Lifestyle
What playing a 7-hour video game with strangers in L.A. taught me about the resistance
The donkeys are pissed off. Put upon, out of work and victims of decades-long systemic abuse, it’s time, they have decided, to protest.
The donkeys, metaphorically, are us.
At least that’s the premise of “asses.masses,” a video game played by and for a live audience. It’s theater for the post-Twitch age, performance art for those weaned on “The Legend of Zelda” or “Pokémon.” Most important, it’s entertainment as political dissent for these divisive times. Though the project dates to 2018, it’s hard not to draft 2026 onto its narrative. Whether it’s unjust incarceration, mass layoffs or topics centered around tech’s automation of jobs, “asses.masses,” despite generally lasting more than seven hours — yes, seven-plus hours — is a work of urgency.
The audience cheers various decisions made during the playing of “asses.masses” at UCLA Nimoy Theater.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
And for the audience at the Saturday showing at the UCLA Nimoy Theater, it felt like a call to arms. Citizens executed in the street for exercising their right to free speech? That’s in here. Run-ins with authorities that recall images seen in multiple American cities over the past few months? Also in here, albeit in a retro, pixel art style that may bring to mind the “Final Fantasy” series from its Super Nintendo days.
In a city that’s been ravaged by fires, ICE raids and a series of entertainment industry layoffs, the sold-out crowd of nearly 300 was riled up. Chants of “ass power!” — the donkey’s protest slogan — were heard throughout the day as attendees politely gathered near a single video game controller on a dais to play the game, becoming not just the avatar for the donkeys but a momentary leader for the collective. Cheers would erupt when a young donkey reached the conclusion that “I kinda think the system is rigged against everyone.” And when technological advances, clearly a stand-in for artificial intelligence, were described as “evil, soulless, job-taking, child-killing machines,” there were knowing claps, as if no exaggeration was stated.
“Our theater is supposed to be a rehearsal for life,” says Patrick Blenkarn, who co-created the game with Milton Lim, interdisciplinary artists from Canada who often work with interactive media.
“We grew up in a radical political tradition of theater,” says Patrick Blenkarn, right, who co-created “asses.masses” with Milton Lim.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
“We grew up in a radical political tradition of theater, where this is where we can rehearse emotional experience — catharsis,” Blenkarn says. “That is what art is supposed to be doing. We have been very interested in the idea that if we come together, what are we going to do and how are we going to do it? What we are seeing in your country, and other countries, is the question of how are we going to change our behavior, and will the people who currently have the controller listen? And if they don’t, what do we do?”
Video games are inherently theatrical. Even if one is playing solo on the couch, a video game is a dialogue, a performance between a player and unseen designers. Blenkarn and Lim also spoke in an interview prior to the show of wanting to re-create the sensation of gathering around a television and passing a controller back and forth among family or friends while offering commentary on someone’s play style. Only at scale. And while I thought “asses.masses” could work, too, as a solitary experience at home, its themes of collective action and reaching a group consensus, often through boos or shouts of encouragement, made it particularly well-suited for a performance.
The UCLA Nimoy Theater played host to “asses.masses” this weekend.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Beginning at 1 p.m. and ending shortly after 8 p.m., coincidentally, says Blenkarn, the length or so of a working day, not everyone made it to the “asses.masses” conclusion. About a quarter of the audience — a crowd that was clearly familiar with the multiple video game style represented in “asses.masses” — couldn’t stand the endurance test. But in a time of binge-watching, I didn’t find the length prohibitive. There were multiple intermissions, but those became part of the show as well, as there was no set time limit. Blenkarn and Lim were asking the audience, via a prompt on the screen, to jointly agree upon a length, emphasizing, once again, the importance of collective cooperation.
And “asses.masses” holds interest because it, in part, embraces the animated absurdity and inherent experimentation of the medium. While often in a retro pixel art style, at times the game shifted into a more modern open-world look. And the story veers down multiple paths and side-quests — some requiring wild coordination such as a rhythm game meant to simulate donkey sex, and others more tense, such as “Metal Gear”-like sneaking, complete with the donkeys hiding in cardboard boxes.
Audiences vote, often by cheering or booing, on choices in “asses.masses.”
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The way “asses.masses” shifted tones and tenor recalled a game such as “Kentucky Route Zero,” another serialized and alternately realistic and fanciful game with political overtones. Other times, such as the surreal world of the donkey afterlife, I thought of the colorfully unpredictable universe of the music-focused game “The Artful Escape,” a quest for personal identity and self-actualization. The donkeys in “asses.masses” are an ensemble, often trying to steer the audience in different directions. As much as some push for a protest as a way for communal healing and progressive action, others take a cynical outlook, viewing that path as “intellectually compromised” by a “commitment to past ideals.”
The goal, says Lim, is to create a sort of game within a game — one that’s being played with a controller and one of debate among a crowd. “It’s not about having a billion endings,” Lim says. “We understand it’s a theater show, and we as writers have objectives for what we want it to go towards. But the decisions people make in the room really matter. The game is half in the room and half on the screen.”
The audience, for instance, can play a role in keeping certain donkeys alive. Or what jobs a group of renegade donkeys may choose. Our audience voted for the donkeys to enter the circus, at least until they were deemed obsolete and sent to detention centers, which felt uncomfortably of the moment. Such topicality is what drew Edgar Miramontes, leader of CAP UCLA, to the show, despite his admittance to being largely unfamiliar with the world of video games.
“It doesn’t shy away from the nuances of when organizing happens and what we’re seeing in our world right now,” Miramontes says. “There are instances in which a donkey may die because, in organizing to achieve their goals, these things happen. We have seen this in our Civil Rights Movement and other movements and the current movement that’s happening right now around ICE.”
The Nimoy event, part of UCLA’s current Center for the Art of Performance season, was the 50th time “asses.masses” had been performed. The show will continue to tour, with a performance in Boston set for this upcoming weekend and it will reach Chicago later this year. Our donkeys on Saturday didn’t solve all the world’s inequalities, but they did live full lives, attending raves, engaging in casual sex and even playing video games.
A player celebrates during “asses.masses,” live action theatrical video game.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The show is an argument that progress isn’t always linear, but community is constant. As one of the donkeys says at one point, “If you aren’t doing something that brings you joy, do something different.”
“In case anyone is like, ‘I don’t want to be lectured at,’ or I don’t want to do all this work, it feels like you’re just having fun with friends,” Lim says. “Maybe revolution doesn’t always look like just this. Maybe it’s also this.”
And like many a video game, maybe it’s a chance to live out some fantasies. “We do beat up riot cops in the game,” Blenkarn says, “in case anyone is hoping for that opportunity.”
The first time Pop’s Social, a catering company in South Orange, N.J., that specializes in dirty soda, served an alcoholic drink at an event, something strange happened.
At the event in December, its nonalcoholic offering, a spiced pear-cider seltzer with vanilla and peach syrups, cream, lemon and cold foam, was a hit. The Prosecco-spiked version? Not so much.
“People were more interested in the mocktail than the cocktail,” Ali Greenberg, an owner of the business, said in an interview.
Dirty soda — a customizable blend of soda, flavored syrup, creamer and sometimes fruit, served over pebble ice — has been crossing into the mainstream for years, especially after the cast of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” the hit reality show that premiered in 2024, frequented Swig, the Utah chain that started it all.
But its reach has gone far beyond the Mormon corridor, and its rise in popularity has dovetailed with an overall decline in U.S. alcohol consumption. “There’s not a lot of Mormon people in our neighborhood,” said Greenberg. “But there are a lot of people who are sober-curious or not drinking.”
The reality show, which follows a group of Mormon influencers in Utah, helped popularize dirty soda beyond the Mountain States and inspired a wave of TikTok videos on the subject. Swig rapidly expanded — growing from 33 locations in Utah and Arizona in 2021 to now more than 150 locations in 16 states — along with other Utah chains, and spawned copycats nationwide.
Dirty soda has joined other Mormon cultural exports, like tradwife influencers, a “Real Housewives” franchise in Salt Lake City and Taylor Frankie Paul, the Bachelorette who wasn’t, that have captivated America.
With the recent rollouts of dirty soda at McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A and Dunkin’ — behold the Dunkin’ Dirty Soda: Pepsi, coffee milk and cold foam — and the appearance on grocery shelves of Dirty Mountain Dew and a coconut-lime Coffee Mate creamer for homemade dirty sodas, we may have reached peak dirty.
The idea for dirty soda came out of a desire for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has millions of followers in Utah and surrounding states, to have more options for social drinking, as the church prohibits the consumption of alcohol, hot coffee and hot caffeinated tea.
When Swig introduced dirty soda in 2010, it filled a need, providing a pick-me-up for car-pooling moms and an after-school treat for their kids. It was quickly adopted by many in the community.
“In other cultures, parents go, they pick up their coffee in the morning, and for me and for a lot of my other friends’ parents, it was, ‘Let’s go pick up our dirty soda,’” Whitney Leavitt, a breakout star of “Mormon Wives,” said in an interview.
Leavitt was surprised when her dirty soda order became a recurring question from reporters in recent years. “They were so excited to hear all of the different syrups and creamers that we add to our drinks to make whatever your go-to dirty soda is,” Leavitt said. (Hers is sparkling water with sugar-free pineapple, sugar-free peach and sugar-free vanilla syrups, raspberry purée, a squeeze of lime, and fresh mint if she’s “feeling really fancy.”)
In April, Leavitt became the chief creative and brand officer at Cool Sips, a beverage chain based in New York that sells dirty sodas.
“Mormon Wives” inspired Kaitlyn Sturm, a 26-year-old mother of three from Jackson, Miss., to post recipes for dirty sodas on her TikTok. The one she makes the most contains Coke or Dr Pepper, homemade cherry syrup, a glug of coconut creamer and a packet of True Lime crystallized lime powder, which she combines in a pasta-sauce jar filled with pebble ice. “It kind of has become like a ritual, where I make one for my husband as well, and we have it most evenings,” Sturm said in an interview.
The trend has also hit fast-food menus. The new “crafted soda” menu at McDonald’s is riddled with dirty soda DNA. The Dirty Dr Pepper, with vanilla flavoring and a cold-foam topper, is the chain’s version of what has shaped up to be the universal dirty soda flavor. Since 2024, Sonic, beloved for its porous, soda-absorbing pebble ice, has offered “dirty” drinks — your choice of soda plus coconut syrup, sweet cream and lime.
These drinks might feel new, but there are antecedents in the Italian sodas of the ’90s (fizzy water and a pump of Torani syrup); the Shirley Temple (ginger ale or lemon-lime soda with grenadine and maraschino cherries); and the egg cream, a tonic of seltzer, chocolate syrup and milk. And what is a dirty Dr Pepper with cold foam if not a descendant of the root beer float? “It’s just a soda fountain from 125 years ago,” Kara Nielsen, a food and beverage trend forecaster, said in an interview.
Though Leavitt moved to New York City with her family in December, her dirty soda ritual has remained consistent, with one key difference. “In Utah, we don’t get to walk to dirty soda shops,” Leavitt said. “We have to drive there.”
Annuals include flowers like marigolds and nasturtiums. They grow fast but won’t come back the next spring (though they will drop seeds and possibly propagate). Perennials like lavender and sage will return year after year, but they may take longer to grow. Wildflower and pollinator packets often contain both annual and perennial seeds but are frowned upon by some serious gardeners, because the selection can be haphazard and ill-suited to the area.
It’s a good idea to exercise a little situational awareness. How much rain can you expect? How much sunlight? Dig the earth and feel it between your fingers — is it sandy? Loamy? These are things to keep in mind as you prepare for your journey into horticultural chaos.
“You want to prepare your soil, your site, at least a little bit,” said Deryn Davidson, a sustainable landscape expert at Colorado State University Extension in Longmont, Colo. “Try to get rid of weeds. Make sure the soil is ready to receive seeds.”
Davidson, who has written about chaos gardening, strongly advised covering the seeds with a layer of soil, lest they become bird food. As for watering, that depends on where you live, she added. On the whole, though, the formula is straightforward: “Soil, sun and water is what these seeds need,” Davidson said.
Not everyone is a fan of the trend, or at least the way it has been portrayed on social media. “Nature is not chaos — nature is pattern,” said Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and the author of “Braiding Sweetgrass,” which recommends imbuing modern life with Indigenous wisdom.
“It seems unrealistic,” Kimmerer said of the chaos gardening videos she has watched. The feeling of effortlessness they convey — a common social media effect, almost always the result of deft editing — seems to elide the work that goes into a garden, whether chaotic or not, she suggested.
“I want my garden to be natural and biodiverse,” she said. “That’s a good impulse. I don’t think this technique is going to get you there, but that’s an important impulse.”
Boitnott, the maker of the viral video, offered a simple reason for why chaos gardening has become popular: “It just makes you happy.”
Admission: I suffer from eyestrain. Even right this very second. As a reporter working on a computer more than eight hours most days, my eyes often feel fatigued and itchy by evening.
I’m not alone: More than half of the U.S. population lives with computer vision syndrome, also known as digital eyestrain, and nearly 16.4 million Americans suffer from dry eye syndrome. So I was especially excited to stumble on New Vogue Spa, in the City of Industry, which offers a relaxing, if intriguing, treatment called “Eyeball Care” — something I’d never heard of before at a day spa.
New Vogue Spa is an Asian-style spa with Korean and Chinese influences. The spa’s offerings include massages and body scrubs — I was curious about the “Red Wine Body Scrub” — but I couldn’t help exploring eyeball care, which was much needed after my 50-minute drive from Silver Lake. (The City of Industry is about 30 minutes from downtown L.A. without heavy traffic.)
So it came to be that I found myself lying on a massage table, wearing what looked like protruding diving goggles, with clouds of cool, aromatic steam oozing from both sides of it and engulfing my face. A spindly plastic tube extended from my forehead to the “Eye Spa” machine. Serene spa music, a blend of classical piano and loudly chirping birds, trilled in the background as the machine sloshed and gurgled. It felt like lying, creekside, in a spa robe wrapped in a blanket of chamomile and rosemary-scented fog.
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As my esthetician, Jenny Chen, adjusted the eye mask and added essential oils to the mist, New Vogue manager Lesley Xie explained that the 60-minute, $125 Eyeball Care treatment aims to hydrate and stimulate blood circulation in the eye area, decrease puffiness and dark circles and aid eye fatigue and dry eye syndrome.
“It’s really helpful for overall eye health for people who are on computers for a long time or sleep really late or who are reading a lot,” she said.
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1. The Eyeball Care treatment included a mask filled with cool, aromatic steam to help relieve fatigued eyes. 2. Slippers in the Himalayan Salt Room.
Xie said that eyeball care treatments are common in China. When she was growing up in Guangdong in Southern China, elementary school students were given a break every afternoon to perform “eye exercises,” which involved gently massaging pressure points around their eye areas, for 5-10 minutes.
“It released eye stress because we studied from eight o’clock in the morning until almost noon time,” she said. “It was a break for our eyes to prevent nearsightedness and tired eyes.”
New Vogue Spa’s treatment was supremely relaxing from the onset — part Head Spa, part facial, part eye care. Chen began by massaging my scalp for about 10 minutes, as I tried not to fall asleep.
Next she cleaned my face, applied massage cream and gently massaged my face and eye area, manipulating the outer corners of my eye sockets as well as under my brow bones and on my temples. She was precise and firm but careful — as she pressed on the outside corner of my eye, I felt tension draining down the side of my cheek and neck.
Esthetician Jenny Chen conducts “Golden Eye therapy” on reporter Deborah Vankin.
Xie said the massage is based on traditional Chinese medicine, focusing on stimulating acupressure points around the eyes.
“Gentle massage of these areas is believed to help promote blood circulation, relax the muscles responsible for focusing and relieve visual fatigue,” she said. “While it’s not a medical treatment for vision conditions, it’s widely used as a preventative and restorative method.”
The massage was followed by “Golden Eye therapy,” during which Chen used an electronic device on my face with a metal roller ball on it. It uses “ultrasonic vibration technology,” Xie said, to help the skin absorb the applied moisturizing cream and combat eye puffiness.
The main event was the “cooling steam therapy,” which Xie said was meant to be calming and refreshing and help relieve tired eyes. Chen fitted me with what looked like an enormous diving mask that quickly filled with cool, hydrating mist — I felt droplets of water dripping from my eyes and down my cheeks. The Eye Spa machine uses a “cold mist atomization process,” Xie said, “that disperses micro-particles of moisture combined with soothing essential oils.”
At the end of my treatment, Chen gave me under-eye gel pad masks, for added hydration, while conducting one last head massage. She applied moisturizing eye cream, face cream and sunscreen before sending me off.
Dr. Kristina Voss, an ophthalmologist with Keck Medicine of USC, was enthusiastic about the Eyeball Care treatment.
“It sounds wonderful. Anything that makes you feel good, I generally support,” she said. “It sounds safe because they’re not putting pressure on the eye. Direct pressure on the eyeball [is dangerous]. And I’d be nervous if they were putting something in the eye, but they’re not. Steam, or even cool condensation from a humidifier, is effective for dry eye. Massaging pressure points probably doesn’t treat dry eye, but could potentially treat eyestrain or tension headaches that can be interpreted as eyestrain.”
Los Angeles Times features writer Deborah Vankin inspects her eyeballs after her treatment.
Temporary relief aside, however, Voss warned that the treatment is not a replacement for seeing a doctor if a condition is ongoing.
“It’s relaxing and complementary to a doctor’s dry eye treatments — like medicated drops or in-office treatments — but it’s not a simple fix or cure all,” she said. “Ongoing doctor’s care would be important.”
After my treatment, I was invited to linger in the co-ed Himalayan Salt Room and Red Clay Room or woman-only spa area, complete with a warm soaking tub, lounge area and treatment rooms for body scrubs. (I skipped the adjacent New Vogue MedSpa, where you can get botox, dermal filler or microneedling treatments.)
Guests are also treated to a cup of homemade snow fungus tea (made from tremella mushrooms) with a single jujube, or red, date, floating inside. New Vogue makes a fresh batch every morning for guests, simmering the collagen-rich drink so long it becomes somewhat gelatinous.
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1. The Himalayan Salt Room. 2. The co-ed lounge area. 3. The Red Clay Room.
“Snow fungus focuses on deep hydration and skin plumping, while red dates support circulation and a healthy glow,” Xie said, calling the concoction “a warm bowl of snow fungus and red date soup.”
I can’t speak to the medicinal benefits of snow fungus tea. But after a glass of the warm, woody-tasting drink — together with the hour-long tension-taming eye treatment — I saw the world in a whole new way while walking out the door: clearly, from a relaxed perspective and with the bigger picture in focus.
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