#when i release collections/zines and start uploading a fan comic and games you have to be real nice to me okay

[venterry]

genuinely i dont even care that im not working on an original project, usually for all these years i would rather spend my time on one of my own worlds but ive been having so much fun with sonic for like a Year now and its only going up

im actually serious about these fan works and loving every second of it, sorry to everyone whos looking for other stuff this is the only thing youre gonna get from me this next half decade minimum lol

[myfriendpokey]

zine thoughts pt 2

where do you sell videogames? zine fairs, children's book stores, used record marts, from the trunk of a car like rudy ray moore, on etsy or on craiglist, with flyers on the wall of the local chip shop or library. through awkwardly hammered-together handmade electronic systems or the reverse, turning your game into a jumbled set of paper text and graphical fragments which can be sold in boardgame stores as some kind of reconstruct-the-narrative puzzle. you could make one-off bespoke games or game simulacra for movies that want to depict some kind of videogame being played onscreen without having to go through the licensing rights. you could ghost-develop games for wealthy people to put their names on ("american mcgee presents my life with princess diana by donald duck"). you could develop training games for the military-industrial complex, ha ha ha ha. you could get funded by the CIA to ensure the medium of videogames remains sufficiently arty and rehabilitated to function as propaganda for capitalism... i mean we already know they were involved with the paris review and iowa writer's workshop and all that jazz so they gotta have least a couple people on the payroll already, right, and we will all be treated to some very entertaining revelations following the inevitable freedom of information act request 15 years down the line. you could try connecting with the little self-contained fan communities for things like touhou, fnaf, undertale, m-minecraft, like those renaissance artists who had to drop their patron's face in the background of some religious scene except in this case it would be one of the homestuck guys. you could make "trainers" for more popular games, or demos that could show how they "feel" without a $60 investment. you could sell small games as assets for larger ones that want to have some kind of in-universe  playable arcade system without having to invent a whole new game from scratch. you could just make extremely specific forms of pornography, maybe not the worst option even, just make sure the very artistic sequences of the protagonist remembering his dead wife are broken up every now and then with scenes of him unhinging his jaw to swallow and slowly digest another, smaller sad games protagonist whole (with rumble function for controllers!!!). you could make games for all the people who are still on windows xp or earlier or have some kind of arcane video card setup that prevents them playing anything other than that one preinstalled pinball game. you could try selling them at street vendors. you could try learning another language and making games for non-anglophones that don't sound like an english-written game that was localised without much thought after the fact.   you could make games for kids in the hopes that they sexually imprint on them enough to support your erotic oil paintings of the characters 10 years later, just like nintendo. you could make an extremely interesting and thoughtful videogame and then offer not to release it if the donation threshold is met, thus sparing people the emotional obligation of having yet another thing on their should-play-this-eventually list. you could develop games with some bewildering system of in-game and real-world currency interactions and then sell it to the mob as a way to launder money. you could make videogames that robots record themselves playing to upload en masse which are then watched by other robots as part of some weird, ungraspably abstract SEO economy, or better yet make robots to make the videogames as well. you could make virtual cemetary plots either private (downloadable exe) or public (hosted on the server) with their own customisable mood-themes and weather settings (dark, stormy, remember-you-will-die; sunny, quiet, circle-of-life etc). you could make prosperity orbs. you could make games for office workers or call center staff which resemble excel documents or phone system frontends from a distance. you could make games which really ARE excel files, some dense collection of interlocking hidden formulas that change to display text and ascii characters as you tab your way through. you could probably talk your way into "adapting" any of those old IPs that still float around long after anyone stopped having any particular thought or feeling about them at all, like the flintstones or ziggy or something, maybe do like those 1960s superhero cartoons where they just filmed panels from the comics - just break a 2d flintstones cartoon into constituent elements and have them hover around in a little cutout diorama that you fly thru, possibly explained in-universe as representing the 4-d vision of the great gazoo. you could make games that play themselves, for the depressed. you could become a ghastly serial m**derer where after each crime you upload a new game to itchio which will reveal the  name of your next victim, and costs only $9.99, and of course everyone buys and plays it because the police have put up a reward for solving the crime because they can't get past the dinosaur on level three, and all seems lost until some plucky young computer student who found the game on a friend's hard drive manages to solve the riddle hidden within the game's structure, following the clues, to an old castle, she knocks on the door, it's opened by, yes, it's will wright, wearing a wizard outfit, who tells her that by dint of solving all the puzzles she is now invited to join that mysterious organization known as "The Elect" which is assembled from the finest minds in all game design with a view to secretly controlling the world economy (via "werewolf blood", somehow), that she need only complete the ceremony by sacrificing one untutored soul, he holds out an ornate knife, she hesitates........

the question is where to sell videogames rather than how because for the most part we already know how - there are a million more or less instructive articles out there about hitting up conventions or talking to the press, and it's not that they're wrong, exactly, more that they expect to be applied in an environment that no longer exists. but what should preface and qualify the idea of sheer volume swamping the indie games market is that, outside of a few small pockets, there never really was an "indie games market" to begin with - indie games drew and mostly still draw on the existing videogames market, rather than constituting a new one. it's telling that the glory days of indie games were just the ones where they were able to draw upon some of the same privileges larger titles already had in the ability to access that same audience - being frontpaged by steam, say, or making it onto a comparatively closed console platform, or generating earnest thinkpieces... you could say that they were tapping into structures the industry had already built but had not yet occupied to full capacity.

of course there are exceptions and various efforts to set up new economies for small weird interactive things (like patreon, or game bundles), and some efforts to reach outside the existing games audience likely were successful - but when we think of indie games "functioning" economically, whether that means supporting a small team, a single person, or just hitting minimum wage per hours spent, i believe we're mostly still talking about ones which are built around the existing games economy. which is fine, but i think it's also intrinsically precarious in ways which maybe get glossed over in discussions of the "indiepocalypse" - are all those new steam releases really causing a problem or are they just exacerbating a structural limitation which was already always there, a reliance within the indie game economy on a certain lucky-few-ism which just became grossly more noticeable the more disproportionate it got?

of course it's easier to be dismissive after the fact, and my fantasy about "where" to sell videogames is partly a fantasy of them having a location to begin with - of attaining something of the grounded and immutable appearance of the non-digital, as though brick and mortar stores  don't have a relationship to the likes of amazon as basically precarious as any online storefront. and there are also real and obvious reasons why the various videogame audiences all tend to clump together - similarities in terms of the hardware required, the inputs allowed, of visual and cultural reference points, to say nothing of the personal / professional histories of the people involved in each. we are all contained within "the medium"...

so maybe it's also a fantasy of starting to pick apart that conception of the medium. i think small game developers already have more in common with artists or musicians working on the fringes of their respective industries than they do with even moderately successful teams within the same format, and use similar language, engage in similar forms of practice - particularly as near everything  comes increasingly mediated by the digital these days. i think they already ARE working in similar spaces to some extent, whether it's social media sites or digital storefronts or meatspace stores pushed by necessity not to specialise. and without wanting to be paranoid (or moreso than the CIA thing, at least) i think we should be cautious of the way a certain focus on mediumicity can obscure these overlaps.  a "new medium" is one which inherently pushes against the image of one as grouded ahistorically in some eternal human verity or other (where each medium supposedly embodies some different mode of perception / medieval humour / ninja turtle etc) - it is to see firsthand the way in which supposedly eternal, neutral qualities are materially constructed, which includes seeing forms of social organisation and usage become mystified into extrahuman conditions.  and given their basis in technology that includes drawing from wider trends in the use of that technology as a whole - which specifically, in tech circles, can mean more and more tightly interlocking systems of proprietary knowledge and speculative capital, as well as "new mediums" constructed so as to be inseperable from some storefront, website or monitoring technology. i don't think anybody will necessarily break even taking their games to a zine fair (not that they're breaking even now). but i do feel like trying to build networks across those medium boundaries could be more valuable in the effort to build some sustainable environment for these things than any amount of reform within the house that tech built.

[PS: it occurs to me that you could plausibly argue that the very bagginess of medium-centric formulations is what makes them valuable, in forcing many different groups to butt against each other on one platform rather than just disperse into echo chambers. but i think exactly the reverse is the case: nobody really engages with each other's work in artgames because the stakes are simultaneously too small and too large. they're too small in that however much i might be picky about another person's work - and i think it's this vague pickiness or sense of not-quite-right-ness that drives the most searching critiques - it still feels pointless to pursue that instead of the glaring, omnipresent faults of the big AAA players, which means more complaining about far cry for all eternity. and they're too large in that most small game development is so precarious that it's not really worth the risk of knocking someone out of the circle over penny-ante shit. only with both economic security and broad similarity of outlook can a truly vital,  human culture of spiteful cattiness begin... our day will come]

(image credits: Eco Fighter, World Heroes 2 ,The Space Adventure, Nancy)