I wrote a 1000 word primer on Drakengard 3 and Xenofeminism, though I’m not going to share it yet because it’s for publication.
Also, today I wrote more insane tf smut.
I’ve been writing a lot of insane tf smut and publishing it to furaffinity. DM if you want the link I guess
xmas trip home opinion roundup
I recently had a fun essay titled A Ride Through the Objective Field of Passion published in Unwinnable Monthly. I am very proud of what I accomplished with it, being an article that argues for a continuity between the theories and work of the Situationist International, their critique of urbanism, level design theory, and the work of modders and mappers. It’s a story about a playthrough (or, a derive) of a Left4Dead 2 campaign called Journey to Splash Mountain, which is in part a virtual recreation of Disneyland California. It was really important to me that the essay is fun, but informational, and enlightening. Without having heard feedback from anyone but my editor, I feel like it managed that. So, just as I said, I’m proud of it.
I recommend subscribing to Unwinnable, but I’ve isolated the pages from their February 2023 issue which contain my cover feature. You can read it here!!
i have a giant new post about video games, the first i’ve written in a long time… that covers a bunch of different topics (incl snippets of discussions that have been had on here before)
as a hardened industry realist,
congrats liz
great stuff! honestly the fact that it does cover so many different topics in one place one after another has helped me with threading together a lot of these concerns.
turns out connecting broader patterns and material causality helps! who knew
thank you! yeah i’m hoping doing all of that in one big place makes it easier to just like, hand it to a person not very familiar with the space and catch them up to speed at least somewhat. because one of the things i hate the most is how conversations and contexts get disappeared very quickly.
oh 100%, and it’s definitely something i notice a lot in my conversations away from well i mean, here
even of my friends elsewhere who are into video games or even specifically indies, most of them really got into it in … the late 2010s, it seems like? like, a lot of them can name every other SotN-alike that comes out but haven’t heard of cave story or yume nikki, or don’t have the context of the early indie boom cause they just weren’t plugged into it at the time
or i’ve got a friend who basically has never played video games that’s been getting sucked into some gacha stuff which ended up bringing me around to just yesterday talking about the early indie mobile boom and the extremely predictable crushing by tech companies controlling the platforms (so it was of course, extremely funny to see mention of that boom in the first section of your post)
obviously it’s not as though not-knowing is their fault, the systems we operate within on this net are largely built in a way to prevent it, but its still unfortunate. (and wishing to be able to communicate those lost conversations or contexts is a somewhat recurring discussion around here for good reason, obviously)
but i certainly feel that your blogpost accomplishes laying things out in a way that could catch an unfamiliar person up to speed! obviously hard to say as a person entrenched in the nonsense we call games enough to post on this forum but i mean hell even then it helped me think of things less disparately from each other, so, here’s hoping
this is an incredible piece
thank you so much for sharing this, it has given me a lot to think about
its taking me a while to read it but this is basically every thought ive had about indie games and development in one big post
Really enjoyed ellaguro’s piece. I think the thing that resonates most with me is how invisible this kinda dialogue even is amongst devs, academics, players, etc. Like it feels like half the time one engages with a parallel discourse about games and the games industry that is completely dissociated from reality. All for the sake of not having conversations that are too challenging or would threaten institutions. Having to contend with this daily feels like a grind but it’s refreshing to see people express these anxieties so clearly.
I work in a theoretically academic environment focused on games and the conversation is almost entirely uncritical. Why? Because the vets don’t want to hear about any problems ever and going against the grain of whatever oft-cited history of auteurs and fanaticism is too awkward. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be a creator amidst similar denials.
I often wish I knew more about the smaller, genuinely experimental creators and games that don’t make market research driven screenshots and gifs to guarantee consumer appeal. I feel I need to work harder to shed light on this myself.
Check out Glorious Trainwrecks, a community I was active in for quite some time, they make…very strange and small games.
i think this is sort of by design? i mean there is sort of a learned helplessness to games because of the insularity of the industry and people just being more cagey about speaking out in general. and the fact that the games industry was birthed out of an extremely anti-labor environment. everything is sort of displaced onto the individual and any failures people experience in the industry are treated more of a failure to innovate (either on the part of the individual or the part of the large companies) instead of… just a shit working environment.
but it also goes back to people buying into the libertarian dream of the tech industry and just kind of passively waiting for new technology to solve old problems. and then having no answer when so many problems turn out to have nothing to do with technology. because it turned out they didn’t account for that. because everything is so STEM-inflected even when it doesn’t really make sense for it to be.
but yeah it leaves everything feeling like a very unstable series of unrelated isolated events rather than something that’s connected at all. which i guess part of the attempt for this is to connect more of those threads. and realize that it is all related to each other.
to me tbh the breaking point is all the indie publisher shit because it feels like such a mirror of where the industry went in the 90’s and into the situation that made small scale games a commercial/industry impossibility and that indie games were reacting to in the first place. and it’s like - not particularly down to just repeat history here and act like it’s not what’s happening.
(and also maybe partly a justification from me to myself of why i’m doing the EGW stuff)
This was great. Changed how I felt about all the auteur stuff. Very nice to read a blog again too. It’s been so long
To echo what some other people have already said this really helped me collect and organize my own loose thoughts about indie games
I had a 29-page honker of a long, weird story finally get published a year after being accepted. It’s called SLOWLY THROUGH THE MIDDLE-DISTANCE, and I guess the teaser is to say that it is set in the painted territories in the backgrounds of Scooby-Doo episodes, where a woman pursues a collective of donor organs that have decided to form a body and commit themselves to permanent stillness for good. I wrote this between 2019-2020, so it is interesting for me to read and try to imagine what the heck I was huffing to write a story like this, and who I was and where I was at. But I really love it, especially how it comes to an end with a resolution that is maybe my favorite I’ve ever written, which sees this small group of cartoon characters taking big steps to be there for each other emotionally as they ride through the midnight undermoon. I made a fun little teaser poster that evokes its mood, color, and some of the literal things inside it.
Continuing to write insane things and post them to my furaffinity, which I will not share publicly in what is basically my only practice of OpSec
Interesting piece vodselbt, thanks for sharing!
Brings to mind a section about Pokemon GO from film critic Nick Pinkerton’s Live Stream Follies Pt 3. (The essay is behind his Substack paywall but if you’re interested in reading there’s a $5/month subscription option):
Invoking again the unquiet ghosts of the Situationists, committed to the introduction of a spirit of play into a crushing quotidian existence, we might say that Pokémon Go invited the player to embark on a species of derivé—a Debord coinage describing a philosophy of spontaneous, follow-your-nose urban drifting designed to break one free of the banality of homogenized daily life, first defined in a 1956 essay written towards the end of Debord’s Lettrist International days.
The difference, and a crucial one, is that the path of the ideal derivé was improvisatory and truly aimless, a course charted by spontaneous, gut-level responses to the cityscape as one moved through it. While the Pokémon Go player might, in their quest, be led to discover previously unknown territory, that discovery would be incidental and subordinate to the carrot on a stick: the Psyduck scooped up outside of a Blimpie’s in Rahway, New Jersey, or whatever.
In describing the gamification in everyday life, a discrimination between types of games is necessary: between those forms of play without rules, identifiable objectives, and winners and losers, like the derivé or the involuted processes of art-making, and those that incorporate all of those barriers and prompts, like Pokémon Go, geocaching, and most of what’s evoked today by the word “gaming.” In a recent paper titled “Gamification: What it is and how to fight it,” academics Jamie Woodcock and Mark R. Johnson develop a distinction between ‘gamification-from-above’—“the imposition of systems of regulation, surveillance and standardization upon aspects of everyday life, through forms of interaction and feedback drawn from games but severed from their original playful contexts”—and a proposed, oppositional ‘gamification-from-below,’ a rejection of games designed to serve management’s goals of optimized efficiency, and a return to pure play.
Thanks for taking the time to read it! Pokemon Go has always stank to me of the sort of things Pinkerton’s pointing out. When they were active, the Situationists always resisted the creation of an ism; Situationism was like a creation of people who didn’t understand the liberatory nature of their theories. But I think you see Situationism alive in some of the most insidious aspects of gamification like this!
We definitely need more games as cool as Kangaroo. Not sure about the 2600 version, though. ^ _^
I wrote about 3300 words about making a videogame over 7 years. Includes a bunch of screenshots and gifs I had saved from development. I kind of want to make more posts detailing the game’s narrative, combat, and UI systems since those might be interesting breakdowns…to me.
