#ill put this on my blog for everyone who wants to donate :d
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This is me Aya.. 🇵🇸
wake up with nothing left.That's exactly what happened with us .we moved from having everything to having nothing.In a blink of an eye ,we lost everything, our house ,dreams,
memories belongings and our works. We are starting from zero and need your help to climb the leader step by step from scratch.
All the positive words cannot express how generous you are, especially in sharing my posts to inform other donors about the people of Gaza who are still suffering from the terrible conditions caused by the unjust war on Gaza!
Please continue to support us by donating directly or by sharing the link to let others know. Don't hesitate to help people in difficult and miserable times until the dark days are over. 🙏🏻🍉
https://gofund.me/c4c2cf82
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This may sound stupid but how do I turn off blazeable on my blogs?
And how is this bad? Again, I don't wanna sound stupid or rude. Thank you for the heads up :]
Hi! No worries, you're not the only one with these questions.
On how to turn off the option to get blazed:
On desktop you can turn it off at this link: https://www.tumblr.com/settings/blog/#blaze It looks something like this
On mobile it's in the account settings menu, there's a lof of screenshots in the additions to my other post like here (i haven't updated since i got a funny little bug that lets me add polls in reblogs of other people's posts so i can't screenshot anything).
Alternatively you can also log into Tumblr in your phone's browser and use the link above there. Don't forget to do it on sideblogs that you don't want to get blazed as well! You can also change the settings per-post in the post menu. I've actually enabled it for my complaint post that's circulating because it would be really funny :D
On how it is bad:
With the way it is set up, people can blaze your posts without active consent. This can be used to bully people, by digging out old or not-adapted posts that were not meant for a wider audience and putting them on blast. This can include vent posts, opinions you might have changed since then, selfies, niche things many people might think are cringe (like 2014 self-insert omegaverse fanfics and the likes ... idk if you've seen the drama that resulted from someone blazing their fic, it wasn't pretty), posts that were only meant to circulate in your carefully curated audience, and more.
Since Blaze's are registered in many minds as advertisement many people will react negatively to them so this opens up a way to bully a lot of people. As usual, people of colour, trans people, and other vulnerable groups will get the worst of it, many are already getting deactivated regularly because of coordinated reporting harassment and since people donate hate organizations all the time they will definitely use the option to make the life of a person they're targeting living hell for 10$.
Staff thought of some safeguards but there are several fallacies:
The option to cancel a blaze before it goes live: Not everyone has access to the internet every day, and staff might accept the blaze while you're asleep / at work / on a trip / in the hospital / on hiatus. Then when you're coming back to tumblr your notes will have turned into a nightmare.
The guarantee that staff will check every Blaze manually to prevent harassment: Let's take the case in which someone's old fic get blazed against their will. How can staff know whether it was blazed with friendly intent (to promote a friend's work) or ill intent (to get people to point and laugh)? They can't as long as it's not against the Terms of Service. In general there will be many false positives (Blazes that get rejected by staff despite being innocent) and false negatives (Blazes that get accepted by staff despite being malicious). After all, the people working at tumblr are only human too. But in this case, false negatives will have devastating consequences - and extinguishing a blaze after it's live will be too late.
Many people don't follow @staff, so many people don't know about this change. In fact many people on that other post commented that they didn't know what Blazes are at all! I think i've read that they will add a login banner to tell you and check your settings, but iirc they had banners like that for the original Blaze function announcement so i don't have faith this will prevent anything.
I should clarify that i don't think the feature itself is bad at all, but it should be opt-in so only people who want to participate get blazed (e.g. art blogs). Or add an active mandatory confirmation by OP instead of a veto option, this would prevent the issues above as well, i think that would be the best option - that way people could leave the option on. I know staff are currently getting bombarded with support requests / flames (please be civil to them guys!) (also sorry. but not sorry. i didn't expect my post to blow up but also i think these are legitimately troubling concerns and i won't make the other post unrebloggable). They're aware of these issues so i hope they will change to one of these options - if they add active mandatory confirmation by OP i would enable to option globally as well (Hint hint this means more money for you, @tumblr, because otherwise many people have and will turn this feature off completely) A bit more time between announcement and go-live (4/20 iirc) would have been helpful as well.
Here's the original announcement by the way:
And since i'm gonna pin the post as long as the other post is circulating: Listen to goatbed guys!
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This interview is part of our Road to the IGF series. You can find the rest by clicking here.
Oiκοςpiel, Book I is an opera in five acts, taking the player on a surreal journey of music, canine programmers, bear assassinations, unions, and a relationship between player and game world, breathing life into it through the manipulation of objects and sending their will to move through the computer.
Developer David Kanaga's heady, almost overwhelming work has earned him an IGF nomination for the Nuovo Award. Gamasutra sought him out to talk about the process of Oiκοςpiel, Book I's creation, and how that, and all are aspects, became a part of an extensive message told through imagery, interactivity, and sound.
I've been working with games for about 8 years. I'm probably best known for doing interactive music designs on projects such as Proteus (with Ed Key), Panoramical (with Fernando Ramallo, et al) and Dyad (w Shawn McGrath). My blog, wombflashforest, has some of my writings on musical game theory.
Before working explicitly in the field, and as a kid loving games, I was brought up Zelda, Conker, group improv, Fruityloops, and D&D -- Josh Bothun, who coded the website, was the one to introduce me to game dev as a doable thing and got me into it!
I'd always wanted to compose for a game in the AAA style. In late 2014, while working on Panoramical, Fernando Ramallo showed me the unity landscape sculpting tool and the unity asset store, and I realized it'd be possible to make my own Frankenstein-ian AAA game with these tools.
I sculpted some landscapes, imagined different activities on the landscapes, and had a desire to run with a pack of dogs and to trigger a few things, including perspective shifts, between First, Second, Third person, etc. So, I bought the dogs and I hired Fernando to make the tools for triggering things, and he made these amazing scripts that after about a month of debugging together, basically never crashed for me again, which means I was able to write the game without coding and without running into fatal "bugs"-- a huge boon.
Unity, the "Oik OS" tools, coded by Fernando Ramallo, Ableton, Money.
A little over two years.
Videogames already have a generic tendency to be operatic, and I wanted Oiκοςpiel to riff on this - that engulfing quality which is the totality of the screen and sound system (outputs), the inputs, and the throughputs which hold it all together. I wanted to be able to accommodate any possible form that I could manage within the game - weaving them together was much of the difficulty and pleasure of working.
If I could code, there would bits that feel more like TurboTax and Bloomberg Terminal in there, so there was this synthetic thing going on, piecing diverse components together, and then there was some kind of pun-warhammering going on, pitting the Pluarality of opera (which means, plurally, works) and dispersion of Form in a playful skirmish with the Unity of the development environment and the idea of Totality and coherence. So, there's also, on yet another scale, the attempt at Unionization in the plot, but also the scabby dog and Koch Games who want to prevent the union.
As an example of this process in action - a murky image of global warming, and the industry of its denial, inspires much of the game's dread. To "write" with this concept or mood, I select potent signs… e.g. GLOBALLY: the Earth, the biosphere, glowing coltan ore, the Epic scale, the north pole, travel, airplane, shipping container; WARMLY: the image of Heat, leads idea of Energy (en-ergos, means In Work), leads to the words of Wind turbines and oil pumpjacks.
With all of these keywords, I search the asset store and find these, and buy them. Thus, an image becomes a word becomes a commodity. And now in Unity, for example, with the wind turbine, which was first just a word, I attach the speed of its rotor to the mouse input scrubber, and it becomes a cyborg creature with the player, who assumes the allegorical role of Wind. And player, being Wind, e.g. Atmospheric- is thus considered the air which the dog breathes.
The internal mythology of the game expands in this way, constructing itself out of words, assets, mechanics, all treated 'flatly' as one substance. In general, the potency of imagery was something I was always keen to follow formally-intuitively, the chains of associations give rise to the 'shaggy dog tale' style.
I like to think of the game as a kind of instrument or animal, and the player is its external world, and the inputs are its various peripheral nerves or sense organs. The outputs are its voice and visible body, the song it sings and movement it dances as it experiences the world of the player's "breath", while the inner game topology is a kind of mentality or central nervous system holding the animal's experience all together.
The game is a kind of bildungsroman about the life of this imaginary "animal", which is actually a piece of material software or musical instrument.
Mu Cartographer & Everything are both enchanting. Excited to dig into Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor & Quadrilateral Cowboy. Inside was really lovely and expensive!
Money of course! In Oiκοςpiel, Book I, everyone is aching to unionize except the loyal dogs. Really, though, I wonder - would indie devs ever collectively band together in a kind of Union-like? Obviously, classical unions are not designed for the kind of precarious freelance / boom / bust economy most indies are caught in, where people are constantly being employed by and employing each other, with ambiguous hierarchies, and no clear "boss"-- but some kind of imitation of the idea might work. Just as a little daydream… from the game, the GPU : General Precariat Union.. just for fun-.
Imagine, each member - and it's all types of devs, programmers, designers, artists, musicians, producers--pays some percentage of their annual earnings as union dues. It could be a flat rate or progressive, ultimately voted on by all members. Let's say 5%. It's an added expense, sure, but I'd guess possible to budget into expenses as a given. Compared to steam's 30% cut of sales (and for many devs, I imagine a large percentage of income is thru steam), it's not a whole lot.
And the idea of sharing money is not new in indie games - itch.io allows the developers to choose their percentage of a game's cut; humble bundles collectivize profits amongst a select group; recent game sales with 100% of profits going to ACLU and other organizations showcase the flexibility of game pricing and profit sharing. Game developers could be more nearly poised to try on some collectivism like this than other culture industries, which I think are not as familiar with the idea of a variable, the means by which collective sharing can be formalized and automated.
So, now, imagine, the GPU has come together, and everyone is potting 5% of their earnings into a collective bin. What next? How would the "union" money be spent? This should be voted on. And for instance, it could be split like this:
50 percent - Internal welfare 25 percent - External action 25 percent - Administration
I've put 50 percent towards that first category, because I imagine that a crucial purpose of the union would be as a mechanism of internal redistribution - that this might end up being the primary function, just like collective bargaining is for the classical union. The history of computer games has coincided with the history of neo-liberal economics - thus, the lack of a safety net has been perceived by many as a state of nature, as opposed to what it is - an explicit set of policy decisions functioning as instruments of ambient violence directed against the poor in order to help the rich grow richer.
Our current US government is not about to better things in this regard - so it's an even greater reminder that it's time to step in at as big a scale as possible. Right now, some people are beautifully supportive about helping each other with Patreons, game-tippings, donations, kickstarters, etc. But these systems of aid are still hyper-individualized - person-to-person - and not adequate. Something more ambient is needed.
The Union could step in, and walk the walk with all this "We love indie games!" patriotism, which doesn't recognize the dark underbelly of this love, which is so much love giving rise to so much concentrated wealth, on the one hand, and so much precarity, mental and physical illness, etc, on the other. It would step in, and play the part of the proto-nanny nurse state for the indie games world. Welfare would most likely take the form of basic cash assistance, although it would be great to help with health care and other such costs if that were practical. The 50% (or whatever) of union income could be netted out equally to all members, a la Universal Basic Income, or it could be inversely redistributed to members based on need.
I would favor strong redistributive measures as an attempt at creating a safety net which ideally would allow game developers the freedom to practice their craft without its being always put to the service of pleasing the marketplace's whims. Thus, richer members would join the union at a loss of profit, but a gain of creative biodiversity (and yes, the top dogs benefit very much from this too-- it's more energy), while poorer members would hopefully join at a profit. The profit would be small, but perhaps an ambience of inter-class solidarity would be formalized to good effect? I believe many of those more well off who pay their dues into the union's pool would do so gladly, and understand this giving as a way to share gratitude for the kind of value indies are making off of the commons community effort.
There is so much unpaid and underpaid labor which makes the game community the vital space that it is. Might even some scoundrels like Notch join in? He was a big supporter of Proteus early on, which I'm grateful for, even while his politics since becoming a tycoon have disappointed me very much. Although, did he support Bernie before he supported Trump, and he's not the only one - once ran into a man in a hot tub who did the same thing - he loves indie games -. Notch, would you join an indie game union that might help the form flourish?
There is so much unpaid labor happening, because people love the work, and paying into a pool would be one way to express gratitude for that, and also a means of joining a community committed to rising up together. Also it would be a small measure of protection against future busts into precarity for even the more well off (who are always afraid of sliding back down).
Aside from the internal welfare, there would obviously be administrative costs. At a bare minimum, a regular voting period would need to be administered at regular intervals, which would probably be a fairly involved systems procedure. This would require a dynamic voting website (though maybe could be as easy as Google form?) and backend needing to be managed. There should be a forum for union members, where ideas for union action are proposed and discussed. I would encourage quarterly voting, as it could stimulate more regular interest amongst members in shaping union policy, and create an ambience of micro-political efficacy which wouldn't be lost in its ripple-out effects. Admin jobs would need to paid, as a matter of principle, as well as to get them done well. The union should be an attractive offer, and its forum a lively place to hang out.
The budget for "external action" would be determined by vote. This could be anything whatsoever. Events at GDC and other conferences, emergency/strike funds, "salt" training, protest sign-making, attorney hiring, even a stash of investments to grow union capital? Party? I imagine this forum of coming up with proposals would be quite a fun project. Again, it would be a little microcosm of the larger political theater, and a kind of training in a way, at least tuning in to a system which allows smaller voices to be heard.
Anyway, that's all just some dreaming, a bit of a D&D campaign of the imagination, but I would love to join something like this (hungry to be organized!), even if it ended up being a chapter of the UAW or something…
I do think material basic needs and free time and their shared symbolic medium MONEY are very clearly the biggest hurdles facing indie devs, as with people in general. And money is very interesting because it is an Ideal-Real, equal parts fiction and material. Check out this info-graphic.
It's tempting to think something must be either one or the other, fictive or real, but with money, that's not the case. And we live in a world conditioned by what Mark Fisher calls the "business ontology"-- which we could also call the ontology of money, one quirky feature of which is that the Real and the Fictional are intimately entangled.
No wonder people are trying to come to terms with "post-truth", "fake news", etc. The business ontology treats these flatly. In any case, I think one of the sad Real fictions attached to money is that each person is responsible for their own, and earns precisely what their merit deems them worthy of (if merit is defined by the market, this is tautological) -- I think a healthier Real fiction would recognize that money is an atmosphere that we breathe-- a commons constituted from a surplus of value generated by a huge community of devs-- and that it should be formalized and shared accordingly.
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1 (more coming) I'm a little confused about your situation. I understand that you don't feel comfortable disclosing all the details with people online, although I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that you're asking for donations. I realize mental health plays a big part in the reason why you're unwilling to get a job, but... If I were in your shoes, and I was stuck in a toxic environment, I would be doing whatever I could to ensure I was out of that situation.
[CONTINUED] Sure, offering resources for small fees can be helpful, but there are people out there giving them away for free - so how far can that really get you? Eventually, you’re either going to have to put yourself in an uncomfortable situation and do what’s best for you, so you can escape the toxicity, or you’re going to be stuck there forever. Personally, I think it’s time to grow up and realize you’re not going to make a living off of selling resources. I just think it’s very unfair to those of us who are working for our own money, and I believe you’re completely capable of going out and seeking employment. Yes, you have issues - but so does everyone else. There are people who are way worse off than you are, I’m sure. I’m not trying to be rude, but I’ll admit I’m a tad bit suspicious. A piece of me believes you’re just trying to get whatever you can out of the community, as if they owe you something. You’ve been known to lie before, therefore I just can’t trust your story and accusations. Sorry.
i actually wrote a long ass reply to this but because my computer crashed right before i was about to post it, i lost everything and need to start again lmao. ANYWAY. i never once thought that in a community that is branded to be a “safe haven” and an “escape from life” that i would be thrown some bullshit like this at my feet, making me feel anything but safe or comfortable. honestly there are few messages i have received during my time on this account that made my stomach drop to my feet. this includes messages coming straight out and telling me to kill myself - that i can handle.
but something like this, honestly made my stomach drop and i hope you’re happy because when i first read this last night i began gagging/feel nauseous and then had a full blown anxiety attack and breakdown. now i’ve had some sleep and i’m not reacting as badly as i did at first to this message but i’m still shaking and feeling incredibly sick because: fuck you. now i really hate explaining myself and trying to “prove” myself to people that really do not deserve the time of day from me, but i guess i should have expected this because there are some really fucking toxic people in this community. lets get to the fun part, my actual replies to the points made in these horrible messages !!
POINT A: “if i were in your shoes i would be doing anything to get out of your ~toxic~ situation” --- first of all, be fucking thankful you are not in my situation because it SUCKS. it really sucks and experiencing this level of pain on a daily basis whilst trying to remain positive is really fucking hard. and guess what? YOU’RE NOT IN MY SITUATION. therefore you have no right to sit back and play commentator on everything i have said and done. let’s get that straight. now i have fucking tried to get out of here. let me make you a nice fucking list because you probably won’t settle until you have all the information from me.
>>> i have applied for ten jobs in the space of two days, all of which i was qualified for or they offered training for if i wasn’t. all of the answers were the same: we have filled the spot or you’re not what we’re looking for. and i have to admit my resume is pretty fucking lit because of all the things i achieved before my mental health destroyed my life. >>> i have babysat for a woman who years ago traumatized the FUCK out of me one day and i don’t want to go into specifics but it was really hard to put aside the fact that she made me run home in tears to my mum when i was 12 for a stupid reason. >>> i have considered asking my sister if i could move in with her. get this, any other time i wouldn’t even think of it because: a) she lives in a small three bedroom house - by small i mean really fucking small. b) she has a 3 year old daughter and a 1 year old daughter as well as herself and her boyfriend so you can imagine how much space they have already taken up. OH and she’s having another baby so they would be struggling to even fine space for them. c) i know that if i live with her i will only be able to have a suitcase of my possessions and would have to sleep on the floor, yet i still consider it and am close to asking. d) i have practically lived with her for a month and had a complete breakdown at the end because i was treated like a babysitting machine instead of a human and being an introvert, when spending so much time with people i need time for myself to regenerate but because the house was so small and the children wouldn’t leave me alone - i broke down. >>> i have done things to get $5 that i do not want to talk about because i know that if i even told my family i would immediately be disowned and i am not proud at all about what i’ve done to EAT FOOD. JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE. >>> and lastly, i’m asking complete strangers for money - something that i have struggled with all my life is asking people for money, even asking my mother for $5 for school when i was younger invoked anxiety. but here i am.
POINT B: “sure you can offer resources for money but how far is that going to get you? people already make them for free” --- do you REALLY think i came into this thinking that selling resources was going to pay my rent? do you REALLY think i’m dumb enough to believe that i could actually live out on my own with just commissions from people online in exchange for pixels that will be meaningless in a few years? HOW DUMB DO YOU THINK I AM? you know what, $5 every now and again isn’t going to pay for my funeral insurance or my wedding in a few years, but $5 NOW is going to buy me a pretty decent fucking meal for once, it’s going to buy me a part of a ticket out of this small town. in the long run, $5 a week is going to add up and its going to HELP. also, there must be a reason more people are taking commissions each day - because there are actually people in this world who are fucking KIND and i like to believe in those people. paying commissions isn’t even buying my resources to me, because i know these people can get it anytime they want for free. no, it’s like a pat on the back or like paying someone a tip. IT’S JUST BEING FUCKING THANKFUL. if i had money i would be tipping my friends all the time. but i don’t.
POINT C: “it’s unfair for those of us who are working for our money” --- i’m,,, sorry. IS MY MENTAL ILLNESS A FUCKING INCONVENIENCE TO YOU? DID MY MENTAL ILLNESS DESTROY HALF OF Y O U R LIFE, MAKING IT ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO EVEN FUNCTION PROPERLY IN THE WORLD? DID MY MENTAL ILLNESS DESTROY Y O U R RELATIONSHIPS WITH YOUR OWN FUCKING FAMILY? DID MY MENTAL ILLNESS DESTROY Y O U R FRIENDSHIPS? DID MY MENTAL ILLNESS TURN Y O U R CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENTS INTO APPOINTMENTS WITH A PSYCHOLOGIST, ANTIDEPRESSANTS AND FINDING WAYS TO MAKE YOUR SCHOOL LIFE MORE COMFORTABLE SINCE YOU WERE LITERALLY TWO STEPS AWAY FROM KILLING YOURSELF IN THE MIDDLE OF CLASS? DID MY MENTAL ILLNESS MAKE Y O U WANT TO KILL YOURSELF MORE TIMES YOU CAN COUNT ON ONE HAND? DID MY MENTAL ILLNESS MAKE Y O U ATTEMPT SUICIDE TWICE BEFORE YOU WERE EVEN SIXTEEN? DID MY MENTAL ILLNESS EFFECT Y O U IN YOUR WORKPLACE TO THE POINT WHERE YOU WERE CLOSE TO GRABBING THE NEAREST PLASTIC BAG AT YOUR REGISTER AND PULLING IT OVER YOUR HEAD AND SUFFOCATING YOURSELF? DID MY MENTAL ILLNESS MAKE Y O U BULIMIC AND ANOREXIC? DID MY MENTAL ILLNESS MAKE IT HARD FOR Y O U TO LOOK AT YOURSELF IN THE MIRROR WITHOUT WANTING TO FUCKING DIE? DID MY MENTAL ILLNESS DESTROY Y O U R BODY IMAGE? FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU.
POINT D: “you’re capable for going out and looking for employment” --- please refer to my next answer to another anon who is a fucking dick too.
POINT E: “you’re just trying to get shit out of the community cause you think it owes you something” --- again... FUCK YOU. what the fuck have i done to make you believe i’m that shitty of a person? and if i was trying to scam this community out of money or whatever the fuck you think i’m doing, IT MUST HAVE BEEN THREE FUCKING YEARS IN THE MAKING, BEFORE I EVEN KNEW I COULD MAKE A FEW CENTS USING ADF.LY LINKS. i have lied about things in the past, but things that i a) owned up to and b) were NEVER about my mental health or my living situation. i’mm fucking SURE that if you go through my blog you will find me talking about how fucked i am in life. this isn’t some story that i shit out yesterday for money, for fucks sake. if it seems like i suddenly have all these problems - i’m fucking great at pretending i don’t want to be alive and that i hate myself.
POINT F: “i’m not trying to be rude” --- YES YOU FUCKING ARE. IF YOU WERE NOT TRYING TO BE RUDE YOU WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN SELF AWARE OF IT AND PUT YOURSELF ON ANONYMOUS, FOR FUCKS SAKE. IF YOU KNEW THAT THIS WASN’T RUDE, YOU WOULD HAVE COME OFF OFF OF ANONYMOUS, FOR FUCKS SAKE. but of course this isn’t fucking rude it’s just picking away at my life and trying to make it sound like i’m a fucking asshole because i am literally suffering in my own home :~)
you know what? there is no way i can possibly come to a nice conclusion about this message in a sentence or to. so here is all i’m going to say: a) i’M NOT COMING TO YOUR DOORSTEP AND ASKING YOU SPECIFICALLY TO HAND ME OVER $2 SO I CAN BUY DRUGS OR WHATEVER THE FCUCK YOU’RE THINKING and b) YOU DON’T EVEN FUCKING DESERVE AN EXPLANATION FROM ME BECAUSE YOU ARE A FUCKING ASSHOLE. i don’t know what the fuck you want from me. my family is in $7k debt from my mum’s boyfriend’s mum’s funeral a month ago. do you want the fucking death certificate? do you want to see the flowers we got from her funeral insurance? DO YOU WANT A WHOLE FUCKING LIVESTREAM OF HER DEAD BODY BEING LOWERED INTO THE FUCKING GROUND? OH FUCKING HELL, DO YOU WANT TEXTS THAT GO BACK YEARS BETWEEN ME AND MY CLOSEST FRIENDS AND FAMILY OF ME CONSTANTLY TELLING THEM I WISH I WAS FUCKING DEAD? DO YOU WANT ME TO RECORD WHAT I EAT IN A WEEK? DO YOU WANT ME TO RECORD MY MOTHER TELLING ME I’M BEING FAT AND TO STOP EATING? DO YOU WANT ME TO HANG MYSELF IN PUBLIC JUST SO YOU CAN FUCKING SEE HOW SERIOUS THIS IT? i don’t know what the fuck you want from me and what your great plan was when sending these messages, but i hope you’re fucking happy.
#a#if u wanna see me go off then (:#also general trigger warning like if you're sensitive then ?#Anonymous
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Hello, I hope you and your family are well. Can you please help me recycle the post on my account? 🌺 And help rescue my family from the war in Gaza? 🙏 Thank you.
https://gofund.me/d36bfdc0
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This interview is part of our Road to the IGF series. You can find the rest by clicking here.
Oiκοςpiel, Book I is an opera in five acts, taking the player on a surreal journey of music, canine programmers, bear assassinations, unions, and a relationship between player and game world, breathing life into it through the manipulation of objects and sending their will to move through the computer.
Developer David Kanaga's heady, almost overwhelming work has earned him an IGF nomination for the Nuovo Award. Gamasutra sought him out to talk about the process of Oiκοςpiel, Book I's creation, and how that, and all are aspects, became a part of an extensive message told through imagery, interactivity, and sound.
I've been working with games for about 8 years. I'm probably best known for doing interactive music designs on projects such as Proteus (with Ed Key), Panoramical (with Fernando Ramallo, et al) and Dyad (w Shawn McGrath). My blog, wombflashforest, has some of my writings on musical game theory.
Before working explicitly in the field, and as a kid loving games, I was brought up Zelda, Conker, group improv, Fruityloops, and D&D -- Josh Bothun, who coded the website, was the one to introduce me to game dev as a doable thing and got me into it!
I'd always wanted to compose for a game in the AAA style. In late 2014, while working on Panoramical, Fernando Ramallo showed me the unity landscape sculpting tool and the unity asset store, and I realized it'd be possible to make my own Frankenstein-ian AAA game with these tools.
I sculpted some landscapes, imagined different activities on the landscapes, and had a desire to run with a pack of dogs and to trigger a few things, including perspective shifts, between First, Second, Third person, etc. So, I bought the dogs and I hired Fernando to make the tools for triggering things, and he made these amazing scripts that after about a month of debugging together, basically never crashed for me again, which means I was able to write the game without coding and without running into fatal "bugs"-- a huge boon.
Unity, the "Oik OS" tools, coded by Fernando Ramallo, Ableton, Money.
A little over two years.
Videogames already have a generic tendency to be operatic, and I wanted Oiκοςpiel to riff on this - that engulfing quality which is the totality of the screen and sound system (outputs), the inputs, and the throughputs which hold it all together. I wanted to be able to accommodate any possible form that I could manage within the game - weaving them together was much of the difficulty and pleasure of working.
If I could code, there would bits that feel more like TurboTax and Bloomberg Terminal in there, so there was this synthetic thing going on, piecing diverse components together, and then there was some kind of pun-warhammering going on, pitting the Pluarality of opera (which means, plurally, works) and dispersion of Form in a playful skirmish with the Unity of the development environment and the idea of Totality and coherence. So, there's also, on yet another scale, the attempt at Unionization in the plot, but also the scabby dog and Koch Games who want to prevent the union.
As an example of this process in action - a murky image of global warming, and the industry of its denial, inspires much of the game's dread. To "write" with this concept or mood, I select potent signs… e.g. GLOBALLY: the Earth, the biosphere, glowing coltan ore, the Epic scale, the north pole, travel, airplane, shipping container; WARMLY: the image of Heat, leads idea of Energy (en-ergos, means In Work), leads to the words of Wind turbines and oil pumpjacks.
With all of these keywords, I search the asset store and find these, and buy them. Thus, an image becomes a word becomes a commodity. And now in Unity, for example, with the wind turbine, which was first just a word, I attach the speed of its rotor to the mouse input scrubber, and it becomes a cyborg creature with the player, who assumes the allegorical role of Wind. And player, being Wind, e.g. Atmospheric- is thus considered the air which the dog breathes.
The internal mythology of the game expands in this way, constructing itself out of words, assets, mechanics, all treated 'flatly' as one substance. In general, the potency of imagery was something I was always keen to follow formally-intuitively, the chains of associations give rise to the 'shaggy dog tale' style.
I like to think of the game as a kind of instrument or animal, and the player is its external world, and the inputs are its various peripheral nerves or sense organs. The outputs are its voice and visible body, the song it sings and movement it dances as it experiences the world of the player's "breath", while the inner game topology is a kind of mentality or central nervous system holding the animal's experience all together.
The game is a kind of bildungsroman about the life of this imaginary "animal", which is actually a piece of material software or musical instrument.
Mu Cartographer & Everything are both enchanting. Excited to dig into Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor & Quadrilateral Cowboy. Inside was really lovely and expensive!
Money of course! In Oiκοςpiel, Book I, everyone is aching to unionize except the loyal dogs. Really, though, I wonder - would indie devs ever collectively band together in a kind of Union-like? Obviously, classical unions are not designed for the kind of precarious freelance / boom / bust economy most indies are caught in, where people are constantly being employed by and employing each other, with ambiguous hierarchies, and no clear "boss"-- but some kind of imitation of the idea might work. Just as a little daydream… from the game, the GPU : General Precariat Union.. just for fun-.
Imagine, each member - and it's all types of devs, programmers, designers, artists, musicians, producers--pays some percentage of their annual earnings as union dues. It could be a flat rate or progressive, ultimately voted on by all members. Let's say 5%. It's an added expense, sure, but I'd guess possible to budget into expenses as a given. Compared to steam's 30% cut of sales (and for many devs, I imagine a large percentage of income is thru steam), it's not a whole lot.
And the idea of sharing money is not new in indie games - itch.io allows the developers to choose their percentage of a game's cut; humble bundles collectivize profits amongst a select group; recent game sales with 100% of profits going to ACLU and other organizations showcase the flexibility of game pricing and profit sharing. Game developers could be more nearly poised to try on some collectivism like this than other culture industries, which I think are not as familiar with the idea of a variable, the means by which collective sharing can be formalized and automated.
So, now, imagine, the GPU has come together, and everyone is potting 5% of their earnings into a collective bin. What next? How would the "union" money be spent? This should be voted on. And for instance, it could be split like this:
50 percent - Internal welfare 25 percent - External action 25 percent - Administration
I've put 50 percent towards that first category, because I imagine that a crucial purpose of the union would be as a mechanism of internal redistribution - that this might end up being the primary function, just like collective bargaining is for the classical union. The history of computer games has coincided with the history of neo-liberal economics - thus, the lack of a safety net has been perceived by many as a state of nature, as opposed to what it is - an explicit set of policy decisions functioning as instruments of ambient violence directed against the poor in order to help the rich grow richer.
Our current US government is not about to better things in this regard - so it's an even greater reminder that it's time to step in at as big a scale as possible. Right now, some people are beautifully supportive about helping each other with Patreons, game-tippings, donations, kickstarters, etc. But these systems of aid are still hyper-individualized - person-to-person - and not adequate. Something more ambient is needed.
The Union could step in, and walk the walk with all this "We love indie games!" patriotism, which doesn't recognize the dark underbelly of this love, which is so much love giving rise to so much concentrated wealth, on the one hand, and so much precarity, mental and physical illness, etc, on the other. It would step in, and play the part of the proto-nanny nurse state for the indie games world. Welfare would most likely take the form of basic cash assistance, although it would be great to help with health care and other such costs if that were practical. The 50% (or whatever) of union income could be netted out equally to all members, a la Universal Basic Income, or it could be inversely redistributed to members based on need.
I would favor strong redistributive measures as an attempt at creating a safety net which ideally would allow game developers the freedom to practice their craft without its being always put to the service of pleasing the marketplace's whims. Thus, richer members would join the union at a loss of profit, but a gain of creative biodiversity (and yes, the top dogs benefit very much from this too-- it's more energy), while poorer members would hopefully join at a profit. The profit would be small, but perhaps an ambience of inter-class solidarity would be formalized to good effect? I believe many of those more well off who pay their dues into the union's pool would do so gladly, and understand this giving as a way to share gratitude for the kind of value indies are making off of the commons community effort.
There is so much unpaid and underpaid labor which makes the game community the vital space that it is. Might even some scoundrels like Notch join in? He was a big supporter of Proteus early on, which I'm grateful for, even while his politics since becoming a tycoon have disappointed me very much. Although, did he support Bernie before he supported Trump, and he's not the only one - once ran into a man in a hot tub who did the same thing - he loves indie games -. Notch, would you join an indie game union that might help the form flourish?
There is so much unpaid labor happening, because people love the work, and paying into a pool would be one way to express gratitude for that, and also a means of joining a community committed to rising up together. Also it would be a small measure of protection against future busts into precarity for even the more well off (who are always afraid of sliding back down).
Aside from the internal welfare, there would obviously be administrative costs. At a bare minimum, a regular voting period would need to be administered at regular intervals, which would probably be a fairly involved systems procedure. This would require a dynamic voting website (though maybe could be as easy as Google form?) and backend needing to be managed. There should be a forum for union members, where ideas for union action are proposed and discussed. I would encourage quarterly voting, as it could stimulate more regular interest amongst members in shaping union policy, and create an ambience of micro-political efficacy which wouldn't be lost in its ripple-out effects. Admin jobs would need to paid, as a matter of principle, as well as to get them done well. The union should be an attractive offer, and its forum a lively place to hang out.
The budget for "external action" would be determined by vote. This could be anything whatsoever. Events at GDC and other conferences, emergency/strike funds, "salt" training, protest sign-making, attorney hiring, even a stash of investments to grow union capital? Party? I imagine this forum of coming up with proposals would be quite a fun project. Again, it would be a little microcosm of the larger political theater, and a kind of training in a way, at least tuning in to a system which allows smaller voices to be heard.
Anyway, that's all just some dreaming, a bit of a D&D campaign of the imagination, but I would love to join something like this (hungry to be organized!), even if it ended up being a chapter of the UAW or something…
I do think material basic needs and free time and their shared symbolic medium MONEY are very clearly the biggest hurdles facing indie devs, as with people in general. And money is very interesting because it is an Ideal-Real, equal parts fiction and material. Check out this info-graphic.
It's tempting to think something must be either one or the other, fictive or real, but with money, that's not the case. And we live in a world conditioned by what Mark Fisher calls the "business ontology"-- which we could also call the ontology of money, one quirky feature of which is that the Real and the Fictional are intimately entangled.
No wonder people are trying to come to terms with "post-truth", "fake news", etc. The business ontology treats these flatly. In any case, I think one of the sad Real fictions attached to money is that each person is responsible for their own, and earns precisely what their merit deems them worthy of (if merit is defined by the market, this is tautological) -- I think a healthier Real fiction would recognize that money is an atmosphere that we breathe-- a commons constituted from a surplus of value generated by a huge community of devs-- and that it should be formalized and shared accordingly.
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