Death to Realism! 005
Death to Realism! 005
Hello! The newsletter keeps chugging along now... for those of you who'd like more of an intro to what precisely is going on here, you can check out the first issue before reading on.
What’s New?
Between now and the next newsletter, I’ll be starting a 9-5 for the first time in ages! It’s a six month contract, and largely unrelated to my actual field (though will end up giving me a lot of data handling experience, which is something a ton of museum and academic jobs are looking for, apparently), and I think the most important thing it will do is just take up less of my brain than chasing freelance work or filling out job applications does. This week, my main freelance gig was some grant writing (for a local festival I love!) but it really hammered home how the application process for these roles is so casually over-demanding as everything needs to be evaluated in terms of KPIs and ROIs. And when you have to keep repeatedly running into that wall because you haven’t broken through it successfully yet, the things that actually help produce good work, like reading and thinking, don’t seem like priorities. Maybe that somehow explains the people who succeed in this style of evaluation and go on to design the subsequently more awful application processes, haha.
About a year and a half after I wrote it (to give an example of average academic turnaround time,) my expanded article on eXistenZ as a prescient engagement with the ideas of “the material turn” in Game Studies and the shortcomings of the field’s overwhelming idealism is out! It’s a longer version of this old blog post and through the magic of peer review has become kind of far afield from the core argument I was making there, not necessarily in ways that fully satisfy me, but I think it’s still pretty good. And my shout-out to classic TNG ep “The Game” has led to the horrible and bizarre looking VR game from that ep being featured on the cover, which I think is a victory for cultural detritus. Anyways, I won’t make you beg; if you don’t have institutional access here is a sneaky dropbox link.
Those are both pretty big, but by far the most exciting thing that happened over the past two weeks was candle’s flickguy release. I helped out with early feedback, as well as making a demo that showed how this tool could be used to make picrew-likes in browser. I wrote a quick blog post about what appeals to me about these types of tools versus the downsides of corporate closed platforms (especially ones yanking small game aesthetics), and then later was also overcome by the spirit of spontaneous human creativity and made a sickos generator too.
Coming Soon
Writing the posts on visual novel and RPGMaker formats, as well as the broader art historical lineage of games, continues, but slowly because I am a bit burnt out on forcing sentences out of my brain the past few weeks. However, I’ve also been a bit reinvigorated and inspired by the recent work of Eugenie Shinkle and the way it incorporates things like landscape and perspective into the understanding of videogames, so I’ll be drawing on this a lot as I go.
I attended a digital panel called “How Do You Draw Sexy Lines?” featuring a bunch of really neat comic artists talking about their erotic and pornographic work, and I’m especially a fan of Sophia Foster-Dimino’s sensibility for this material so it was a real treat to hear about her approach. Building on my recent visual novel project, I’ve been writing a lot more fiction, which is also sexy in the sense that it has sex, but hopefully also has this same general erotic vibe as well. For whatever reason, it’s a lot easier than writing “nonfiction” work right now, but given that I’ve only really been writing fanfic in this vein over the past 8 years or so, I have no idea how to distribute or share it… well, let me finish something before I worry about that.
I am also preparing for a workshop on browser based narrative game development and distribution! It’s aimed, I think, mainly at writers with little games related experience, so probably not many people on this list, but if you know someone who might be more in line with that description, here is the event page.
The Rec Room
- Casey sent around a nice email about how she updated her site, and I really love both the restored Goblet Grotto fortune teller and the collection of street slogans from ‘68.
- Soft Valkyrie’s first act has finished, and I continue to be wildly impressed with it, so I say, why not listen to the whole act now?
- There are also a ton of really cool flickguys that people have made already. I can’t list them all here, so I’ll try to pick out three favorites… ok: make a slime, make a sobbing guy, make a space landscape.
- I also have to give a shout out to my partner’s new project, because a new game in the series is probably dropping tonight, and also I think they’re just really funny. Sorry for the craven bias.
- The developer of RenJS, which I used to make my recent visual novel project, has also come out with a rather ditherpunk take on their own time at an Antarctic research station. It’s really cool!
- LanVodis is also a really cool use of RPGMaker to make a game that both encourages exploring but can be deeply disorienting. It kind of reminds me of the feeling I got from Ramble Planet, combined with an unpleasant realization about why it’s so easy for me to get totally turned around when walking irl.
I’ve Been Reading
I’ve been working my way through a collection of short stories by Izumi Suzuki, which are speculative, surreal, and have an amazing blunt yet evocative tone. I also was able to get my hands on a copy of Moto Hagio’s out of print sci-fi collection, A, A’, plays heavily with some of my favorite old school sci-fi tropes, namely psychic powers as a metaphor for neuroatypicality, gender nonconformity, or both. Treat Tube is also a really fun short story, distributed as an embedded document on itch.
I enjoyed these two papers about community identification and the design of the Low-Tech blog from the Computing Within Limits conferences, but I feel like I also have to register my disappointment with the writer of the Low-Tech blog apparently being fine with solar cells but not with universal vaccination for COVID, fundamentally a technology that emerged around the same time as, idk, pasteurization, and playing classically internet-dumb (tweets now deleted) when people brought up the dubiousness of the data cited to this end and hypocrisy and harm of this sentiment in general. Like this very early piece cautioning pure tech determinism in the potential of the internet being conceptualized as a shared space, I think if we’re interested in questioning the more/bigger is better attitude common in the mainstream development of tech, we have to do it from a foothold that explicitly includes disability and neurodiversity as an inherent part of human experience that can be helped by and have a say in what forms technology takes (thinking of this article about the shortcomings of expensive, closed source artificial limbs that are primarily intended to look slick and mimic “normal” hands more than provide useful functions), rather than treating them as symptoms of the excesses of tech that can be “cured.”
I enjoyed this interesting analysis of the emergence of fabric and other craft-y textures and effects in consumer tech. The White Pube also did a really informative and reasoned write up of strategies for art world boycotts of institutions and figures directly involved in the ongoing displacement of Palestinians. While it’s specific to a particular gallery, I think there’s a lot of thoughts here that can be applied to tech and art world issues more broadly. Finally, I’m always happy to see a new piece by Leeroy Lewin, because their work engages with the diffuseness of videogames in a way that’s always interesting and surprising to me.
I think that’s all I have this bi-week! For new subscribers who have signed on since the last newsletter, you can check out the archive of past issues at any time!
Thank you again for your support,
Emilie