. I’ll enter dead-eye mode and headshot a few, dive off my horse, fuck behind a rock for cover then take the others out. Unless I am very careless, it’s not actually difficult. What makes that engagement interesting is what comes next – the decision of what to do right after the guns come out.

The gunplay happened on a road. These men tried to rob me, and are now lying dead, their possessions morally mine within the general ethics of this kind of game. Do I go and pad down the bodies, taking their money, ammunition and trinkets to sell at a fence later on? Do I do that and risk that a traveller on a horse or carriage may turn up, see me looting the corpses and run off to describe my crimes to the nearest law-man, resulting in a bounty on my head?

In Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, raiding settlements is a big focus of the game. You and your longboat full of angry bearded goons scream and charge into the town in a historically-sanitised raid that usually results in no ‘civilians’ being killed. Once that’s done, you open their chests and pilfer their valuables, before heading off on your way. There is no real decision to make, other than when to begin your raid. The challenge, and what people obviously enjoy about that game and others like it is the combat itself.

The moment to moment challenge of using your skills and weapons to defeat the village’s random large guard captain and some of his underbosses, along-side the many other random men with swords who come out to defend their village is the point. Once it’s one, you get your spoils and head back to spend the loot upgrading your village, giving you access to more equipment and tools to make the next raid easier (or at least more possible to accomplish).

I haven’t taken pleasure in getting better at fighting in games for a long time.

I’m not interested in spending hours re-fighting the same battle until I manage to take out a particularly tough boss. To me, it’s the larger decisions about what to do next in a game that makes me come back for more, especially if those decisions exist in an internally-consistent world, ideally resembling our own to some degree.

I accept that combat is, in many games, mandatory. A thing that we have long since accepted as just What One Does In A Video Game.

I sometimes even enjoy it a bit.

But for the most part, video games are about escapism to me. To spend time living in a place or time I cannot actually be in real life. The moment to moment mechanics should be simple and easy enough to almost be flavouring – something which adds to the sense of really being in that world.

I accept that Arthur Morgan gets into gunfights and robs banks because, well… that’s the story this game is telling. But it’s the fact that I can get on my horse, ride for days, camping at night, hunting for my meals and trying to find interesting places to visit that grabs me.

If that part was spun off into its own game, I’d play it – if the combat parts were put in a Naughty Dog style linear action game with the same story, I’d likely never have even finished it in the first time.

The meta-game and the experience of a world feeling real interests me; the mechanics of the moment-to-moment gameplay only interests me insofar as they help me feel like the world is real.

It’s why management and construction games where you build a single, large functional system or object interests me (whether that is a single commercial tower in Project Highrise or a city in Cities: Skylines), yet strategy games where you build multiple smaller structures as part of a ‘campaign’ of levels, like in Two Point Hospital, tend not to.

I want to create, explore and enjoy a space, whether that’s a top-down 2d space or a large, open 3d one. I’ll even shoot or stab a few people in that space, if I must – but the world feeling alive and the game giving me a sense of accomplishment when I complete my own player-set long term goals of advancement and construction will always matter more to me more than how challenging an individual event or encounter within that space is.