Year in Review 2018 Letter Series: Where the Water Tastes Like Wine-WTWTLW Knows That Marginalized American Grumps Tell the Best Stories

Hi Caitlin!

American culture, for all of its current strengths and weaknesses, is one molded by the storyteller. I’m sure this could be said about any culture. Sumerians developed the first forms of written word in 2000 BC. Since then, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia have defined the shape urban myth, religious belief, and simple history for millennia. Before then, a rich culture of song-singing and poetic recitation were the sparks of human creativity and the vehicle for intellectual insight and expression in every human community, on every biome this planet could house them in.

But America, being so young and advancing so quickly through the epochs of human history, has a unique relationship to these times we would normally consider ancient. Maybe it’s because it’s only been a few hundred years since we started running the indigenous people off their lands. It’s been about a century and a half since we stopped legally trading people as goods. It’s been approximately 50 years since we’ve started treating those same people like equal citizens.

Women couldn’t vote for their political representatives until the 1920s. We didn’t even start treating them like anything more than birthright until the 40’s. It took until the until the 60s and 70s before we treated them as fellow intellectuals. These days, we can’t even figure out how to pay them what they’re worth.

Even before we become the jewel of the West, North America has been an immigration superhighway. The parts of Europe that fought over the land through all of the 19th century left their cultural imprints everywhere. Our push-pull relationship with the southern border with Mexico has created a tide of Mesoamerican people and ideas that has been washing along the southwest for generations. Every once in awhile, we decide we like the Mexican people and their willingness to work for wages we wouldn’t pay our kids. But then we find our way of life irrationally threatened, and attempt to push the ocean away. It’s a back and forth that we may never truly (or even want to) end.

This is all to say that there’s a set through-lines of storytelling in America that makes it particularly unique to all of the classical, globally historical examples. We are a nation built on the backs of the downtrodden, screamed over the silenced, and cashed in on the poor. It’s the marginalized and shoved-aside that keep this country honest, and those people tell the best stories.

It’s no coincidence that Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, a game about storytelling, is set during a time when a whole lot of people could count themselves among the poor and forgotten. The Great Depression sent many modern urbanites in the early 1900s back to some equivalent form of ancient history thanks to rampant poverty and joblessness. Sitting around the hearth wasn’t a luxury anymore, it was survival. Telling stories, be they personal tales of grief and struggle or the retelling of stories one heard somewhere along the way, is the only thing left to pass the time with.

In a year with another big game set out to depict the wild American free spirit as untameable as it is wise, WTWTLW excels because it doesn’t shy away from letting ugly, humble, imperfect people demand your full attention without needing to also check all the boxes to keep a certain demographic enthralled.

As a traveler hoofing it across the land and chatting up all of its denizens, you are exposed to every manner of person with every manner of tale. Some of these are tall tales with the dark entrancing lure of Southern Gothic mystery. Some are heart wrenching tales of forced migration or runaway slaves. Some are completely mundane, only made special because a particular patron is very excited to tell you it.

But all are stories from the blue collar, salt-of-the-Earths that often get skipped over and downplayed when interpreted in other games. I can never overstress how much that spoke to me during my time with this game. The currency is the plight of the people, and you’re soulbound to trade in it.

As you alluded to, there’s a sort of charm in collecting the sad stories from this fictional repurposing of the Silent Generation. Maybe it’s because, as a Millennial, our people aren’t that different from theirs. We like to take a lot of credit for turning existential despair into absurdist humor and expressive humor and rhetoric, but post-World War I dadaists were memeing nonsense a full hundred years before us. Strolling around, listening to homeless boys recount a completely twisted version of a ghost story I told him last time we met sounds a lot like an exchange on the internet to me.

I think it goes deeper than just time-framed cultural similarities. There’s something uniquely human and definitively American about hearing a tragic story being told to you by a grumpy, grizzled man with a smile on his face. Hemingway, a problematic bae of mine, is sort of the Silent Generation’s mascot. He saw horrors from the war. Was disfigured by it physically and emotionally, and documented his self-deprecating decline into women, alcohol, and depression until he finally killed himself. But whenever he told a story or entertained, he did so with a sort of cynical rebellion against the inevitability of his own tragedy.

Maybe an even more personal example of the cursed rebel is the blues man. Blues men were working class musicians, born from secular choirs and the musical traditions that grew within them. They were often farmers or some other sort of low caste laborer. They probably couldn’t read or write music (or regular words for that matter). They learned to play guitar by watching the local heroes play. Learned to sing songs by listening.

They had funny names like like Muddy Waters and Blind Lemon Jefferson. They travelled from town to town, telling stories about themselves or people they met to perfect strangers through song and dance. They were Southern, black bards who kept small town culture alive. They gave people something to aspire to. They provided escape from a world that constantly abused and exploited people just like them. They came with their own rockstar personas, myths, and legends. And even as outside forces conspired to extract this beautiful, pure way of life from these folks, they persisted until it the very end.

Because the people were hardened by struggle already. Like B.B. King once said “The Blues is an expression of anger against shame and humiliation.” Sometimes literally, the words are aggressive outcries against the things that wrong us everyday. But more metaphorically, the act of being a blues man, and therefore a sort of wandering loudspeaker for the voiceless, is its own expression against the world that be.

Caitlin, I’m shit at guitar, so it was never in the cards for me. But I’ve never felt closer to that aspiration than I did wandering the land in WTWTLW, keeping people’s legacies alive.