Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Here's A List of Some Videogame Youtubers Who Aren't Terrible



It shouldn't be too crazy to say that videogames have a lot of problems right now. For a variety of different reasons and factors, a lot of shitty people with shitty opinions have taken refuge in the videogame space, and have become very popular doing so. And as youtube establishes itself as the premiere land of video punditry for far-right reactionaries and more and more popular game youtubers to air their sexist/racist/homo/transphobic/etc opinions and help people harass anyone who gets on their shitlist (including game devs), it can be hard to want to go anywhere near the world of videogame youtube. But I think this is precisely what is to be avoided, as our favorite problematic Marxist troll Slavoj Zizek says! I think there's still a lot of potential for really interesting video content about games. And part of the reason my opinion about this subject has changed over time is I have spent some time immersing myself in the youtube trenches and found a handful of channels I actually legitimately like. This is a post to share these channels with you all!
Please note that these are by no means the only interesting or non-shitty channels on youtube - they're just personal favorites. I also wouldn't say any of these channels are exactly perfect. Both online video content and especially video content about videogames are things that haven't really been figured out. It's a new format. And even the good stuff you're liable to find tends to still stick to some tropes or cliches to survive in the current landscape.
So maybe it's instead better to look at them as the beginning of something rather than the end-all-be-all of video content about games. And maybe it will spur more of you all to action to get involved, and do something new and interesting in this space that is often so dominated by reactionary ideologues, clickbait, and the same old boring and toxic conventional "gamer" wisdom. It's definitely a toxic space that's hard to exist on, especially if you're trying to do something new and different. But maybe it can still be done, and maybe - like a few of these channels do - it can reach a bigger audience than you might think. So go forth and embrace the new flesh, fellow comrade!
Without further ado... the list:

Classics of Game
Classics of Game is basically like a well-curated little digital art gallery. Out of context snapshots of particularly strange or alienating or funny moments from mostly obscure older games come in and out of focus before quickly moving onto the next strange snippet. It functions kind of as a document of some of the silliest, most alienating, and most unique elements of games that are often forgotten about. And because it's highly curated, it's potentially more accessible to people who are outside game culture and just want to be exposed to some quick concentrated weirdness. I do wish it credited individual games, but there are other people who have taken up the work of sourcing where the footage is from (which I can't find right now... will update when I do). Regardless, ClassicsOfGame is still a highly surreal and essential encapsulation of game history and very worth tuning into.

Retropals
I discovered Retropals, formerly Adventure Pals, originally via their Playstation Year One series. There are a lot of "game historian" type youtubers out there, especially on Nintendo-related subjects and 90's era console wars, but this one struck me as a very highly specific and interesting subject to pick for an entire series. And indeed, longtime games journalist/writer Danny Cowan goes all in on covering all aspects of the PSOne's launch in a way that is well-written and informative, if sometimes a tiny bit dry. Still, PS Year One is absent a lot of the usual gamer platitudes and conventional wisdom echoed by a lot of game historian youtubers. It seems to include original research and has its own unique tone. It's also still an ongoing series, so definitely keep an eye on this series as it develops.
But honestly the biggest reason I love this channel is because Danny and his partner Alex are perhaps my favorite game streamers out there. Streams are generally laid back but entertaining and they generally pick interesting and highly unique things to play. Danny has a lot of knowledge about a wide variety of obscure games and oddities, especially a lot of FMV games and mid-90's era games that are fun to watch them fail gloriously at. Danny also generally does his research and has interesting things to say about the games they pick to play. Lightly edited highlights are available on their youtube channel and are just as much, if not even more, worth watching than the PS Year One series overall.
Here are a few recommended videos of theirs:
Double Switch 1 Credit playthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXF9xFKB5-w
Jurassic Park Sega CD playthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VlX9bUunxw
XBLIG Silver Dollar Games Postmortem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeeDWzdkRl8
They do have a small but spirited fan following, but I am really sad they don't have a larger audience. So please support them on atreon here: https://www.patreon.com/retropals and subscribe to their channel on youtube! They deserve a much larger audience!

Accursed Farms/Ross's Game Dungeon
Ross Scott is best known as the creator of the well-known humorous Machinima series Freeman's Mind, a narrated playthrough of Half-Life 1 where he gives voice to the game's voiceless protagonist Gordon Freeman. Freeman's Mind is very... of its time. The humor, while certainly not poorly written by any means, is very of the internet of when it started in 2007. But if nothing else, Freeman's Mind seems to have been a launching off point into a more recent project of his - Ross's Game Dungeon.
I discovered the Game Dungeon because it kept showing up on youtube search results when I kept searching for different obscure PC games. I have to admit was really baffled how a series that picked games that were so obscure seemed to have as many views as it did. I admit I also assumed it must have been the usual youtuber shouting over how these old games all suck. But I was totally surprised to find that it it wasn't really that at all! Ross, while he doesn't shy away from complaining about a games's flaws, usually manages to be respectful and have something interesting to say about every one of the games he reviews - even the obviously bad ones. Ross's Game Dungeon grew on me a lot, especially after seeing his Deus Ex video which actually seriously analyses the way the game takes on issues of inequality and government corruption in a sincere and accurate way. That's a lot more than you'd expect for a videogame reviewer on youtube.
Over time Ross's Game Dungeon has become easily my favorite edited youtube series about games. The fact that he is able to talk about games that are highly obscure in a way that is interesting and weigh the good with the bad to a pretty large audience is kind of a miracle. It's thrown a lot of my own cynicism and conventional wisdom about what is or isn't able to get traction on youtube on its head. Maybe doing something different and new on youtube is actually possible! Maybe we shouldn't be so cynical! No doubt many of the views to his videos come because of the popularity of Freeman's Mind. But the fact that Ross's Game Dungeon does exist in its own universe at all is kind of a miracle, and I'd like to hopefully think of it as a model for future things to come.
Other videos especially worth checking out are his overview of the existential Tetris horror of Nyet 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG0ANGRwSl8, the disturbingly bizarre and highly cursed 90's adventure game world of Armed and Delirious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qRCzIj9QEo&t=12s, and his take on lost classic and GTA precursor Quarantine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abrKxAHJ7qU.

docfuture
Here I have to talk about one of my favorite video artists of all-time, videogame-related or not. The work of Docfuture, aka Topher Florence, is really hard to describe. Generally, he does a lot of bizarre and strange mashups of pop culture and videogames. Recently he's known for strange and funny videos like "ASMR Roleplay: Caring And Supporting Funky Kong Picks You Up From The Airport". But he got his start on the Something Awful forums in the mid-2000's. This spawned what would be my favorite work of his, and what I still to this day, easily consider to be the best Let's Play of all time.
Sonic 2: Special Edition (which is also up here) is a fake version of Sonic 2 docfuture was trying to convince other forumgoers on Something Awful that existed, so he made a Let's Play of it. Initially he starts out trying to present the game matter-of-factly as some kind of version of Sonic 2 with extra bonus cutscenes and other content that he has access to because he has an uncle who works for Sega (which perhaps the Twine game The Uncle Who Works For Nintendo might be a reference to?). The game initially looks like Sonic 2, albeit with a lot of strange jokes added in, but over time it slowly dissolves into a surreal mashup that encompasses so many bizarre and obscure pop-culture references and surreal video editing techniques. At times, it feels like a very strange comedy sketch. At others, it feels like a video art piece from another universe.
Docfuture has perfected the art of Let's Play as performance. The fact that this was done so early on in the history of Let's Plays, and that these ideas have basically never caught on just shows how much of a singular achievement it is. It's also, honestly, really sad because it makes you reflect on the potential of what that medium could be vs. what it largely is now. There's a sense of anarchic wonder and possibility here that is missing from the unwaveringly stiff and sad format of current game content on youtube. I find that incredibly depressing, and very much desire to see this kind of work come back. And maybe it will some day.
Less of an artistic statement, but still wonderful and surreal are his narrated Sonic 1 Easy Mode playthrough featuring a nice jazz fusion soundtrack, his playthroughs of Sega Saturn platformers Super Tempo and Thrybrush Deppy that include things like a fake interview with Super Tempo's star and a Maya Angelou narration of the game's action, and a couple bizarre video skits he did over a gameboy color game based on the cartoon Doug.
Sadly because of their age, the versions that exist online of most of these are pretty low-quality. They also aren't on docfuture's own channel, making them harder to find. BUT - they are still uploaded by other people on youtube, at least. so I've linked them below. And in spite of the low-quality these are still essential viewing.
If you want to know more about docfuture and his interest in preserving a sense of mystery online, I would really recommend checking out the interview I did with him last year on my podcast Beyond The Filter: https://archive.org/details/beyondthefilter07nostalgiaandstrangeness_topherflorence

SiIvaGunner
Explaining SiIvaGunner is like trying to unravel a giant ball of yarn of in-jokes and internet lore. According to TVTropes, apparently its inspiration was a channel named SilvaGunner (with an "L" and not an "I"), which uploaded Soundtrack rips from videogames that was taken down several years ago due to copyright violations. It then eventually got resurrected as an account named GilvaSunner, which also uploaded OST rips until it eventually also stopped due to fears of more copyright takedowns.
In response, the parody account GiIvaSunner was launched. The joke being that the uppercase I made it appear to look exactly like the real GilvaSunner account, making it look like just an extension of that well-known and respected OST ripping account. Uploads are also presented in the format of typical game music uploads, also making them indistinguishable from the usual GilvaSunner uploads. And then when you clicked on the track it would usually play a bait-and-switch with some kind of humorous musical mashup - either referencing pop songs or other game music. The channel is the most famous for the recurring joke of the Flintstones theme which is a reference to some pirate version of Flinstones for the NES named 7 Grand Dad that appeared on a popular Vinesauce stream.
The funny thing about the channel, though, is because of its popularity, if you want to search for the actual OST or track from a game it is very likely that you could get the joke GiIvaSunner version instead. It confuses and complicates the format of youtube to bring you something different. In an era where a lot of mystery is gone from the internet and corporation tends to have consolidated control over the distribution of content, this kind of thing doesn't happen too much anymore.
The other part of the background to this joke is that a lot of modern software that is either able to emulate (i.e. Famitracker for the NES) or accurately extract samples from old games has made doing seamless rearrangements of the game in their natural sounds possible. This can be a trip to hear if you're used to the original game audio, and adds to the feeling of traveling into an alternate universe with these tracks. However, the channel is obviously full of all kinds of musical in-jokes and references in ways that can make it alienating to anyone but a particular audience of people, so you sort of have to pick and choose.
GiIvaSunner eventually turned into SiIvaGunner after being deleted, and attempted to end the channel at the end of 2016, but it came back not too long after that. I'm not sure how many people run the account, but it's still extremely active. And like I said - while the quality can also be inconsistent (and it's worth searching some "best SiIvaGunner rips" playlist or something) - this channel is still an essential and fascinating part of the videogame landscape on YouTube.
I enjoy this Earthbound song that quickly turns into a Beatles song (fitting, given how much the Beatles inspired the Earthbound OST): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liU-hxGbUAg
this mashup of the Super Mario World Star Road music from and David Bowie's "Star Man": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibM-zGTK_5w
and this Silver Surfer/Jet Set Radio mashup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-TxnK5z__M

Hbomberguy
Probably the most well-known traditional youtuber on this list is Harry Brewis aka Harris Bomberguy or Hbomberguy. And while he makes many game analysis videos, he is perhaps more well-known for his funny takedowns of hateful, racist and anti-feminist, alt-right youtubers, as well as his analysis of TV and film. I'd say his political takedowns are probably his best videos, to be honest, because he's one of only a handful of people operating in that space successfully from a left-wing perspective who still manages to be funny and entertaining. More than anyone else on this list (barring one..) I could imagine him pulling off his own tv show because of how he's able to cover a broad range of topics deeply and in an interesting way. His production values, editing, and comedic timing are very impressive for being all presumably done by one person as well. So that alone is enough to recommend his channel.  
That said, I don't think he's brought as much to the field of videogames as he has with some of his other videos. Long analyses of popular AAA and indie games are kind of their own subgenre on youtube, but most tend to be fairly surface repetitions of gamer conventional wisdom or else far too dry and detail-oriented to be terribly engaging outside of a particular niche. He kind of joins in on that tradition and doesn't completely break the mold, but in spite of that his videos are definitely still very entertaining. I particularly like his feature-length videos on why Fallout 3 sucks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLJ1gyIzg78 and his defense of Dark Souls 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRTfcMeqhig. In spite of all that I've said, these are both really good videos and the fact that he's able to keep them both interesting and engaging over an 1+ hour of run time is pretty impressive.

PushingUpRoses
Because of the hostility that women face online - both women youtubers AND women gamers, making your living primarily as a female videogame youtuber who puts her image out there has to be super difficult. So I have a lot of respect for a woman like PushingUpRoses who are able to pull that off successfully. And she's certainly not the only visible female videogame youtuber out there by any means (and maybe this is my apology for not including more women on this list... I'm sorry... but there's always potential for a sequel to this list), but she's just a favorite in general so I had to include her. Her niche is primarily older PC adventure games, and she generally comes from the perspective of a fan of the genre. She also talks about a lot of her personal experiences and history with games, and some of her past problems with depression and eating disorders. While her videos fit into standard game youtuber tropes in some ways, they're still definitely consistently high-quality and worth checking out - especially because they often cover territory lesser explored in the game space and genres like the often highly mocked graphic adventure games.
She also does LPs that you can find on her channel as well (and streams on her twitch channel).
A couple of her favorites are her review of the Harlan Ellison-penned game I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzr64-ESJ1A
...and her video on the infamous controversial 90's game Harvester: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51LFXWlmFMg

videoGaiden/Consolevania
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecVDzKzLrhk - videoGaiden season 4 episode 1
I can't mention gaming youtube channels without mentioning Consolevania, an important part of the history of internet videogame shows. Former comedy writer Rab Florence and Ryan Macleod (later joined by others) filmed their own series back in 2004 which they distributed on BitTorrent and other filesharing networks. Eventually due to its popularity, it got picked up by BBC Scotland as the show videoGaiden, which ran for three series until ending in 2008. It was also resurrected a year or two ago for a final, fourth series which you can watch on youtube. Most of the old episodes of Consolevania and videoGaiden are available on youtube too (and note that Consolevania doesn't just talk about game consoles in spite of the name).
Both Consolvevania and videoGaiden are notable because they're written by professional comedy writers. There are sketches, there's commentary on game culture, there are in depth personal narratives about experiences around games. They film on location and, in the case of videoGaiden, actually have a budget! That's right - it's actually a legitimate tv show. Admittedly it might be a bit impenetrable for American audiences who might have a hard time navigating their thick Scottish accents or don't know so much about British staples like the BBC Micro or ZX Spectrum computers. And some of the old episodes are no doubt dated because of being 10+ years old. But I think this honestly just helps give the show more of a fresh feel, again especially compared to a vast majority of contemporary content about videogames. Both Consolevania and videoGaiden help remind us what a show about games can actually be.
Maybe as an effort to keep that flame alive, Consolevania has recently resurrected, and you can support them on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/consolevania
and they have a youtube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb5dkmeyjJ9kHbDoWGUATVg

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So... that's the end of my main list. However, I wanted to include some quick extras that I thought were worth mentioning. Buckle up for the conclusion of this list, my partners in crime!

Sonic 2006 LP:
I have to give this a mention because, circa 2011, it's the first Let's Play a friend of mine who professed his love for "surreal let's plays" sent to me and said I absolutely had to watch. This let's play, like Sonic 2 Special Edition, has its own TV Tropes article and is one of the most famous let's plays out there. Basically, a handful of friends in 2007 decided to rent Sonic 2006 for 48 hours and record themselves beating the entire game uninterrupted. As you might expect, they gradually descend into madness over the course of that time.
Also like docfuture's Sonic 2 Special Edition let's play, this was released in installments on a forum thread on the Something Awful forums (which I missed out on at the time because of not wanting to pay the 5 dollars for membership). It's also on the not-as-active anymore LP Archive that was also driven by Something Awful. This was in the era before Youtube let you upload high-quality videos. LPs like Sonic 2006 were uploaded on a separate service and I remember waiting forever to watch each chapter. But I eventually made it all the way through this let's play, and it was definitely a formative experience for me seeing a Let's Play as some kind of potential for deeper entertainment.
Thankfully this LP has made its way to youtube in more recent years without any quality loss. Unlike Sonic 2 Special Edition, though, I'm... not entirely sure it holds up. While their gradual descent into madness makes for an entertaining arc, it's very drawn out and not as dramatic as some accounts make it out to be. And there are the occasional sexist or transphobic joke you might expect from internet forum humor circa 10 years ago but still weren't fun to be reminded of. While the group certainly is more articulate and less obnoxious than a lot of more recent let's players, they're still very much young dudes.
But there is something to be said for how the LP captures a whole progression of time, and also captures a little snapshot of their night - like them ordering Chinese food, the abrupt departure of NoTimesForSocks sometime during the night, or the famous billiard ball puzzle that causes them to lose their minds. That kind of outside ambiance is something you miss in more edited, sealed-off experiences. The generally surreal, broken quality of Sonic 2006, it's incredibly overwrought and stupid plot, and the insane amount of repetitions of stages it forces on players only adds to this. So this is definitely a worthwhile watch for those who are interested, even if I definitely recommend it with reservations.
And hey, if you like that they did plenty of other Let's plays you can find on pokecapn's channel. They don't have the mythic quality of the Sonic 2006 one though. https://www.youtube.com/user/pokecapnLP

Errant Signal
I want to at least mention Chris Franklin's youtube channel Errant Signal before I forget. He does a sober and articulate analysis of games in a way that is generally more well-considered and lacking in the usual gamer platitudes. He will also sometimes cover smaller indie games that don't get a lot of coverage otherwise from a critical perspective, which is much appreciated. Definitely check his stuff out if you like more serious analysis.

Play Different
I wanted to also give a shout-out to my friend Andrew's videos. He focuses a lot on basically documenting a lot of highly obscure Mac games which you can't really find anywhere else on youtube. He also provides commentary for each video which gives a little personal background or background into creators of the works. It's generally a low-key channel and good to put on and chill to. It's also updated very often.

This also leads me to a handful of channels that also document obscure games and curiosities and are worth checking that out if you like that sort of thing (though usually don't include commentary like Andrew's channel)...

Quarantinesim
Super obscure and strange mostly fps games with a unique character all of their own. This channel sort of feels like it's own weird little universe and is definitely worth a look. I'm sad it hasn't been updated at all recently though.

MarphitimusBlackimus
The obscure FPS series is definitely worth looking at, among other things

Retro Pixel Lizard
More obscure DOS/Windows games that aren't documented anywhere else and other assorted curiosities.

Curly Brace
Curly appears to just be getting started on her channel, but I really enjoyed her one upload so far about Ape Escape and look forward to more!
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That's the list! I'm sure there are a lot of things I left off, but these should at least get you started - and maybe will be a launching off point into something new. I think quality videos about videogames are totally possible and are something more people are willing to explore. Enjoy and spread your newfound knowledge out into the world, my comrades!
AND if you like this list, please consider supporting me on patreon at http://www.patreon.com/ellaguro and follow me on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/ellaguro as usual. Thank you!
- liz ryerson
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Saturday, August 12, 2017

do the right thing


i wish i could say the recent revelations of (now ex-)Polygon video producer Nick Robinson sexually harassing several women over an extended period of time was any surprise or event where i'd be hopeful for any kind of productive dialogue to happen in the videogame space. but it feels long past the point where that kind of dialogue is possible. for me, it's just another item of the exhausting list of examples where men in the game industry have gotten away with harassing and abusing vulnerable people around them and have maintained good standing as long as they appear to display the bare minimum of decency and self-awareness about those issues in public (and oftentimes even have maintained careers by not even pretending to do the latter). and indeed, it has been suggested that several men in the game industry who acted disgusted at the Nick Robinson revelations are still actively harassing other women in the industry in private. i've also personally heard allegations stories about men who have abused other women in the industry and still continue to have careers in good standing, many even branding themselves as "SJWs" and showing solidarity to marginalized folks.

post-gamergate mainstream game discourse has encouraged basic performances of solidarity for marginalized people from most game industry folks out of a basic awareness and understanding of all the horrible things that have happened and continue to happen around games. this seems like this would have been an improvement over before - where these events were largely ignored in the mainstream consciousness. but that's all it ever is for many - a performance. it doesn't mean that people performing solidarity have any real actual desire to undertake concrete actions to make women or other marginalized people feel safer or make workplaces around the game space more equitable in general, and certainly doesn't mean that they have to show solidarity in ways that can't be seen and recorded by social media. those are the lowered expectations that exist, and are often even encouraged by other women in the industry because it seems like the best that can be hoped for in an already very regressive and fucked up space.

for me it's becoming more and more clear that we should not argue, as many men and women have tried to in the last several years, that women and people of color are an untapped market that just needs to be found and marketed to - and that's what will create a more open and accepting videogame space that isn't filled with fascist reactionaries. the fact is the primary reason women have been excluded from game industry marketing in the first place was that as the game industry grew, it was decided that it took more money and resources to market to people outside of its narrowing demographic of mostly white men so marketers and publishers narrowed their focus accordingly.

if the market has historically excluded women and other marginalized people, we shouldn't hope for the market to correct itself. just because highly popular games like Overwatch have successfully implemented a diverse cast of characters doesn't mean that the tide can't turn on a dime after a few unsuccessful attempts and the game industry moves back to marketing to its core demographic of mostly white men. i don't believe the game industry can hope for its Get Out because the audience it historically has sold to is inherently reactionary. and even if it could, people who want a more inclusive (and frankly, less awful) space should stop putting their hopes into the fickleness of the market - one the major reasons that non-white men have been ignored as long as they have in the first place.

besides, the game industry isn't exactly worth saving in its current form. it's well documented how big game companies exploit workers with long hours and crunch, in environments with low morale where individual workers are made to feel disposable. bigger budget games are increasingly factory-assembled experiences by hyper-specialized workers and every part of projects are micro-managed by producers and marketers to make sure they hit the bottom line. big game experiences feed on consumers' social isolation and disillusionment and often lazily echo deeply-encoded biases of society (i.e. the Call of Duty series' persistent depictions of Muslims) because making a challenging and coherent piece of art requires a sort of coordination that would take more effort and potentially lose money. even most indies often have the same problems with needing to rely on crunch and burning out their workers, if they even manage to stay in business for very long. tech and videogame companies don't neglect to hire women or people of color in anywhere near equal numbers just because they're inherently racist or sexist (though they often are), it's that it costs more to do so and it's harder to maintain them because of already existing workplace culture.

the fact is that it costs more to spend more time on your games, to treat your workers better, and to create more fair and equitable environments for everyone. and often, that doesn't pay off at the end of the day.

and so we can't confront the argument that fairer/more equitable treatment of workers and consumers isn't favored by the market by trying to argue that it somehow, in some way, does pay off. the market itself is the problem. we have to stop any form of argument for inclusion of things are morally right because of the potential value they might have on the market entirely. if a game is good and it was made by a workplace that treated its diverse group of workers fairly - that's a universally good thing, whether or not the market agrees. if a group of people make a piece of genuinely challenging and interesting media that actually values people's time, doesn't vacuum their money and feed off their disillusionment that's a good thing, whether or not the market agrees. we should argue for things that are morally right because they're the right things to do, market be damned. it's as simple as that. anything else is just condoning more exploitation and ceding space to regressive reactionaries.

if that sounds too idealistic or out of the realm of possibility for you, maybe it's time to seriously reconsider your positions and change your picture of reality.

=========

i've written about games since late 2010 or so on this blog, and been very critical about the inequalities and hypocrisies in indie game spaces that presented themselves at the time as egalitarian and meritocratic. but i gave up on engaging honestly with the videogame space at some point because i just felt kind of defeated. to put it simply, it felt like the creators who were doing the best work - game designers, writers, artists, musicians, etc - were being ignored. i felt a rigid cynicism take hold. little of which was aired openly, but able to be witnessed just under the surface. the divide between what was expressed publicly and privately seemed to widen vastly because of conflicts that had happened in the past. people either started to leave the game space because of its hostility and instability, become full-time social media Personalities who were good at getting attention on themselves and staying on top of the current discourse, or get professional gigs which limited their ability to speak openly. blogs stopped being updated, smaller outlets either folded or only subsisted on a small number of readers. the landscape fractured even more and corporate-owned platforms took over the sphere. maybe some of those platforms absorbed some better and more progressive writers and commentary than before, but at the end of the day safe fan-friendly commentary about more mainstream games took over again. but even those corporate platforms are really unstable and could topple and go the way of MTV News or Grantland at a moment's notice.

at a personal level, i felt like i could only see some new writer or youtuber with an exponentially bigger platform than me make a point i'd seen made many times by other writers as if they're the first person to make it so many times. i could try and reach out, but what incentive to they have to listen to me or anything anyone like me does? i'm a nobody to them - i don't have a huge following. does it matter that i've been writing about these things in detail for many years? nah, because their bigger following means that they're right. this can only happen so many times before you start to feel like you're in a time hole. it makes you wonder if there's really any point to spending your life on of this, or if everything is just going to continually be sucked into the void and the only thing left that will float to the top are corporate platforms and social media celebrities. the internet 1%, basically.

and the more i've been exposed to it, in my recent attempts to connect more to the music world as an artist and critic, the more i'm aware that this is the case there as well. music blogs that used to expose a wider audience to new/obscure music have gone under or made themselves into another version of Pitchfork and talk about the same handful of artists. celebrity dominates the landscape and people are afraid of losing dwindling opportunities so conversations don't happen in the open. so this is in no way a problem unique to videogames.

yet somehow the specter of Trump, the alt-right, gamergate, any of that shit seems so greater we don't see the ties back to how we treat each other and how we all seem willing to throw ourselves into a cycle of diminishing returns out of the hope for career aspirations for micro-fame that seem increasingly tenuous and unable to influence the larger horror show that our society is becoming. it's a blinding cloud of shit that keeps us unable to have these discussions, and it's fucking ridiculous.

let's be real, here: there's something about this complacency and bland unwillingness to see past supposed status quo practicalities that is both bullying and intimidating and also extra-vulnerable for being taken over by some kind of much more violently reactionary force. it's an extra weak stance against an enemy that is much more vulnerable than many of us might think they are.

we can't fuck around any more in this cloud of misery and despair. the only defense against increasing war on the marginalized and poor is to take a moral stance - not stand up because something is popular or marketable, but again, because it's the right thing to do. back into videogame world, the fact of the matter is there are plenty of games out there that work against the same cynical systems of exploitation and try and offer a radically new perspective on the world which we can support. i've seen them appear on sites like Freeindiegames and Warpdoor, and in the corners of itch.io and Steam. talking about these games, and talking about labor issues in the game industry in all the depth and detail they deserve might not be a popular thing to do. doing so might endanger career opportunities and/or reduce the amount of clicks your work gets.

but fuck it - it's the right thing to do. not just for forwarding the artistic possibility of games themselves, but for keeping reactionaries out of the space, for creating a fairer and more just space for those who work in the industry, and for including voices that have been traditionally left out. none of these are mutually exclusive, and all of these can be achievable goals for people committed to doing the right thing.

besides, what the fuck else is there to do anyway?
Posted by at 12:45 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

The Beginner's Guide and Videogame Criticism's Awkward Baby Steps

(obvious spoiler warning)

i didn't want to write about The Beginner's Guide, at least not publicly. while i don't know its creator Davey Wreden extremely well, i have talked to him a bit over the past several years about various life things and generally appreciate his openness with the struggles of being thrust into the realm of indie game celebrity from the success of his previous game The Stanley Parable when he was not at all psychologically prepared for it. in a scene which often privileges social currency above all else, and is filled with many friendships based mostly on utility, it was refreshing to see someone who's in the center of all of this open up about it, at least to some degree. i intended to email him my thoughts on this game because i talked to him about it at GDC last year and i thought that might be better to show my appreciation privately than posting something which may or may not be interpreted as scoring points off him or his work (like pretty much all criticism in the game world these days is or could be misinterpreted by people out there as doing). but then i also think about how i'm maybe affording him a lot of empathy i'm not affording myself enough of, especially now that the game is out there and launched much critical discussion.

while observing the game criticism sphere blow up with thinkpieces on the game a few months ago, i was pretty content to not join, even to respond to Ben Gabriel's piece which referenced many of those pieces while bringing up a parallel between Problem Attic and The Beginner's Guide i hadn't considered while playing it. Gabriel says:

 The most obvious connection between Problem Attic and The Beginner's Guide is that the former is "a game about prisons, both real and imaginary" (the creator's description) while The Beginner's Guide is a game about a designer who makes games about prisons (at least some of the time) that are aggressively interpreted at the player as both real and imaginary.

i'm not interested in simply parroting an argument which states my game (Problem Attic) did a better job of conveying certain ideas than Davey's did, but i have to admit this parallel was amusing to me. when our fictionalized narrator version of Davey in The Beginner's Guide says he completely lost track of his fictionalized game-developer friend coda, in coda's very last game Davey presents to us towards the end of Beginner's Guide - an impenetrable, cold, dark, gigantic geometric structure - i thought for the first time that this was something that i might actually want to make. while the Davey of the narration said he felt more alienated than ever, i started to feel for the first time like i got a sense of who coda actually was. for me it hinted at a deeper truth not really observed in the game itself, acknowledging something that Davey was very afraid of. while Davey said he never understood why coda liked to make games about prisons, that topic is something i'm very fascinated with. this allowed me to easily put myself into coda's place.

but it's important here to note that both characters in The Beginner's Guide are easy to project yourself onto (as many out there have done). i also saw myself as much in Davey at times as i did in coda. i have both felt largely misunderstood by a lot of well-meaning but ultimately self-serving people as i have tried so hard to advocate for others' work that i've made it so much more about myself than anything they ever might have wanted me to do for them. both coda and Davey are archetypes -  Davey might be seen to embody a privileged white cis male who is used to seeing his perspective echoed in everything and coda a person without much of this privilege who is trying to challenge the notions Davey builds his foundations on - just as much as they might represent actual people. and so many out there seem to have missed this very basic point.

The Beginner's Guide is a deeply personal game, and the kind of personal distress it captures makes it also seem disinterested in having easy conclusions be made about it. Laura Hudson calls it "a game that doesn't want to be written about". Both Heather Alexandra and Chris Franklin talk in their videos about their difficulty plunging into the nuances of The Beginner's Guide's narrative. carrying on nuanced conversations about a piece of work has been a thorn in the paw of game criticism for years and its extremely rare for something so multi-faceted to have the visibility The Beginner's Guide has had. perhaps this might also explain why one prominent game writer sincerely suggested coda was literally a real person Davey was stealing work from and selling - this writer is part of a larger group of games writers who have not ever been forced to read or consider art beyond its stated intentions before. The Beginner's Guide forces this process on its audience, many of whom are dealing with it for the first time, and for that i appreciate it.

the obvious mistake the Davey of the Beginner's Guide makes, in the game's fated twist, is to try to read a human being's life into a work when he's much better served reading what that work might be trying to communicate more abstractly. in a larger sense, it's also about his failure to see outside his own perspective and bubble of privilege. it's important to note that this doesn't make the kind of analysis he's trying to embark upon completely useless, however, just grossly misinformed in the way he's embarking upon it. Heather Alexandra, in her video, suggests that coda's mod of a Counterstrike map Davey presents to us at the very beginning of the game has no significance as a space and that narrator Davey is stretching by trying to find meaning in it when there's obviously nothing there to comment on. this, i think, is also misinformed - you can look at the space and see the subtle changes made to its Counterstrike shell as an attempt to de-familiarize one with an environment so overly familiar to its audience it's taken for granted. that is the point of public art installations, for example. art still needs interpreters - to disseminate it, to help it be recognized - but not nearly as much as the interpreters need art - often to legitimize themselves as people, their identities, their practice, and their careers. still, Davey's impulse to interpret and explain coda's work is probably a sincere one, even if it's coming from a bad place. while his obsession with the person behind the work dramatizes the grotesque elevation of the individual practiced by Western culture, as celebrity or mystical object or scapegoat - one that is especially relevant in videogames post-Indie Game: The Movie, it's still not altogether completely useless. while critics like Chris Franklin self-deprecatingly acknowledge this is something they've also done before, we can still at least see this impulse to understand the work as some kind of genuine one (even if misinformed).


======


this brings me back to Ben Gabriel's assertion: "Everything worth attending to in The Beginner's Guide is handled better in Problem Attic". Gabriel argues that while it's true that you can say the nature of Problem Attic's design pushes its player towards understanding its central narrative themes, it also doesn't matter to say this for anything outside conversations where that kind of approach to game design is seen as a valuable marker of quality (embodied by conversations of the past several years around various kinds of "empathy games").

i think it's a good point to ask - is an experience a game provides interesting enough, in itself, outside of it being 'about' something? videogames, more than any other media, are slippery beasts that seem to perpetually confound and subvert the wills of their interpreters. the more that we fuss on what a work is 'about', the more each nuance of the actual experience tends to slip through our fingertips. but that's also not to discount that it's not possible to talk of what a work may be 'about' or represent in some way - it certainly is. but that conversation should happen in a way that's open to a multitude of different interpretations and lenses, and different experiences and perspectives - which discussion around art so rarely is. we must allow ourselves to be open to all potentially contradictory details of an experience if we can really hope to understand the deeper truths that piece of work might represent - not to try to be the carrier of the One True Reading of a work which comes from a place and context we can never hope to know fully. this is what Susan Sontag's essay "Against Interpretation", which Gabriel invokes, rails against. the One True Realities privileged Davey might need to invent in coda's work to feel good about himself break apart to a level of subjectivity and complexity Davey's not capable of making sense of from his position.

The Beginner's Guide, then, maybe represents the discourse around videogames' first awkward baby steps into the realm of taking on complexities in art. it also could represent the more mainstream videogame culture's first foray in trying to actually make sense of their position of privilege.

while this central theme - of a piece of work confounding and subverting the will of its hapless interpreter - is explored in The Beginner's Guide, there's still something missing here that we don't see. the matter-of-fact presentation of coda's Source engine games hide unsettling realities creeping under the surface. coda's games may or may not purport to be struggling with issues of communication and loneliness, but they only do so mostly via surface signifiers. you wander around hazy islands - the islands represent scattered thoughts and lack of confidence according to Davey. you're on the stage of a crowded theater talking to someone who is too anxious to act - then the game bars you away from that theater, Davey says representing social anxiety. you're on a ship that is about to crash and you have to perform the correct series of actions to not die - representing trying to come down from a panic attack, according to Davey.

we might leave all the misunderstanding and misreading up to Davey's narration - but then if we turn off all the narration, as Gabriel suggests, we can see more clearly that these works are mostly one-dimensional and present their ideas in a fairly conventional and marketable package - through slick, professional-feeling 3D structures and textures with little bits of quirk thrown in and standard WASD first-person movement. these games definitely don't seem like the first experiments of a new game designer, but someone who's been hardened by the craft of a particular sort of design practice attempting to branch out a little bit. these works might be a bit novel but largely don't subvert their package very much, merely embody them as confused and contradictory pieces of art that can never completely escape their Source mod shell. in the end they're maybe not bad but also not terribly unique as experiments in themselves, outside of Davey's framing of them.

and then it becomes important to say - not only might coda not represent a real person, but coda might just be a reflection of Davey himself. specifically the aspect of himself that he may not understand - his own pain that he's crudely trying and failing to represent to the best of abilities. his imagining of coda's Source engine constructs seem to reflect the kind of game culture commentary on games that the real Davey addressed in The Stanley Parable, and the culture of the Source engine mods he came out of, much more than decisions made purely for artistic reasons. even the real Davey seemingly can't escape his own perspective. while all of coda's games are presented in a fairly conventionally-polished package, games like those featured in the catamites' 50 Short Games compilation are much more sketchy, hand-drawn, cartoony, abstract, hard to pin down explicit meaning or intent in. the catamites's games, or increpare's games (which i find the most similar to the kinds of games coda is making) challenge players not just with novel approaches to narrative but also in their presentations and framing. the fact that they work on more dimensions makes them harder to talk about than the works in The Beginner's Guide - they often problematize the centering of the mainstream white cis male voice in games much more explicitly, for example - which just adds to the feeling that we're only seeing a more one-dimensional, neutered, still fundamentally unenlightened presentation of those kind of games here.

a friend suggested to me that is possibly why the game is called The Beginner's Guide - it's a more palatable window into taking on the more difficult (but ultimately more rewarding work) of game designers like increpare. but, if so, the game actively contradicts itself by calling into question its own method of analysis by the end, leaving the player to question how effective any of this really was.



The Beginner's Guide says - i tried to make this thing for you and instead i just used it as an excuse to hurt myself. the Davey in the game recognizes this is all really about him in the end and panics, in much the same way real Davey might have upon receiving the criticism that the fictional works of coda seem to have a lot more to do with him than anyone else he might be advocating for. it shows a level of self-awareness that is unusual and maybe admirable, at least for this sort of game - but still leaves us behind feeling unsatisfied, like we don't really know where we've ended up after all of this. while narrator Davey's analysis is self-serving and one-dimensional, his self-destructive freak out at the end of the game is equally as self-serving and one-dimensional. he's still centering himself in coda's story, assuming coda has come to hate him in a way that may or may not be true but probably doesn't represent the full reality of what's really going on behind the surface. so we're left feeling like there's a story there that's never really told, and we're only ever seeing Davey's side. he freaks out when it comes time to acknowledge his position of privilege and lack of perspective without ever taking us away from his world. his freak out feels like just that - a freak out, one that we're left to do the work pick up the pieces from. it's like we still have to comfort Davey, in a way. the wordless ending after all of this is over maybe suggests a possible escape or transcendence outside the bounds of the level - and Davey's own perspective, perhaps into the realms explored in games like Problem Attic or Corrypt, but it's left only as a fleeting thought for those games to address. Davey is not capable of doing that work himself.

i admire The Beginner's Guide in some ways for existing in the context it does - for inspiring the discussion it has - for implicating (at least in some ways) one-dimensional, self-centered criticism of videogames and art in general - and for being a deeply personal work which honestly exposes the anxieties of its creator. but i have to feel like in the end, Davey's freak out leaves him no closer to understanding what's truly wrong about his perspective - or truth of his privilege - or that real answers Davey seeks are contained much more in the other, more radical works i've mentioned - the increpares, catamites, Nathalie Lawheads, the altgames - the ones the ending perhaps points to, the ones that challenge game culture in the way this game fundamentally doesn't. the ones that most game critics are afraid of taking on and trying to make sense of because in the end they might just dismiss the authors, as Davey does so often with coda, as being "depressed". The Beginner's Guide, like most critics, needs those kinds of games much more than it will ever acknowledge - and far more than those kind of games will ever need it.



 (as always, this post was made possible by your support on my Patreon. thank you!)

Posted by at 11:53 PM 0 comments
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Wednesday, December 30, 2015

an itemized end of the year list


1. i don't care about Undertale. i don't like talking about things just because they're popular.

2. i have accepted that most people don't know, care, or understand how much effort or thought i put into my work. i have accepted my obscurity as an inevitable result of following my own path. in some ways, i'm fine with this. but i'm tired of being walked over and stepped on because i'm so afraid of being an unkind person to anyone. ever since i got into videogames, it feels like everyone wants to step on me, use me, take advantage of me and then throw me away when i'm not useful to them anymore. i don't care if everyone out there hates me, just so long as they know i do what i do for me, because i care about myself and having a positive impact on the world, not them or their expectations. i work harder, am more talented, and care more than almost anyone i know. i'm sorry if that hurts your feelings, but it's true. if you don't like it, prove me wrong.

EDIT: an addendum to this. i said this to someone who was upset by the above statement & this article in general. i hope, if you're interested in reading my work, you will consider trying to take what i said for what it is and not take it as a personal attack on you or other people but enter it in for a little longer and think about what i might be trying to say beyond that. i think that policy is generally a good one when entering into any kind of field of criticism. you'll have to take my word for this, but - i'm not generally interested in making personal attacks on people. there are much broader things at stake here. and if you wanna make me look stupid by me saying the above, then please do.

3. i think i finally know how Kanye feels now.

4. early this year i ended up in a bar in Baltimore after a show my brother took me to. a friend of his partner's, after learning i did videogame-related stuff, repeatedly started drunkenly exclaiming to me: "the indie games... these indie games aren't good enough.... they're not good enough!". i know more and more what she means every day.

5. this was as good of a year for videogames as i can remember

6. it still doesn't matter - videogames ARE not good enough. then i think about the most popular/talked about games of 2015 - A Japanese RPG fan-game with slightly cuter dialogue and slightly less annoying battle system (Undertale), self-indulgent 'games about games' that might be kind of neat in parts but are extremely reflexively insular to game development culture (The Beginner's Guide, The Magic Circle), a tool that may be super accessible but locked away and corporately controlled on hardware most people don't own and at risk of disappearing in a few years (Super Mario Maker), more Metroidvanias (Axiom Verge, Environmental Station Alpha) a slightly better iteration of the same bloated open-world soulless wander-fest that's dominated the industry of the past many years (Fallout 4), PG-rated lesbians in a bottom-tier Netflix miniseries-worthy story about the Pacific Northwest by people who've never been to the Pacific Northwest (Life Is Strange), a 3rd person multiplayer gun shooting game branded to look slightly cuter (Splatoon), a kind of cool FMV game with a daytime soap-level story (Her Story), soccer-but-with cars? (Rocket League). and then --- a game with actually socially relevant themes that everyone in their mother shit-talked because the developer has said mean stuff about videogames (Sunset), and a bunch of experimental games no one played or talked about (Rooftop Cop, Anatomically Incorrect Dinosaurs, ENOUGH, Strawberry Cubes, etc etc).

7. at first i thought people in games were just ignorant, or that it was just the cis white dudes who did this - but more and more, i think people in games (regardless of who they are) delight in only being interested in talking about games-about-games, they delight in feeling like they're experts and part of a culture, no matter how insular, and they delight in not talking about or exposing themselves to anything that might ever challenge that idea to its core. they delight in "comfort food" to the exclusion of everything else. this blog post, which exclaims "...but sometimes you don’t want The Seventh Seal or Citizen Kane. Sometimes you want to huddle up with a bowl of popcorn and watch, I don’t know, Buffy." as if it's some kind of revelatory statement to make about videogames. but there is no Seventh Seal or Citizen Kane in videogame culture. it's ALL Buffy - all of it.

8. the whole "wolf vs. the vampire" dynamic i was talking about in my 21st Century Digital Art Manifesto holds more true than ever. the old world (i.e. traditional labels, publishers, galleries) has to rely on predatorily sucking the blood of new artists, scenes, movements, and technological developments to stay alive and stay relevant. the new world (i.e. social media, internet content-o-sphere) is chaotic and cutthroat and relies on luck & ultra-conformity to survive. what's popular becomes so ultra popular it becomes a cultural meme (i.e. Undertale). what's unpopular (most else) becomes ultra-obscure. virality is the only thing that really matters. the old world has some of this problem too, but it also supports a lot more nuance in its discussion and has a much more well-developed dialogue that exists over multiple centuries - but it is extremely inaccessible to most & filled w/soul-crushing hoops to jump through to get your work seen as worthy of a deeper, broader look (that has about 1% to do with the quality of work itself). the new world is accessible to anyone with a computer is always buzzing w/activity but contains many glass ceilings - it cultivates a cutthroat atmosphere of ultra-conformity based on social codes and friendships and virality where most fall beneath the cracks. and even more than in the old world, they possibly fall through the cracks forever.

9. the theme here is - the world is becoming more and more unequal, and it's becoming easier to see how that affects everyday life. people are increasingly retreating into their own spheres and not listening to dialogue, not considering outside views, increasingly insulating their lives with click-baity junk food, are increasingly trying to be objectively "correct" instead of listening to each other, increasingly projecting their outward biases and anger as the objective truth.

10. as much as i love music, i think the music criticism sphere is worse than the videogames sphere, because at least many people in the videogame world will admit that most videogame writing is consumer-based and has never really escaped that. music critics have much more interesting art to write about and hide behind a thin veneer of cultural legitimacy as a place to hide their unchecked, poorly thought out theses and conclusions that almost always come from a place of weird jealousy and outright ignorance. or they write clickbait about pop spectacles that read exactly the same as clickbait about AAA videogames except with some college freshman level terms to go with it. people there understand that they have to like things other than just mass media spectacle, or other than what confirms their own sense of self and identity, but they still don't really want to.

11. this M.I.A. video pretty much sums up 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpttHOHEKMo\

12. social media has made me intensely distrust and be more paranoid of people than anything else i have experienced in this world.

13. here's for a world filled with complex people and not brands in 2016. here's for a more just, less destructive system for all people 2016. here's for a world where nuance is recognized and celebrated 2016. here's for no more escaping into "comfort food" 2016. here's for going outside your comfort zone and actually talking to people who differ from you 2016. here's for a death of "correctness" and a life for broader empathy and understanding 2016. here's for breaking down social media and corporate hegemony over our daily lives 2016. here's for no more externalizing your ignorance and emotional weaknesses as objective truth 2016. here's for no more escaping into the false legitimacy of old institutions 2016. here's for death to neo-liberalism and austerity 2016.

here's for a land of no memes 2016.

=======

p.s.

14. here's a starter youtube playlist of songs i like from 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5GCn1BKkxg&index=1&list=PLEdRlER1F5rF6stTG7L_IFnvsiy8OR_VB

15. here is an experimental video presentation about the political theory of Neo-Liberalism and how it intersects into the digital realm/the realm of videogames i did with David Kanaga for this year's Indiecade Conference in LA (download to see the whole thing): https://www.dropbox.com/s/rsmvid0f2n4ac7v/LR%20DK%20IC%20FINAL%20%28%3F%29.mov?dl=0

16. here is the playlist of all of the Doom Mixtape (playthroughs of individual levels from Doom fan mods i find interesting w/commentary) videos i did this year: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEdRlER1F5rF1YMwLG66KPmMuv0h2OWiU

17. i have uploaded a few of my full albums to youtube for streaming. feel free to share them around, and also please consider purchasing them if you haven't & you like them: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEdRlER1F5rF0BnlIG9FlOFAH6CYtLjOB

18. if you like, you can continue to support me on my patreon. thank you.
Posted by at 8:52 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, December 8, 2015

healing from past wounds

i didn't want to talk about this in a public setting because part of me wanted to protect the people involved. i was trying to pretend it didn't really happen like i thought it did - that everything was okay, and that i could deal with it. that it was my responsibility. it was personal business after all and i didn't want to bring it public, because of all the other drama in the past that had been made public in the "queer game scene". it felt like it would just be petty, and i should just take the hit and move on. i didn't want other people to see it as just "more drama".

i also didn't want to make a post about this for years because all of the conflict that happened very messily and very publicly in that group of people a couple years ago and onward. i wanted to be a good person and let these things be as they are. but i finally decided that i need to do this for me. this is because i still have nightmares, and suffer from low self esteem and depression. i still feel really upset, and hurt about everything, and like i let myself go out of fear. i really can't seem to move on from all of this or escape it, and everything i do in the games sphere seems pretty tainted by it in one way or another. i want to gather the pieces back together from the wreckage of my life right and to escape with some sense of dignity and self-respect.

...

when i first moved to the SF Bay Area in 2011 from Ohio, it felt a little bit like a dream. it felt like i was stepping out of reality and into fantasy. it felt like i finally escaped a life of mediocrity in the midwest and had started doing something with my life. i was gonna set out on my own and make a career out of doing music for games. i was around other queer people, other weirdos and artists for the first real time in my life. it was so huge. and Anna Anthropy and her ex, Daphny, were a huge part of that.

but right from the beginning, things also didn't feel quite right. i wasn't the biggest fan of Anna's work or ideas about game design, but i was also curious to meet her. the first couple times i hung out with her and her ex, we had a lot of fun. maybe the second or third time i came over to their apartment, Anna said to me "we bought a present for you" and handed me a pair of black thong underwear. i honestly didn't know how to respond, because i had not expressed a desire to be sexually involved with them, and it didn't feel like it was a joke at all. but how often had i got to hang out with other queer people who were kinda famous for doing the things i wanted to do with my life? besides, Anna after awhile appeared to have a sensitive side which made me feel kind of sorry for her. so i kinda just laughed about it and thought that's what meeting new friends with alternative lifestyles was about (they were in dom/sub BDSM relationship and Anna was the domme). but i feel like those kind of interactions defined my relationship with them.

i felt super boxed in, not knowing the ways which it was acceptable to respond without starting a fight and losing friends, so i just shut down. i was amused but also creeped out that Anna had created a fictional character named Star Wench, a skinny blonde girl who was always being bound up or tortured in many different scenarios. there was a poster of her tied up and screaming in their living room that i kept staring at, over and over. and i have to admit, i like weird and disturbing shit and am not adverse to BDSM, so a part of me was intrigued. but i felt kinda like i was being seen as the analogue of that character, as a skinny blonde girl. like i had no real agency, or space to assert my boundaries within it. i wanted to have a distance, but i felt like that's the way i was being seen. and it seemed like much more an idealized fantasy and much less a reality. i felt objectified.

i always thought Anna was good at consent because of how much she made an enormous deal about it, both online and offline. it was her brand, her identity. i initially respected her for that. but i started to see that, outside of very particular contexts, she had no real boundaries. i felt uncomfortably sexualized around her all the time, and i know i wasn't the only one. i felt like the way she treated women she was attracted to was disrespectful and objectifying, like she was entitled to them and she knew what was best for them - better than anyone else. but it was also like she had to be superior to them, like she couldn't let herself be vulnerable to them at all. like they were wax figures or something, not real people. i guess that's part of what the fantasy of being dominant is about, but there was no dividing line between fantasy and reality here. it was completely how she saw herself.

she got a lot of pleasure out of acting like the rules didn't apply to her. she constantly bullied people with her ex on twitter and laughed about, and used her status as a plus-sized queer transwoman to her advantage as much as possible - both for favors and for money. granted, she had some tough times getting by, though i also think she had a lot of opportunities she crapped out on and often made excuses whenever it was convenient, and looked for ways to make her vision of reality appear to be true even if it wasn't. she also used it to take advantage of other people, like transwomen with far less of a following and support network than her. when she spoke on behalf of other queer transwomen, most of the time she was really just speaking about herself.

i felt like i was made to feel shitty about my body because i wasn't sexual enough for her liking, and i had no space to assert my boundaries within it. and i felt like i couldn't say anything because i was depending upon her for support - emotional, and even a space to live for a little bit. i lived with her and her ex for awhile when i didn't have another place to go, and i was extremely grateful to just have a place to stay. but it was in a weird kind of limbo, and i feel weird about it, even still. i wanted a friend and supporter and she wanted someone to flirt with from afar, someone to use to make her feel better about herself. she treated me really coldly and nastily and acted totally suspicious towards me as a result, like i was trying to take advantage of her. she would make reference to me having no real sense of humor and would make me feel like it was bad to like the things i did. like i was weak and a sad, unfortunate person she wanted to have nothing to do with. i felt like all of these were imagined projections she had of me, but i was scared of being homeless so a lot of her fears got to me. she and her ex made me feel like i had to follow their tastes and their friends, and my friends were bad, ignorant people who wanted to hurt me didn't really understand me like she did. i felt no space to be myself, and felt i had to maintain that act to other people i met through them.

for the longest time i thought she was really right - that she knew what was best. that she was trying to protect me in some way. and that i took advantage of her financially. that she didn't have to take me in at all and i should be thankful about being a huge burden on her. having guilt about needing to stay with her for several months because i would have otherwise been homeless made me feel like i couldn't say anything about my issues with her publicly without being a hypocrite, or very selfish. i thought she always had a trump card on me ever calling her out for anything. and it made me forget about promises she had made for financial opportunities that were broken and never talked to me about or apologized for. when i was still in a dire financial situation and really needed the money. it made me feel like i needed to be her friend, and support her even in tough times after she broke up with that ex. it made me believe it was really her ex's fault that things were messed up and that Anna was misunderstood.

but the worst thing is that is i feel like i couldn't even be her friend. i felt like there were so few contexts for me to express genuine concern or care because they'd be turned around on me to "why are you so awful?" if i wanted to say something about feeling sexually uncomfortable around her or that she might make other people uncomfortable, i was kink shaming.  if i wanted to say something being concerned about her health and diet, i was fat shaming. if i wanted to express a disagreement about something she liked that i didn't, i was a negative person. if i didn't find something funny or was uncomfortable with something she did at someone else's expense, then i had no sense of humor. if i liked something she found questionable, she'd find a way to turn it around and imply that i was a racist. she had a lot of her identity invested in being an ally, in a way that felt objectifying of the people she was supposed to be supporting. i couldn't be a friend - she didn't want a friend. she didn't know how to have real friends. i had to be a follower. i had to listen to her lecture me. i had to subscribe to her views and support her ego and let her insult me to even get support. only recently have i been able to recognize the pattern of so many of the things she did as classic abusive behavior.

it really laid a mindfuck on me after awhile - i started feeling like she was morphing me into another kind of person. i felt like i lost a lot of strength and became totally weak and submissive in her eyes. i felt like it was the only way to avoid all the conflict that had been happening with her and her ex and others and be on people's good side. i felt entirely changing myself and personality would be the only way to reach her. and then i would have to be closer to her weird conceptual model fetishized ideal what a girlfriend should be - someone who was good at looking pretty and being objectified and maybe "important" to her but was ultimately there to be subservient to her and make her feel better about herself. but even that didn't work to reach her, and just made me hurt myself more and more by how much i tried to change myself. she wasn't comfortable dealing with real emotions.

even after i lived with her and her ex, i always felt that she was judging everything i said online and in public in the games sphere. i felt like she was always testing me, evaluating me, waiting for me to say something incorrect so she could dismiss me. whenever i did something i felt good about, i felt this sense of guilt wash over me. every time i wrote my opinion online i was afraid it would cross her, and she'd decide she hated me, that i was "gross" and that she was done with me like she did with so many mutual friends of ours. she took everything so personally and she burned through friends so quickly. but she had a lot of power, both in the trans and game communities, so it felt really dangerous to cross her. honestly i feel like the only reason she never quite burned through me was that i shut so much of myself off in order to stay friends with her, and she lost a lot of her power. but even then, i still felt a need to defend her position. i felt like this was a necessary sacrifice at the time because she was the only real family in the Bay Area i had.

i honestly think she felt jealous of me (and many other people as well) - that i had talent in a lot of different areas and i was open to meeting lots of different kinds of people. and i feel like she used that jealousy to keep me feeling bad about myself so i wouldn't ever challenge her ideas, because she felt deeply insecure about her own. so that i'd always be secondary to her, and accept that she was right and i wasn't, because she had so much of herself invested in being right, and i couldn't care one way or the other. and i felt like a total sucker for doing this, but still i basically just ceded it to her and let her feel that way, because i didn't want to create more drama or fight more about it. and it worked, and i began to accept her vision of reality even though i knew it was wrong. i really needed that support, because i never felt like my parents or family ever understood me or were there for me. she was also the one with all the experience, who'd met all the people and done all the interviews, and i was a naive, sad little girl who didn't know anything. so i felt like she must really know in the end.

and yet she was one of the saddest and most unhappy people i ever met. and i never really figured out why, but so much of my sadness came from trying to understand her's. she had so much invested in being "important" on the surface that obviously became less and less effective at masking all the pain underneath. i knew this from the beginning. but i felt so sorry for her as she begun to lose so many friends. i begun to feel like the only person i could trust with my emotions was her. i sacrificed a lot of myself because of that, and i sacrificed saying how i really felt about anything because i wanted to help.

and when i'd go to events, and people responded positively to her work and came up to her and hugged her and said how much it meant to them, i eventually accepted her view of the world as the correct one. that she really was as important and valuable as she made herself out to be. i felt scared to be anywhere around that was not around her, because it didn't feel safe. i didn't want to bring cognitive dissonance onto myself. she knew a lot of other people who were actually good people, and it made me feel like i must be wrong in feeling bad about her behavior, because they didn't seem to have any problem with it. so after protesting a lot, i felt like i was being a jerk and i shut myself off again, trying to support her and her work - especially, again, as she started losing support. she still had so much social capital in that group of people with so many people i respected that i felt like i had to keep supporting her, to support what was left of the queer community i had. but all those people all knew her on the outside - they didn't really know what she was like. and so i felt like i took on the burden of dealing with her despite disagreeing with her because it felt like no one else was.

i really thought i was better than this. that i could deal with it all and move on. that it was mostly all in my head, it was all just from past stuff i couldn't get over. that i was being judgmental because of my past trauma and growing up in the middle of nowhere. that this is just what you had to do to be real friends with someone, and to be a caring and kind person. i had a lot invested in being caring and kind, because of the way my parents treated me - like i was selfish and self-absorbed. so even though i resisted at first, i eventually became the easiest target. i became totally submissive and lost pride in myself and what i was doing.

...

it's still hard for me to come down emotionally from this. to accept that i wasted a lot of time and energy into something that was really hurting me. i have trouble having any respect for Anna's work because of what she did, the way she made me feel horrible about myself and way she treated other people. i like to pretend it didn't affect me sometimes but it really did, very deeply wound me. i think she is still a deeply mean-spirited, entitled person who believed she was always above the rules. when i did see sensitive sides to her it made me feel like i needed to keep supporting her, and that i could help her heal. and it's my fault for being so naive and thinking i could help change a person.

but i don't care about trying to reach her at this point - i already tried to several times, and i finally gave up after several years. i felt like she kept playing the victim, and blaming everything on her exes and people in the scene - really everyone around her but her. she had a startling lack of self-awareness. and i knew it, and i was deeply bored by it - but i stuck around because i felt sorry for her. and i feel a lot of shame at myself for doing that, knowing nothing would come of it.

i guess i just want other people to know to be careful who they support, and to educate themselves more on the dynamics of these communities. just because someone is big in a community and appears to be doing great work doesn't mean they won't use it to their advantage to hurt other people. if someone uses abusive language a lot of the time to make their points, that's probably not a good sign. just because someone purports to care about a lot of people and be an activist doesn't make them really capable of it, or capable of doing anything but being nasty and hurting other people.

i have plenty of anger at cisgendered white men for hurting me over the years, not to mention disrespecting my personhood and identity. but i also understand that i have to work with cis white men sometimes to achieve a positive shared goal. some cis white men have been really great supporters of me. and of course i often feel anxious around them. but to make something really cool - to show genuine empathy for everyone, you need a lot of different kind of people's help, and you don't always get to pick where it comes from. there's so much good out there, but the internet in this day and age has become so divisive, with so many people willingly retreating and pulling themselves back into their own groups. the amount of groupthink has grown so much, and the ability to escape it has become harder and harder. you end up only seeing the bad, and only getting people who reinforce your own biases.

i feel sick to my stomach being on twitter now. i only feel like the divisiveness is getting stronger. and i don't trust that people who are popular on there aren't just taking advantage of their status to use other people. no matter who they are. the more that i try to censor myself in order to support other people, the more i feel like those people just get angrier and angrier and i'm just hurting myself more and more. i don't feel like i can be myself online anymore. i don't feel like i have that space anymore, but it's so hard to find in the flesh too. and my feelings about this are coming out in ways that are really bad and self-destructive. my health has declined a lot in the past year or so, for one.

the language these days seems to become more and more violent, more and more favoring abusive behavior to get attention and exposure. i think this is no secret - i think social media, and our world, favors this sort of behavior to get ahead and get noticed. and it sucks. i know we live in scary and confusing times in many ways, and that a lot of people have pain. but think we need to be both smarter and kinder to ourselves and others. speaking out is important - being angry is even important too sometimes. but we need to find a way to speak out that actually allows us to grow, and be angry in a way that makes us realize and heal from the source of it. we need art, and compassion. we need to be able to acknowledge and face the reality of our lives, and be able to find a way to move on from it and still be human. that's why i'm in a creative community, and make music, and write, and do stuff with games. it helps me heal. we need to not let the angry monster inside us always do the talking. those who can't find a way to move on from hurt, just hurt themselves the most. it creates a toxic atmosphere for all of us. we need to all find a way to live with each other - and it is totally possible, and i've seen it happen many times.

right now i am more scared of some fellow transwomen than basically anyone else in my life. and that's a weird place to be - isolated from and distrusting of a community i wanted to be part of. and i don't really think that's internalized transmisogyny on my part - that's my self-preservation. that's recognizing those people i was around in my community turned out to be kind of dangerous and bad to be around. does that mean most transwomen are this way? of course not. there are so many different kinds of transwomen, and queer people, and women, and people of color, and cis white dudes even. and there are so many who also want to make a genuine difference in their life and make something positive from pain. i have met some of these people. and there is plenty of reason to be optimistic about these people. but oftentimes the people with the biggest platforms and power - the ones you're most likely to see from the outside on places like twitter, tend to be the ones who use it to their advantage, and at the expense of others. oftentimes you see the pain ahead of everything else, and the healing gets ignored. you see the negative stories make headlines, but all the positive work being done day to day is erased.

i just want to clarify - this isn't a thinkpiece. i'm not interested in trying to join the twitter debates about abuse or "callout culture" or whatever else. all of those are super abstract ideas that have no real resonance to me and take away from the reality of the individual situation. this is something that happened in my life. this is an intense personal thing that's hard to talk about. i still feel afraid to talk about it. it feels like everyone is either pissed off or checked out on these issues and doesn't want to have anything to do with it. it feels like i'm reaching hardly anyone with anything i'm saying anymore. but maybe that's ok, because i'm doing it for myself and not anyone else.

i'm not a perfect person by any means, and i have a lot of regrets. one of the biggest one is spending so much time invested in understanding other people's feelings and not exploring my own. one is letting other people's negative views of the world get the best of me, and not focusing on the positive. another is being afraid of confrontation and hurting people's feelings so much to where i hide my own. i'm still naive in a lot of ways. but it's something i'm working on. i've moved on from a lot of really bad shit in my life, and i plan to move on from this one too. i hope this situation is another opportunity to start being true to myself again. in the deepest despair there is always the best opportunity for positive change. and because of that, even though i really feel like i'm in the hole right now, i'm still genuinely optimistic about the possibilities. and i think other people should do it too. try it out - it might make you feel better.

these have been rough times, and i'd appreciate any and all support you can give. thanks so much. and thanks for your continued support online, in person, and on my patreon - it's what's keeping me going.

<3's

- liz


Posted by at 1:25 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

i'm leaving games

i tweeted this out about a week ago, but basically: after this next month's QGCon and Indiecade (where i'll be doing a talk with David Kanaga about art and politics), i'll be leaving games. this has been a long time coming, and something i need to do for many reasons. the biggest one is that music has always been the most important thing in my life, but i never seriously thought i'd be able to make any kind of real career out of it for a long time. i have terrible performance anxiety and never really thought i had what it took to be a good producer either. there were other reasons, but a lot of why got into working on games stuff because i thought they'd make money. and of course i took an interest in game design, because it's something i've always been interested in. but over that time, my relationship with music evolved in a much healthier way. and i feel like i put had to put that and a lot else about myself aside when i moved here because i thought that's what i needed to be to be liked and successful in an industry like this. and also becomes videogame spheres really do demand of people involved in them to be forever pledged to them for eternity. and that has been extremely destructive to me.

the time i've spent in games has certainly been an interesting one. a lot has happened - it would obviously be impossible to summarize. i have been given some space to explore myself, for sure, and some people have been incredibly supportive and are what have kept me going over the years (and i'm eternally thankful to them). but outside these wonderful people, most of my experiences have been pretty awful and done a lot of damage to my emotional and physical health. needless to say, it's way past time for me to find a place for some healing from past hurt, and to be direct myself back on the right course - where i've always really wanted to go, in the end. a lot about my games career has screamed feelings of unhappiness and unfulfillment to me from the getgo, and i think that's just because i was doing something i've never been fully happy with. but i'm done with that now. now's a time to have more space to think about things without trying to be successful or be a brand, or spend all my time on the constantly anxiety-producing twitter. now's a time for me.

i'll also being moving out of the bay area to portland at the end of this month. there are many reasons for this, some of them personal. but basically, things weren't what i thought they'd be like here at all. it's expensive, it's full of tensions i knew basically nothing about and feel terrible about shoving myself into. i've had tremendous problems with the dynamics of social groups i've been a part of. i've felt a lot of selfishness here, the place is becoming unlivable in multiple ways. i have learned a lot and become a lot less ignorant about a lot of things, of course. i've connected to so many people in ways that would have blown my mind before. but a lot of it's been learned the hard way. i still go through a lot of stress and frustration about how everything went, and feel like a lot of my efforts have been wasted - especially emotional efforts i invested in people i probably shouldn't have been investing in in the first place. i will probably struggle with that for a long time. it's hard to let stuff go. i moved here with next to nothing and a lot of optimism and i'm leaving with much more than that and a lot of pessimism. hopefully these are things that can be shed over time, in a safer space. we'll see, i suppose. i still have some hope for the future, even if it's a very guarded hope.

--- SO HEY, since i haven't posted on here in forever, i figured it would be good to update this here blog on the happenings of the past year. the biggest thing, of course, is my Patreon - which is still my primary source of income. i still very much plan to do more with in it the coming months. i am eternally thankful to many people's generous support on here. without it there's no way i could have survived like i have. it's been a hard time, but i'm glad people have been there to get me through it. i hope you can continue to support me in the future ---

now, for more catching up:

~~~ first and foremost, i released some music this past June: "EP Year Zero". it's mostly older stuff, but i wanted to put it together in a nice place.

~~~ i did a talk at this past GDC called "The Power of the Abstract" which you can watch the video to (free!) there. it was a fairly big undertaking but a lot of people came and i was happy with the end result. the comments were, however, less than stellar. i also spoke with Isaac Schankler at this year's Different Games conference about unconventional approaches to composing game audio - the link to the video is there.

~~~ i was also on the jury for this past IGF Nuovo award which the fabulous Tetregeddon Games by the fabulous Nathalie Lawhead won. 

~~~ i did a series of videos on selected levels i like from Doom mods with commentary called "Doom Mixtape". the link to the full playlist is there.

~~~ in other youtube news, i did a few commentated playthroughs of increpare games and streamed myself playing through all six episode of Wolfenstein 3D (warning: audio is a little lo-fi) on twitch.

~~~ i wrote a couple articles you might have missed. the first is from last month - a piece i put up on Medium about FKA Twigs and the double-standards of online pop feminism. the second was for Offworld - a very personal piece about my getting into making games, my relationship with Braid and the inception of Problem Attic.

~~~ i did the sound library for Anna Anthropy's neat game tool Emotica Online and sound fx for Brandon Sheffield's ill-fated last Playstation Mobile game Oh, Deer!

~~~ i made a few Mario Maker levels you can find the codes and screenshots to them here.

~~~ as always, you can always find updates to the most important stuff i've done on my tumblr (like art, and any other things), in lieu of anywhere else. especially if i'm trying to spend less time on twitter!

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post script:

i've recently been fixated on watching a lot of retro game collecting shows on youtube. one is called "The Game Chasers", which involves a couple of men from Texas and their cohorts driving around to flea markets and game stores trying to get deals and catch each other 'slipping', as the catch phrase of the show goes. the show also features lots of farting and references to each other as "chodes", for those wondering about the quality of the programming here. another is called "Flea Market Madness" by PatTheNESPunk, who shows up to flea markets early in the morning to hunt for good deals on games with his friend Frank (my favorite part of the show), an older eccentric completely disinterested in games. Pat, by the way, is also known for employing a "but it's about ethics in game journalism" argument on youtube in the early days of GamerGate. so yeah, that's kind of what you should expect.

as strange as it sounds, i've become weirdly absorbed into both of these. part of it might be that their kind of game collecting is something actually very familiar to me. me and my brother collected NES games and followed the much smaller online NES community back in the late 90's/early 2000's (tsr's NES archive, anyone?) when he first got a job as a teenager. at one point we had close to 150 NES games, several boxed. it was, of course, easier to find stuff then than it is now, with a market much more interested in retro and the idea of owning the actual, real deal. and i was always more interested in playing the games than he was - which is probably why he sold most of them off not too long after.

a lot of this stuff is still swimming around in my head, but it permeates around Magfest, where several Game Chasers episodes were filmed. Magfest was my first game event of any kind - it was the place to meet up with people i knew from back from my time as a remixer/community member on OCRemix, which was a very formative (and often frustrating) website for me in my teens. i have fond memories of the two Magfests i went to - Magfest 8 & 9 (January 2010 and 2011), even if i had already basically moved away from that community several years back and my reunion was relatively short-lived. i still have a very awkward and complicated feelings about that phase of my life. but part of it was really meaningful and important to me, even if i seemed to grow out of it all very quickly.

i still think back and i try to visit that kind of unpretentious enjoyment of games and game music - before i knew much of anything about indie games. before i went to GDC. before i did any talks at any conferences. before i somehow became part of a "queer games scene". before anyone saw me as being "important". i look back with sadness, because it was still really fun and important time to me. but there was also such a sadness and emptiness at its core i've never been able to get over.

IRC channels i regularly spent my waking hours in my damaged state after college in were constantly filled with people talking about how awesome last years Magfest was, and how they got so drunk, and how next year will be even more epic. people structured their entire lives around it. so many didn't really have an existence or sense of purpose outside of it. i felt very much a part of this because of that. i still never understood why, if it was that important to them, they couldn't spend more time trying to make these things happen outside of Magfest. but i don't know how capable of it they really were. these were people living for an event that only lasted three or four days out of each year. just one little burst to bring them out of the monotony of their otherwise boring existence. post-Magfest depression was always such an immense thing for everyone for a reason. you came back, usually with a horrible flu, back to your normal existence. and it sucked. it's hard to have such a high and have to wait a year again for anything approaching that meaning in your life. i escaped all of this by going on my own path, maybe, but i still think i lost a lot in the process.

the fact is: i cried hysterically at the end of my second Magfest. it was meaningful to me as much as anyone else. i felt like my life was nothing at the time, and i didn't want to go back to it anymore. so i ran away from that life and into games. and found that land of internet fun and games was not at all what i thought it was.

i guess this also just goes back to the whole culture of retro gaming. these discarded bits of consumer culture become people's church, their mecca. they become such an important and fundamental part of their lives. they become holy in every sense of the world. and the culture becomes much more about how this reflects on them and their identity, and what happened in the past, and endlessly trying to re-own and relieve every event of your childhood, than generating new culture or engaging with stuff critically or seeing clearly. of course it is a clouded, manic kind of excitement that's very infectious and extremely unpretentious. and that manic energy is a far cry from the businesslike seriousness of GDC or all the cutthroat competition and social dynamics and pretensions of indie game/tech spheres, for sure, but there is no moving on in the world of videogame fandom. the love becomes a weird fetishism that can never be escaped from. everything is put on a pedestal forever, never to be removed or changed.

watching a video by Pat the NES Punk on the Flintstones: Return To Dinosaur Peak (one of the rarest NES games), i see the emptiness of this dynamic exposed in its rawest form. Pat's videos are filled with weird "why am i wasting my life" jokes and asides, but this video takes it to another level, into an absolutely excruciating level of pathos. at the end he makes a plea to his audience to consider why any of this is even important or valuable. at first, it seems to be a joke. but then the video just ends and never goes anywhere after that. and in that moment it seems, very clearly, to not be a joke. 

Pat poses a really good question to his audience that he obviously has no way of answering. in the end, if you're one of the lucky ones like him and you're a straight white guy from America with lots of disposable income - you can try and own everything. you can collect them all. you can search far and wide to try and save all these old cartridges from less loved fates. but you can never own what you really desire - to gain back your childhood. you can never really get back that feeling that you lost. it won't ever be like it was before. and you really never have space to discover yourself or move on from it healthily, because that's not what the culture is about. so instead of dealing with this trauma, we try to create bigger and bigger illusions and fantasies onto ourselves. we make it part of our world, hoping it will seep into our sense of being. but it can never bring us onto a path of awareness or clarity or fulfillment, where we can see these things for what they are and move on from them, happily. they will always be ghosts of the past stuck inside of us.

the thing i love about game culture is so many people try and preserve what creations were left behind by a ruthless, brutal market and bringing it back to the forefront in a passionate, sincere way. that's the best of what something like Magfest has to offer the world to me - an unaffected, infectious, incredibly excited exploration into the world of games (and especially the music, which i've always connected to so much). the thing i hate about game culture is there's no real creation, no challenging, no constructive criticism, no moving forward, no healing. the fundamental truths of games can never really be questioned unless you want to greatly offend people's entire basis for being. even as the industry moves on coldly and the world of indie games moves on just as coldly. and so it just seems, in the end, like the church for a lot of very damaged, lost people. and nothing i've ever experienced in games - even after several years of being involved in the "social justice warrior" side of games, has really challenged this fundamental truth for me.

so yes, maybe one day i will return back to making games. who knows? i still believe in the potential of the medium - there's so many directions you can go and that people are going in. there will continue to be the exceptions - the increpares or Tetrageddons. and i don't think my work in this sphere can ever really be done, for sure. but videogame culture - from the fans to indie games, to alt and queer games spaces, to game jams, up into the highest level of the industry, is and probably will forever remain very insular and closed off to outsiders. because of that, and many other reasons, i'm fine to have nothing really to do with it - or anything surrounding it - its conceptions, its critics, its creators, teachers, preachers and practicers - anymore.
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