Somehow I learned that the world does not only have startups and funding options and entrepreneurs and business mentors and bizdevs... but that Arts Grants exist, that even in the absence of a Fully Automated Luxury Communist society the government* will at least pay people ("artists") to explore weird shit - not because it's good shit, but just because (???).

(*The Canadian government has Arts Grants. I barely know about this, and I know nothing about other countries. But I'm hopeful about the future - that these types of things will become more mainstream here and elsewhere in the world. If nothing else it is inspiring to me that there are people who exist who care about making this stuff happen.)

To be honest it's still really hard to wrap my head around the concept that money doesn't solely exist to... I don't know, make more money? Arts Funding makes no sense at all to the capitalist mind, I guess.

I've been poisoned, but I'm getting better.

I'm making myself get better.

Friends are helping.

I started to realize that I had to let go of this fantasy where videogames were wrapped up in the meaning of money. What else could they be wrapped up in, instead? We started writing the letterclub; I started Paradise; I'm still waiting for my library hold on Mutual Aid to come through so I can actually read it (but I daydreamt, in the meantime, about how making art and appreciating art might be a form of mutual aid - we all want to listen and be listened to)... [UPDATE: I read Mutual Aid]

Oh, and I started and stopped a Patreon over the course of three years. It felt weirdly transactional, because I made it weirdly transactional, because my evaluation of what made games valuable had been wrapped up in this transactional commercial videogames industry. I'm planning to start it up again on a strictly tip jar basis, once I really figure out I'm committed to this "free art" thing.

It all began to unravel, slowly, over years.

The INDIEPOCALYPSE, then the miserable monetization discourse followed and never let up: Here is what you have to do to make money with your "indie game," and if you're not prioritizing that then you're a fucking idiot.

The shockwaves of "You should charge for your work, you're worth it"

My experience with the Gloam Collective (we really tried) and Ontario Creates and engaging with the industry at large. Steam. The Humble Bundle.

Microtransactions. Addictive games. Algorithms.

NFTs pushed it all over the tipping point: digital art is worth nothing if it doesn't have resale value. Ouch.

NFTs. Fucking NFTs. I think they broke me.

When I was very young, my dad introduced me to computer programming and computer games and the internet. I grew up with burned CDs and emulators and ROMs and a high-speed connection. Cave Story and A Link To The Past were not different (free game vs commercial game). Pretty much every piece of software was. It barely occurred to me that there could be such a vast gulf between a free game and a commercial first-party Nintendo game when they were both so full of fun and love, they both belonged to the same art form.

They were peers.

The first console I ever owned was the Nintendo GameCube. It was an interactive museum that lived in our basement, and all we had to do was buy the games as they came out. Majora's Mask and Beyond Good & Evil were incredible adventures. Animal Crossing was a fucking revelation. Great games couldn't come out fast enough. I wanted to be a part of this world.
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I never opened a childhood lemonade stand, but when I was in grade 5, I made this game called Ghost Hunter in Game Maker and I had thoughts of finishing it and selling it on floppy disks to my friends. (I recreated Ghost Hunter to the best of my memory in Godot. It's not good, but if you want a hit of 2001-era Game Maker nostalgia, you can dig it up on my itch page.) Even back then, it was about money. I didn't want the money, I wanted what it represented: legitimacy.
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In 2010, Newgrounds sponsored ​Fishbane. They gave me a thousand dollars, and I got the front page treatment and everything. It blew my mind. I kept making games and people kept noticing them. In 2013, Starseed Pilgrim was nominated for a couple IGF awards, I released it on Steam, I made a HUNDRED thousand dollars, and it felt like I got the front page treatment a hundred times over, too. Everybody wanted to talk about me and my game. I got what I had always wanted: LEGITIMACY.

QuoteIf you find that you start a number of stories or pieces that you don't ever bother finishing, that you lose interest or faith in them along the way, it may be that there is nothing at their center about which you care passionately. [...The core, ethical concepts which you most passionately believe to be true or right] probably feel like givens, like no one ever had to make up, that have been true through all cultures and for all time. [...] the truth doesn't come out in bumper stickers. [...] Your whole piece is the truth, not just one shining epigrammatic moment in it.

QuoteHere is one sentence by Gary Snyder:

Ripples on the surface of water--
were silver salmon passing under--different
from the ripples caused by breezes

Those words, less than twenty of them, makes ripples clear and bright, distinct again.

QuoteTo be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass--seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colorectal theology, offering hope to no one.

QuoteShort Assignments

[..]Often when you sit down to write, what you have in mind is an autobiographical novel about your childhood, or a play about the immigrant experience, or a history of --oh, say--say women. But this is like trying to scale a glacier. [The way I deal with this is that I panic and panic and panic because of the weighty impossibility of the task... until] I finally notice the one-inch picture frame that I put on my desk to remind me of short assignments. // It reminds me that all I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame.

[..] E. L. Doctorow once said that "writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you.

Turned out OK with all of the above actually. Also, with chicken stock from store-bought salt-filled bouillon, don't need the soy sauce.

Whisk 1 egg
Add 1/2 cup chicken stock (preferably made with Chinese Knorr powder-- it's different)
Steam for 15 (?) minutes.

* How long to steam for? Is 15 too much, too little? I think it might be too much
* Remember to cook in our small glass cups, not the small glass bowls. It turns out better; I think the smaller mouth means it catches less water and gets less watered-down.

Add seasonings. Usually: a bit of soy sauce, a bit of sesame oil, a sprinkling of roasted sesame seeds

"Failure requires the possibility of success"

In the past I've tried to avoid the pain of failure by creating intentional failures, intentional glitches. This is doomed to fail. (Fail at failing... hmm)

Some rough notes from an unsent email:

-Appreciating glitches is about seeing something work the way it's not supposed to work; the key is that it does suggest a way it was "supposed" to work. Glitches don't exist in a vacuum, they are failures, which means they tell you what success was supposed to look like, and there's a lot of room there to suggest not just how normal things might glitch, but also how fantastical things might glitch.

-Rather than fabricate glitches out of nothing, make a genuine attempt to be successful, but embrace glitches and failure in your own processes, your own tools. Game jams are the perfect opportunity to do this -- to let go of perfection (since you have very limited time) and share your risky attempts and beautiful failures with others.

-To release something with a real glitch takes a bit of courage, a willingness to be vulnerable. Something about how when engaging with people's work that contains glitches and failures, be kind and generous. Choosing to appreciate a glitch, rather than exploit it for gain or make fun of it, is an act of empathy. (which does not need to be extended to all glitches in all contexts! but it's nice to be empathetic to each other's glitches here)

-I have a few images of real-world glitches I've loved (some are glitchy screen displays, but one is like a malformed button - like a malformed clothes button) and I'll go on about what I think they expose about the underlying systems & processes that formed them.

-A lot of the game mechanics that exist in my games are the result of prototyping which feels a lot like discovering things that were... mistakes, errors. Intentionally sowing a little chaos in order to produce interesting failures. I could get into "Failing Upward" sort of at the end to show how I've personally folded glitches/failures into functional pieces in my body of work? I could talk about this for probably too long but I don't want to overdo it.

I've been invited to give a keynote for the Vector Festival Game & Hardware Jam! This year's theme is really exciting to me: