Earlier this month, Rocky Mountain PBS and Denver Film hosted a screening of “Break the Game,” a documentary that deals with mental health, online gaming culture, and the unique experiences transgender people have with both of them.
The film was followed by a brief Q&A session, moderated by RMPBS Community Relations Director Amber Coté, with Colorado Springs community advocate Stoney Roberts and LGBTQ mental health counselor Dara Hoffman.
When the credits ended and the Q&A began, the air was heavy in the theater. It seemed that “Break the Game” was a hard-hitting watch for most people in the audience, this writer included. Its focus on discriminatory harassment against transgender people, and its impacts on their mental health, seemed to hit harder during the ongoing legislative and executive attacks against transgender rights in the U.S.
“I also felt like a roller coaster of emotions,” said Coté. “I really, given the world now, I think there’s a different impact of watching this film than even a year ago.”
Hoffman, who is nonbinary, echoed this sentiment: “I myself being someone who’s trans as well, and like you were saying, Amber, there’s just so much on my mind when it comes to what’s happening now in our world.”
This was one of three movies screened as part of RMPBS’ POV Screening Series, all of which highlighted stories from marginalized groups. I took a special interest in “Break the Game,” though – as a journalist who often covers LGBTQ political issues (and a member of the community myself), it seemed like the one where my specific knowledge would be most applicable.
The movie uses archived stream footage to retell the story of Narcissa Wright, a once-popular streamer and speedrunner who, in the 2010s, lost most of her fanbase after coming out as a trans woman.
For the uninitiated, speedrunning is a type of self-imposed challenge to complete a video game in the shortest possible amount of time, often exploiting glitches to go faster than a casual playthrough would allow or skip parts of the game altogether. World records for popular games are often hotly contested, with many record-holders winning by fractions of seconds.
Wright’s speedrunning specialty had been Nintendo’s “Legend of Zelda” franchise, so when “Breath of the Wild” is released as the newest installment in 2017, she vows to not just claim the world record, but to stream until she surpasses her past record number of viewers on Twitch in doing so.
Over the course of the documentary, Wright grapples with the vulnerability that comes with being openly trans. It costs her social connections and status, and it also means she is targeted by online trolls for harassment, suicide-baiting, and doxing. At one point, anonymous individuals send a mental health check-up team to Wright’s apartment, a thinly veiled threat that the trolls know where she lives.
“Folks coming to her door and things of that nature quickly become something where it’s like, oh, okay, folks are not just being ignorant to be ignorant. This is unsafe. And I think that, you know, being a trans person, that uniquely is something that, you know, is concerning,” said Roberts.
In addition, Wright struggles seriously with her mental health. The archived stream footage gives an unblinkingly intimate look at what is described as an addiction to attention, as Wright fails to draw healthy boundaries between her personal life and her streaming. This culminates in her “feeding the trolls” in search of ever more attention, which becomes a self-destructive spiral.
But the visibility isn’t entirely a negative thing. Wright’s live chat, throughout the documentary, has a small but consistent community of dedicated supporters, and through that community, she forms a romantic connection with another streamer, who is also a trans woman. It’s support from her and Wright’s mother that allows Wright to ultimately “break the game” and leave streaming behind to focus on offline life.
Emotionally, all this made for a tough viewing. But it also felt raw, bracing, and most of all honest in a way that feels important given the Trump administration’s ongoing attempt to strip back rights for and suppress the history of trans people in America.
“I think specifically as queer folks, as trans folks, we often go through these periods in history where our histories are stripped away, or get eradicated, or they’re erased, or they’re changed, and so being able to tell our stories authentically and fully is really, really important,” said Roberts at the Q&A session after the screening. “And I think the power of being able to see yourself reflected, oftentimes, you know, people use cliches like representation matters, but it truly does. If you don’t see yourself reflected, it’s hard to realize and to feel like you might have a future. I know as a young person I felt that way, not seeing a lot of gender expansive black folks, or black folks in general, there wasn’t, I didn’t think there was much of a place for me.”
A lot of people, trans or otherwise, could relate to Wright’s recollection of her childhood, feeling isolated from others and taking comfort in video games. Speaking personally: I’m not as much of a gamer anymore, but when I was a kid, I was about as geeky as they came – I spent many long car rides glued to my Nintendo DS, sometimes playing until I got car-sick, then continuing anyway. After I moved to a new town to attend middle school, it often felt easier to collect friends while playing Pokemon than it did to make them in real life.
I also really appreciated the genuine affection between Wright and her mother (who passed away before the film was released). Too often, when we hear about trans people’s relationships with their parents, it’s because those parents refuse to accept their children’s identities. But there are also many parents who continue to show their children unconditional love, and I think that’s important to remind people of. It’s a bright spot in a movie filled with emotional turmoil.
And, while the streams that built this movie took place years before the COVID-19 pandemic, I think that Wright’s struggle to find connection in a mostly online life is all the more relevant now. Online communities became a vital social lifeline for people stuck at home during the 2020 lockdowns, and they have continued to be this for many young people, including those struggling with long COVID-linked chronic illnesses.
All this is to say that even if you’re not transgender, or even a gamer, there’s a lot that you could take away from Wright’s story. The human aspects of the documentary are things I think anyone can understand. I think that’s the most valuable thing to recognize at this political moment.
Especially in a time when anti-trans bigots seem more vocal than ever, it’s worth noting that the streaming and speedrunning communities’ general attitudes towards LGBTQ people have, in many cases, changed for the better.
That’s not to say that the gaming community is now a complete bastion of progress and inclusivity. Years after the misogynistic harassment movement of Gamergate, it’s still easy enough to turn over a digital rock and find weirdos spinning their heads about diversity in video games.
But nowadays, there are more than a few trans streamers with sizable fanbases, as well as cis streamers who are vocally trans-supportive. Games Done Quick (GDQ), an organization that runs an ongoing series of charity speedrunning marathons, has in recent years been inclusive of trans speedrunners, and in 2022 cancelled an event in Florida in protest of the state’s anti-LGBTQ policies, including the infamous ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill.
Right now can only be described as a strange and ambivalent moment in transgender history: at once, trans people in the U.S. enjoy unprecedented social acceptance, while also facing unprecedented levels of vitriol and attacks from elected officials.
Hoffman said that, in this light, honest trans storytelling like that of “Break the Game” might be more important than ever.
“Especially now, just seeing the human aspect of somebody is so important, and I could hear, in the audience, you know, at different times, things that, um, Narcissa was going through and hearing like gasps or tears,” they said. “And I think that’s exactly what needs to happen, is to have that emotional connection with a real life human, and that’s what storytelling does, especially for the trans community. At this time, these kinds of stories being conveyed to people who aren’t trans I think is gonna go a long, long way.”
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