Ball of Lint

A non-linear journey of the emergence Lebanon's punk and metal scene. Play it here.

this game is still a work in progress and there may be inacuaracies within the game (as I added in some fictious elements).

This project came out of curiosity from being born into a Lebanese-Syrian family and hearing stories of what those countries were like before the wars. How did the civil war, Israel, and Hezbollah impact the vitality of the subculture? Lots of black metal and punk bands from Europe and the US create fantasies of violence, but I wanted to know how living through multiple wars impacted both the messages within songs and the existence of those bands in Lebanon. How did the Lebanese scene hear of punk and other extreme music genres from abroad? The average Lebanese person in the early 1990s to 2000s would not have consistent access to the internet nor would the groups which control Lebanon allow that sort of music into the country. What was the government's response to the Lebanese punk scene? In other religious countries, we could see black metal bands being imprisoned for their sacrilegious messages, and so was the treatment similar in Lebanon?

The questions I asked were evidently not easy to find answers to. I searched Reddit forums, archived-MySpace pages, and YouTube channels. The discovery was that most of the Hamra scene did not occur online, which makes sense, as even now, Lebanon's electricity and internet infrastructure are nowhere comparable to the West. What I could find left of the Hamra scene were fragments of what their story was. Due to names and content being deleted for safety reasons from groups such as Hezbollah, I was really working with fragments. So, I began to piece together old interviews and everything else that I could find into this big web of interconnected histories. The format of a standard research paper seemed incompatible with the story I was learning about, thus I decided to opt for something a little different. I made A Ball of Lint on Twine 2, which is an open-source tool for creating non-linear stories. Twine 2 enables me to share the emergence of punk bands in West Beirut and their individual stories while also showing how those bands are all connected in unique ways.

Subcultures emerged in a non-linear fashion and I wanted to conceptualize that by looking at how punk emerged in Lebanon. The format of the game allows me to insert pictures, videos, and sounds that play while players click through the different options of the game. I wanted the experience of the punk and metal bands to not simply be text on a scene but a sonic and visual one too. Something that I found unique to the Hamra scene was how there was no clear divide between punk, black metal, and other extreme metal subcultural groups. The scene was so small that everyone was connected and just shared a love for extreme music and a hatred for the unstable, oppressive system in which they lived. The best way for me to demonstrate that was to take players into the physical locations where the subculture existed (the Alley and the Pavillion) and tell the story of the collaborations between groups. I also wanted to demonstrate how the climate of Lebanon impacted these subcultures, both leading up to the emergence of the Hamra scene and throughout its peak. I chose to have certain songs playing for certain moments during the game to show how the bands' music was very much impacted by what was going on around them. For example, I played Nightchain's "Where We Come From", which was written about the wars and violence within Beirut, during a moment in the game when Israel's 2006 invasion occured.