Neofeud is anti-capitalist, anti-racist & anti-imperialist cyberpunk. I'm a Native Hawaiian who made this game while working 40+ hrs in social services / teaching in ghettos, while homeless. Neofeud is my life, in art. Thread 1/?
https://silverspook.itch.io/neofeud
I often describe my work not as science fiction but as
'stylized journalism' with futuristic characteristics.
The art, stories and gameplay of Neofeud are a direct reflection of my upbringing and experiences as a Native Hawaiian STEM teacher for the underserved youth of Honolulu’s inner city. 3/?
Teaching robotics, programming, and sustainability is an often difficult, stressful, and even Kafka-esque endeavor - being in one of the richest, most beautiful places on Earth, yet dealing with families with working parents, who are living out of a van or sleeping on the street
It's hard trying to keep the kids out of gangs, off of drugs, and on a path towards better opportunities, such as the ones I had growing up in a slum area of paradise while going to an upscale private school - only cause dad taught there & we got free tuition (it's $20k a year)
Hawaii is known for its postcard, Corona-commercial scenery, but it is not all fun and sun for everyone who actually lives here. I grew up a Native Hawaiian on 'the not so nice side of the coconut trees' where the tour buses avoid. 6/?
My parents and parents' parents have lived in the poverty-stricken area of Kalihi-Palama, cleaning for, teaching the kids of, or dancing fake-plastic hula for the profit of mostly white/foreign millionaires and billionaires of Hawaii -- I am a third generation neo-feudal serf.
My friends in the neighborhood lived 20-to-a-house surviving on ramen and spam from foodstamps, just dirt
poor. On weekends we would run through the forest barefoot, playing games like, “rock war” which involves whipping rocks at each other and trying not to get bloodied. x/?
Again - that he could only afford because he taught there and we got free tuition. (Obama's school, right nearby, is $30,000 a year). I was the one ghetto 'sprawler' amongst upper crust 'corpos' children. It was a horrific 12+ years.
At this school, everyone didn't have holes in their shoes, came in Mercedes and limos, and dodge*ball* was illegal, to avoid lawsuits. x/?
I was an overweight brown Hawaiian kid from the ghetto amongst a lot of wealthy “fairer”-skinned whites & Asians,
& as you might imagine, I was singled out, along class and race lines. Got made fun of for having old shoes, looking different. Dad's rusty beater vs their Mercedes.
In Gibsonian cyberpunk terms, it was like waking up in the
sprawl, and going to school in the Villa Straylight, then returning home to the sewer every night. x/?
I never learned a single word of Hawaiian in that
private school, with just a few coloring books about 'ancient
Hawaiians', who are gone now. The message I got from school, TV, movies was basically, "I'm an American, but not quite. Wrong color. Maybe 3/5 of an American."
The public schools teach even less. Hawaiian language itself was *illegal* to speak in Hawaii till 1986, & in 2018, a professor from Maui (Kalekoa Ka'eo) was arrested for speaking Hawaiian in a courtroom (despite Hawaiian being an official language here).
https://splinternews.com/judge-issues-arrest-warrant-to-hawaiian-man-for-speakin-1822421239
The only words that the business and imperial interests want you to know in Hawaii is "Aloha" and "Mahalo". x/?
"Aloha" and here's a lei for you as you get off of your air conditioned plane with a fake Hawaiian woman on the side of it, owned by a white man in a mansion with a gaudy golden bird-of-paradise gate who makes 3 million a year.
https://www.amazon.com/Native-Daughter-Colonialism-Sovereignty-Latitude/dp/0824820592
"Aloha" as you step into an air-conditioned tour bus, that then takes you to your air-conditioned, high-thread-count hotel to have mai-tais on artificial white sand beach & watch bastardizations of our sacred dances (hula) performed for $7.50 an hour with cellophane grass-skirts
"Mahalo", thank you for enjoying our starvation-wage prostitution of our culture, people, & island while we drive our 30-year-old Toyotas or take the bus back to the dilapidated favela & live 20-to-a-house, & fight with each other over the money we don't have for medical bills,
cry into our ramen and get diabetes, dying at 39.
This is what being indigenous Hawaiian has meant. It's meant having no idea who the hell you are. Because who you are has been obliterated.
x/?
It means commodified versions of yourself prostituted for the profit of foreign capitalists, and you forced to participate in your own for-profit humiliation. For 40 years of your life, till you die.
x/?
It means being erased, abused, annihilated physically, mentally, and spiritually. And having no idea who your abuser truly is. I still get into arguments with my mom and dad to this day, when I talk to them about decolonization.
x/?
They say, "Chris, we're all Americans! Let's just be thankful for what we have!" as they keep slaving away, at the age of 70, and probably till they die, teaching the children of the
aristocrat future-owners of Hawaiian airlines and the Sheraton, for table-scraps. x/?
(I should also note that if you're Native Hawaiian / Pacific Islander you're 6 times more likely to be shot by police per-capita than white people, much more likely to be in poverty & homeless -- so 'Great' to be an American State, huh?)
Also, the illegal US occupiers police round up more Brown and Black children *in schools* for prison than any other US state.
The world of Neofeud, where you have the equivalent of the Palace of Versailles literally floating above an endless cross between the Honolulu slum, a Brazilian shantyscape and a mega-landfill, is just taking my own experiences and cranking the knobs up to 11. x/?
Neofeud is a reflection of the sick nature of blood quantum, racial & class discrimination in hiring, SAT Apartheid, etc, & countless kids I worked with who were sent off to prison making Amazon Whole Foods vegan & non-vegan cheese for 25 cents / hour for the rest of their lives.
There's a difficult scene where the player character is actually asked to do a CPS examination of a robot family's home. They have a government-issue check list to fill out "Access to clean water?" - they don't have it, because they've reconfigured the tap to spout
valvoline oil
@silverspookgames thanks for this. It's interesting to read your story. Good for you for making a creative response to what sounds like a really difficult situation. Something I have struggled with in my life are what are thought of as severe mental health problems, diagnosed currently as schizophrenia. I think something there is in common is the sense of not being treated as a full person and also not being believed when you try to talk about your experiences in your own terms.
@highfellow True, having disabilities in an uncaring system can be quite brutal.
@silverspookgames something I find is that there always seems to be someone who thinks they are the expert on how I should be looking at my situation, but not many really have the time to listen to me when I talk from my own point of view. I don't know if this is something you experience?
@silverspookgames I guess NeoFeud is your way of telling your story in a way where people *will* listen?
@highfellow Kind of yeah! Hopefully some cyberpunk and adventure game fans.
@silverspookgames thank you for sharing your story. I would come give you a hug in Hawaii once I'm fully vaccinated, if I could afford to visit.
@silverspookgames absolutely moving thread, comrade, from a puerto rican to a hawaiian i hope one day soon both our homelands are free of the americans.
@silverspookgames is there an update to this story?
@silverspookgames @dibi58 that is very weird and i had no idea. i’ve even been to kauai 10 times ! how strange…
They were wild kids, but we had good
times building tree houses and cannonballing into “Tin Roof”, a big pond in the back of the valley. But then on Monday my siblings and I would pile into a cheap old
Toyota Corolla and dad would shuttle us off to an elite college prep school