Puzzle game Is This Seat Taken? is all about anxiety — not crushing, elephant-on-your-chest anxiety, but the small instances of overthinking that come up throughout an average day of life as a human. Where should you sit on the bus when one side has middle schoolers playing competing terrible music as loud as their phones will go, and the other is home to some passenger’s stinky takeout food? In the world of Is This Seat Taken?, characters — represented as shapes like triangles or squares — don’t have to fix those worries for themselves. You, the player, take on that task, placing characters so everyone fits on the bus, movie theater, or cafeteria happily.
The first time I played the game, it was about 8:30 a.m. and I’d already been up for an hour. I woke up in my sunny apartment on 14th Street in Washington, D.C. to a whistle blowing just outside and someone screaming “ICE” at the top of their lungs. I donned my KN95 mask both for obscurity and safety and joined in with my neighbors, who were surrounding an unmarked vehicle with an armed, masked ICE agent inside. We shouted until the vehicle pulled away, following the car down the street. Then we moved on to another car that was parked across the street (I’ve anecdotally noticed that one ICE agent means another is likely nearby), first verifying that the unmarked vehicle was in fact an ICE agent by peering through the highly tinted windows until we could see a stocky man in the hallmark bulletproof vest in the driver’s seat. Many of the ICE agents active in D.C. right now wear unofficial garb like black buffs and nondescript vests that anyone can purchase online. In this case, our suspicions were verified when a Metro police officer drove up and told us to stop harassing a stranger. “It’s ICE,” we said. He had the agent roll down the window, confirmed it was ICE, then told us to leave them alone and let them do their job.
On this particular morning we shouted and shamed and told our neighbors, many of them on their way to drop their children off at school, to take another route. Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network, one of the prominent activist groups in D.C. focused on immigrant safety, asks that allies who see ICE activity make as much noise as possible by blowing whistles or screaming “ICE” or “la migra” — anything to prevent ICE from abducting people with no witnesses. Eventually the second car left, and a few people followed it further up 14th Street. I saw online later that day that ICE had a checkpoint set up at 14th and U streets, evilly placed right where the Green Line lets out and where so many rideshare drivers make their money. This was a typical day under the occupation of the National Guard and the Metro Police Department, federalized and militarized by President Trump for the sake of “safety” in the District.
So while I was looking forward to playing an indie game that was supposedly all about life’s little anxieties, Is This Seat Taken? landed differently for me. Still calming myself from the adrenaline rush of that morning’s events, I launched the game and started dragging the little triangles onto the bus, making sure kids were with their parents and besties could sit together and nobody who wanted to sleep was too close to someone noisy. But instead of feeling anxiety about the game’s puzzles, or satisfaction when I solved them, I felt jealous. I was jealous that the characters in the game worried about smell and having a nice view rather than whether someone might be an undercover ICE agent and what that could mean for the people around them. I was jealous of the public spaces themselves, held back by too few seats rather than an intense and highly-armed police presence that scared everyone off. I was jealous of the chaos of the game — the natural chaos that occurs when a bunch of people gather, not the manufactured chaos that occurs when 15 police cars block up a major road just to do car checks at random.
The truth is that for me, a youngish, wealthyish white woman, my worries when I’m in public are typically similar to those in Is This Seat Taken?. The privilege isn’t just about safety in public; I’ve been just fine pushing the limits with law enforcement for my entire activist life. It’s also about the privilege of choice — to choose whether I’d like to take the Metro, hop in a rideshare, or walk to my destination based on budget and vibe, not the location of today’s ICE checkpoint.
Even when I change my route or plans to try to defend my neighbors from ICE, I still have the privilege to avoid these confrontations if I need or want to. The same morning I chased those ICE cars off of my block with my neighbors, a woman walked by on her phone, chattering on her way to work: “Something’s going on, I guess,” she said. “Everyone’s so loud.” It’s tempting to be inspired by how the community has banded together, but many of D.C’s white transplants like me are still able to be more concerned with the everyday issues of sharing space than protecting our neighbors before, during, and after this occupation.
I wish for myself and for my neighbors that we could spend our time focusing on the little concerns that crop up in third spaces like the park or the bus — spaces that are less populated than normal, especially on days when ICE activity is high. But Is This Seat Taken? has also become a reminder of how I don’t want to be in public, ever and especially during a fascist takeover. People might be loud or unkempt in public for all sorts of reasons, and thinking about how my neighbors move through space due to ICE threats reminds me to extend grace to them rather than engineer ways to avoid proximity to them. I would far rather sit beside someone with bad breath for 10 minutes on the bus than never see them again because the state abducted them.
These days, when I head to the Metro station, I scan for police and troops in uniform, check to see what weapons they’re carrying, and try to position myself between them and any people of color I can see. I film the troops in Dupont Circle, for posterity and because anything can happen at any time. I shout when it is time to shout. I eat a spoonful of honey to soothe my voice after interactions with the police, who are everywhere.
What Trump and his puppets haven’t accounted for is D.C.’s community of immigrants and allies who know exactly what to do when your government becomes a military and existing in public becomes surveillance. The occupation can force us into meeting in the back of a cafe or someone’s living room instead of the park, but community will thrive nonetheless. That’s the community I’m proud to be part of — the one that’s working towards a day when we can all ride the bus together again without fear.
