Deadpan

Tangential to the thread, but inspired by its concept: I've been looking into setting up a weekly games criticism club where we'd read formative games criticism and a dash of critical theory for a quick tour of different styles and important conversations/aspects/lenses (mostly by coming up with a vague list of texts consider important and have strong enough opinions on to guide a reading of). Would anybody here be interested in that sort of thing?

Been working on providing more guidance to folk who want to pitch to our site, which includes a list of other places to pitch to that could prove interesting if you ever thought about trying to get paid for writing (it's still expanding) Would anybody here be interested in a weekly games criticism club where we read formative games criticism and a dash of critical theory as a quick tour across different styles and conversations? Hosting something like that would likely be my next big project.

It is pretty telling that some of the responses to the criticism I've read on Ghazi are indistinguishable from GG talking points. There's the pointless assertion that not the entire subreddit is "like that," basically the #NotAllGhazi to match #NotAllGamers, there's indignation about this being a hurtful generalization and insult, which gets awfully close to the histrionic "Death of Gamers" outrage, and more than a few people were dismissing her concerns (and sometimes a little more than that) in the name of fighting the good fight. Throwing women under the bus while paying lip service to helping women? Let GG keep that cynical garbage all to themselves folks. People being more interested in seeing a good fight than helping folk is something that Maddy herself wrote about back in January last year, when we were talking about toxicity opposite discussions among critics, a long time before GG came along and a) froze all of these conversations b ) set them back about a million years first. This is just one of these reminders that just because bigots hate your guts doesn't necessarily mean you're the perfect exemplar of progressivism and aren't part of the problem in other, more subtle ways. These massive, glaring issues obviously need to be addressed, but they also give people wrong ideas about what things like sexism look like, since that isn't lmited to open and unabashed misogyny. It's kind of how people think of racism as some KKK bogeyman, and so they never consider the internalized stuff they might still be carrying around. Instead, they get mad at you for comparing them to such vile people. So those who were fighting for more diversity and better representation in games before it became a fashionable necessity were rightfully worried all through this that condemning GG would become the new ritual for video game progressives to pat themselves on the back. It's important to condemn it for sure, but unfortunately it means the next time one of these discussions starts people are going to point to it and say "What do you want, I already did my part," which is no good. We're already seeing that here, I guess.

For people who want to make Twine things I can even offer a little bit of guidance.

Depends on what you mean by "keep on board" I guess. I'm sure there a plenty of gaters who'd call him irrelevant and an unfortunate presence tainting their movement, but they'll say that about just about any figurehead, even mere seconds after parroting their talking points. It's that whole implausible deniability of their no leaders bullshit. (I'll be convinced they actually themselves get rid of people instead of just losing folk who wised up when they turn on Milo for his recently dyed hair)

Grants are on a much smaller scale than incentives usually, and even if they're hypothetically open to all, their structure often benefits small companies regardless. There's often a specific goal to these ("make a game about X") or just a general need to pitch or show a prototype, and that's easier to do when you have a team to back you up. Plus the sheer scale of these alone can put them on a level that makes it very hard for individuals to compete for them. Committees want results to show off fast, since they too are often under pressure from above to show their usefulness, and giving one person a lot of cash on the grounds that they'll have something great in a few years doesn't look that great. Plus it's just much more beaurocratic hassle to split your efforts and keep track of many applicants and projects instead of using your funds on a few big hitters. So there's just all sorts of structural barriers that prevent small, weird stuff from being slow-cooked over a long period time.

That sort of takes us back to the art vs. product conversation though because those kinds of grants and incentives are usually targetted at companies, not individual artists.

Yeah, those kinds of grants already exist in some places to various extent. For instance, if you've played Secrets of Raetikon you might want to know that that was funded in part on the back of a grant from the city of Vienna. Awarded for showing the beaty of the alpine region, if I recall.

Caveats certainly exist, but the idea that there is a job for everybody (not the job you want perhaps, but always some kind of job) and that you always have agency in this system are baked into it on a very fundamental level. That whole narrative about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is essentially the foundational myth for capitalism. This always wrote over gender, race and class lines in pretty gross ways (See people who've been given every chance in life saying "If I made it to the top, I don't see why everybody else can't do that as well" about people who are systematically discriminated against), and the bleak economic prospects of recent years have only made the issues with this narrative stand out more and more. Regardless, it persists, and you can still see it every time somebody finds fault with the person struggling to find work without ever doubting the system. Should have looked harder. Should have tried harder. This can happen with good intentions. It can be done by people who want to suggest something to try, at least. But it also operates on the assumption that there's always something we can do, that we are always in control.

This provided me with H.D. Coolspot, which is a pretty straightforward suggestion if you read it simply as "Make an HD remake of Coolspot"

Maybe that's a good time to back up a little in general on that discussion: I originally only took issue with the idea that the market should be the ultimate arbiter of what is produced and what isn't produced, as it has proven to do a very bad job of supporting certain things even if they are universally considered to be of importance. That turned into a discussion about states more quickly than I would have liked, both because I'm not sure placing these as natural opposites is very helpful (it ignores how deeply capitalist logic is ingrained into concepts of government, and foregoes any solution that might fall outside of these concepts) and because it took us to discussing issues of propaganda almost immediately. You already identified some more benign ways states can benefit from producing art, and I'd go on to add there are certainly other uses for it that don't take away from the other functions of a nation. If you can imagine a campaign to address racism, sexism, or (which are themselves worthwhile attempts to prevent issues that the state otherwise has to police after the fact), you can imagine how these might benefit from giving a platform to people who face these issues and to allow them to express themselves. Artistically or otherwise. Nobody really has a big problem with these kinds of image campaigns (okay, some people do, I guess), so I don't necessarily see the big whoop about using those funds to create something in the process. Regardless, I don't think the talk of potential abuse of this system really gets to what I wanted to get across, both because I meant to address everything surrounding art (after all, the plight of unpaid internships but no available jobs extends to archival, academia, criticism, journalism and pretty much everything else) and because I didn't want to advocate for state-controlled art (as in, art created at the behest of the state for a specific goal) as state-enabled art (art which the state supports but has no real control over the shape and content of), which I posit isn't the absolute worst use of government funds. Or, at the very, very least, it strikes me as rather odd that people are so quick to dismiss this as a complete waste of money while hundreds and thousands of young people these days are sent to mandated courses on how to apply for jobs which don't exist so they can keep their unemployment benefits. It does make me wonder what some of the minds that emerge from our universities to discover that their field isn't hiring could come up with if they were left to their own devices instead of constantly being told the lie that there's enough jobs for everyone and if they haven't found one yet than that's entirely their own fault. In that sense, the kind of basic social security Gaizokubanou was talking about is one way of enabling art, because it gives people limited freedom to keep creating even when the market fails them.

That's definitely a large part of what drew me to it: it's a good way to externalize and make explicit trust issues (by which I don't mean trust problems, just anything related to trust). Giving somebody else that kind of power over you says on a certain level that you trust them not to abuse it and that you feel safe with them, and ebyond everything else, I really like being able to show this some way. It definitely doesn't preclude negotiating in advance or maybe even stopping them at some point if you feel uncomfortable*, but it's still a pretty satisfying gesture to give yourself to somebody else completely, even if just in the mutual fantasy. *: It can be hard to know yourself what you want or how much you can take that day, so not everything that goes wrong is necessarily a gross overstepping of boundaries, often it's a matter of "tone it down a little today, please" or "I thought I wanted this, but I'm not feeling it, can we do something else?"

In light of this, I anticipate at least one game about farting skeletons.

Cool <3

Going back to the original point of having a discussion about male sexual desire, I think what's at the bottom of a lot of this is that men still aren't really taught how to talk honestly about their emotional or sexual needs. There's a pretty small range of things you're expected to want, and if what you actually want falls outside of that, then working that out can be pretty confusing (and if what you want coincides with what you're told to want, how can you be sure it's really a genuine desire). Especially when you grow up surrounded by peers demonstrating the intended desires, even if merely to hide their own insecurities. Male homosociality is pretty messed up that way, to the point where a special word was apparently needed to describe less dysfunctional bonding (let's be real, a "bromance" is just a friendship, although one much more intimate than men are used to having). A lot of it is about enforcing those accepted needs, so that the group doesn't have to question what few, shaky notions it has established about intimacy so far. Everybody pretends they want the thing they're supposed to want so as not to get in trouble, and that pretense becomes the justification for the stereotype. So when they end up in an relationship, men might have trouble seeing oral sex as a simple act between two people, rather than a part of the big act they've come to despise. Or they might have trouble accepting that they just don't care for it that much, even though they're supposed to. Maybe you don't care for any kind of sex all that much and just want to be cuddled. This is all something that feminism is already helping to address through its questioning of gender roles, so it's pointless as ever for MRAs and ilk to use it as an example of why men supposedly have it worse. But it's also something that's worth talking about, when you're not using it to talk over women. Particularly, it's a conversation that men in general should be having amongst themselves, I think. Yeah, these are important things to keep in mind. Thanks for bringing them up!

Yep! Having to establish nonconsent instead of making active consent a requirement is obviously crappy because it has lead to arguments about how passed-out drunk folk or people in similarly impaired states technically didn't say they didn't want this, but it's also crappy in more benign contexts for building sex up as something that happens if you wear somebody down and get them to begrudingly accept, vs. various schools of enthusiastic consent or Yes Means Yes, which posit that sex should happen if all people involved agree that they are HYPED for this. (I posted something in the Ethics thread to clear up I didn't want to be a butt which you've hopefully seen by now)

I don't know, I've generally been exposed to more sex positive, kink friendly feminism, so the advice I got is closer to "do whatever funky things you want to do to each other's bodies, so long as you discuss it and agree to it" which, alongside notions of enthusiastic consent (basically the idea that agreeing to sex should be less about the absence of negative answers and more about showing excitement for the things that you do want to happen) are really fulfilling concepts to implement into your personal life, just purely on a level of having better sex. It's kind of problematic to advertise feminism as sexy, of course (because why would it have to be in order to win people over? Isn't fixing discrimination enough?), but also, it absolutely is. Like, hot damn! So i don't know that these misguided notions of chivalry aren't something modern feminism is already adressing, at least from personal experience. There's definitely still a lot of that stuff around, too I guess, the kinds of feminism that say all porn is bad, and all sex work is bad (and maybe all sex is bad, actually), but there's a lot of pushback against that too. I don't know where the desire comes from in any one individual of course, but I think part of this conversation plays into a common misconception about power dynamics in kink, namely that submission is about weakness and dominance about strength. In a lot of ways, it's actually the submissive that's in control of this kind of play, not the dominant partner. They hold all the cards, they determine how far any of this will go. In a sense, it's not about being hurt, or humiliated, or whatever else you're into: it's about allowing yourself to be hurt and humiliated and whatever else. It's about being strong enough to allow yourself to be vulnerable, and secure enough in your own personality that you can take a break from being that person for a while. I mean, you absolutely do get subs who are using this to treat some kind of emotional baggage and doms who think it's a place where they get to be an asshole without consequences, but in the safe and consensual kind of play, it all works differently than you might expect from the surface level expression of power. Which is just an act, never forget.

Oh dear, sorry if it looked that way, I just didn't really want to argue about it much more since you already acknowledged we actually agree on some of these things and just fundamentally disagree on others. There's just a pretty big difference to me both between both what's at stake and the odds of success in these examples. Sorry I looked like a butt there!

Rami did mention on Twitter that GG seems to have misunderstood his attempts to improve things as an invitation to join in (read: hijack the project), telling them to piss off. I've not been following this closely though. I suppose fiddling with development tools is by far one of the more benign things they could get up to. Shame that it won't last long, but they have always demonstrated much more interest in claiming they are doing something productive than in actually sticking with it. EDIT: Only if you consider people not being able to pay rent or afford food and states maybe spending a bit of money on a project that's not so hot to be equal risks.

So... his argument consists of putting different parts of the text next to each other and then presenting his own inability to wrap his head around these words as a fault? It takes considerable effort to pretend these are anywhere near irreconcilable: I imagine the reason the post has that title even though the author points out she does no speak for all women is that it includes multiple other accounts of "what women want" via the work of these artists. Gotta love it too when these intellectual giants quote lore as the reason for something as if it was an immutable fact of life and not something somebody came up with to prop up a fantasy. "It has to be skin-tight because it goes under her combat armor!" Give me a real reason dude, not a fictional one.

If we're going in that direction, I'd probably suggest "A wizard jam about wizards who are not really wizards" instead.

It's not, though. This isn't some big unknown that we have yet to suss out, a lot of people have already tested the sustainability of these ventures for years at a time, and this is the conclusion they've drawn almost universally. Some people manage to get by for a while, and if they have any shred of self-awareness about them they'll tell you that's because they got lucky. Most don't. The issue is that the encouraged and even enforced philosophy of seeing if you can make it actively contributes to the problem. It makes sure that the fundamentally unsustainable system never fully breaks down because new people willing to "pay their dues" always show up to replace those wrung dry by the machine, who quietly slip away to take up some sort of day job (if they're lucky). This loss is hard to quantify because it's impossible to tell what insights people would have given us if they got to write about games for a longer time, but I do think we're missing out by replacing so many of our thinkers with new people every couple of years. From the outside all this looks like it must be working, else why would people keep showing up? (Naivete, youthful innocence, genuine enthusiasm, having been told that this is the only way. The machine feeds on these things) But after you watch the scene for a while you notice the pattern of people appearing and disappearing and new sites springing up that tell their writers that they'll be paid, eventually, and thus contribute (sometimes willfully, sometimes unwittingly) to the continued abuse. I know this is going to sound hypocritical, because I too devote a lot of time to this thing I have no idea will ever be a real option for me. I don't know how to solve this, or that it can be solved, but increased awareness of the issue probably does not go amiss in the process. Rest assured that grants are never easy to come by. You also chose a pretty singular example to discuss this, I think of it more akin to state-funded or state-supported TV and theater productions or art shows we have around here, which are pretty widely enjoyed. A lot of people still consider it a waste of money, of course, but I don't think that outrage is necessarily justified: states are sometimes in the position of a parent trying to feed their child broccoli, after all. Art, culture and education are, on a certain level, essential to keep democracy going. People's right to choose depends on their ability to make informed decisions, which benefits from an enriched perspective on life - but that doesn't mean they'll agree that this is something worth funding opposite potholes that need fixing or more fighter jets for that sense of security. That these efforts will not always turn out great is something you kind of have to accept when you deal in something fundamentally subjective, and good management generally tends to address this by spreading their efforts on a lot of different projects. The shocking thing about that movie shouldn't be that it's bad, which is always a possible result in making movies, but that they spent 200 million on a single thing in the first place. EDIT: I remembered that I also wanted to point out that not all of this is necessarily about creating a thing, but also commenting on a thing, critiquing a thing, advancing the discourse around a thing, helping people who are doing one of these. This is a pretty good summary of why "maker culture," the idea that valuable creative expression always results in the creation of something, comes with some really bad baggage. I can understand that it can look pretty cynical to talk about the larger issues she raised rather than to focus on empathizing with her over the harassment she received, although I also don't see how doing that would have necessarily helped the matter either. I doubt she would have found our support here, and even good will sent directly to her hardly makes up for the horribleness she was on the receiving end of. These emotional extremes don't balance each other out, I think. Regardless, this is terrible news. I hope she gets to keep doing what she wanted to do and with less of the bullshit surrounding it. I apologize if I ever seemed callous about what she has to deal with.

Thanks for offering! I honestly don't even know enough about it to tell you if this would be helpful to me, but I imagine it might, like poking around in Twine files other people shared with me to see how they did a particular bit of formatting. Other things: Date: The only input I can offer is that I have a uni break coming up from March 30th to April 12th, if that's a good time for anybody else, and will be away from April 22nd to April 25th for A MAZE. Theme: A Wizard Jam that's not about wizards, at least as one option among others, sounds disappointing to me.

I think you are misunderstanding why people might take that stance though. A lot of the alt-games and alt-crit community I move in prefers not to think of their work as a product, and it's not because they don't want to be paid or are afraid of the corrupting influence of money (a fear that only people who are well moneyed for other reasons get to indulge in). It's because calling it a product suggests that it should be subject to the laws of the market, and the market has traditionally shown that it's unwilling to support certain things, important as everybody might agree they are, because they're not terribly popular. See also Nachimir's example of poetry. Or theater at large, any kind of fine art that depends heavily on subsidization. Not calling it a product or rejecting the whims of an industry that would leave you to starve is a way of saying "What I'm doing isn't saleable or marketable. It still deserves support. What now?"

I've been meaning to look into Unity a little, or I might use this as an excuse to finish my Twine prototype at least, but then I'm also usually quite busy so I don't know how that two week stretch is going to work out. I'll probably play to lose, and then y'all can feel better about what you achieved in that time.