Let's Play Life

hello - this post of mine i've been working on for the past few months! it's a sequel of sorts to last year's California Problem post and it's about let's plays, youtube, and internet culture. it is book-length, so i have divided it into three parts. i could not write something this ambitious without my supporters on Patreon. money is particularly tight for me right now, so if you enjoy this post and you're able to throw me some support - i would really appreciate it! if you can't support me - please share this post with your friends!

my 2000's indie music podcast Kitschfork is currently somewhat on hiatus, but i am working on an album of original songs i'm planning to release before the end of 2024 titled "Saint Elizabeth". you can check out my first released song "Terrible Town" here, and hit the "follow" button on my Bandcamp page for more updates here!

also: yes, you can read the whole post over on my Patreon for free here as well. and no, i will not answer messages on social media that complain about the orange background of this blog or my lack of capitalization in this post. you guys should have learned by now - i will not waver in my convictions.

- liz

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"...how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?"

- Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism 

 

Part 1: The Memory Office

 

You've heard the usual sob stories recounted endlessly in increasingly public fashion. each one comes on weepier and more uncomfortable than the last. long ago you lost count of the amount of tearful testimonies you've witnessed. by now you've started to feel progressively more alarmed by how the relatively simple memories shared in these stories seem to overtake virtually anything else out there in the world in their passion and fervor.

and yet you could not know that, later in your life, these sorts of stories would be repeatedly invoked by you too as a pivotal moment in your life. or that the feelings brought up by these memories would rarely fail to make even the most hardened of grown men, steeped in the many long days and nights of their brutal everyday work grind, start welling up wistfully in solidarity. even the most grizzled among us can agree: these times, they were so significant, so consequential. they simply cannot be matched.

without even really knowing it, you yourself have spent your entire life silently training to be ready to conjure up story after story of past wistful yearning as well. maybe you won't need them, but: remember that you can drop these tearful treasured memories like a bomb on others the second anyone doubts for a single second that you are, or at least were, passionate. you could even bring them up if you ever run for public office and your authenticity is ever called into question. this path is a crucial part of you - it's your birthright. you've continually demonstrated that you’re a good, normal, media-consuming individual from birth - no one can question that. it’s important to think about that. don't let others dilute your mindset.

and yet your rapidly growing confidence somehow doesn't push away the also rapidly growing dread you feel that these stories have started sounding indistinguishable from each other in their millionth retelling. you wonder, in the back of your mind, if all the trips you've taken to the memory office inside your head haven't left your inner world increasingly stripped of any kind of imagination. sometimes you worry that you have no real distance. can you ever grow past these stories? do others want you to grow past these stories? hasn't the strange ritual of sharing them simply begun to make less sense every time you do it? isn't it all just scattered jigsaw pieces of aimless cultural waste, invoked by you in an increasingly disjointed manner? are we all just performing this elaborate, impassioned ceremony in an attempt to prove to ourselves, or to others... are these memories actually real at all?

the life of sharing these stories sends you hurtling through the endless tunnels and neural pathways of the collective consciousness. you're now on a perilous journey into the elaborate puzzle worlds of others' minds - always searching for a kind of treasure that may or may not have ever really existed. these memories are like the Green Hill Zone of life - they're Level One, full of shimmering fields of possibility... before it all really started happening. before we lost ourselves somewhere out there in the bigger, meaner, more confusing world. 

but also: somewhere out there is a new 'natural' world, one made to compensate for all the vanishing possibility and diminishing sense of mystery in the real one. and somewhere in this new natural world you can actually find a real heaven, a real floating city, a real mysterious gold palace, a real sexy neon futurescape, a real life on Mars. a real sun-soaked land with waterfalls and canyons and birds singing.

anything and everything you've dreamed of is there. and we all can experience it - we can really have it all... through media. 

CRT monitor photo of lost Sonic 2 concept art from Frank Cifaldi https://twitter.com/frankcifaldi/status/1734802109516886056

and so, in one of these many childhood memories you've ritualistically shared too many times to count now, a young version of you is over as at your best friend's house. this could be one of many friends. but, in this case, it is your friend whose family had way more money than yours. this friend's parents also didn't appear to care to watch their kids very much, for reasons you did not understand. you seem to recall that a few years later, this friend maybe moved out of town, or maybe decided you were too much of a loser to be friends with anymore. maybe you didn't really have much in common with each other to begin with. maybe you were never really friends at all?

the details are unimportant. on this evening, you both sit inhaling some cans of Sprite and half-watching cartoons that ambiently hum at a low volume in the background on a TV in your friend's family's living room. suddenly, you both make the very consequential decision to stay up all night playing some videogames. tonight it's gonna be just you and your friend (who you're pretty sure was definitely your friend), all night, alone. it's time to sit up with your faces pressed perilously close to the screen. everyone else is gone, for some reason: it doesn't matter why. that is outside the bounds of this particular story. it's time for both of you slam your fingers onto small plastic buttons in order to shuffle your little pixelated guys around in those wonderful virtual worlds.

in the midst of sharing your story, you seem to recall that this memory looked a lot like those kitschy Thomas Kinkade style tableaus of consumer childhood nostalgia done by artist Rachid Lotf. yes, these memories bring up confusing emotions that are hard to put in a particular place or give a particular name to - but these pieces seem pretty close! suddenly you've hit all of the markers of a bygone era that you haven't seen for a long time, and you're flooded with old feelings. once you learn how to channel these feelings, others will materialize to show you their love for what you've done. soon enough, they too will begin to share their own stories.

but, as it turns out, this is all really an elaborate political performance. any sense of memory displacement you experience invariably gets gobbled up and puked out by many esteemed cultural commentators out there. these guardians of the thought realm want to assure you that, regardless of how you might feel, there are powers that be who want to take all these precious moments away from you. posts like the screencaps above and below from twitter account "Wokal Distance" are there to urgently remind you any time you unearth long-dead feelings that you can't really put into words, that what you really feel is the ache of the call home. you feel Pokémon cards, and mom's spaghetti. seeing these makes you feel the late 1990's consumer culture iteration of paintings of the British countryside. but here's the problem: the powers that be don't want kids of today to experience what you experienced. they want to piss all over your memories, and the memories of future generations. and they're doing it every day, in broad daylight. they're pissing in broad daylight, and no one cares! it's actually fucked up.

and so: how to fight back? good question. the time is well upon us now to reassert that we are vigilant consumers. we must violently grapple (for there is simply no other option at this late stage) with the ongoing efforts to exterminate traditional values, whatever those may be at the current moment. we must remember to be guided by the glowing light of these precious memories. our brothers in battle may be marble statue avatar accounts on social media. or they may be failed actors who grew a sizeable online audience by antagonizing blue-haired college students on behalf of good media-consuming people like you, in an act of great self-sacrifice. maybe they're anonymous folks with avatars of characters from some Japanese anime who seem to frequently share vaguely racist images that feature somewhat incoherent elaborate taxonomies of different types of human beings that you don't really understand. maybe we're all strange bedfellows here, but that's what makes it exciting! a brand new universe has opened up to you, and a whole new lexicon of ideas is now there for you to experience and study. 

and now that you have entered into this world, it is time for you to know the true nature of your mission: you must start by extolling the dangers of modern architecture. they have corrupted the beauty of traditional Western values (represented by ornate details and columns on buildings) into the meaningless decadence of the modern world. it was good enough for past civilizations, so why isn't it good enough for us? it's the question that has haunted many generations. and you must fight to achieve a total victory here. you must do this to show your appreciation to those failed actors and obsessive anime avatar souls who sacrificed so much for you.

by now you're pretty far down the rabbit hole - way too far to ask any questions about what gothic architecture or marble statues have to do remotely with childhood memories of engaging with kitschy consumer products of the late 20th century. and the further we go down, the deeper we dive into conspiracies like "Cultural Marxism" and the idea of the Frankfurt School of the early to mid-twentieth century that are built on a foundation of antisemitism (though our culture of the moment is certainly doing everything in its power to obscure what that term even means). the world you're in has become even loopier and more fantastical - these are magical feelings you can no longer feel in your regular life anymore. your family is getting very worried. you can no longer connect to the real world: you've started to look like Robbie Coltrane in the video for the Kate Bush song "Deeper Understanding". the further down you spiral, the more it reads to anyone on the outside that you've become lost in an increasingly incoherent jumble of random grievances on the culture war bingo card linked together by violent bigotry and vibes. the more you dig in, the more you risk permanently alienating your loved ones around you. it's a sad but inevitable sacrifice you must make to live in a true and right world.

and that's invariably where the fixation with nostalgia and returning to some kind of lost past that may or may not have ever existed ends up. any given dive into childhood memories of playing videogames with your friend gets used to fuel right-wing RETVRN-style fantasies on the hyper-politicized internet of today. our memories are all just raw fuel used to send people down one kind of radicalization pipeline or another - leaving broken lives and families in its wake. there's always a Thomas Kinkade-style mind palace somewhere that should be forever fought for and upheld, and there's always a scapegoat to blame for the current rot in society. and it will always leave many more victims in its wake. even when the picture of this memory, the one manifested into a fever dreamy fantasia of consumerist signifiers, probably didn't even really happen. 

where did it all go wrong? those garishly hyper-real re-digested versions of TV or magazine ads of the time are rarely what anyone actually experienced: they're what you hoped you could have had back then. maybe that's the point of their existence to begin with, and maybe that's not so harmful in some ways. because so much culture is so ephemeral, it can be very valuable to further reflect on what's been left behind. from the 17th to 19th century, nostalgia was originally considered a medical sickness so severe that, if left untreated, could lead to death. this was particularly pronounced in the case of soldiers who experienced homesickness serving terms of duty far away from home: the only known cure was to return home. the meaning of the word "nostalgia" eventually changed in the 20th century to mean what it does today: a strong emotional experience of sentimentality. but perhaps something of these homesick afflictions still come out when we observe the victims of today's culture. images you haven't seen in a long time that might conjure up long repressed memories of what was forgotten in your life. the pace of culture moves faster than ever, and it leaves so much waste behind it. perhaps trying to resolve these feelings on a deeper level is essential to help you function and offer a clearer path forward into the future.

and also: you should know, at some level, that the real picture never feels like an ad you'd see somewhere. the real picture is always so much more complex and so context-specific. the true nature of these memories is often elusive and ambiguous. you can't really summarize it in a way that doesn't lead the to you talking about the circumstances of your life in general. and you should know that. you have to know that. right?

and yet, shockingly little of substance ever seems to worm its way out from the sharing of such anecdotes. because, in the social sphere, they're memories that can be shaped into anything you want to shape them into, and used for any sort of purposes you'd like to use them for. they could be the right-wing mass culture war campaign grievance of the hour, or they could look like the consoomer meme, or they could come from ultra-woke fanfic authors and primp Disney adults. so these memories get metabolized by mass media industries into another corny cultural cliché. any horizons beyond the blanket fortresses you created from consuming a trash heap of media inside your giant suburban castle fades into the background. all major sides are invariably fighting for slightly different variations on the same formula. the thought of joining a community not built entirely on unquestioned brand loyalty presented in slightly varying flavors never even enters the picture. it's about stamping your ticket into a theme park of increasingly nonsensical cultural sludge. and it's all reinforced by the culture of the internet, where we can celebrate as some kind of victory for the masses. it's epic bacon all the way down, folks. we all win, even when we're losing!

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. =)

How To Be A Nice Person On The Internet And Not Speak For Others

this is a response to some discussion threads happening on twitter recently among some queer games people that center around a bunch of tweets made by a transwoman, which i have quoted in full below. the tweets led to a discussion about exclusivity in queer circles, in this case the queer gaming one - and the perceived endless infighting and divisiveness among it. i talked a little bit about some of my experiences with this a couple months ago on this blog, for those interested.

the below quote will probably be upsetting and/or triggering for some to read. and so i'm going to place a TRIGGER WARNING! on this whole article for that reason, for that and for some of the things i'm bringing up later. i understand that several people might not want them to be brought up again, but i think it's important to look at the language of the offending tweets for the ideas they represent so that we can better understand how these things often manifest themselves. i'm not interested in singling out or calling out the person who posted this or saying they're a bad person, or whatever. i'm not going to name them either, and i don't believe it's important to anyway. i also understand that people can be inclined to say more upsetting things than they usually would in the midst of angry tweeting, but that doesn't change the overall sentiment, which is something i've heard multiple people i know express to varying degrees.

note that i cleaned up some of the spelling and shorthand of the tweets a bit so it's more obvious what's being talked about:

for anyone who hasn't spent tons of time around angry, jaded trans women, here's a vocabulary term you might not know: "theys"

"theys": white skinny FAAB (female-assigned at birth) intellectually-genderqueer women's studies students who think being trans is a contest to have the most intellectually rigorous gender identity, who experience masculinity as a fun thing they can put on to experience liberation and privilege, but can still totally fit themselves into women's spaces, and for whom "visibility" is the foremost goal, who think they're more oppressed than trans women because not everyone understands their gender.

The Theys think that because They're trans, They're not implicated in transmisogyny.

In reality, They're the most direct descendants of the original post-gender transmisogynistic early feminists.

Now, just as I hate all men but have a couple men in my life that I love and trust deeply, I also dislike Theys but have some in my life.

In fact, one of my best friends is a They.

That said, my rules of preemptively disliking and distrusting Theys has always paid off. I recommend it to all women, especially trans women.

"theys" as a descriptor strikes a pretty strong chord, since it's the most direct way to signify an other ("they", by definition, signifies a group of people who is not you) and it bears an uneasy resemblance to xenophobic language used against immigrants and PoC, especially when the author says their "rules of preemptively disliking and distrusting Theys has always paid off". in this case, it's also a snarky way to redefine and disrespect the language of people who choose to identify by "they". By portraying "theys" as privileged, skinny, white women's studies majors it also presents a caricature of queer people that is similar to the one portrayed hatefully outside the West as the embodiment of queer culture - endless privilege, excess, entitlement, and self-righteousness. the choice of language is what probably makes this the one of the more extreme examples of this sentiment that i've seen expressed online.

still, i'm going to have to admit this is a sentiment, however ugly it's worded here, that i've felt in the past was true a lot of the time - even if i never really openly expressed it (at least on these terms). there is a general sense among many transwomen i've known that women's spaces are traditionally built as a haven for "FAAB" people, not for us and our concerns, and therefore there's less willingness to trust or identify with things that happen in women's spaces. this is a very valid concern, because it's a thing that still seems to happen. even if transwomen are now treated with much more respect and compassion than we have been in the past, there's still a lot of misunderstanding and white-washing of our experiences in ways that can be, quite frankly, insulting and dehumanizing. there's often nearly not enough room in these spaces to allow for differences of experience to where every individual person feels comfortable being themselves. and so maybe transwomen dominate queer game and tech spaces, but we are much less of a presence elsewhere. and we have much less likelihood of being accepted by and taken into dominant cultural narratives that traditionally fetishize "FAAB" people's bodies but still (in the end) will probably see us as disgusting impostors.

but also - creating an exclusive community to cater to our supposed experiences as transwomen doesn't do much of anything fix the problem of spaces lacking inclusivity! in actuality, it even excludes a lot of transwomen! there are many different axes of oppression, after all. what about race, what about immigration status, what about disability, what about sexual trauma, what about income level, what about body image, what about culture? you may think you're doing a great service by righteously speaking for people who fit your particular group, when in reality you're speaking for maybe 10-20% of the people who do. you might not, in fact, be very aware or conscious of their experiences at all. but that sure seems like a lot if you're well-connected on social media! and so the idea of a universal transwoman "experience" may be a nice thing to entertain to feel connected to others with some similar experiences, but it starts to evaporate the more deeply you go into exploring all these different axes. people continue to feel excluded, and then they create their own exclusive communities catering more to their specific concerns, and then they make someone else who fits some but not all of those categories feel excluded again. and it just goes on, and on.

and let's talk about the fetishization of "FAAB" bodies. if you feel like you find both "female" and "male" cultural conceptions of gender incredibly limiting because of the way they've directly enforced an idea of acceptable and unacceptable behavior and presentation on you, what should you do? accept "i am a woman", or "i am a man" and all the implications that may or may not come with that, both internally (to you) and externally (to any other people)? or maybe you choose a term that at least, hopefully, somewhat better expresses your indifference towards these narrow conceptions of gender that are having a limiting effect on who you are and what you can do. and maybe that term isn't perfect, but maybe it does help you escape some of the ideological barriers placed around you.

i understand (firsthand) that gender dysphoria is a different thing altogether from just feeling alienation from abstract cultural constructions of gender, yet they're so often so deeply intertwined that it can be hard for many to understand how and why they're different. i identify as a woman, but i fully admit that the idea of "woman" wasn't shoved down my throat growing up in the way that it is for FAAB people, and because of that i was allowed more of an opportunity to create my own definition of what that means for me. i also feel like i probably fit the stereotype of "woman" better than a lot of people - i often feel much more comfortable with a more traditionally "femme" appearance. FAAB people are often taught that there are things you just can't or shouldn't do, because you're supposedly this idea of a "woman", which supposedly means you just can't do some things - like big creative things, or science or mathy things! i experienced something much different - feeling like i had to be a Big Deal and Super Smart for anyone to care about me or anything i said at all. both of these are oppressive ideas to implant into people early on, and it's often hard for one side to see the other's experience as being truly oppressive.

speaking of bodily dysphoria, one very big reason a person who identifies as genderqueer but who does not experience gender dysphoria in the way trans people do might do so because of past trauma involving their bodies - like, say, rape. this is NOT to say that all of their identity is necessarily a response to that trauma - but that it can be a factor a lot of people overlook because of outward signs of privilege. i understand that this is a dangerous issue to bring up because it's used to shame and dismiss a lot of queer identities, but i want to remind others that by dismissing FAAB folks in the way the original tweet does, they might be participating in rape culture. bodily dysphoria is a thing that happens to a lot of people for many different reasons, not just ones related to a particular gender orientation. so some "FAAB" folks may not feel like a "man" in the full-on gender dysphoria sense, but they may desire to have the sort of power that was inflicted on them instead of feeling like a powerless victim (as well as experiencing less ideological barriers placed on their identity, etc). and so, adopting a genderqueer identity might allow them to feel less like another victim of rape culture.

when dominant culture fetishizes your body, and fetishizes this very idea of "femininity", and conditions males to see women as sex objects and prizes, i can see why you might have some pretty fucking legitimate concerns - even if you not necessarily experiencing gender dysphoria - for not wanting to identify as a "female"! especially when it is directly triggering to a very real traumatic experience you've undergone. this is something people who've not had this experience will, fundamentally, just not understand. this is also an 100% real and valid way to respond, and does absolutely not mean you're "making up" these feelings or anything like that, nor does it mean you're not experiencing dysphoria for many other reasons. as a survivor, there is nothing i could say that would ever really come close to describe the enormity of pain i've experienced. and, of course, i'm not saying that plenty of MAAB (male-assigned at birth) people don't experience rape too. particularly transwomen. i'm one of those people, after all. but because of that, i feel like i have more insight into how rape culture can define the terms of this discussion than people who haven't gone through it do.

let's talk about terms, also. i understand we make FAAB and MAAB distinctions so we can talk about existing power dynamics. but like, it certainly doesn't feel good for me to be described as MAAB, and i can't imagine most transmen feeling good about being called FAAB either. and so maybe they are nebulous distinctions that only exist because of cultural conditioning and we shouldn't be giving credence to them? maybe by using them we end up falling back into the "Language of Our Oppressors" category?

look - many people feel excluded, and many people experience horrifying levels of pain and suffering at the hands of a dominant culture that erases, oftentimes actively destroys their being, their autonomy, their existence. and so maybe we can have a little empathy and acknowledge that it isn't always about us - and we even may be complicit in someone else's suffering on one of those axes we hadn't thought about? maybe we can also recognize that making generalizations or broad statements about the experiences of us and others is what directly creates the sorts of environments that lead to exclusion and infighting?

instead, as a rule, whenever making broad statements, how about we just always assume there are any number of people outside our own experience who will have insight on many issues that we, fundamentally, just lack? this is something we sure don't like seem to like doing, particularly in the "first world", because it feels better not to think about it.

and hey, okay, it's great that you feel empowered for saying that thing but maybe your empowerment doesn't have to always involve making someone else feel like a piece of shit! it'd be nice to see a lot more effort made to understand the nature of those experiences outside our own, to understand that they are not an attack on our being and to not speak for them, or over them, or defensively in reaction to them, because we recognize the kind of spaces that creates: ones defined by infighting, exclusion, silencing, repression, emotional outbursts, defensiveness, misdirected rage, and hurt feelings. this goes for anyone and everyone. it doesn't feel good for anyone involved to have those spaces, so why do we keep making them that way? we need to listen and empathize to create the kind of spaces we wish had been created for us. and that means: have some fucking respect.

on "queerness" & making things for yourself

since the beginning i've had immense problems with the label "queer games". i understand the reasons it's been adopted - visibility, increasing awareness, empowering others. but what are we supposed to do with it? so much of it has been about getting recognition, but it's only ever recognition given on the terms defined by the people oppressing you. once the story turns into "we all just want to be treated like you" it becomes the same old narrative of assimilation and undermines any kind of subversiveness "queer" might have been supposed to stand for in the first place.

another problem is one i witnessed at QGCon in Berkeley this past year, where no one speaking really seemed to know exactly what they meant by "queer" but they sure were all very eager to adopt it to mean whatever they felt like. i guess what i could boil it down to, if anything, was "difference". as in, how does this "queerness" offer us a fresh new perspective on this particular previously mundane, stagnant area of study? how does it provide us with the necessary techniques for dealing with a changing landscape for how we evaluate art and culture? or how we evaluate ourselves? these all presumed "queerness" to be some kind of substantive, identifiable thing they could use instead of the very vague, amorphous term it is. there was a lot of talk on why a lot of the ways we traditionally talk about things are problematic, but none on why "queer" is problematic, or why "problematic" is problematic, none on how terms often turn into meaningless panaceas easily tossed around or used to shut down any meaningful discussion from happening, none on how they're used by the more-privileged-underprivileged to define all the terms of discussion amongst themselves and shut out the less-privileged-underprivileged.

much of online social justice's image has been come to be defined by young confused people engaging in the complete contradiction of wanting to be fierce outsiders and wanting to go viral for it. several recent pieces by queer games writers like Mattie Brice, Aevee Bee, Zoya Street, Kat Haché, and Katherine Cross have called for SJ activists online to curb some of their anger and engage with others more civilly - a completely justifiable response to all the nastiness and pettiness of communities on tumblr and twitter (over the last year or so especially) and the emotional fallout it's caused in so many people actively working to make these areas better. but i can't say that i think anger's really the problem at all. there's a lot to be angry about, after all, and precious little outlets for letting it out. how we use the anger, however, is another issue entirely - and it's most often used by people who are more interested in gaining followers or visibility for themselves than engaging in any actual debate with other people, as Katherine Cross talks about in her piece.

i've supposedly been part of a "queer games scene" in the past year or whatever. ostensibly it was a community of mostly transwomen mostly living in the bay area. leading up to GDC last year we joked about a "trans hive mind" and being mistaken for each other because the public assumed that there can only be one queer trans person who makes games. things seemed to be moving so fast, and so unsurprisingly they ended so fast. a few days ago, i joked to an acquaintance that we all hate each other and don't talk anymore. that's an exaggeration, but only a little bit of one. it wouldn't exactly be a great tragedy that people moved on from this community that was having negative effects on them and did what they needed to to care for themselves, except that we never had a community in the first place. we had a social group.

and after all the talk about sisterhood and women not fighting each other, we never actually did much of anything to ensure those things happened. everyone seemed too infatuated with the idea of being a scrappy outsider infiltrating an oppressive space, more in love with the image they were coming to be seen as than anything else. because in reality - deep emotional scars, lack of trust, and bad communication broke stuff up before it could ever really begin. there was nothing ultimately sustainable there.

i'm offering that not as a cautionary tale but as one way to show why i feel ambivalent at best about the eager adaptation of these kind of labels. i don't believe in "queerness" because i don't know what that really means. i don't desire to make things "more queer". they're just words to me, words that have caused so much pointless jockeying that i really couldn't give a fuck. i desire to be more honest to myself and others. if i believed in making new year's resolutions, that would be mine.

how many people really want to be outsiders in the first place? i feel we have no meaningful way to distinguish "outsider by circumstance" with "outsider by choice" in this queer games community. the line between them, of course, is very hazy. being trans or queer or a person of color can force you into the position of outsider regardless of whether you've chosen it or not. many adopt the label "activist" because it works better for them but may only be marginally engaged in it. what does it even mean in the context of online? "activist" is another "queer", another panacea used to talk over those with less of a voice.

how much of this conversation about hot-button topics that goes on, across different blogs, on the twit-o-sphere, etc just the image of a conversation happening in just the image of a community, just different young insecure people positioning themselves for potential career advancement? how much is it that in the end, they just want to be recognized, just want to feel like they're a worthwhile human, and feel like they've done something valuable with their lives, because that's how society has taught to them evaluate their own worth? how much of it is hoping that this period of economic instability will just subside and lead to a secure, happy job doing what they want to do? these are entirely reasonable and justifiable feelings, but they have absolutely no bearing on the meaningful actions we take for others. in the end they just amount to us helping us feel better about ourselves.

we can't control much, but we can control how we treat ourselves and others. and that is, honestly, really the only thing that matters in the end.

i sense Mattie's struggle, in particular, but i worry a lot about the toll it might take on a person's sanity. sometimes you do so much just to get recognized, and then when you're passed over you feel you must have done something horribly wrong. Mattie says in her article that she spoke at 14 conferences in 3 different countries and co-founded QGCon while still living in SF on money made from game criticism. that, by absolutely no stretch of the imagination, seems like any lack of effort on her part. it actually strikes me as a little insane (not that that's always a bad thing). but so much of our culture is resistant to letting in meaningful structural change, and what gains are made get made painfully, with great sacrifice, over a long period of time. sometimes you get lucky and break through, sometimes you don't. it's not always up to you. sometimes the game is just rigged.

sites like Kotaku and Polygon are funded by empires built on advertising money. they're only interested in outsider voices insofar as it helps their public image. whether or not individual people who write for the sites stand for those ideas or not is not the point. their employers are the ones who call the shots. they might tell Mattie they love what she's doing, but it still would be too big of a "risk" for them to hire her. transwomen talking about being transwomen don't make them money. these venues have continually shown they're only interested in an appearance of openness, not doing much of anything meaningful to bring it about. the same goes for conferences like GDC or PAX, or groups like the IDGA.

so let's offer a less inherently self-destructive proposition than the "i must be recognized as soon as possible or i will not be able to survive" model. let's plan long-term. how do you continue to make things and survive in spite of the disdain or disinterest of others?

one is there are plenty of publications not funded on big money like Kotaku and Polygon are, and there are plenty of conferences not funded on big money like PAX or GDC are. several people seem to be having luck lately with Patreon as a way to crowdfund their work (p.s. i have one too!). there's still a lot of fertile ground in bringing what's happening in the progressive games community entirely outside of game spaces and into other art spaces, though no one seems entirely sure how to do that at this point.

all i can offer ultimately is this: support yourself any way you can. don't buy into the idea that success comes with money or online followers. don't feed any more time and energy into the PR cycle of places like Kotaku or Polygon or credence to the idea that being recognized by them legitimizes your existence. don't slow yourself down for the sake of others. do what you need to do for yourself. then, and only then, will it become clear how to help others.

the game may be rigged, but that doesn't have to stop you. the game goes away, but in this moment you are eternal - and you have the entire universe in front of you to explore, not just some tiny little niche community on the internet.

my QGCon talk - "The Abstract and the Feminine"

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before i begin, i want to make this clear: these are two problematic terms. i chose a slightly provocative title for a queer conference because "queer" itself, despite being a very inclusive term in a lot of ways, comes with a lot of implications and baggage for a lot of different people. the label tends to embody a more western, white, urban, educated sensibility. but i want to be clear: femininity and masculinity are abstract concepts as they exist in our culture. it is not my intention to back any prescriptive definitions about gender norms or behavior. at heart i think they are really a pieced together assemblages of ideas into oppressive archetypes, and what gender or identity you assign them to really doesn't matter.

in the same way, i say "abstract" to mean an idea that exists in our culture of something that is more ephemeral, and not representational way we think about representation. we might see the abstract as frivolous, or incomprehensible, or messy, or incomplete. but "abstract" is a term that could be applied in many ways to mean many different things. so it's important to recognize that these terms are constructions, and ones with much of the language of oppression built into them.

so yes, these issues are hard to talk about with correct terms, but in itself the idea of an inherent correctness or consistency to a set terms we can use and all know what it means is part of the problem. the more weight you place into a concept the more it begins to crumble. the more you look into this issue, the farther things spiral down into a wormhole.

women, people of color, queers, indigenous people, those not in the western world are forced to embody these ideas of the feminine and the abstract. they become the other, the unknown or unknowable, the illogical creatures to be observed, the noble savages, the object of great worship and even greater hatred and violence. the uncontrollable beast that needs to be tamed and controlled and imprisoned.

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Erin Stephens-North talks about this issue as a divide between "maleness" and "femaleness" is in her excellent essay gender and brilliance:

maleness enables “the explicit.” it is also a culture, a culture of the illuminated, the visible. maleness manifests in “seeing,” “naming” and “doing,” as these words are commonly understood. it is the means by which anything is done—the means by which a thought is thought, a piece is crafted, a scene is surveyed. it is language. it is whatever is acknowledged as common currency amongst human beings. maleness asks: “so what are you saying?” or “so what do you do with this?”

femaleness is the reason for the doing. femaleness is reality. femaleness is anything that must be believed in before it is seen. it cannot and will not speak. it learns and speaks of itself only through maleness. it is the expanse of infinite possibility. it has no nature.

to be male is to be “consistent.” to be female is to appear to be inconsistent.

the vast majority of female brilliance is lost (or is invisible), not because brilliant female-thinking people do not attempt to communicate what they see through various forms of expression, nor for the reason that they do not understand the principles of logic, aesthetic consistency or craftsmanship, but because they encounter the obstacles to communication associated with femaleness.

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there's that saying: if you ever see someone credited as Anonymous in history, they're almost always female.

on its face art could be the embodiment of this female idea, but in actuality the art that's been made - and the way we think about and talk about that art has really been defined by this "maleness" way of thinking to idealize and imprison and co-opt and use the "femininity" and "abstract"-ness to its own ends, just as the rest of the Western world has been.

and i think these ideas end up culturally inherently circling back down to this archetypal, cultural idea of "masculinity" vs. "femininity" at their core.

if we look at different media, especially at the inception of this media, or the beginning of movements within it, we see the presence of women whitewashed over and made invisible. you see this visually represented in this cartoon about the state of comics by sloane i took from twitter a few days ago.

there's something about newness in itself that embodies this "feminine" or "mysterious" ideal.

look at the situation at the inception of film: “during the teens, 1920s, and early 1930s, almost one quarter of the screenwriters in Hollywood were women. Half of all the films copyrighted between 1911 and 1925 were written by women.” we all know what happened afterwards.

in visual art, earlier i was embarrassed did not know a single visual artist who i could name as a favorite who was female. so i started searching for stuff online - and i eventually found quite a few artists by resorting to clicking on random people from the list of "female visual artists" an wikipedia, and a lot of interesting stuff came up - but basically none of it i'd ever heard of. like Jacquine Lamba (who is apparently most well known for having sex with Fridha Kahlo by the way). a lot of her early work is lost. i can't even find a bigger version of this excellent-looking painting anywhere online. i'm almost positive if she was male this would not be the case.

one of the most haunting things for me is an interview with Nico, towards the end of her life. the interviewer asked her if she have any regrets about her career. she said she regretted that she was never born a man.

in, electronic music (a subject dear to me), women played a vital role as pioneers. three well known examples are

delia derbyshire

wendy carlos

laurie anderson

but then here a quote from one of the most well-known and well-respected electronic musicians of any gender in 2008:

"it feel(s) like still today after all these years people cannot imagine that woman can write, arrange or produce electronic music. i have had this experience many many times that the work i do on the computer gets credited to whatever male was in 10 meter radius during the job. people seem to accept that women can sing and play whatever instrument they are seen playing but they cannot program, arrange, produce, edit or write electronic music."

spoiler alert: it was this lady.

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okay, so i wanted to look at a bit of a talk about the two hemispheres of the brain from iain macgilchrist, who is a neuroscientist and psychiatrist. i'm gonna gloss over a lot of the talk about the differences between the two hemispheres so you can get the important bits of it.

(i'm just going to link to the whole talk on youtube here).

=================================

the thing i wanted to point out is the obvious and eerie similarities between the divide between "femaleness" and "maleness", or "femininity" and "masculinity", and the described divide between the right and left hemispheres of the brain.

regardless of what is or isn't neuroscience truth, i think this at least suggests that there's some kind neurological basis for why we as humans continue to fall into these traps, and that it's a very easy trap to fall into. in a sense maybe if we take the time to understand this, we're kind of escaping some of the weaknesses of our biological programming and reprogramming ourselves.

in a sense, digital games seem to embody the kind of mechanical, virtual, fixed way that favors the left brain's point of view. but there's also something strangely...resistant about games. there's something fundamentally unknowable about them to us, and because of that we still kind of fear them. no matter how much we vie for mechanical perfection in the worlds we make, some bug in the system inevitably seems to push back at us and subvert our desire to beat it down and fashion it into our perfect utopian visions. this might be true in all art, but with games because there's still something so new and visceral, and upsetting about them to us.

there's this idea, a sort of trend in games spaces now of games approaching something "real" on the horizon - either in the strict material terms, as in being representational of real human environments in terms of look or feel. like in AAA games. or representing of something we understand as being part of the human experience, like in a direct personal, autobiographical videogame.

but this "reality" is really only an idea we have of reality, an idea that's created and maintained by our culture, an idea that's slowly slipping into the water and many people are frantically trying to grab onto the last still sinking bits of it to make any kind of sense of what's happening in the world.

in art, this is kind of goes with the divide between what we think of as modern and post-modern. or about high/low art.

it's in these dichotomies:

but digital art is completely changing the ways that art is made, completely exposing and making  irrelevant existing models of thinking about and evaluating art in ways that could've only been in our wildest imagination in the past.

in visual art, now we have:

painting

vs. comic art, but also

digital art (this is from a hubble telescope photo). or god forbid

pixel shit

in music: symphonies or (more contemporarily)

the album as great cultural event vs.

digital mixtape/soundcloud/bandcamp or god forbid

chiptune or midi music

movies:

feature-length film vs.

digital short, or god forbid:

let's play

in the written word:

the grand, sweeping novel
vs. poem or short story, or god forbid:

IF/twine game, or even more god forbid:

fan fiction

and at all the end of all these different totem poles of expressive artistic worth we have videogames and their related offshoots scraping the bottom of the barrel. and so we can effectively understand their existence as novelties, or something cute, or machines that can be tweaked, or objects to be fetishized, but not anything more than that. we admire them for how completely and obediently machine-like they can be, and yet we laugh at their "videogamey" weirdness like it's a horrible, garish, weakness.

to go back to Erin's essay:

most great “female” minds have created effective pieces through working in relatively simple media, rather than attempting to control extraordinarily large projects with many variables.

the vast majority of female brilliance is lost...

femaleness... femininity... is lost.

we want to just arrogantly assume in the sphere of people who think and talk about art, that if a work is worth knowing, that if it's culturally significant that it will eventually in one way or another make itself known to us.

but what if that isn't true at all? what if something that could be a great, transformative work in one context disappears every week or every month, because its creators weren't in the right place in the right time, or no one around them cared or understood.

what about voices outside our own culture? what about great works not done in English, not done for western culture's needs and values? do we even think or care about them? do we even know they exist? do we have any conception of who they are outside a vague, racist, xenophobic conception we've formed of an other, or outside of a conception of existence that we have in our culture? how much of what they do will change the course of what we do? how much are we even allowing for that possibility?

let's just put this out there. making something uncommercial is not a weakness. not having or being able to have a flashy, clever hook is not a weakness. not having or being able to have a large promotional campaign that tries to establish why your thing is the greatest and most culturally significant new thing this month is not a weakness. not making or being able to make something with a large number of variables is not a weakness.

choosing making a mod or fan-fiction or something otherwise dependent on another piece of media is not a weakness, and does not subjugate you to that media. not defining or being able to define who you are and what you are about is not a weakness.

we want to say we're not being swayed by definitions, that we don't listen to the talk and that we're being open-minded and understanding. that we don't love to romanticize ideas of lazy, meaningless perfection at the expense of an other not so easily asserted, not so easily understood, not so easily accepted. that if something truly new and different came along we'd be able to greet it with open eyes and ears and we wouldn't send it away or become angry or laugh at it or try to destroy it or co-opt to it to use it to further our own ends.

but that's bullshit. because that's our culture. that's how we've been raised to view the world. but it's not just about us or the actions we take. unless we are aware of just how much exists outside our own sphere of self-interest, then we fall into the trap of the western, left-brained, "male", "masculine" way of thinking. and in turn, we will destroy ourselves.

there's this image from the freeware PC game Yume Nikki. you're a girl who goes to sleep in her empty apartment, only to wake up and walk through the door to find herself standing stand in a strange, uncertain purgatory-like space: a world through several different doors. the world seems to contain all sorts of arcane rules, and expand amorphously infinitely in all kinds of different directions. the further you go, the bigger the mystery seems to grow and the more questions you have. but these questions are never really answered. there is an ending, but the ending is not really the important part of this world.

i suppose this all comes back to that if we really want our answers of how to look at art, and games, and identity, and what to do with our lives we should be looking inward, and not be afraid to be scared, or disturbed, or disappointed, or disgusted - because we have a lot to learn about ourselves.

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p.s. (i'll come back and source the images at some point soon).