This Week In Games - Marvel Snap Caught In A Trap

At midnight EST on January 19th, social media app TikTok was voluntarily taken offline by publisher ByteDance and delisted from app stores in the US hours before a ban went into effect. This follows a congressional ruling in May that gave the company nine months to find an American buyer or be banned (divest-or-ban). Steadfast in their convictions, they accepted the ban and went offline.

For all of twelve hours.

By noon TikTok was back online thanking “President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to…Americans” (Biden was still in office). On the 20th, Trump (who got the ban ball rolling in 2020, claiming he feared the Chinese app could “impair national security”) signed an executive order giving the app a 75-day reprieve. But this is not an article about the propaganda politics of the TikTok ban – you can find one of those under every rock right about now – no, this is about Marvel Snap.

Marvel Snap is a popular competitive deck-builder where players collect cards based on Marvel Comics characters to compete against one another. Packed with microtransactions and Steve Rogers, it’s as American as apple pie but had the misfortune of being published by Nuverse, a subsidiary of Bytedance.

Apple’s statement on ByteDance’s apps being delisted “[p]ursuant to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” included all applications from ByteDance, including Marvel Snap. Even though TikTok was reinstated hours after the ban, the Snap team were “actively working” to get it back up for days. According to readers of Game File, the PC version of the game was also affected by Trump’s publicity stunt.

Publisher Nuverse and developer Second Dinner were blindsided by the ban, with their social media statement calling it a “surprise” and Chief Development Officer Ben Brode not-not saying players should use a VPN to continue playing “as long as you pretend you're from Canada or something”.

Marvel Snap came back online in the US at 21:53 EST, January 20th and fellow ByteDance apps Lemon8 and CapCut came back with it. Why these three apps took longer to come back online in the US is unclear, especially considering the voluntary nature of the outage in the first place. At present, none of ByteDance’s apps have been reinstated on Apple’s App Store.

In the wake of this, Second Dinner have announced that they “are looking to bring more services in-house and partner with a new publisher” and promise a “new era” for the game. Considering the anti-Chinese sentiment that led to the bans, it is ironic that a game by an American company that uses American characters with art largely from American artists would be one of the apps hit hardest.

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This Week in Me : Fix Your Hearts or Die : Remembering David Lynch

David Lynch died this week. His family announced his passing on Facebook last Thursday, saying :

There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, “Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.”

My own experiences with Lynch’s work have been fewer than I’d like, owing mostly to my first work of his being the disturbing short film “The Grandmother” which tackles child abuse with non-verbal grunts for dialogue and a surreal mix of live action and Gilliam-esque animation, but the news hit me hard.

During my time in college, I enjoyed coming home after class to watch his Weather Reports. “Good morning,” he’d say to me, long after the sun had set in the UK, before giving the weather as he knew it from his window in Los Angeles. He might talk about songs or people or types of food that were on his mind or cut right to the chase. Sometimes it was sunny, sometimes it was cloudy, sometimes the report was coloured by the stress that comes with living in this world. No matter the weather, he would turn it into a positive, promising “blue skies and golden sunshine all along the way”. If not today, then soon enough.

It feels fitting that his passing comes at a time where there were no blue skies, nor golden sunshine in his home state. Instead, the skies of L.A were choked up with smoke from unseasonal wildfires burning at all hours. People fled their homes to save their lives while firefighters, both free and incarcerated, risked their own to contain the blazes.

Over time, I’d read interviews with him about the five Woody Woodpecker dolls he called his boys, discover his connections to Dune and Link’s Awakening, and appreciate his old comic “The Angriest Dog in the World”. I’d see screenshots from his most famous work, the TV series Twin Peaks, too.

In the days since his passing, one scene has been shared the most. It’s a scene from Twin Peaks : The Return. Lynch, playing FBI Agent Gordon Cole, speaks to Denise – his former sub-ordinate who transitioned years ago – telling her :

“When you became Denise, I told all your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die.”

And God did I need that.

On what would have been his 79th birthday, Donald Trump came to office in his home country. Each day since then, there has been a flurry of executive orders signed (I didn’t even know those were a thing before his presidency) that seek to strip away the freedoms and equalities that have been afforded to people in America over the years, including trans people. Now more than ever do we need to give hatred no quarter.

That is who David Lynch was to me – an offbeat and occasionally cantankerous old man who, no matter what, knew how to see you off with a salute and a smile. A man who knew all about the evils of the world and refused to let them change how he treated others, letting his art speak for him. I suggest we all do the same.

Rest in peace, David Lynch. You’re already missed.

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The Week Ahead :

26/1

27/1 Holocaust Memorial Day

28/1 Neptunia Riders VS Dogoos (Compile Heart) - PS4/5, Switch

29/1 Agent Fall (Pufferfish Digital) - Switch, PC, PS4/5, Xbox One, Xbox Series

30/1 Hello Kitty Island Adventure (Sunblink) - Switch, PC (disclaimer, I know someone who worked on this)

31/1 Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector (Jump Over the Age) - PC, Xbox Series, Switch, PS5

1/2

Housekeeping

Thanks for reading. I have been working at all hours the past few weeks on deadlines but squeezing in time to do this newsletter was important to me. My Marvel Snap article might be under 500 words but the research I did on it involved maybe ten times that much in reading and drafting alongside my usual workload. Hope it came out well.

I also hope my David Lynch piece doesn’t feel like overstepping. I meant every word of it, but am conscious of how little of his work I’ve engaged with so far even if they have been so impactful. This weekend I’m going to start watching Twin Peaks at long last. Maybe I’ll watch all of it.

If you liked any part of this newsletter, I’d love it if you shared it with people you know and considered supporting me on Patreon. I’ve also just started a BlueSky account so feel free to follow me there while I try to get that going. If you have questions or comments, feel free to reach out at rin.but.online[at]gmail.com.

The times we find ourselves in are in equal parts terrifying and infuriating. It can be easy to feel powerless in the face of it all, but just acknowledging the insanity of certain things and talking about them is a good start. Engage in community and let’s see where we all go from there. See you next week.

Thanks for reading rin.but.online! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.