#liz ryerson

[correlatedcontents]

the uncle who works for nintendo: ten years on

10 years ago today i released a game called THE UNCLE WHO WORKS FOR NINTENDO. with art by Kim Parker, multiple endings, a metafictional structure, and extensive sound design, it was (and remains) my most ambitious completed solo dev project. initially conceived as the gamergate harassment movement sprawled over social media, and coinciding with the attacks on residents of ferguson, mo following the police killing of michael brown, it's often seemed in retrospect that this was a moment where the loathsome present really crystallized

for my part, the response to the game was beyond all expectation; kotaku linked it and totally obliterated my webhosting, incurring a huge overage charge. i was a poor grad student and people helped crowdfund the cost. that was amazing, but the whole thing kind of scared me, honestly!

that's mainly why my projects from this point scaled back, then ended as i turned my mind toward finishing grad school: i didn't have the time or resources to technically expand in the ways that i wanted, and furthermore i was leery of becoming a guy who was expected to make Statements.

the intervening years have been… well, they've been something. you were there, presumably. one of the people namechecked in the game's author notes, a target of harassment at the time, is now a noted unprincipled political hack, and i'm not talking about zizek. but remember quoting zizek?

the world turns. i recorded my first podcast because of this game. it got onto people's best of the year lists. paste called it "the indie game of the year." it won the xyzzy award for best npc.

and none of the stuff that distressed me so much that i made the game went anywhere.

there was a lot of talk in the early 2010s about the power of games to change people and make them better. and i think that's probably true--all encounters with art can change you, for better and worse--but i've long been skeptical of strong and positive claims for art's "efficacy."

i didn't think my game was going to solve any problems, but it was at least going to index them. and i think it indexed gamergate, though it did nothing to stop that ravening, juvenile nostalgia mindset from wholly subsuming the gamer cultural sphere, to say nothing of spheres beyond it

Liz Ryerson, another influence on UWWFN, recently wrote a long essay about just this.

but one thing the game's reception did show me is that there are in fact people who want to think, ant to interrogate the easy bindings between experience and unreflective thought, and find ways of thinking and feeling contrary to the ever-rising tide of culture's venom. the world is not settled.

the game cemented my friendship with Cameron Kunzelman, and the podcasting work we've since done for Ranged Touch has been (to my mind) more useful in this regard than any game i could make, modeling engagement with the weirdness of both art and the world critically and thoughtfully. and gaming is not kaput! i was fortunate to make connections within the twitter dev scene, and currently work at Half Mermaid on a project that will not make you a better person, but might offer ways for thinking about life in a turbulent world where our ugliness is sold back to us at a premium.

10 years is somehow both a short time and, it turns out, an incredibly long time. a lot happens, and it's never enough, and it's also way too much. and sometimes a decade on, even when you're a guy who doesn't want to make Statements you still feel like there's something worth remarking upon. thanks

[eccentric-nucleus]

so ellaguro/liz ryerson made a big blog post about games, nostalgia, let's plays, etc which touches on a lot of stuff i've been thinking about recently

i think a lot of what my feelings come down to is... videogames, the internet as a whole, used to be a scene. it was something new and weird that people weren't really sure about. how it fit into society or how it was possible to interact with it, nobody knew. you could do whatever. and as time has gone on the scene has ossified into a market: people know precisely what these things are for and they are for advertising and consumer products.

(that was definitely one of the weird moments i had when i was posting on royalroad. i thought i was trying out a writing exercise and sharing it with some people who might be interested, but lots of people reading were definitely assuming i was positioning a marketable offering for an initial release.)

and like, it doesn't really escape my notice that yeah the idyllic pre-capitalism time i'm ascribing to the earlier internet also took place when i was a kid and thus incidentally unaware of any monetary influence already there. you did, after all, have to pay to get a dial-up internet connection. there's no actual, like, prelapsarian state of grace here. there's just the world. & probably a big part of getting older is seeing the things you used to enjoy either fade away or be streamlined to fit with the rest of society. i used to be with it. now what i'm with isn't 'it'. it'll happen to youuuuuu

[titleknown]

...Reblogging because I think you open up some interesting points in a far clearer way than others I've seen, and I'd like to discuss from the reverse end in good faith.

Because like... fundamentally I find the idea that critique isn't meant to have some material effect fundamentally alien, to the point where my base assumption has always been that the understanding of the function of critique in the circles you speak of was...

...Well, this is antecdotal, but it seems like a viewpoint divorced from popular experience?

Like, to give an (intentionally extreme) example, the largest material impact critical theory probably had on the arts was Frederic Wertham using it in a way that set back comics as an artform in the US by decades.

Ditto for a large chunk of the moral panics or censorship decision we witnessed in the 80s/90s, there was always a child psychologist with Data and Theories on why this artform needed to be destroyed or censored.

Even if it's different disciplines evaluating social impact, I think it's easy to see where the wires got crossed.

Plus, criticism is a great instrument to legitimize or delegitimize an artform or work in the public sphere, and a lot of us are painfully aware that if your artform is culturally delegitimized, you don't get to exist in public space.

Like, for an object lesson in that, see how furries and fanfic writers were treated in public forums in the aughts wrt the massive cultural hate-complex around them vs now where folks in both subcultures have been building up that cultural legitimacy.

Or, for a closer to home example, how Steven Universe fanart fucking disappeared from my dash after the critique of its politics (and its fans) really went into overdrive post-Bismuth. No matter what way you evaluate the show, I feel like that's a pretty visible example of cultural de-legitmization banishing something from a public space.

Hell, on a personal level, a lot of people in fandom have painful experiences with their interests being marginalized due to that lack of cultural legitimacy. Anyone with a special interest can tell you that.

Point being, a lot of people have a lot of personal experience with critique being used as an active weapon and a passive means of denying/gaining cultural legitimacy, that the idea of critique as just this... low-stakes "think about it" sort of dealie you speak of is; again; alien.

And there's also the element of complicity, I think, that provokes that reaction. Like, in terms of a lot of the critique I see I feel like complicity and disgust with how people uplift these works and socially interact with them despite them being "tainted".

Like, to give an example, this is part of why I find Liz Ryerson's very antisocial view of games and art so loathsome. You can also see a lot of that in the left-leaning sneerposting towards "fandom" as a social practice, including someone who ran me off a server with it.

So, with that context in mind, the idea that it's not meant to condemn or shame those into those games comes off as more than a little two-faced, whether intentional or not?

Like, at least from my experience, it's very difficult to see someone say "I'm not saying you're a bad person for liking these games" when everything else around that discourse says "by allowing these cultural complexes to exist you legitimize the violence of your peers" and not think the former is less "sincere sentiment" and more "plausible deniability ass-covering".

Plus, I'd say the issue of colonialism is probably especially a hot button there; given that it's something a lot of us in the Global North who hear about it have few levers to do much about* and there's also that constant drumbeat that if it's solved in the just way our lives will have to get worse just like they are under capitalism but more "fair"**.

So, with an issue a lot of us are stuck being complicit in and are often told even by its advocates that to not be complicit would be to be impoverished and stagnant***, bringing it into a critical framework associated with condemnation over complicity is probably an easy way to take a raw nerve and bite down.

Couple that with people with scrupulosity issues who get exposed to this (myself included), who are probably more numerous than most people realize, and it's also easy to understand why people read that specific discourse as "Ok, you're trying to give me a secular form of Catholic guilt."

Like... does that help you grok better where folks are coming from when they get flustered over this? Do you have any thoughts on how to bridge perspectives like mine with perspectives like yours when they very clearly come from very dissonant experiences?

Like, I feel like there's a massive gap between the experiences of those in critical circles who think of this as a zero-stakes consciousness-raising exercise and those who've been; to put it bluntly; fucked by the Overton Window, and I feel like there needs to be some attempt to bridge it.

*At least wrt my US perspective, given both major parties unity on being unfathomably evil there and the fact that most non-electoral action on that issue here is a joke

**Note I don't necessarily agree with that sentiment, but a lot of people in favor of anti-colonialism do, but I don't think any of us know enough about political economy to know for sure, which is what makes it frustrating to discuss.

***Again, not a sentiment I agree with, I cannot stress that enough, though the forcefulness with which its proponents speak does end up setting off my Issues

Wish I had been able to articulate this sooner but the current wave of discourse about Cozy Wholesome Farming Games really shows once again that a lot of people's metric for the line that divides "smart person doing good, thoughtful analysis" from "terminally online freak looking too deep into into shit to start pointless discourse" is when they look deep enough to find something to criticize in a Popular Thing.

Like. The takes "Stardew Valley is an anticapitalist tale about the importance of community because in it the members of this small rural community band together to kick out the Costco analogue" and "The fantasy of landwonership on which games like Stardew Valley are predicated on is kinda bourgeois and the fact that it's considered politically neutral enough to be a common subject matter for games explicitly labelling themselves as Cozy or Wholesome speaks to how entrenched it is in our our culture and art" attribute roughly equivalent weight and importance to the politics of a cutesy farming game, but one of them is very popular and widely liked and the other gets you anons like "Uhm it's literally just a hecking cute farming simularino!? Touch grass lol you should be at the club lol do you even enjoy stuff lol not everything is politics are you really trying to make my heckin' farmerino simulator problematic? Stop looking for politics in everything you're just looking for stuff to get mad at you are a tar pit" etc etc etc

[anantradingpvtltd]

Price: [price_with_discount] (as of [price_update_date] - Details) [ad_1] In The Queer Games Avant-Garde, Bonnie Ruberg presents twenty interviews with twenty-two queer video game developers whose radical, experimental, vibrant, and deeply queer work is driving a momentous shift in the medium of video games. Speaking with insight and candor about their creative practices as well as their politics and passions, these influential and innovative game makers tell stories about their lives and inspirations, the challenges they face, and the ways they understand their places within the wider terrain of video game culture. Their insights go beyond typical conversations about LGBTQ representation in video games or how to improve “diversity” in digital media. Instead, they explore queer game-making practices, the politics of queer independent video games, how queerness can be expressed as an aesthetic practice, the influence of feminist art on their work, and the future of queer video games and technology. These engaging conversations offer a portrait of an influential community that is subverting and redefining the medium of video games by placing queerness front and center. Interviewees: Ryan Rose Aceae, Avery Alder, Jimmy Andrews, Santo Aveiro-Ojeda, Aevee Bee, Tonia B******, Mattie Brice, Nicky Case, Naomi Clark, Mo Cohen, Heather Flowers, Nina Freeman, Jerome Hagen, Kat Jones, Jess Marcotte, Andi McClure, Llaura McGee, Seanna Musgrave, Liz Ryerson, Elizabeth Sampat, Loren Schmidt, Sarah Schoemann, Dietrich Squinkifer, Kara Stone, Emilia Yang, Robert Yang Publisher ‏ : ‎ Duke University Press (20 March 2020) Language ‏ : ‎ English Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1478006587 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1478006589 Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 408 g Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.24 x 2.03 x 22.86 cm Country of Origin ‏ : ‎ India [ad_2]

[ellaguro]

hey! today is Bandcamp Friday, which means artists get 100% of the revenue share in sales on Bandcamp. it’s also the day i’ve put out a new EP - this is the soundtrack music i made for the Cis Penance project, an interactive collection of interviews representing the trans experience in the UK (organized by Zoyander Street, with graphics by June Hornby). enjoy!

[titleknown]

[The lack of support for avant-guarde artists] is frustrating partly because there is a history within consumer tech companies providing more holistic and powerful tools to artists - tools which often have now been laid dormant or actively suppressed because they don't fit in with the current "closed box"-style tech business philosophy. Hypercard was a programming tool for Apple computers in the late 80's and 90's. it was a bit like Twine in how it made programming accessible, except it was more visual and intuitive. it was also, to be honest, much more powerful than Twine. Hypercard was well integrated with the Mac, it was full-featured, and its interface was much less piecemeal and clunky than something like Twine. it was as if Apple actively had an interest in making it as simple as possible for its users to look inside the computer and learn something new about how they work. some games you might have played - like Myst, were made with the backbone of Hypercard. yet nothing like it has been well-supported or embraced since then. from an essay called "Why Hypercard Had to Die": 'HyperCard is an echo of a different world. One where the distinction between the “use” and “programming” of a computer has been weakened and awaits near-total erasure.  A world where the personal computer is a mind-amplifier, and not merely an expensive video telephone.  A world in which Apple’s walled garden aesthetic has no place. ...(When Steve Jobs came back to Apple)...He returned the company to its original vision: the personal computer as a consumer appliance, a black box enforcing a very traditional relationship between the vendor and the purchaser.'

Liz Ryerson, a 21st Century Digital Art Manifesto.

While I rant and rave about Ryerson’s more punching-down snobbish opinions, hell I did so just today, I will say that the parable of Hypercard is an important one; because how it shows how quickly tech is willing to pull up the fucking ladder on tools that help artists after they’ve gotten their use from them.

And, with @staff and @support‘s doing of such actions as “Best Stuff First” (HA) and the blacklisting of external links; and how that appears to be related to larger independent-artist-disempowering trends in tech, I think that we need to learn from this parable; and we need to fight the hell back.

And, if you’re a member of the tech industry working towards/complicit in these practices that fuck over artists I hope somebody breaks your legs in with a shovel.

You can find the essay at ellaguro.blogspot.com/2015/02/a-21st-century-digital-art-manifesto.html, which I keep in its unabridged form not as a direct link to see if Tumblr will not eat it, tho be warned it also contains some of the parts that’re bullshit about her work too...

[ariesandartemis]

if anyone’s got cool trans nerd blogs to follow, please lmk! particularly interested in theory, tech, gaming, art, and politics. 

Like, Liz Ryerson is probably the coolest person who talks about videogames, and JJE is an excellent poet, and I want to know people like Merritt Kopas and Alice Atlas and and and!

Anyways, you probably get the point. I want to see / be a part of the incredible output of this (community? loosely associated set of people in my brain and mine alone?)

[headspace-hotel]

Given I agree with you on this issue, I'm curious what you think is really going on with the perceptions of a mass-stagnation in people's media interaction habits, because it feels like there's a real frustration there just being expressed in the worst, most snobby ways. (1/2)

My hypothesis is it's at least in part a reaction to how independent/transgressive artists are struggling so hard (You see this a lot in the critiques by Liz Ryerson & Sam Keeper) and an anger at people supporting big media franchises/fanworks instead of said small artists rotting in poverty, and partially a reaction of blaming fandom culture for enabling the monopolies currently strangling art b/c consumer-activism-mindset in the face of government failure's warped us all. (2/2). To be clear, I think the way they've chosen to respond are maladaptive at best and cruel and ableist at worst, especially when using mediums without percieved aesthetics of respectability as a punching bag, but I think they do need to be addressed or the asshole brigade's gonna steer this conversation off a cliff. (3/2)

Mostly, I have problems with the idea that there is something inherently inferior about fanfiction as a medium. There's no reason why that would be true. It's just a medium.

As for the reason why people increasingly read fan-fiction rather than books? I would argue that the people who "only read fanfiction" probably wouldn't be reading books anyway, and blaming individuals for the death of art is stupid when we've known for a long time that a significant percentage of adults do not read at all.

Why don't they read? I'm an American, and at least in my home state of Kentucky, the answer is very likely that they can't.

According to this report, a whole 40% of adults in my state can read on only a basic level. Included in that 40% is the nearly 15% of adults that are virtually illiterate. Other reports from this past year have said that almost a third of kids in Kentucky schools have basically no reading skills.

This is not a whole hell of a lot better than the rest of the U.S. Many, many adults in poorer communities in the U.S. barely attain the ability to read past an elementary school level.

Fanfiction might actually be a net gain in terms of how much people read in total. We just don't know. Many students do come out of high school hating reading, and/or barely able to read, and comparatively with fanfiction it's hard to find out what kinds of books you might be into.

Like I was privileged in that I grew up being read to CONSTANTLY and I was able to retain those skills.

But kids in American high schools are forced to read stuff like Moby Dick or the Scarlet Letter, they don't learn jack shit, and then they're thrown to the wolves.

Okay. What would a world where people who didn't properly learn to read in school could easily pick up reading look like?

Here's what really grinds my gears about disdainful posts about fanfiction: The people saying that books should have tags like on ao3 are ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. Some of the basic things that you look for when finding a book to read are the following: the tone, the types of character dynamics, the themes and subjects, potentially disturbing or triggering content you want to avoid.

There. That's Ao3 tags, ya pretentious asshats.

Frankly, a tagging system for books coming into more frequent usage would help both authors and readers. A huge amount of negative reviews on Amazon and Goodreads come from people who were just misled about what the book was going to contain. They looked at the cover and thought the book looked like it was going to have action and adventure, but it was primarily court intrigue and slow-burn romance.

A lot of authors get fucked over when their books are given misleading covers or marketed to the wrong sub-group and readers get disappointed.

On that note: THERE IS NOTHING WRONG OR NEW ABOUT READING FORMULAIC PLOTS OVER AND OVER.

I would like to direct the Bitch-and-complainers to the romance and crime/thriller sections of the library, THE LARGEST PORTION OF BOOKS ADULTS READ I might add.

There's a little niche for sweet romances about Amish girls in sunbonnets, and for angsty romances about detectives falling for the edgy asshole with a heart of gold. There's a niche for romances about women falling in love with dragon shapeshifter dudes, cowboys, cops, vampires, billionaires, you name it, there's a whole ass list about it on Goodreads. Romance readers know at a glance whether they're holding something sweet and chaste or steamy and kinky af, whether the sexy hero is going to be an edgy asshole or a sweetie, whether the heroine is getting in some illicit action in between escapades as a detective or whatever or if she's being courted by a gentlemanly figure who hopes to make her his wife.

Horrifying, I know, the concept of people seeking out specific dynamics and tropes they like and reading them over and over again.

If you're into, like, SFF stuff, though? It is hard as fuck to find specific types of book you like and seek them out. I say this as someone who reads more SFF than almost anybody I know. It's lawless. You have to DELVE.

And icky stuff and weird kinks are still there, they just aren't tagged! Last year I encountered both a book containing horribly detailed mpreg and a book where the love interest licked a puddle of a random stranger's piss.

[innuendostudios]

Thoughts on The Witness

[no spoilers... this game would be nearly impossible to spoil in text]

Where do I even start?

I guess one thing to know about The Witness is that you can watch the famous 9-minute tracking shot from Nostalghia - where Oleg Yankovsky tries to walk a candle from one end of a drained pool to the other without extinguishing it - in its entirety. (I think it’s the entirety, I left before the clip was over; yeah, Jon, I get it.)

How do we interpret this? I haven’t watched Nostalghia, but I know that scene. Every film major knows that scene. Tony Zhou cited it in discussing lateral tracking shots, how they emphasize environment and create emotional distance from humans in the frame, and how Tarkovsky uses this to make the sequence lonely and arduous. Kyle Kallgren cited it in discussing how YouTube makes critique of certain types of art difficult, and Content ID essentially decides for us what film as a medium is even for.

Jon Blow plays the clip in full with no commentary - or, rather, the game itself is the commentary. There’s a sequence in Indie Game: The Movie where Jon Blow expresses some pain about how his game Braid was received, how he felt no one who played it ever really understood everything he was trying to say with it. That feeling might be ameliorated if he weren’t such a constituionally obtuse motherfucker.

Perhaps the scene is meant to draw parallels between Yankovsky’s dedication to a task that is simple yet difficult and the game’s puzzles, built, as they are, around complexity-through-simplicity. Except, Yankovsky’s Andrei has a personal investment carrying this candle, one Tarkovsky has spent the entire film setting up. I was about five hours into The Witness when I found this clip - more than twice the duration of Nostalghia - and I still didn’t know why I was solving the game’s puzzles or what they were trying to communicate.

Perhaps the scene is meant to draw parallels between the patience it encourages in its audience and the calm, meditative mode all The Witness’ allusions to Buddhism are seemingly on about, to give yourself over to the time investment the game demands of you. Except, Nostalghia asks you to spend nine minutes thinking about one thing; zen Buddhism encourages you to think of nothing; The Witness asks you to spend between fifteen and forty hours thinking about a zillion things. It is not a game about clearing your mind, it’s about filling your mind up. There is little continuity between the thoughtless peace of meditation or Yankovsky’s emotional collapse and the game’s intended “aha” moments.

But the ambiguity, the contextlessness of the scene’s inclusion, means you can’t be sure whether it’s contradictory. If we assume it’s about dedication, and we find a flaw in that worldview, maybe the problem is that we didn’t assume it was about meditation. And vice versa. If it fails to communicate, maybe the problem is us.

The only thing this scene communicates for sure is that Jon Blow wants me to know he watches Tarkovsky.

Jon Blow wants you to trust he knows what he’s doing. That the game is saying something. He also never, ever wants to tell you what it is. (If he could just tell you, he wouldn’t have spent eight years making it into a game, I suppose.) But this operates on completely opposite rules to the puzzles. Puzzles in The Witness are maze-drawing panels with increasing numbers of rules, all conveying their rules nonverbally, through gameplay. You see a symbol you don’t recognize, or a shape you don’t know how to draw, and you try things out, you make assumptions, you fail repeatedly, and then something works, the panel lights up, and you know you got it right. Now you understand what the symbol means.

The theming doesn’t work that way. Whatever theory you have as to what the game’s about, there will be no moment of clarification. Blow has an incredible talent, in fact, for constructing imagery that is hilariously blunt yet still ambiguous. As with Braid, where he crammed a straightforward narrative about memory and regret with allusions to quantum physics and the atomic bomb, The Witness references Einstein, the Buddha, Richard Feynman, romantic poetry, tech culture, game design, and - most of all - itself.

I realize I’m dancing around the subject here, because what the gameplay is (or isn’t) in service of is far easier to talk about than the gameplay itself. The Witness is a big island full of touch screens where you draw lines on grids. That’s it. The island is dense with structures and biomes, impossibly having a desert, a swamp, and three different kinds of forest which appear to be in four different seasons. What it doesn’t have is any reason why you’re there or a justification for solving ~600 line-drawing puzzles other than because Jon Blow wants you to. I was wrong in my video from 2015 to call The Witness narrative-based; the game contains narrative but it is not a narrative game. The island is very pretty, meticulously crafted, and not trying in the slightest to look like a real place. It is Myst minus everything people like about Myst.

Absent a reason for my character - if I’m even playing a “character” - to solve the puzzles, why am I, the player, solving them? The short answer is, “Because they’re there. You knew what you were buying. You solve the puzzles because it’s a puzzle game, do I gotta draw you a diagram?” (No, you need me to draw 600 diagrams.) That is unsatisfactory because the island is clearly more than an elaborate menu system.

Do I solve them because they’re interesting? I mean, they’re not bad, if you’re into Sudoku or, like... cereal boxes. In and of themselves, they’re not my cuppa. People told me about a repeated sense of epiphany the game provoked for them, but that’s not the way I experienced it. Every puzzle is so carefully tutorialized that I never felt I was making an intuitive leap. There is no lateral thinking in The Witness, it is strictly longitudinal. You get a row of puzzle panels, and you take them one by one (you are, in fact, prevented from jumping ahead), each one building on what it taught you. And they get hard, certainly, but each is the logical progression of the one before. And each is a marvel of nonverbal communication, but that’s more Jon being clever than it is me. This is not to judge people who did get a feeling of discovery; one person’s “aha” moment is another’s “yeah, Jon, I get it.”

(Aside: I did get a proper “aha” moment when I came to a panel that could be solved two ways. It controlled a moving platform; draw one line, the platform moves right, draw the other and it moves left. And I thought, “Huh, I guess I get it, but those shapes seem kind of arbitrary.” But then, while it was moving, I realized the platform itself mirrored what I had drawn; the two designs were what shape the platform would take when connected with each endpoint! And I went “oh fuck, oh fuck, that’s clever, that‘s really clever.” My first epiphany. It was the most Myst-like the game got, it was clearly not the kind of experience Jon Blow was interested in recreating much, and it took place 7 hours in.)

Do I solve them because I’m compelled? In the first play sessions, I asked myself several times, “Do I even like this?” The game is often tedious and frustrating and I regularly muttered “fuck off, Jon.” But I kept playing. I got annoyed when people interrupted me. I got a hideous case of Tetris effect. They’re not the kind of puzzles you can spend the day thinking through, like you would with Myst or Riven; they’re too abstract to visualize without them right in front of you. And the world is pretty but it’s not a place I wish I could visit, like I would with, again, Myst or Riven. But I kept going back. I solved puzzles less because I found pleasure in finishing them than I found displeasure in them being unfinished. Jon Blow has given talks on how game design focused on being “addictive” is basically evil - his word, not mine. And yet... it felt more like I was playing his game because I was hooked than because I was enjoying myself.

Do I solve them because I trust Jon Blow? Because I believe this will all amount to something? Jon certainly expects me to trust him. The game blares PROFUNDITY AHEAD constantly. (I remind you it quotes the Buddha.) But, in the years since Braid, I have grown less impressed with Jon Blow’s “art game genius” shtick. One fun bit about playing The Witness so late is finally reading all the discourse, and, well before finishing the game, I had read the thoughts of Andrew Plotkin, and Liz Ryerson, and Andi McClure - all of whom are brilliant - so I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting into. What’s surprised me is, having gotten to the first ending - not the secret ending - what the game is up to still isn’t clear. There are enough allusions to heady ideas that you can infer some stuff, but the default ending - while pretty enough - adds nothing and reveals nothing. And getting the True Ending means completing the In the Hall of the Mountain King section, something many will never find and precious few will ever complete. (Debating whether I’m going to even try.) If Jon Blow wants you to trust that he’s going somewhere with this, he makes you wait a long time before finding out if it’s worth it. [EDIT: turns out the secret ending comes after a different set of obscure puzzles than Hall of the Mountain King.]

Which leads me back to my original conclusion: I am solving the puzzles because Jon Blow told me to.

I suspect the arc Jon wants is for me to begin solving puzzles because I want to know what they’re in service of, what point Jon is trying to make, and then spend so long on them that I forget about the destination and just wrap myself up in the work, and, after dozens of hours on the hardest of the hard puzzles, Jon will finally reveal that the point he was making was about the labor I have just done. That he couldn’t tell me what it was for until I’d already done it. That the labor was its own reward. And how much you like The Witness is going to depend on whether or not you feel ripped off.

The overall impression The Witness left me with was less of meditation than discipline. (I have joked that playing The Witness feels like being in a D/s relationship with Jon Blow and not knowing the safe word.) Jon presents a simple concept and then expects you to solve every. single. permutation. of that concept. You do the work to find out what it’s about, and then what it’s about is the work. That game is about itself. The subject of The Witness is solving The Witness. It’s about purity of design, about simplicity, about slowly mastering a set of skills. (That these skills are neither inherently pleasurable to perform nor applicable in any other context seems not to matter; the point is, you learned them.) It’s hard not to read a game fixated on the beauty of its own design as all kinds of smug.

I allowed myself to be spoiled on the True Ending, and it seems, in the eleventh hour, if you draw lines til your fingers bleed, the game makes room for self-critique, questioning whether all this dedication to design actually is, in any way, meaningful or useful to us. Which, just a little bit, smacks of an artist spending two years making a sculpture of himself, chiseled to make him look a perfect Olympian beauty, only to label it “EGOISM.” Ooo. Make you think.

I suspect, in the end, I played it to (partial) completion because I was curious. I didn’t necessarily buy Jon Blow’s hype, but his hype is intriguing. As a portrait of a certain mindset, a monomaniacal obsession with design for design’s sake, the folk-religion of salvation through technology, and the critique of same, it is fascinating. I know people - smart people - who genuinely love this game, and, if the above is any indication, I clearly love talking about it. I have no regrets.

But, word of advice: if you don’t a) love the puzzles, or b) love the discourse, just walk away. Everything will be fine.

[worklabournewsresearch]

Manufactured Landscapes: Edward Burtynsky Donates Archives to Ryerson University

“Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky is donating his archives to his old school, including even his student assignments. The Ryerson Image Centre announced Tuesday that the celebrated photographer is making a multiyear gift to the institution where he began his career in the 1970s, studying at the School of Image Arts at what is now Ryerson University. The gift will be made in several chronological parcels. The first part features 142 images made between 1976 and 1989, most not represented in public collections. These include early photographs of landscapes and city scenes submitted to his Ryerson photography instructors before Burtynsky achieved renown as a photographer of large-scale industrial landscapes. Later photographs of architecture and manufacturing include this image Holland Marsh, Ontario from the series Packing. “

The Globe and Mail, November 23, 2020: “Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky to donate archives to Ryerson University,” by Kate Taylor

University of Toronto community can watch the video Manufactured Landscapes via the National Film Board here

TedTalk, 2005: My WIsh: Manufactured Landscapes and Green Education (Video 33min. 55 sec.)  

TedBlog, October 31, 2006: “Gallery: Edward Burtynsky’s extraordinary images of manufactured landscapes,” posted by Liz Jacobs 

 Edward Burtynsky website: photographs     

[halfwaythroughmonday]

a lot of people who have been left out by current neoliberal narratives have fallen into a endless pit of irony, never to return irony is the easiest refuge when you have no other outlets for process your paralyzation but have enough privilege to still sort of function irony is the religion of choice in an intensely privatized, isolated society for those lacking any vocabulary for collective struggle irony poisoning happens when the hope for having a voice and ability to affect change is gone but culture keeps functioning as if it's there

Liz Ryerson

These years will affect us forever, friends.

[jackhealybct]

Politics and Identity, but in a fun way

Political Statements Censorship While censorship has its place in protecting young children from gratuitous violence and explicit sexual displays, I think that it is a dangerous game to be playing to be censoring play. Yes, there are still recovering wounds from tragedies like World War II, and fresh wounds from acts of violence like 911, and respect should always be a factor in discourse concerning these kinds of events, I don’t believe, however, that there should be an enforced prevention of these kinds of media being produced. An insensitive game that doesn’t have its place should not be removed by a government or a bill, but rather removed by peoples aversion to engaging with it. Play should be free.

I can understand, on the other hand, the shock and horror that might come with seeing something horrific made into a game, and I think the abstraction of a tragedy into a cheerful enough game is a minefield that lots of thought and time and discussion should be put into before release. Commentary The Free Culture Game is an interesting little game about trying to keep creative ideas free and available to redistribute in a free market, and out of the hands of copyright, so as to avoid everyone becoming passive consumers. The gameplay has you control a cursor that guides new ideas around the creative commons, while the “Vectorialist” tries to consume the ideas by sucking them into the market. The ideas float away from your cursor when it gets close, so it becomes something along the lines of trying to herd cats away from a heater. The frustration of trying to keep creative ideas going around while keeping it away from being commercialised very much reflects the same in the modern world, especially topically now that copyright is being further enforced such as in the EU. The way the game feels to play very much reflects that feeling that while creative ideas are somewhat random and unwieldy, they have a common ground in wanting to avoid being sucked into the market to just become a product made for profit.

Problem Attic, and the problems in my attic. Problem Attic is a fascinating little game that breathes frustration, symbolism, and the telling of a deeply personal story. Liz Ryerson has clearly set out to tell us about a journey, but not just to lay it out before us, to have us experience almost first hand what it felt like. Despite this, I also think that there is very much something personal to each player to be taken away from this, that may not become relevant until discovering the intended commentary on gender within the crosses and dots. Ryerson communicated a specific story and a non-specific one at the same time, and I think that may have been very much by design. When I played Problem Attic I didn’t get very far, thinking I’d reached the end before I had, however, I had a personal insight into the game that I discovered an extra layer to when I discovered the intention of the symbol of the crosses. In one of the early levels you are able to get up on moving platforms, or you can stand on the cross to have it lift you to the top, a sort of “exploitation” of the mechanics of the crosses. One issue I had with this was my personal aversion to getting help in games, or to not overcoming the challenge set by my own personal perseverance. I felt nearly disgusted or disappointed with myself for picking the easy way. However, upon discovering the cross was meant to symbolise masculinity this was compounded even further. One of the glaring traits of masculinity is not wanting to receive help or feeling disappointed when you can’t do something yourself, and so this I felt was heavily reflected in myself with that level.

[tonkislim]

Examples of questions for loaded questions game

I still enjoyed the game a lot more than Celeste, but I’m not seeing any of the creative expression that you mentioned. I didn’t find many scenarios where there was an option to choose between inks. It’s very much a pure execution test like Celeste. I also think it does a better job setting up its fiction compared to Celeste (do they ever explain why Madeline can air-dash?).īut I don’t really see much space for creativity in its level design. The game is a lot less strict in punishment, and it just doesn’t demand tight timing like other games in its subgenre (the physics might be a bit too loose in some cases). I picked it up due to what you’ve written about it. Maybe OReilly’s whimsical approach is funny to some people, but as with Foddy and Fox, his humor doesn’t reveal any wisdom or truth.Īnthony Navarro: How is Splasher any different from other linear platformers? This lack of philosophical rigor complements the game’s absurd vision of trees, animals, rocks, and other things. OReilly never dares to directly question Watts’ sayings. His last game, Everything (see my review here), uncritically employs audio of philosopher Alan Watts. But he is very much like Foddy and Fox when it comes to trying to prove his cleverness. Games like Fallout also don’t ask you patronizing questions like “Is killing things really necessary?”ĭavid OReilly is different than Foddy and Fox in that he emphasizes the experiences of random things rather than obstacles. However, other games, such as the Fallout series, have allowed audiences to see the ramifications of their decisions to kill or not kill, and they don’t ask you to play them multiple times to experience the consequences. Fox seems to believe this binary option lends his game a moral dimension that we should care about, and if you play the game more than once (I didn’t), you can see how killing or not killing might affect the game’s world. The only significant difference (beyond Undertale’s amateurish use of bullet-avoidance action) is that you can either kill or not kill enemies during battle. Toby Fox’s Undertale (which I reviewed here) is another game that wants you to think its obstacles are different, yet Undertale is as repetitive as any turn-based RPG. Foddy should take note of games that challenge players to think about context and meaning rather than practice mechanics, such as Liz Ryerson’s Problem Attic and Will O’Neill’s Little Red Lie. So if you want a unique experience with obstacles in games, Foddy isn’t the answer. At one point, he said obstacles in games are largely “fake,” and one of his reasons was that you can overcome most obstacles “just by spending enough time.” But how is this not true for Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy or its major influence Sexy Hiking? You have to spend enough time, or practice, to advance in either of these games. In my review of Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, I highlighted some of Foddy’s in-game comments on difficulty. To expand a bit more on Foddy, let’s take a closer look at how he views difficulty in video games. Jed Pressgrove: I wrote that line because these independent developers would like to think they’re above the big-budget norm and that they have something clever to say, but in reality, their commentary is superficial and insufferable. In your review, why did you say, “If there’s anything the indie gaming world needs to get over, it’s these guys”? It was great, but I am curious about your complete opinion of game developers like Bennett Foddy, Toby Fox, and David OReilly. Recently, I read your review of Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy. Questions will be edited for clarity.Ĭesar Marquez: Hi Jed. If you have a question you would like to submit, please email it to or tweet it to Questions can cover anything closely or tangentially related to video games or art, including but not limited to criticism, culture, and politics. Loaded Questions is a new weekly feature at Game Bias.

[orendarecords]

Trio of Veteran Improvisers, PraXmitH, releases "Comfort in Danger" featuring guitarist Stan Smith, bassist/producer Steve Perakis, and drummer Breeze Smith

PRAXMITH is a coeval of three musicians offering a praxis of improvisation.

Although the trio have performed and recorded together in various configurations of ensembles, crossing several genres of musical styles over many years, they have performed together only once as a trio, in January of 2020. This was the catalyst that began the excited recipe for the descent into Steve's studio to begin the process of creating the 5 journeys on this, their first release in the current trio configuration.

As a guitarist Stan Smith was a member of the Moacir Santos band in Los Angeles, and as a band leader in Columbus and regionally, has accompanied artists such as David Amram, David Ornette Cherry, Ali Ryerson and Mark Vinci. As a composer he has received Fellowship Awards from the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council. His compositions have been performed internationally and recorded by the Columbus Jazz Orchestra, Michael Cox, The Keith Henson Octet, The Afro Rican Ensemble, Nova Madrugada and Spectrum. His book Jazz Harmony on the Guitar; A Linear/Structural Approach is published by Hal Leonard. He is an associate professor of music in the Conservatory of Music at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio where he has been the head of the jazz/contemporary guitar curriculum since 1978.

Breeze Smith played and toured in bands at an early age, in Ohio and Indiana, recording first in 1966. His growing interest in experimental and improvised music and his ever-expanding and percussive repertoire led him to incorporate playable metal sound sculptures into his drum / percussion universe.  His solo performances led to commissions for sound sculptures, including a commision by Stephen Wright. Some of his solo recordings being used in a documentary film.He has lived, performed and recorded in Ohio, California, Denmark and beyond, with artists such as David Ornette Cherry, Justo Amario, Ralph Buzzy Jones, Don Littleton, Roberto Miranda, Neneh Cherry, Rod Poole, Hannibal Lakumba, Dianne MacIntyre, Roger Hines, Dwight Trible, Trevor Ware, John Beasley, Billy Childs, Charles Owen, Maggie Brown, Eric Barber, Tony Green, Eddie Ray & Co, Willie Pooch Blues Band, duos with his wife, dancer / vocalist Cheryl Banks-Smith and more. 

Steve Perakis plays mostly basses, but his interest in many sounds and musics brought him to guitar, drums and keyboards, composing, arranging, being a bandleader and recording engineer. Performing and recording Avant Garde, Blues, Country, Experimental, Funk, Jazz, Latin, Polka, Pop, Rock, Soul, Surf and just about anything in between, including composing for Modern Dance. He has performed with Tito Puente Jr, The Benny Goodman Orchestra featuring Henry Cuesta, Louis Bellson, The Guy Lombardo Band, Eddie Clearwater, Johnny Vidacovich, former Sun Ra Arkestra member Cheryl Banks-Smith, Jerome Dillon - pre N.I.N., George Bedard, Mark Braun, Todd Hepburn, Carl Sonny Leyland, Liz Pennock and Dr Blues, Richard Lopez, The Sean Carney Band and a few hundred others. He has performed in the Midwest, Eastern and Southern US, as well as Europe, Thailand and Columbia.

[fffartonceaweek]

Podcasts Podcasts Podcasts

click on the podcast title to play/redirect

Citations Needed Podcast  

(Probably the best left politics podcast)

The Discourse    TIED TO THE TRACKS  

(about the Biden Dilemma)  Super smart, funny - Awesome ! 

Struggle Session246 - Every President Was Racist w/ !!! Margaret Kimberley !!! 

Pod Damn America  

From Smell: The Joe Biden Story      (Oh boy!!!)

FOFOPFOFOP 296- Everything is Fucked  

Here’s your future ...

The Black Podcast With Wine Cellar Media

If you can donate to only one podcast, this is the one. 

They ( Phoenix Calida & William J Jackson) are great, smart and funny -  and actually need the money .( rhymes ! )

DEATH // SENTENCE  

Lefty pop culture/ politics podcast):

(genre)fiction, movies,music,  anime/manga, vid games + most importantly EXTREME METAL !!!

Why You Mad Pod   

Leftist Latino philosophy podcast about art, standup comedy and other things that make us mad.

(Best newer lefty podcast) - smart & funny 

The Dollop  

Especially the episodes about Bush, Reagan & John McCain 

beep beep lettuce

“about huffin leef and political shrieking “ 

The Blood Zone  

a podcast about cult art and niche culture.

(Great new podcast hosted by Liz Ryerson ) 

The West Wing Thing   

About the liberal brain poison that is Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing ...

The Wonder Of It All

A Podcast About Everything ( (Pop)Culture ) 

  Kiss Your Ass Good-Bye  also  Sean McTiernan

Old time (public domain) suspense radio plays (intro & play) . 

More?

Reply Guys Podcast 

TRASHFUTURE

The Antifada

Trillbilly Worker's Party

Ballin' Out SUPER

dumb bitch media

Street Fight Radio 

Podside Picnic

Travis Bickle On The Riviera /  Comic Books Are Burning In Hell

And please stop listening, or at least paying/supporting nerdy “shitlib-slumber party “ podcast with bad /or no politics .

[ellaguro]

my new album LP ZERO - out NOW!

my new album LP ZERO, a pseudo-narrative of melodic experimental electronic music, is out NOW

https://ellaguro.bandcamp.com/album/lp-zero

some influences: Aphex Twin, Björk, The Knife, Burial, obscure videogame soundtracks

this is an extended version of my earlier released EP YEAR ZERO, presented in its ideal and final form. please share on here & twitter: https://twitter.com/ellaguro/status/913674811385069568

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ellaguro/posts/1703188103025069

and elsewhere!

YT streaming link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H82g2Yxm9ZY

also subscribers to my Patreon (www.patreon.com/ellaguro) will get a free download code of this album to show my appreciation for their support!

i’m really excited for everyone to hear this now. i’m so proud of all of this material and i hope you will be too! please share far and wide!