When I first visited Norco, in 2019, to participate in Dread Scott’s “Slave Rebellion Reenactment,” I met the game’s creator—a thirty-six-year-old geographer who goes by the pseudonym Yuts—on a bike path that runs along the levee. I’d arrived early, and while waiting I made the mistake of photographing an oil tanker emblazoned with the huge green words “Protect the Environment.” Within seconds, a red-faced security guard materialized from a van and demanded my phone. Startled, I collected myself enough to realize that the man wasn’t a police officer, and that it was perfectly legal to take pictures on public land. I walked away feeling shaken but relieved—until, half an hour later, a sheriff’s deputy interrupted my interview with the same demand. He said that I wasn’t breaking any laws but borrowed my driver’s license anyway. Not for any official reason, he apologetically explained, but to make a copy for Shell’s national-security database.
Yuts, who grew up in Norco, is used to such encounters. As we watched the sun set from a riverside bench, he regaled me with stories of his adolescent trespassing on the grounds of Shell’s nearly thousand-acre manufacturing complex. His step-grandfather worked there, and his father was employed at other refineries in “Cancer Alley,” the industrial corridor that extends from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. (The corridor was recently the subject of an investigation into environmental racism by RISE St. James—a local nonprofit—and the London-based research firm Forensic Architecture.) In 1988, when Yuts was two years old, an explosion killed seven workers at Shell Norco and blew out windows all over the neighborhood. His mother found him still asleep in bed, covered in broken glass.
The landscape of his childhood frightened yet transfixed him, inspiring a “fantastic anticipation of ecological collapse” that paralleled an early interest in the unreal scenery of console games. Yuts found echoes of Norco in Midgar, an underground city ruled by a tyrannical power plant in Final Fantasy VII, and in Hideo Kojima’s cyberpunk classic Snatcher. With his sister, a collaborator on Norco, he dreamed of a game that could convey their home town’s singular blend
