Dreg is a narrative simulation game about tending to sick machines in an exploding desert.
In 2016, I worked as a voting machine repairman. Most of my working hours were spent on "preventative maintenance", which means that I was fixing machines that were not yet broken. I would spend nine hours each day replacing unspent batteries and unstripped screws in a warehouse full of voting machines, listening to music, remaining pleasantly thoughtless. This work was menial, but it also felt necessary with an immediacy that caught me off-guard. After years of having to squint to find social benefit in my paid work, feeling secure in the knowledge that I was contributing to the health of an indispensable public process was unexpectedly sustaining on a day-to-day basis. Also omnipresent was the constant awareness of waste: The waste of nonrenewable resources spent fixing unbroken machines, the waste of days of my life spent turning screws, the waste of so much time and care expended on a process that reciprocated so little. These two feelings—of reassuring necessity and inextricable culpability—rolled over and over in me, altering each other through touch.
Our present is cracking under the unimaginable weight of a history we struggle to remember. We plug the holes by pillaging our own future, sickening its possibility, thinning our path, all to create tools that become weapons in use. We only experience this titanic give moment by moment, constrained to the pinhole vision of a person who goes hungry, who wants pleasure, who is too much i'the sun, who falls hopelessly in love. We never rest assured of our place in the collapsing world. And we are, each of us, always discovering anew the meanings of our actions.
Games' worlds are holey and vermicular. We slip into them through spaces made for us. When we try to leave, we bring a blurry trace. We burrow a path through them by decisions made in the illimitable present moment, guided by our desire, curiosity, imagined needs. Many games make sure we are never on unsteady ground, lest we feel alienated. In some rare ones, we may find the way ourselves. Dreg is a rare one.
