Hey y’all. I’ve been feeling pretty down lately just with the state of the world and everything going on. I’ve also felt kind of dissatisfied with the work I’ve been doing and my contributions to discourse overall. The short version of it is really just trying to reckon with how my work (and criticism more broadly) gets subsumed by capitalism, how everything is just kind of sucked back up into marketing and how even when someone comes out with (metaphorical) knives and tries to cut up the structures that essentially envelop everything we do, the most that happens is that they get praise for doing the work and nothing actually changes.
I have been struggling with the supposed inevitability of it all. The sense that, no matter what we do, no matter how we move or how conscious we are of wrongdoing in the world that we cannot change things—that essentially we are nothing but captive observers to a capitalism and state that will only end if they hang themselves (which they could do at random at any time but certainly never by our hand). I have been struggling with the sense of despair I feel whenever certain supposedly leftist slogans are spat back at me like “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” in order to justify giving up, giving in, acquiescing to everything. There’s a right wing problem in games culture, so we should hang out on their podcast, or a company is directly involved in the Gaza genocide but they also own so many studios so what’s the point of boycotting them according to very specific BDS standards; that kind of thing. It helps me understand why so many friends of mine in the anarchist milieu have disregarded games wholesale as a cultural force, as a space where people congregate, as a potential site of agitation and organization—when we don’t even take this shit seriously ourselves, how can we expect anyone else to do so?
I’ve also been struggling with the idea that we live in a so-called “ludic century,” as Eric Zimmerman put it over a decade ago. That everything is already a game, or can be/has been gamified, or that everything is best approached as a game designer, much less a player. It seems like this idea was accepted pretty much in full by the right but rejected by the left, from the centrists all the way out to the radicals, and as a result you’ve got one side playing wargames with a full birds-eye view of the board and the other side is still trying to figure out how and why their mortar rounds are landing so accurately. Or, maybe more realistically, we’re still trying to understand why Calvinball doesn’t make any fucking sense when we’re reading the rulebook, they’re markedly not, and they’re still so fucking good at it.
I was pretty eaten up a couple weeks ago, and I’m still fairly upset now. But I hate sitting and stewing in that upset. I talked to a friend a few weeks ago about some of the projects they’re working on and the book they just wrote (I’ll be posting the interview soon), and one of the things I took away from that conversation was, “it’s been time to do more. You’re capable of more. You will derive joy from taking concrete actions and putting your values back into practice.” So rather than write big long screeds about individuals who’ve pissed me off lately and the shitty fucking systems they’ve held (and are holding) up, I’m gonna take that energy and put it into something cool and worthwhile, and useful beyond hot takes about video games.
So what is that something?
Like a lot of my ideas it’s probably gonna be pretty hastily slapped together at first. It’s gonna involve a lot of borrowing (and some stealing) of ideas from across time and space. It’s probably not going to be very academic, and it’s also probably not gonna be everyone’s cup of tea. It’s gonna look like shit you’ve probably seen and read before, online or in coffee shops or on the sides of buildings, hastily scrawled in spray paint in a hilarious approximation of cursive. Some days you’ll look at it and think, “fuck, this is way too performative for me,” and other days, maybe, if I do my job right, you’ll read something that hits. None of it will be my idea; at any point if anyone else wants to take and run with anything developed here, they’re free to it, with or without my blessing. The only motherfuckers who aren’t allowed are nazis and their chudlord friends. At first it will look like an alphabet; and then, slowly, a glossary; eventually, someday, it might look like an entire encyclopedia. It will be about play, and the end of hierarchies, and the cessation of domination. It will be my life’s work.
I don’t know when the first post of this new project will be out. It says “soon” in the title of the post but fuck, sometimes “soon” is tomorrow and sometimes it’s months from now. I’m still working on Escape Velocity and Children of Lightning; expect something elsewhere sooner than this on that latter project, but I can’t say any more than that at the moment.
Let’s build a world where there are no borders, no tyrants, no rulers of any kind; where we can create new ways of being in the possibility spaces left open in the wake of dictatorship; where fear is no longer a factor and nobody can subjugate anyone else. See you soon.
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