The California Problem

greetings! this is a very long post about video games and capitalism. feel free to take breaks if you need them. make sure to stick around till the end, if you can. plz enjoy. and support me on patreon if you like (and read this post on patreon here for free if you don't like orange). i have a new indie music-related podcast, by the way, in case you're interested in checking it out. anyway......

- liz

"If silicon is prone to make your dreams come true
You could probably say the same thing about nightmares too"

- from 'The Future of History' by Tropical Fuck Storm 

 

the 0th Indie Game Jam

almost exactly 10 years ago, i made an account on Twitter to promote a fake game called "Gloomp!"

 

at the risk of over-explaining a not particularly deep joke, the idea was a spoof on a lot of games that were getting attention at the time, particularly mobile games. it seemed like there was an industry-wide belief that the growth of mobile and casual games could lead to a profound shift in how the public experienced and thought about games, especially among many influential game academics and industry figures. the surprise success of mobile games like Canabalt or Spelltower by new independent developers came along in this wave of games that were reaching increasingly larger audiences, breaking out of the usual demographics of console and PC gamers. 

 

this ran concurrently to a lot of growth happening in the tech industry at the time (i.e. the arrival of the iPhone, iTunes and digital downloads), as video games often do. many people around the industry saw this new direction as a way out of the current depressing path much of the video game industry had been on. (this optimism, of course, ended up being short lived due to large mobile companies quickly consolidating and pushing the quirky indies out of the space and the sad state of preservation of software on mobile platforms.)

whenever any space experiences a new wave of financial success and public scrutiny unlike anything else that came before it, it leads to a lot of industry hype and speculation. the shift from 2D to 3D development as the norm in the mid-90's was a massive sea change that transformed the video game industry in profound ways. the onset of the internet and its increasingly large role in society and culture of the last thirty years is one of the most consequential events to happen in the past century. drastic shifts in technology that alter modes of being are not new. the endless supply of new products that dramatically change how we construct ourselves around them is one of the primary features of capitalism.

all of this is to say, i wasn't particularly sold on this new wave of excitement towards mobile and casual games at the time. to me what felt particularly strange was the intensity of the rhetoric around a certain subset of games, especially when placed in tandem with how tiny and narrowly focused the insights it felt like you could glean from each of these things as experiences was. mobile games like Canabalt were fun byte-sized little action stories that brought back some of the artistry of vintage coin-op arcade games. 

social games that involved more human interaction like JS Joust could get crowds of people interacting with each other in ways often lacking in a space that mostly involves being sedentary for long periods of time (though the critique re: JS Joust was often that you could easily win if you were bigger/had longer arms). there are events focused on physical play like Come Out And Play that still attract a lot of attention and i can imagine will continue to do so as more people lack real-life communal spaces to gather together in. though the kinds of games they feature have never escaped being performed in very specific events and settings. some of which, like in school gym class or mandated corporate team-building exercises, feel pretty far from some of the grandiose theorizing about transforming society through play.

the main point was that these weren't new things at all. they were heavily informed by a fascination with the often underappreciated artistry of mechanically simple 80's video games and the hippie-infused New Games movement of the 70's. twenty- and thirty-year nostalgia cycles dominate so much cultural movement and are not a new phenomenon, of course. but this movement was deeply infused with an increasingly powerful streak of hyper-individualism pushed by the tech industry, which gave all of the rhetoric a special intensity. ever since the 90's, an increasing amount of power and money was being offloaded from other parts of society and onto tech industry entrepreneurs drowning in piles of cash. this only became more prevalent in wake of the Great Recession, which the tech industry seemed almost unscathed by. if you were in any space even vaguely tangential to technology at the time (which game development certainly was), it was completely impossible to escape the overwhelming predominance and full-throated embrace of this rhetoric. the tech industry had been fully empowered by the world to enact its beliefs on a massive scale.

allow me here to quote at length from a very influential (and prescient) critical piece about the tech industry by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron from 1995 called "The Californian Ideology" (emphasis in bold is mine):

"the Californian ideology has emerged from this unexpected collision of right-wing neo-liberalism, counter- culture radicalism and technological determinism - a hybrid ideology with all its ambiguities and contradictions intact. These contradictions are most pronounced in the opposing visions of the future which it holds simultaneously.

On the one side, the anti-corporate purity of the New Left has been preserved by the advocates of the 'virtual community'... Community activists will increasingly use hypermedia to replace corporate capitalism and big government with a hi-tech 'gift economy' in which information is freely exchanged between participants.... Despite the frenzied commercial and political involvement in building the 'information superhighway', direct democracy within the electronic agora will inevitably triumph over its corporate and bureaucratic enemies.

On the other hand, other West Coast ideologues have embraced the laissez faire ideology of their erstwhile conservative enemy...

In this version of the Californian Ideology, each member of the 'virtual class' is promised the opportunity to become a successful hi-tech entrepreneur. Information technologies, so the argument goes, empower the individual, enhance personal freedom, and radically reduce the power of the nation-state. Existing social, political and legal power structures will wither away to be replaced by unfettered interactions between autonomous individuals and their software.... The free market is the sole mechanism capable of building the future and ensuring a full flowering of individual liberty within the electronic circuits of Jeffersonian cyberspace."

the piece then goes on to talk about how much Californian ideology came out of a massive amount of public money and government influence spent towards developing the internet. these tools were, of course, greatly dependent on labor exploitation and the suffering of others to build and maintain the technology necessary for this. but it set the stage for the all-encompassing fantasy of a new virtual frontier; a frontier that goes back to the original American founding myth of the frontier settlers of the west.

and that rhetoric of "the new frontier" and "the wild west" was inescapable at the time in the indie game development sphere. these were not the type of people who were particularly happy or even very conscious of being implicated in critiques of Californian Ideology. in a podcast episode i did in 2021 about this period of time in the space with games researcher (and friend) Alex Ross, he mentioned the influence of famous counter-culture huckster Stewart Brand, his Whole Earth Catalog, and the idea of the "cowboy nomad" on thoughts expressed by prominent indie game figures like Jason Rohrer or Jenova Chen at the time. they often spoke in romantic ways which conflated the idea of personal success with larger social success. these were developers envisioning themselves as wandering empowered tool-users, or anarchist squatters roaming the countryside and creating a space for everyone around to inhabit through their own personal achievement and self-belief. they were, to be fair, by far not the only people in the game industry who bought into these sorts of notions. this tweet from last year by game industry legend John Carmack is a perfect embodiment of this way of thinking for me:

so anyway, if you played Braid for the first time in 2009 thanks to a friend's recommendation and your interest was piqued by its novel use of time-manipulation, you might start looking for conference talks on game design to follow during this time period. and you might quickly notice that there was a lot of talk on short experimental games like Rod Humble's The Marriage or Jason Rohrer's Passage at the time. the dominant discourse around these works often revolved around their ability to demonstrate how you, as a designer, can Do Things With Video Games. their key insights were how they stripped games to their bare essential dynamics and expressed something deeper underneath. 

both of the above games were often tearfully presented by other developers at conferences as making meaningful and profound statements that changed the way they thought about video games at a fundamental level. they appeared like lightning rods for many game industry people that sent them into a tizzy about how they constructed their larger life and work. these games signaled that video games had arrived, that they mattered now, and that they were shedding themselves of their sordid past as violent shooter games and mere objects of "fun".

longtime game designer and Game Developers Conference founder Chris Crawford, while talking to Rohrer for the documentary Us and the Game Industry (which my aforementioned game researcher friend Alex Ross likened to "a Scientology recruitment video for the indie games industry" and you can currently watch for free on Roku afaik), said something related to this that i think about a lot:  

"game developers are very defensive about the sordid reputation they have. ...one reason is that games should form character, and build your body, and so forth - or, at least, they should be mentally like Chess: that's a respectable game! and video games don't have any of those traits. they're just fun, and nothing else. and there is a puritanical streak in American culture that says fun without any redeeming value is sordid"

i can only imagine this desire to escape the sordid reputation of games fed the aura of excitement that hovered around influential industry people so visibly buzzing about an extremely spare prototype involving growing and shrinking squares, or a tiny 8-bit walking simulator. i can't imagine this happening at any other point in the short history of video games. the mainstream industry was awash in the time with gritty military-themed first person shooters and bloated open-world games. development cycles of AAA games had become increasingly more expensive, high stakes, and stifling of innovation. 

the late 00's was also when i checked out of video games in general as a casual consumer, because it just felt to me like so many games were becoming more samey and bland in their design and going in the wrong direction. unbeknownst to me at the time, a growing crowd of influential people in the video game industry were vocally advocating for new forms of innovation to break the industry out of its stupor of derivativity. and parallel to that, the idea of the self-styled entrepreneur was growing in power in larger culture. so the tech industry was increasingly in an excellent place to help empower some new individuals to "disrupt" the space with innovation.

in general, in broader culture it felt like games wanted more and more to be taken seriously as consequential art, but also didn't want to have the same scrutiny level applied to them as other art.

all of this applied even more to the indie space, which was growing in prominence and influence thanks to the breakout success of games like Braid and the sudden monumental juggernaut of Minecraft. to anyone who gleefully espoused the value of some formative indie works, you likely never were allowed to stop for very long to interrogate what questions the themes of games like Passage or The Marriage presented, and what they may say about troubling dynamics in gendered relationships. they were more just signifiers that represented that the possibility of deeper expression was there, and should be taken seriously and given more scrutiny. but the moment you applied more scrutiny and started to ask questions about the themes in the work, that was often handwoven off as irrelevant to the point at hand (which was, again, that Videogames Have Arrived). 

this always begged the question for me (a question which remains unanswered): why is the vessel for this new wave of serious important experimental art games that are poised to transform the industry seemingly all about failing or dysfunctional marriages? the unintentionally funny jankfest Façade from around the same period, co-authored by future military contractor Andrew Stern, was another notable example. and what's the deal with the oddly large number of games featuring dead wives, for that matter?

basically - even if you were willing to ignore how much this space was soaked thru with romanticized hyper-libertarian beliefs about cowboy nomads empowered by the tech industry, it was hard to ignore the implications of the themes that kept popping up within a lot of creative works. Rohrer's game The Castle Doctrine (based of a famous right-wing ideology about 'standing your ground'/property defense) was a particularly notorious example that Rohrer doubled down on in a bizarre post about self-defense and that defense was backed up by many in the space - which felt especially egregious coming in the wake of public outcry around the Trayvon Martin murder. and, much less egregiously, other notable indie games like Dear Esther, embodied the dead wife/death of marriage trope so common to art games at that point in a commercially-facing, mainstream accessible way. my favorite response to this whole odd phenomenon is the satirical game "The Virtual Museum of Dead-Wifery" by Lilith and Zoë Sparks, by the way.

but, for me, this underlined the point that these games perhaps weren't, in a sense, actually about what they were about. they were containers signifying the capability of larger meaning that could theoretically exist. they were meaning machines capable of eliciting empathy (a rhetoric that got even more intense later on in the 2010's around VR), but exactly how that empathy manifested itself was a placeholder. if games were to have a greater purpose in society, they simply must be able to do this. that capability of evoking empathy and containing larger meaning mattered far more than what specifically was being expressed.

so in that case, even though i don't think most people either got the joke or thought it was as funny as me (shout-out to Kepa from Rocketcat Games for getting on the train though), my fake game Gloomp! was a stand-in, for me, which represented the ideal form of art within the commercial indie game space of the time: an entity that is both transformative but also empty, without any particular meaning assigned to it. a squishy container for the over-romanticized ideal of transformative or meaningful 'play' that was poised to take over the space around it, but didn't correspond to anything in particular or make a statement about anything in particular. an object that signified importance in some kind of vague, market-friendly way, by virtue of simply being in the space at that particular time and place. a response to games like flOw that were so focused on the act of expression without having much of any interest in what, exactly, was being expressed. a perfect commodity, basically.

like most things, "Gloomp!" was an inconsequential one-off joke that was quickly abandoned. the era of games it's meant to skewer is, more or less, over by now. the joke's not very funny anymore, if it ever was. Ian Bogost's "Cow Clicker" sort of did another version of that anyway. 

networks of wealthy indie and ex-industry figures who popped up in the wake of the indie games boom i.e. The Indie Fund which chose projects and entrepreneurial new personalities to elevate based via whispery connections of private mailing lists and secret forums and reflected the interests of influential people in the space, were once incredibly important. the tech industry broadly never really got behind funding the game industry outside of whenever it needed to drum up a wave of hype around some new tech i.e. in the big VR push of the mid to late 2010's or the great NFT and AI debacles of the past couple years. so the funding was usually left towards other sources.

so now things in the space have given way to one increasingly dominated by indie publishers and acquisitions by larger companies, which are both basically replicating what happened to the game industry in the 90's. the same sort of creativity-stifling forces all those early indies were fighting against in the 00's are back in a different form. and there has been an increasing amount of discontent with the shoddy deals many of indie publishers are reportedly giving indie developers as well. so this totalizing fantasy of transforming a space forever thru 'Meaningful Play' may still exist in places like games academia, but in the commercial industry they have mostly given away to the hardened faux-wisdom of what i often semi-disparagingly call "The Industry Realist" (a term which i think i borrowed from Emilie Reed).

 

Indie Entitlement

while sitting in a decommissioned airplane in the middle of the Mojave desert in his film A Pervert's Guide to Ideology, Slavoj Zizek paraphrases German philosopher Walter Benjamin by saying that, as humans, we don't understand a culture when we're in the thick of it. only when we're made to see the waste, or the leftovers of a particular culture, do we get an intuition of what culture is about. Indie Game: The Movie is the waste of a culture - and it would be easy just to leave its world and its narratives behind. but i think it's more important than ever to go back and look at it in a slightly different, hopefully wiser light. it may seem presumptuous to be giving a post-mortem to something still so new, yet i believe it's fully appropriate for a culture that has moved and evolved so quickly.

about two years ago, this film - a documentary called Indie Game: The Movie was released - a movie that purported to humanize game-making by profiling a few creators' struggles making their games. two years later, its lasting impact can be best summarized by this tweet:

IG:TM was originally supposed to follow the indie scene at large as it was developing, between 2008-2010 - the culture of game jams and the IGF - but it ended up settling on a few stories for the sake of stronger storytelling. it kept the moniker Indie Game: The Movie in the transition from profiling the scene as a whole to a few subjects, despite following three of the most obviously high-profile games at the time. in my review from 2012 i made the point that by calling their film "Indie Game: The Movie" and then only following the most high-profile stories, the filmmakers were erasing the biggest swath of the truly interesting, risky stuff getting made in the independent game world. i'm not going to chalk this up to ignorance on their part - it was 100% a conscious choice of the filmmakers to follow the games with the highest commercial stakes, and it does a lot to give watching the movie a feeling like it's peddling "indie" success narratives.

as a story, and as a little capsule of cultural tourism, IG:TM provided a human enough portrait to get viewers who might otherwise think of game makers as Mountain Dew-swilling, Call of Duty playing manchildren to perhaps reconsider that image and see games as something that 'real people' make. most reviews at the time focused on this point, which is maybe is a testament to just how regressive image the games and nerd culture has in the larger cultural consciousness. for those involved in making games, it probably felt good to have their passions be legitimized by a very professional-looking production. more than a surface look at the film, however, leaves us with a bland, toothless, glorified advertisement that panders to both its audience and its subjects.

i would say Indie Game: The Movie was the final nail in the coffin that destroyed "indie". but on the ground level, the community has only continued to grow enormously since the time it came out. the only difference is that the stakes are higher now and there are more developers, more of whom are quickly finding that they're part of a much different world than the one described in Indie Game: The Movie. if "indie" has died, in its wake is the slow birth of videogames' conscience. and it's more apparent than ever that there are many people who are not recognized - because they're women, or people of color, or queer, or non-American, or don't know how to exploit marketing language and the culture of the IGF in the way successful indies have, or because the market is oversaturated. the indie game boom was no less reflection of the tech/start-up world's cocky white dude-exclusivity five years ago as it is now, it's just that there are more conflicting voices now to cast more shadows over the previous narratives. Indie Game: The Movie was always about "white dudes remaking Mario" (to quote Anna Anthropy), and it was always parroting a false narrative of success, the only difference is its become all the more obvious now by what's come after.

maybe that also explains why all of its subjects have since seemed to develop a more troubled and cantankerous relationship with the limelight and participation in the indie game world as a whole. Indie Game: The Movie created false expectations for success in many young viewers' minds, and ended up leaving its unwitting subjects looking ungrateful for not greeting that newfound fame and success with open arms. you will never see Jon Blow or Edmund McMillen or Phil Fish openly talking to fans or acquaintances at videogame conferences (if you see them all) like you might have seen at some point before. they're aware of all the resentment placed on them for the ones being profiled, and their walls are up much higher. they seem deeply uncomfortable with the social effect participating in the movie has had on their lives and how they're perceived in the indie world. this is becoming a common trend with newly successful young male game makers who don't have the mental or emotional capacity to handle all the sudden money and fame from having a commercially successful game.

these lingering sour feelings after IG:TM's success recently popped up again in a video on youtube which purports to undergo a deep cultural analysis of "indie celebrity" titled "This Is Phil Fish". among the points made in the video is that Phil's behavior didn't change from being a poster on the tigsource forums when Fez began development to when it became popular, but his level of exposure did. because of his cockiness, and the seeming disproportionate level of focus on his project with a catchy technical gimmick and flashy pixel art, "we" made our image of him into an annoying entitled brat through our own preconceptions, and the expectations for celebrities and their behavior. if Phil had stayed a bro who stayed inside the lines of acceptable behavior, he'd probably be worshiped as an indie hero (maybe more like Edmund McMillen). instead, people see him as a spoiled, pretentious jerk and left him death threats when he decided to cancel Fez 2. the video attempts to provide a complex portrait of internet "indie" celebrity through his situation, but inevitably paints Phil as a hapless, naive victim who was unwittingly thrust into this role of celebrity without his consent. it says that we put him there because he seemed to perfectly embody the type of ugly entitlement we don't like to see made visible.

this analysis is interesting, and i can't lie and say that under the hatred of Fish isn't some of the rabid xenophobia and anti-intellectualism that sits deep in the heart of fan culture. but the video also makes some serious presumptions. first of all, we don't know how much of willing participant Fish was or wasn't in courting this role of "indie celebrity". celebrity is often thrust on people, but that doesn't also mean that they don't also court it. the only person who knows what was going on in Phil's head is Phil, and i'm not really interested in speculating either way, particularly because it seems to be participating in the same kind of martyring process the video is attempting to critique. besides, i've heard enough that isn't public knowledge to not think very fondly of Fish's behavior for multiple reasons. but even that isn't important beyond the individuals involved, which is why i'm not even particularly interested in using him as the subject for this detailed analysis. there are several other people who are way more unjustly demonized, namely Anita fucking Sarkeesian, for one.

game developers come from nerd culture, often growing up seeing themselves as losers and outsiders. because they're afraid of being undesirable grotesque manchildren media has made them fear they are, they continue to believe themselves to be the victims. this fear blinds them into adulthood from seeing their newfound privilege and when and how they're participating as a part of the established dominant culture. in 2013, Hotline Miami developer Cactus told me to give him a blowjob when i (quite sincerely) asked him if he wanted a hug because he was upset he didn't win at IGF 2013. he said he thought he was going to win the Grand Prize "just like Fez", which won the year before. he later apologized to me in an email after i tweeted what he said publicly, and said he was upset at me for the tone in a review i wrote of his game (despite that we had had a very civil email exchange about the review before i met him at the IGF) and that he was very drunk and having a bad week. i more or less dropped it after he apologized, but still keep coming back to the level of entitlement in his behavior. i believe he felt he was owed the award because of HLM's commercial success, and because of his ubiquity for several years in the indie scene. HLM was a resounding success, yet he acted like i had overstepped some serious boundary for writing one negative review. and i just still can't wrap my fucking head around that.

just the same, this situation leads me to believe Phil also thought he was entitled to the 2012 IGF grand prize, because he believed in the narrative that was being painted for him. and when there was backlash when he won, he very much tried everything he could paint himself as a victim in the midst of this instead of trying to reach some awareness about what was happening or why other people were upset. an analysis is only so true as the agenda you enter into it with. he might have been an unwitting participant in his own demonization, but that doesn't mean he didn't come into it with a great deal of entitlement. yes, there is a certain kind of pomposity and grandiosity to his manner which often gets read as "pretentious" and pushes the xenophobic anti-intellectual gamer contingent's buttons super hard down to 'attack dog' mode. when this happens, it can seem weird and arbitrary and not fair. but they are also responding to a kind of entitlement that is, at the end of the day, very real.

maybe people view "indie" as entitled because it is entitled?

"This Is Phil Fish", in its inert, smug navel-gazing, merely reflects back the entitlement of the indie world. in the end it offers no particularly controversial or new insights about celebrity culture, but creates a sense of being a relevant and no-holds-barred commentary to those who are intimately aware of the subject matter. it attempts to exonerate Phil Fish to a lot of the young white dudes who are involved in the indie game community and probably want to identify with Fish. they see his case as "fascinating" and are much more ready and willing to accept that they might have made a snap judgment when they can see their subject as just a misunderstood one of their own. maybe they even want to fantasize about themselves as a rich and famous white dude game dev that people talk about, even if an infamous one. just the same, they are much more willing to relate themselves to a person like Cactus when he makes a poor lapse in judgment, because he is one them. but this sudden well of empathy seems to dry up once it's applied to an outsider like Sarkeesian.

in a sphere of entitlement, people involved are not able to see how their actions reflect their privilege or adds to the oppression of the dominant culture around them, and only take criticisms to their behaviors as bitterness or personal attacks. the indie community is a serious cross-section of haves and have nots, and what discussions are and aren't happening in the open often reflects this. 

in general, the way a discussion is framed - and especially what doesn't get talked about openly in the major public sphere reflects the values our culture. outcry about the lack of women at the recent E3 from sites like Polygon appear to be a clear sign of progress in a historically extremely retrogressive industry, but leave behind a lot in their discussion. while more diversity is obviously a good thing, it's a very small victory when the industry as a whole relies on rapid turnover to keep itself going, and generally is known for bad ethical decisions, both in how employees are often treated and in the lowest common denominator content of games they make. if the industry can't even bother to treat any of its workers well, why would more women and queer people and people of color want to enter it? when most AAA games reflect hyper-imperialist values, why would more marginalized people want representation in them?

in indie games, even what's seen as an "experimental" game also reflects a huge gap between what's actually happening and what's being openly recognized by the culture at large. Aevee Bee and Lana Polansky made the point on a IndiE3 panel about experimental games this past weekend that a lot of smaller-scale experimental game developers either don't have the resources, don't have the ability, or don't have the desire to exploit the kind of marketing tools necessary to sell their games to a wider audience of gamers. a lot of them, therefore, get thrown under the bus and erased by narratives of what's happening in a larger indie culture that's looking more for the more glamorized Indie Game: The Movie-style games. this has absolutely nothing to do with whether what smaller-scale devs make is somehow more or less interesting idea-wise at all, just that it's less marketable.

and in a time where there are more women and people of color making games than ever, the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC this past March had a total of 1 woman (Auriea Harvey from Tale of Tales) and a vast majority of white people (a notable exception being Mahdi Bahrami, an Iranian developer who was a hold-over from a previous year's submission because of visa issues and, again, Auriea Harvey). this is out of a speaker list of over 20 people. a vast majority of the games either relied on some sort of simple technological "hook" or more larger-scale complicated technical systems. somehow, Harmonix and Double Fine were part of the panel. the smaller scale experimental "narrative" games like Passage or Gravitation mentioned as a signpost on the EGW submission form seem to have been slowly phased out and replaced by a place to start the hype machine on the next sexy, marketable gimmick. this cult of marketability defines the EGW now, and makes it seem a lot more like the breeding ground for The Next Braid than any relevant cross-section of experimental games.

i guess you could say the business focus is no big surprise, as the EGW is held at one of world's biggest videogame business conferences. but then why choose to get upset at AAA's lack of representation and not upset at the lack of representation in experimental games? shouldn't recognition of marginalized ideas and concepts be what experimental gameplay is about? isn't it even vastly more important that marginalized devs who have way less opportunities for exposure be recognized? shouldn't we be holding Robin Hunicke, the organizer, accountable for this stuff, and not give her a pass just because she's a woman?

the point is, there are implicit agendas in place behind what things are and aren't openly criticized. those agendas often aren't consciously being enacted, but their being unconscious makes their effects no less real or serious. and a lot of what gets unsaid reflects a culture defined by privilege-blindness. making these criticisms openly is the sign of a community with a healthy panoply of voices. and yet i see a troubling lack of people on the inside who are any willing to undertake any kind of criticism of them. people continually call for diversity and then continually stop listening when diverse voices start speaking. either you speak out and get ignored or become silent and be part of the establishment. when i've heard from so many people participating in the indie game world who have misgivings and come to me and tell me how much they are deathly afraid to talk openly about their misgivings without seriously hurting a friend's feelings and losing a friendship or that saying the wrong thing that will ruin their career, then that's a pretty clear sign there is a stagnant culture. fear of losing friendships and social support is without a doubt the strongest and most effective motivator for maintaining the status quo. all of this make the "indie" world a place rife with paranoia and insecurity, one often masked by an awkward gushing surface congeniality.

the bottom of indie culture seems like it's bound to drop out any time soon, it's just a matter of when and how hard. and when it does, who will be there to build something more durable?

Into (and Out Of) The Belly of the Beast

you know, i'm a strong woman. i'm realizing this more and more every day. i don't care what anyone else might have to say to me about it.

i'm a woman. whatever objective definition may or may not exist of that word doesn't matter at this point, because that's how i'm seen now. that's the role i embody. and i actually feel a lot more comfortable with it, as arbitrary as it might seem at times. and now i'm standing in the middle of a swanky apartment in SF holding a rum and coke in a room full of women (and some non-binary people) who work in the game industry or connected fields, wondering what the hell this is all about. i only got into this party because i was in the right place at the right time the night before - and the guy at the front didn't even see my name on the list, but he let me in anyway, saying "i'm just out here as a formality, honey" warmly and laughing. up until a couple years or so ago, i'd never felt like i'd been at the right place at the right time for anything.

i spend so much time and energy just trying to stay human, and yet i usually feel like the token alien lifeform in any given group of people. the whole week of GDC 2014 i'm occupied with thoughts of my impending homelessness at the end of the week. it seemed like a bit of a cruel joke, with more potential offers for money and work coming my way than ever before. everything was falling apart, but something new was also coming together. i feel so hopelessly inept at living my life in so many ways, yet so extremely confident in others. and now, suddenly i'm a part of a community. suddenly everyone seems really nice to me and tells me they respect my work. suddenly i feel much less guarded towards them, and, for the first time, believe they're being sincere. and yet i still don't know where i'm going to sleep at the end of the week.

i'm spending the week incessantly handing out my obnoxious business cards to everyone i meet, advertising my obnoxious game - the game no one's supposed to like. a game about upsetting shit a lot of people never want to think about. i was secretly hoping that i'd push some of them away or offend them. and nearly everyone is saying "wow, this is so cool!" i doubt they'd feel that way if they spent serious time actually playing the game, of course. just yesterday Cara Ellison told me "your games make me feel really bad" in (presumably) the most flattering way she could muster. it's a hard thing to hear from anyone, but it's what i've gotten used to hearing.

being a woman - defining and reevaluating myself as a woman, leaves me in uncertain territory. there are less examples for me to look to. buildings previously built up by all the things i've looked to in the past crumble, and now i see how flimsy they were in the first place. i struggle to feel i'm really occupying the same space as these women, but i'm definitely feeling a positive vibe i didn't expect to feel from them. maybe it's that women in games are so intensely targeted and marginalized, they couldn't help but emotionally support each other and try and birth something new and interesting. not that those women aren't often equally lethal towards each other - a reality i'd became increasingly acquainted with all too well in the past year. or maybe this is just how things really work in creative communities - that just because i'd never really heard many stories of women in male-dominated worlds didn't mean they hadn't existed all over the place.

presumably i'm some sort of Game Designer or Game Thinker or whatever, but i don't pretend like there isn't a lot i don't know about games. so i go to heavily praised talks like The Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC and i see boys with toys. i talk to highly educated, articulate academics who've spent their careers studying videogames and i see boys with toys. i see boys with toys everywhere. i see them skimming along the surface, endlessly posturing. and i just can't get myself to care. but a lot of people seem to love to throw money at them. so i guess i should care. a few of the younger men - ones i've met before who seemed nice enough, if naive, are being hit with walls of paranoia and depression from all the unexpected attention directed at them from their massive commercial successes. they don't seem particularly wise or powerful, they just seem like insecure young people. and there's nothing wrong with that. but because of that, they don't have psychological mechanisms for dealing with the increased scrutiny placed on them as newly successful 'indie game' celebrities. they seem guarded, and not in good emotional places despite their new-found wealth. meanwhile others who i might respect, who are used to relative marginalization or obscurity next to these celebrities shrug their shoulders and continue doing what they do. no amount of demographic breakdowns and marketing analysis can mask the fact that it's all so deeply arbitrary, and more people seem to be realizing it.

i don't have any respect for the videogame industry as an entity. i have no respect for its labor practices, nor its artistic aims, nor the imagery it worships, nor its treatment of women or other minorities, nor the parasitic relationship it has with its consumers. i think it's disgusting and abhorrent. so i can't say that i respect GDC, as a business conference that stands to represent the values of the videogame industry. nor do i support the IGF, in its endless hype and favoritism, nor in its aim to award 'indie' games with (for the most part) already the highest levels of cultural exposure. but individuals often start to change, even when the worlds they occupy remain as stubborn and stagnant as ever. i appreciate when Brandon Boyer says onstage in the IGF awards that he supports people involved in games fragmenting off and pushing in whatever directions they want to push in, even if he doesn't understand it. i appreciate it when i can have an honest conversation with a deeply professional woman who's spent much of her life in the game industry, even if she might not ever really understand what i'm trying to do with a thing like Problem Attic.

a small one-day conference called Critical Proximity, the day before GDC, mostly made up of young people, seems to be much more interesting and relevant than nearly anything at GDC - despite the appearance of a "videogame criticism" conference sounding like a comically narrow focus from the outside. there was a lot of talk about how to maintain supportive communities, yet in the final talk Ian Bogost (or "Old Man Bogost" as i've come to call him) still seemed intent on breaking up any kind of delusions of community love that might have been held over the course of the conference, or anything that distracts videogame critics from doing the thing videogame critics are presumably supposed to be doing. and fair enough - maybe there is no community. maybe we don't want community. others, like Samantha Allen, made this point too. maybe things will continue to shift and fall apart unpredictably. but even if there is no community, there is a lot of genuine sincerity, and genuine desire to support other people - and that's a thing that doesn't just materialize out of thin air.

then - walking into Moscone Center for the third year in a row, i knew enough to know what i was going to get this time around. i knew the way places like the Bay Area or LA or NYC like to mythologize themselves. i knew that the interesting stuff is most often happening outside of these events, and outside those cities. that is, unless maybe you're David Kanaga or Pippin Barr and you're doing genuinely exciting, genuinely cutting-edge experiments at the intersection of performance art and games. and then, a lot of people are probably either very confused by or very indifferent to you. or if your name is Tale of Tales, and your sustained visibility over the years hasn't done much of anything to move you out of a strange, liminal, heavily marginalized space between the overly stagnant, overly stuffy art world and the overly commercial, overly nasty game world.

i don't know what will happen with videogames in the next ten years. i don't know to be excited about what will happen in them or not. i almost don't care. so much ground is gained, so much ground is lost. so many things have been changing surprisingly quickly, so many stay the same and show no signs of ever being different. i still don't understand why people who make videogames need to separate themselves out from other creative communities creating other forms of digital media, and justify why videogames are more exceptional than them. nor do i understand why those other worlds continually seem to fail to seriously engage with videogames. either way, a lot of people who make videogames are certainly here, and certainly don't seem to be going anywhere any time soon. and neither am i - nor am i homeless anymore, by the way. thank you, patreon!

i'm a woman and a human being who wants to make art. i never saw this as being particularly controversial. nor do i see my need to not limit myself to one medium as being particularly unusual, in an age of easy access to a plethora of different digital tools. and so i'm always shocked to see how much confusion seems to come from that. either i'm overextending myself, or i'm ruining my chance at a establishing a real career by going too far up my own ass. but here i am, still strong as ever. now able to pay rent. and i'm not changing, nor am i going anywhere. and whether or not my need to feel human makes me an alien to others, i'm happy to receive all the support and love i have from this community - strange as it may be, nonexistent as it may or may not be.

and so i say this sincerely, from the bottom of my heart: we might not always understand each other or be on the same page (or even in the same book!) as each other. i might find game culture endlessly infuriating and puzzling. but i know your support is genuine. and i'm really, really flattered. thank you so much, everyone. =)

2013: my year

in 2013 i did 3 things i'm particularly proud of:

1. Problem Attic. i'd never done a real, honest-to-god project i felt proud of. finishing this lifted that weight off me. it also confirmed a lot of things i already knew. there were a lot of things that hurt me in the past year, and a lot of drama that caused ripples and split a lot of people i've been around apart. the time when i finished the initial version of PA felt like the epicenter of all of it. it's been really hard for me to deal with that feeling, like you have something you're trying so desperately to say but you're being ignored and swept under the rug by everyone around you because you're not as loud as them.

all this led me to feeling suicidal for maybe the first real time in my life. i guess the price you pay for doing things your way is feeling increasingly alienated from people around you. i spent several months being upset that many people i knew didn't even seem to want to go near my game, let alone entertain the idea that there might be something more there. the IndieCade rejection form was another blow, especially when a couple judges assumed i made the artistic choices i did in the game because i was inept. i'm also preparing for the inevitable disinterest from the IGF. i'll probably submit it to the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC next year, if only because it's free, but i'm not hoping for much. and then i'll probably call the whole "attempting to get exposure for it" quits.

i've felt increasingly like everyone i know thinks i'm crazy and self-absorbed for harping on this game so much and just wants me to give it a rest. but i'm a stubborn person, and that deep stubbornness is what made that game, and is what motivates in general me to keep going and doing what i do. so that's what's i'm going to do.

i'm very proud to have made this game, and i think it's probably one of those things that will gain in reputation over time. i felt really overjoyed to see that there are some people (people i don't know at all, too!) who feel the same way. it makes me feel like i'm not so crazy for believing this after all. my dream is still to make it as an electronic musician, but maybe i'll keep trying to give this games thing more chances.

2. the three extended tracks i did on the MirrorMoon EP OST. i've struggled a lot with music for many years, and these have felt like by far the most cohesive things i've done in recent years. though if you want to give me money, you should do so on my bandcamp.

3. the two talks i gave: Re: Fuck Videogames and The Abstract And The Feminine. the former is a response to a bunch of different things going on in games around 2013, and i think more people need to read it if they can deal with eye-fucking and a few typos i'm too lazy to fix. the latter talks about a lot of issues surrounding gender (gender and art in particular) that a lot of people seem to ignore, so i think it's important to check out.

i'm not really a natural-born speaker and i still have a lot of dysphoria about my voice, so speaking at both conferences was a real challenge. at No Show in Boston, where i gave Re: Fuck Videogames, Courtney Stanton (the organizer) was nice enough to cover my flight and her and her husband Darius Kazemi were gracious hosts for someone like me who otherwise never would've been able to afford flying out to the east coast. unfortunately for the talk itself, i wrote everything in my talk out in article format, which makes for better reading than it did saying out loud. aside from that, i think No Show was an excellent and well run conference and i may attempt to submit a talk there next year .

my QGCon talk went a lot more smoothly, and i think i was able to convey all the thoughts i wanted to in the time allotted. i hope it came off for the people watching it. the conference itself i was happy to see exist, especially really close by, and meet some new faces. there were also several really good talks! but it also felt a little more jumbled and unfocused around several different ideas of what different people thought of as "queer", and some of the talks were basically just boring student dissertations (including a talk about Japanese representation of queer people in games that really bothered me and some other people). also, i hope they fix the audio on the stream next time around so people can actually hear most of the talks!

and of course, GDC and IndieCade were in 2013, both of which i have the benefit of being close to. both were, in themselves, a whirlwind of interesting people and experiences (IndieCade moreso than GDC), even if i feel less than enthusiastic about their overall aims as events, to put it lightly.


other notable things:

- i'm still broke as hell. if anyone likes my work and wants to give me money or help me find gigs doing music for games or whatever else, email or paypal me at liz dot ryerson at gmail or buy my stuff on bandcamp.

- you should play A.L.T., which is the best Doom mod i've ever played. also read my article about it on Unwinnable if you need convincing.

- a few articles i wrote on this blog ended up becoming pretty popular or whatever. i still like this one called "why should i love them?" the most.

- SCRAPS is an album of a lot of old kinda-embarrassing stuff of mine hopefully made less embarrassing by the super cryptic format

- i did the music and sound design for Crypt Worlds and Triad, which was fun.

- i got interviewed in RPS, which was pretty neat.

- i do plan on finishing my Doom videos eventually, but they're not a priority.

- speaking of that, apparently people kinda like it when you pretend to talk about whatever big current AAA game, even if what you're saying is not related at all.

- i wrote a couple more Wolfenstein 3d level design articles early this year, for anyone who might have missed them.

- i made Responsibilities w/Andi McClure at the very end of last year but you should still play it!

- i finally updated my website (ellaguro.com), which is still very much a WIP. i'm fond of the icons.

- i'm posting assorted other bits (like the glitch art stuff i've been doing the past couple days) on my tumblr, ellaguro.tumblr.com

beyond "indie": a reprise

some two and a half years ago, Anna Anthropy wrote a post (and gave a micro-talk at GDC) titled "beyond indie". in it, she says:

"the indie label doesn’t contribute anything to the discussion except a needless sense of distance: calling a game an indie game or an author an indie developer just enforces the illusion that it’s an exclusive club, an inner circle to which most people aren’t admitted.

so my challenge to all of us is to stop thinking and talking in terms of indie games and indie developers, to get beyond the idea of an indie scene, to center the discussion on GAMES made by PEOPLE because there are going to be a whole lot more people making a whole lot more games and the indie label has become a moiety — a distinction we don’t need to make in an era where there’s no distinction between who can make videogames and who can’t."

there's still a lot of truth to Anna's words, but the usage of the term has also changed somewhat in the past couple years. the idea of "indie" implying a small handful of games made by an inner circle certainly very much applies to larger cultural representations like Indie Game: The Movie, or how a lot of the community around the IGF or IndieCade functions, but the label itself has also gained traction outside of those venues as a marketing term. most major games press has designated "indie" coverage now, and several "indie" games have gone on to be very successful in venues like Steam or The Humble Store. it's also the standard line parroted in the games press about next-gen consoles that Sony is "working with indies" in order to inject lifeblood into their current products, the PS4 and the Vita.

while the "indie" moniker has often been the subject of a lot of mockery (one example being the "Optimistic Indie" meme from 2011), it only seems to have gained greatly in usage and popularity since then. "indie games" now basically encompass anything and everything that isn't games made as part of the AAA development cycle. the popularity of things like Minecraft or Indie Game: The Movie means it's a moniker newer game developers readily desire to identify with because they want to be part of some scrappy cultural vanguard, either commercially or artistically (or both). but this also means that "indie" has become most readily identified with commercially successful developers working outside the AAA system, rather than the massive swath of interesting new games that have also been labeled "indie" but are seen as only as curiosities or failed experiments when evaluated on the terms of success dictated by the most culturally visible ones.

so while "indie" is still a derogatory term for a lot of self-identified "gamers" (search for "shitty indie game" on any major gaming website forum if you don't believe me), it's still very much growing as an established part of the industry. as if adding a nail in the coffin, a Sony spokesperson just this past week declared that "the Indie revolution is over" because Sony is now beginning to do what it needs to to adjust its old business models in order to more readily encompass indies as a viable part of the industry. Sony, of course, wouldn't have done this if they didn't see the writing on the wall. the industry has seen the success of "indie", in the midst of its own creative and financial stagnation, and is now readily attempting to co-opt it and pull it back into itself so that it can keep its machinery running.

but if the "indie revolution is over", what has been its lasting impact? has it been merely a way to inject lifeblood back into the industry by making smaller games more commercially viable, as Sony is trying to frame it? what about the legacy of the kinds of games that often appear on places like freeindiegam.es or forest ambassador? will they fall even further under the radar and have even less visibility once the industry fully co-opts "indie"?

i don't really know the answer to these questions. there at least seems to be more movement towards pushing beyond the idea of "indie" lately: there's Different Games, a conference run at NYU, that focuses on recognizing what we might think of as "unconventional" games, both digital and non-digital. as a name, i'm fond of "different games", if only as a meaningful but unspecific way to distinguish them from what normally gets labeled as a game, but it's lack of specificity means it's not particularly useful to be adapted as a widespread term. there's also the label "queer games", which was adapted to mean many different things by many of the speakers i saw at QGCon in Berkeley this past month. but "queer" obviously comes with a lot of baggage and implications as well. whatever the case, "indie" has proven itself to be an increasingly oppressive label that needs to be dropped.

the videogame industry is financially unstable and filled with deplorable labor practices and highly retrogressive values. becoming subsumed into the industry doesn't seem wise for either ideological or long-term financial reasons. i suggest we rescue what's worthwhile and get the hell out before the ship crashes and establish ourselves somewhere else. there are vast territories of the human experience that games can speak to, but these are rapidly narrowing with the widespread adaption of "indie" and all the implications that come with it. if we're at all concerned about the longevity of any of things done by game developers outside of the AAA system in the past five or so years, i believe we must drop any and all remaining identification with the label "indie" as soon as possible.

Fuck Festivals

fuck festivals.

i say this after having a wonderful time at IndieCade last week, and having just submitted my game Problem Attic to the IGF a few days ago.

the expectation placed on any so-called "indie game" to distinguish itself from the pack is much, much higher now. this might seem like a good thing, right? there are a lot more games now, so the stakes should be higher - and the games should be better, right? it, of course, depends on how you define "better". but this expectation has little to do with artistic or creative ambition and a lot to do with how professional-looking the game is. the end goal the forwarding of these games serves is to make "smaller games" become a new, viable, sustainable part of the games industry. everyone knows that Minecraft/Humble Bundle make tons of money, so a lot of people are pouring a lot of resources into getting in on that money.

this is a pretty violent shift from even five or six years ago, when a game like Passage was praised for being a unique achievement in game storytelling - where it was seen as a wildly left-field part of a new artistic vanguard. now it's becoming more apparent that a game like Passage was extremely lucky to benefit from there not being much else around to diminish it. now we can also see more clearly how conservative of the narrative of that game is in many ways - about a man and a woman and compromises they make, and how cliched the ideas behind it have become. now we can see how many games tried to be as artistically ambitious and less essentialist (i'm thinking of something like increpare's "Home") but never got nearly as much attention. now it would just look like a little experiment, one of many out there. it might get some coverage on a few indie gaming sites or get posted on freeindiegam.es and then that would be it. the conversation wouldn't sustain itself because there'd be something new to replace it in a week or less.

yes, it's easier to make a game than ever. the tools are much more accessible than they ever were before. and no, i'm not a person who believes that everyone making games (or art in general) is in any way bad at all. it's a wonderful thing, especially for the legions of the population who would otherwise be intimidated away from even attempting to try to make a game.

yet it's also hard to know in what spaces those games will be appropriately recognized and respected. things like the IGF and IndieCade might seem to be those spaces, but actually serve well those who have the ability to engage in a sustained PR to promote their games. this obviously benefits people with more resources and connections, who are almost universally not the type of people who would normally be scared away from making games. this is no secret. these festivals exist as a way to inject lifeblood into the games industry, or to legitimize games in the eyes of other industries like the film industry, not to subvert them.

festivals are supposed to be a bastion for new, ambitious developers to bring their game to a wider audience. but are festivals really developer friendly at all? for most developers, it's 95 dollars for the small hope that your game will reach a larger audience. except that it's more or less impossible for your game to be nominated unless you've waged an extended PR campaign for your game or are already a well-known developer. even for those who get in, they're expected to fly out to a conference and stay there (a flight which may or may not be paid for, other accommodations and food/drinks which almost certainly won't) and stand in front of a screen in a crowded expo floor for hours on end as people while people stumble their way through their game. this might be an acceptable sacrifice if there was just one festival - but there are many (the IGF being still the biggest) and there are a great number of games being exhibited at each of these festivals. each game is like a little tidbit, a little unit of ideas or concepts to be gorged on and eventually become absorbed into the industry. and so festival settings are fundamentally not served at all for slower or longer games - and particularly for text-based games. we don't value what these games may or may not have to offer. the nuances get glossed over because of the setting. we gorge on each one rapidly and leave. this is how we've been taught to treat videogames.

and personally, as someone who's designed a couple deliberately abstract games, there's nothing that sounds more like agony to me than being expected to explain and justify my game to any random person who walks by and plays it for five minutes. the Steam deal promised to developers nominated for last year's IGF was certainly a good thing, but that's only one festival of many - and a lot of the developers lucky enough to have the kind of PR clout to get in with the judges are also probably lucky enough to get on Steam without needing a nomination.

i admit it. some of these are my own realizations after designing a game (the aforementioned Problem Attic) that was in many ways unique and artistically ambitious, but i also recognized would not in any way be "festival-friendly". in itself, it might seem like a ridiculous idea that an artistically ambitious game wouldn't be "festival-friendly" - but in fact it makes perfect sense. festival jurors tend to self-consciously cherry-pick and reward the things with the most buzz. why? in order to make games more of a cultural event, for one - and to reward games which have managed to achieve some level of cultural penetration. there's also the practical matter of judges are going to naturally gravitate towards games or developers that they've already heard of, especially among the waves of games they haven't. and also to be what a good friend of mine calls a "photogenic indie" - something that's unique in maybe one or two ways but manages to overall have highly agreeable, unambiguous presentation. that's what people want to play, after all, right? they want the gloss, not the ugly, gross shit that shows its videogamey seams. that's what prominent members of the indie community or events like the IGF or IndieCade want to forward as examples of videogame expression.

i will say that IndieCade was in several ways a lovely, forward-thinking event. it made an effort to have events like Night Games that the public could attend (though the lines were way too long for them), and also stayed lax about checking badges, allowing people to go to talks they might not be able to get into if they really wanted to. but as far as the festival goes, i've also received some of the most condescending feedback i've ever had. here are the two worst offenders (click to make it larger):

one judge says i'm "asking too much of my audience", the other seems to interpret my very intentional aesthetic choices as the fact that i must be clearly an inept and/or confused beginner (that i'm female likely plays into this), or else i clearly wouldn't have made a game like this.

i want to be clear that i don't want to make it out like i'm an exception, or that this is just about me. in many ways i'm maybe pretty lucky. i have enough friends to where if i kept waging a public PR campaign i might actually be able to get recognized in spite of how strange the things i make are, or how unpopular some of the sentiments i express in writing are. but that's not the point. the point is to aspire to have some kind of fair chance for people who can't, or won't engage in this. the point is to emphasize the people who are really, truly doing the most ambitious and crazy and unique things with videogames, and not the ones who are friends with the most judges, or who are making the most "photogenic" games. and i don't think it's possible for this to happen in any real way in the climate of these festivals.