The summer sun beams as a crowd, walking in something that would resemble a line if observed from outer space, snakes down a Los Angeles street. It’s so long that I can’t see its beginning or end. As far as my tired eyes can tell, it just goes and goes until, off in the distance, it meets the horizon. Some people carry signs lambasting ICE and Nazis; one has Hello Kitty waving a Palestinian flag on it. Other protesters run the gamut from looking like they stopped here on their way to brunch to wearing full costumes. There is a Labubu cosplayer holding an anti-ICE sign atop a bridge. Social media quickly declares them a hero.
The scene is one of tense revelry. Resistance moms, 2020-hardened black bloc types, and everyone in between share space, sometimes chanting, sometimes singing, sometimes marching in silence – all aware that cops lurk on the periphery, and that with cops comes violence. Suddenly, we all hear a loud popping sound far away enough that we can’t quite pinpoint it. An acquaintance checks their phone; apparently the police just deployed tear gas.
I check my phone, too. Oh no, I realize, I have to leave. For my video game appointment.
I turn to tell the friend I accompanied to this immense Sunday, June 8 protest, a games journalist I will not name because they were out marching during work hours. “Me too,” they reply. “I’ve got one in, like, 40 minutes.”
Oh no, I realize, I have to leave. For my video game appointment.
There’s no calling a car in the kind of traffic these teeming streets have produced, so I resolve to run back to the site of Summer Game Fest’s Play Days event, a bonanza of demos and meeting opportunities meant to be a smaller stand-in for what E3 once was. Fortunately, the venue is only a little over a mile away from the still-swelling crowd, so I narrowly make it in time for my scheduled presentation of Capcom’s Onimusha: Way Of The Sword and Resident Evil 9. I am drenched in sweat, clothes clinging to me like I just emerged from a swimming pool. This attracts a few stares, but the problem solves itself when I’m escorted into a cool, dark theater occupied by around 30 other games journalists and content creators.
But the whiplash is impossible to ignore. Where the last crowd I was part of whooped and hollered in defense of their rights and the rights of others, this one goes positively apeshit for a menu option. The Resident Evil 9 demo, an understated affair that centers around a tall monster woman perhaps pointedly engineered to look un-hot, ends with the player pausing the game and switching from first-person – the viewpoint of the last couple mainline series entries – to third-person. The crowd goes wild. I feel like I’m on a different planet than I was less than an hour ago.
Welcome to Summer Game Fest. Also, American society is collapsing, so welcome to that, too.
Sunday afternoon develops a predictable rhythm: I play a game. I check my phone. I play another game. I check my phone. I play a third game. I check my phone. Police, I learn from local reporters on Bluesky and Hasan Piker’s stream, have turned the chill, at times downright joyful march I was part of into a battleground. Using flashbangs, tear gas, and vehicles, they kettle protesters onto a highway. Reporters and protesters sustain grievous injuries from “less lethal” weapons, which crucially – even according to their own designation – remain at least situationally lethal. Protesters call automated Waymo cars to light on fire, which is incredibly funny.
Summer Game Fest is just far away enough from the action that those desperate sounds don’t reach our ears, but the helicopters buzzing overhead certainly do. After a certain point, they become a background noise it would be easy to tune out if not for what they represent: a government, derelict of duty, surveilling and attacking its own people.
As afternoon fades to early evening, I sit down to try out a John Wick/kung-fu movie-inspired action game called Spine. The game is rough around the edges, but its action is stylish and propulsive, while everything else about it harks back to 2009 in a way that makes me question how it’s getting made today (complimentary). Moreover, the enthusiasm of its Cyprus-based dev team is infectious. Midway through the demo, they tell me about the game’s world and story.
"It's kind of dystopian, and this city [where the game takes place] is completely messed up,” says community lead Artur Ovchinnikov. “It's controlled by a big corporation called Tenzer Corp, and the head of the corporation is some kind of... artificial intelligence, but government system. There is a social rating system. [The government] is controlling every [person], every movement. There is a gap between rich people and poor people. But in the beginning of the game [main character] Redline doesn't care about this thing. She's trying to rescue her brother. She doesn't care about all these social problems in this city, but the deeper she gets into the mission of rescuing her brother, the deeper she gets into this rebellious stuff."
This is far from the only time that I’ve heard about games exploring eerily relevant themes; not just recently, but today. During Microsoft’s SGF-adjacent showcase, a trailer for sci-fi puzzle adventure Planet Of Lana II began with its young protagonist explaining how “they came to our home” and “took everyone” as ships that resembled bombs rain from the sky. On Bluesky, musician and video game critic Liz Ryerson acknowledged the elephant in the room: “I hope we are all not so desensitized that we can all appreciate the irony of Xbox showing off games that look like this in their showcase given why a lot of people are not watching this stream,” she wrote.
Despite the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement’s ongoing boycott of Xbox products – which has resulted in one studio pulling its game from the Xbox store entirely – millions still watched Microsoft’s film-length video game commercial. But as with previous Keighley carnivals, each time games’ themes hit a little too close to home without acknowledging the broader context in which they exist, the disconnect becomes harder and harder to ignore. (I would’ve liked to ask Microsoft developers for their thoughts on this uncomfortable tension, but even after repeated requests, Microsoft did not allow me to attend its event.)
All this in mind, I decide to ask Spine’s developers what they think of the situation unfolding around them in LA, a clear instance of the exact sort of government overreach and class division they pride themselves on exploring in their game. This question is not met with enthusiasm.
"That's a tough question," art director Alexander Nemov replies awkwardly, adding that he hasn't spent much time in America. "Probably I don't have anything in the moment."
After SGF winds down for the day, I attempt to rejoin the protest. This proves impossible; night has fallen, and cops have blocked the streets leading to the bulk of the crowd. Displaced protesters find themselves in uneasy across-the-way staring contests with armed and armored officers. Meanwhile, lines of police cars blare their sirens while blasting to some unknown destination, their irritating mechanical shrieks only drowned out by protest supporters sporadically driving by in their own vehicles, honking horns and hoisting flags. Eventually, I elect to call it a night.
Just a few streets over, I once again feel like I’m inhabiting a different planet. Despite what right-wing and even centrist media might tell you, Los Angeles has not descended into chaos. To take it a step further, neither has downtown Los Angeles, the mere slice of the gargantuan pie that is southern California’s best-known region where protests are taking place. “Fuck ICE” graffiti and the odd person carrying a sign advocating a similar message aside, you would not know that this place was the site of what Trump and his cronies are trying to deem an insurrection. People meander between bars, restaurants, and other destinations. Cars drive by at normal speeds and refrain from honking their horns. A dude on a bike asks some alt kids who are walking behind me if they’re in a band. They laugh.
Keighley’s show must go on, for he is the oddly wooden impresario fate has chosen to give us a WORLD EXCLUSIVE preview of the sinking of the Titanic, but it never feels like SGF is in real danger of grinding to a halt.
The next day, while wandering the Summer Game Fest show floor, which is really more of a big room in a small village of kiosks, cafes, and food trucks, I overhear a telling conversation between PR people.
“[The protests] are just far enough that it doesn’t really affect anything,” says one.
“Affect anything?” replies another.
“Affect… the show,” the first clarifies.
That’s not to say it’s easy to just ignore the protests amassing nearby each day, nor does it seem like many developers attending Summer Game Fest want to. While I ask a fair number how they’re feeling about the situation, the topic comes up organically more often than not. Some want to know what being in the thick of a protest was like. Others volunteer information about the small ways daily demonstrations escalated by police into violent confrontations have impacted them. For example, one journalist shows me how both the Lime and Bird scooter apps have placed heavy restrictions on an area that includes SGF due to protesters’ proclivity for throwing scooters at cop cars, which – as with the Waymo situation – I must point out is incredibly funny.
But the overriding sentiment SGF attendees feel the need to convey, as though it’s a weight threatening to cave in their chests, is guilt. Multiple PR people repeatedly lament that they can’t make it out into the streets because of job obligations. The aforementioned journalist tells me that they at least donate money to relevant causes. Another journalist concurs with a statement they heard while drinking and networking in the nearby JW Marriott hotel lobby the night before: “We’re the bad guys in The Hunger Games.” They go on to add that they believe SGF attendees are doing “a lot of fiddling while Rome burns.”
I think for me, though, guilt's maybe not quite the right word. Maybe something more like confusion, frustration. What do I do? What can I do?
Asked directly about the awkward middle ground they’ve unwittingly wandered into, a few developers eschew guilt in favor of pragmatism.
"Whatever gets you going and pushes you into action, if guilt is what does it, sure. Feel what you're gonna feel,” says Alx Preston, founder of Hyper Light Drifter, Hyper Light Breaker, and Possessors studio Heart Machine. “I think for me, though, guilt's maybe not quite the right word. Maybe something more like confusion, frustration. What do I do? What can I do? What should I be doing because I have a responsibility to the team, the company, the things we've been working on for a long time, everyone else that works at Heart Machine.”
Preston contends with health issues that limit his physical capabilities. Still, he can’t help but feel a responsibility to the city that molded him.
"I think there's some idea there, especially as someone who's lived in Los Angeles for 20 years, that I should be there for those protests,” Preston says. “I should be doing something to contribute to that in some way or another. But what's my platform? What's my capacity? What am I able to do? ... It's in moments like these where you're weighing your personal responsibilities versus societal and community priorities versus work and capitalism to support yourself in a system that you don't control. That's the math that everyone's doing more or less every time these [major historical] events start to come together."
This feeds into a larger question many find themselves asking in these increasingly tumultuous times: What is the point of making, playing, critiquing, or reporting on video games when it feels like the world is ablaze? And in the case of an in-person event hosted in the United States like Summer Game Fest (or others of potentially greater consequence like PAX and GDC), is it worth potentially putting yourself in harm’s way?
"It's a weird time right now being here in LA and inside this air-conditioned warehouse while people are getting arrested for no reason,” says Chandana Ekanayake, co-founder and creative director of Dosa Divas and Thirsty Suitors studio Outerloop. “It's been surreal as a naturalized citizen in the US where I could probably get deported for no fucking reason. And it's like, oh, we're here talking about video games. But a lot of the themes, as a creator, and thinking about this stuff, it does go into the game itself. … For me, I want to put a little hopefulness into the world. I have two teenage sons, and I want to leave something for them. I want the world to accept them for who they are."
Some are forced to keep their guards up more than others. Veerender Jubbal, a Sikh games writer and reporter who lives in Canada, entered the United States for SGF on the back of mounting tensions between the two countries, as well as horror stories like that of Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian who got detained by ICE for two weeks despite being white and therefore (you would think) an unappealing target to the racist motherfuckers in charge.
"If a Canadian white woman can get detained for two weeks, then someone like myself, with a turban and a beard – and [who is] a Sikh journalist advocating on representation and those sorts of things – [is in significantly greater danger]," says Jubbal.
But Jubbal still sees games – and the opportunities that arise from a trip to the US – as worth the risk. He cautions people against viewing games, even in a purely entertainment-based capacity, as frivolous.
"I've said this to white games journalists who feel like this is all superfluous and stuff, but I've done so much map and guide work,” says Jubbal. “That aids in helping people distract themselves from what's going on, especially… people of color."
I feel completely powerless in my life right now, and I'm somewhat soothed by games that embolden me to become the opposite.
Another games journalist whose parents are currently in the process of immigrating, which limits their ability to speak publicly on these matters, concurs.
"I was thankful for SGF taking so much of my time and attention away from the very real rise of fascism and noxious xenophobia, which could impact my life in a way that makes me truly sick to think about," they say. "I feel completely powerless in my life right now, and I'm somewhat soothed by games that embolden me to become the opposite."
They regret not being able to join the protests – or even post about what they believe in online, despite pressure from peers – out of concern for their parents, but they nonetheless hope others can learn from this moment.
"SGF also made me realize that I want people to know that an 'illegal immigrant' does not fit any one box or set of adjectives," they say. "If you stand next to me, you're standing next to someone directly impacted by a domestic human rights crisis. I, and many others, don't want to tell you that, because we're afraid."
Despite E3’s demise, one of its grand traditions persists during Summer Game Fest: the advertizing real estate on the Hotel Figueroa mural, reserved exclusively for those with pockets so deep that when they reach for their wallet, a mole person hands it to them. This year, the honor goes to Final Fantasy’s collaboration with Magic: The Gathering, resulting in a multi-story ode to Cloud, Sephiroth, and, implicitly, brand synergy as a concept.
A photo of the mural makes its way onto the Magic: The Gathering subreddit, albeit with a twist: It was clearly taken during a protest, with signs and flags framing it, which leads a moderator to step in and request that users avoid discussing politics. “Let’s just appreciate the picture,” they say.
“Considering the picture, this is a crazy ask,” one user replies.
Even with fascism almost literally knocking at the front door, some will prioritize the longstanding gaming culture tradition of sticking their fingers in their ears and ignoring inconvenient politics. It is a tendency born first and foremost of propaganda and privilege, but Ben Myres – the creative director of Relooted, a game about reclaiming African artifacts from Western museums that got announced during SGF and that’s getting lambasted online by all the usual suspects – has an additional explanation for the social consciousness divide between some game developers and some of the people who play games.
“To make a game… you have to be deeply empathetic, almost by default, because you're making something for someone else to experience,” he says. “But on the player side, you're used to being centered in the game. You become the center of that experience. So I think it changes something in your head: The entitlement manifests to such an extent because that's your default. The developers are used to creating something for someone else, while some people who play games are used to everything being about them."
Perhaps it’s an oversimplification, or just one beam that splits into a prism of problems, but a worthwhile question emerges: What will happen to the people raised in these pockets of gaming culture as political situations like those that occurred during Summer Game Fest become more common? As Aftermath contributor Autumn Wright pointed out, “imperialism and the consumerism are always happening all the time,” and with America turning its imperial tactics toward its own core, it is extremely likely that we’ll see more and more strange bedfellows of this sort, until they’re no longer strange at all. Protests, skirmishes, and riots outside of conventions, conferences, and concerts – maybe inside them too. People moving between one and the other, trying for as long as possible to maintain a sense of normalcy, to cosplay it even as industries enter freefall and infrastructure collapses. We’ve hit a tipping point, and unless the powers that be decide to suddenly stop agitating, we can’t turn back.
In that sense, perhaps this year’s Summer Game Fest gave us the ultimate preview: one of the world to come. If that ends up being the case, great job, Geoff. You've really outdone yourself.
Despite this year’s Summer Game Fest being characterized by a pervasive disconnect, the events of the past week eliminated another, less obvious disconnect from previous years. As Minn/Max’s Janet Garcia writes in what was originally going to be a response to my questions about her time at Summer Game Fest, but which blossomed into a truly excellent standalone piece:
This is my third year at Summer Game Fest and with every year come disparaging comments about Los Angeles. It builds up quickly: “I hate downtown LA. I hate LAX. I hate how dirty it is here. I hate the sirens outside my hotel window. I hate the traffic. I hate how expensive the uber is tonight.” The list goes on.
LA’s biggest haters from the games industry would be quick to say they’re only here because they have to be for work. For some of them, that’s probably true. But for many I know that it is not. The reality is they wanted to attend SGF: for their own coverage, for the opportunities, to network, for the experience, that list goes on too.
People are quick to reap LA’s benefits while dismissing the entire culture. People will exclusively take from LA then claim the city is fake. As if there was anything genuine about coming to a city to get what you need while complaining the whole time that you needed it at all.
I’m sure they’d be ready to clarify that it’s not the people, it’s the city itself, and that’s frankly even more frustrating: the fact that they think the two can be divorced. That the place can be separated from the people.
It can’t.
But behind fencing, blocked roads, security-guarded metal detectors, and the tall hedges of SGF's campus, it’s easy to pretend. They can imagine they’re not in the city they love to hate. This year, they couldn’t.
Willingly or not, SGF attendees were gifted a front-row seat to authentic community action, to people united by a common cause putting their bodies on the line for others, whether those were their neighbors or people they’d never met. There’s been endless discourse about optics and protesting The Right Way, whatever that means, but when the dust settles – whether in a few days, a few months, or a few years – that’s the only part any serious person will remember. The rest, including and perhaps especially SGF 2025, will be little more than a footnote.
The final evening before my flight back to NYC from LA, I attend one more protest. By this point the mayor has implemented a curfew – the exact thing that led to me getting arrested when I lived in Virginia back in 2020 – causing me to immediately question the wisdom of my decision. But curiosity and the sense of duty that comes with any form of journalism, even that which centers mostly around video games, get the better of me.
When I arrive at downtown LA’s federal building, the location where crowds have been convening for the past couple days, I’m stunned at how few people are present. A small handful of protesters and reporters mill about while a tiny woman, voice bolstered by the great equalizer that is a megaphone, shouts at 15 or so National Guard troops guarding the building’s entrance. I feel secondhand embarrassment even though I know I shouldn’t, if only because I can’t stop imagining how awkward that same scenario would be if I was in her shoes.
I find more protesters gathered outside the nearby US Justice Department building, but again, the scene is more ghost town than showdown. “It’s gonna be 4,000 National Guard and 700 marines versus 50 unarmed bystanders,” one protester jokes to their friends.
I consider packing it in, but little by little, the crowd grows, bolstered by people of all stripes wrapping up work and – instead of resting, scrolling on their phones, playing video games, or some combination of the three – taking to the streets. Around 30 minutes before curfew, we make our way back over to the federal building, where an actual crowd has formed. We combine our forces and begin chanting, which causes the federal building to fart out more cops and National Guard soldiers. It’s still not the most impressive display on our part, but it’s something.
Then, with 20 minutes left before curfew, a colossal horde of protesters – I’m talking hundreds – rounds a corner, and suddenly we’re cooking with the kind of propane that would bring Hank Hill to his knees. It’s like some shit out of a movie: people whooping and cheering, beside themselves with glee now that the cavalry has arrived. The two crowds move to meet each other. “The people united will never be divided,” they repeatedly chant, a protest classic that’s become a favorite of mine because nobody can agree on whether it’s supposed to end with “divided” or “defeated.”
The crowd is ultimately divided that night, but not defeated. Protesters return the next day, and the day after. Across the country, others do the same. Now they’re joining rapid response networks run by immigrant rights groups and learning about mutual aid. They’re realizing just how deep their roots run.
“You go to a protest, and you’re talking to everyone all of sudden,” a community organizer named Mar told LA Public Press. “When is the best place to meet, if not when fighting back?”
There will always be more of us than there are of them; connection will always come more naturally than fear. We will win. It’s just a matter of time.
