replicating, breeding, virulent–cheap pipebombs and tin can landmines

LOOTER

just a tiny lil 10 second game i made for madam luna

it’s a perfect encapsulation of her criminal lifestyle

i’m lying in bed delirious with sickness knitting words instead of scarves, its all i can do

And trans people, and queers, and everyone else who feels this.

I.

When I think of visibility, renown, people liking my work–the first thing that comes to my mind is that I have less chance of being doubted when I talk about abuse and harassment.

Less chance of suffering in silence.

I resent seeing everything as part of a power dynamic.

I resent this fixation on survival.

It dominates my vision, makes my eye sick.

II.

Women are turned against other women.

I feel sick when I think about it. I second-guess every disagreement I have with other women. I wonder how to disagree with other women in a culture where we’re encouraged to bully and undermine each other.

I feel disgusted and ashamed.

III.

Communities should demonstrate safety from the outside. It doesn’t matter how safe they are if their exterior doesn’t prove itself to people with previous bad experiences.

For example:

It was natural for me to approach the circle of interactive fiction. I made games with words in them. But there was nothing for me. I was poor, not middle class. I was queer, not straight. I wrote experimental hypertext, not traditional parser. I was a woman, not a man, and there were many of them, and one of me.

It was intimidating.

Once I did participate, by submitting my Twine game howling dogs, I got harassing emails saying making howling dogs was a “crime”. Some public reviews were angry, condemning, moralistic, censuring. At the same time, people like Emily Short reached out to me, talked about my work in a different light. I found other reviews that left me teary-eyed, in a good way.

The reality was more complex, both negatively and positively, than my fears.

The point is that I almost didn’t participate at all.

We should think about how permeable we are to outsiders, not just physically but emotionally.

Communities aren’t “just friends”. Sure, they’re often groups of friends based around a common interest, but when a community of friends overlaps or encompasses technical resources, they must take responsibility. We all have contextual power, even if we are marginalized in other ways.

IV.

The future of commenting is no-dignification, wordless deleting.

Avoid the fallacy of fair and balanced. Providing equal status to both sides of the issue is harmful when the other side hates women. That isn’t a stance, that’s violence.

In fact, don’t dignify anything that

wastes

your

precious

time.

They’re just radios mindlessly regurgitating the propaganda of their culture. They haven’t examined their own opinion. Why should you?

V.

Women’s shit test for men (or any marginalized person’s shit test) exists for a reason. Don’t call it rudeness. Don’t call it arrogance. Call it intelligence.

When half the world is socialized to manipulate, despise, and step on you, one gets a little wary.

We’re sick of the false camaraderie that snaps and turns to rage, mockery, hurt feelings. Sick that all it takes to be betrayed is to assert the most basic tenets of our existence.

It feels fucking weird and queasy to try and smile along with someone you suspect has no stake in your reality and will toss you under the bus for any old reason. It feels terrible because you want to smile too. You want to get along. But you know better. You know they aren’t along for the long ride.

It would destroy us to encounter constant betrayal. We need a filter.

We weed out those who will hurt us. We preempt heartbreak.

The truth is many of us have great relationships and friendships with the proverbial straight white dude, and it’s because they earned a degree of trust instead of making a big deal about the fact that we’re acting on instincts finely honed by a lifetime of violence and harassment.

Don’t begrudge people their instincts.

VI.

Women in games.

We are a crucible.

It is not that we seek to fight, but that our existence as women making games, talking about games, and occupying the sphere of play in general, is a threat to power structures.

Women are told they must die for making personal little games on their own time, for writing about their experiences, or simply for existing.

(Even our whispers, a small game or poem circulated among close friends, are deafening to these men.)

And when they are not told directly, they are made to feel like they want to die.

One of the greatest challenges of this time is not blatant misogyny (an easy target for outrage anyone can participate in) but the crypto-misogynist, whose fear is concealed behind language that sounds basically okay to everyone but the women it is intended to harm.

They’ve figured out they can’t call us bitches, so they resurface under a thin veneer of patronizing “civility”, neutralizing our energies with mindless, boring semantics.

They will find endless ways to intellectualize their discomfort.

They are terrified by our joy

They project that terror on our alien bodies

We become stewards of this terror, nurturing it off our own bloodstream, off the very air in our lungs

We become intimidated

Even doing basic work in the games industry, whether it be in a mainstream or indie capacity, becomes filled with chronic ambient terror

Those outside this terror dimension, by virtue of their privilege, do not see this terror

Why are the women agitated

Why is that woman so sad all the time

Why did that woman lose her job

Why did that woman disappear in a burst of ash

MUST HAVE BEEN LIGHTNING

This heightens our sense of unreality

The feeling that we are insane

That we are helpless to stop our punishment for being a woman that is our birthright and indeed our inevitable doom

Endless micro-aggressions and macro-aggressions pile up

Until our voices crawl back inside our bodies

And die

And rot

And poison us

VII.

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.

I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.

We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

Audre Lorde

When I read those words, I cried. I cried because I’d been afraid for so long. I cried for all the times I was too terrified to reach out to others.

I realized that I had been delaying my existence in a world where death exists.

The temptation, of course, is to horde the scraps of power we’re given, like a guard recruited from the prisoners standing watch over her fellow inmates, grateful to hold a gun in her hand, never even considering that she has a gun.

Join your power with other women.

Fight for them.

Exercise your white-hot fierceness and free your fucking sisters from the silence, the doubt, the terror that they, that we, that I have fall into, time and time again.

I have never felt so alive as when another woman told me she would fight for me, that she would stand with me, that she believed me.

Bullets can’t read audience feedback forms.

Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.

Audre Lorde

The idea is to fight for our friends.

The idea is to fight for our not-friends.

We all project a bubble that extends x feet from our body in every direction and in that bubble we can have that better world any time we want.

There is no singularity, no utopia, just how you treat the people around you.

I don’t need assurances of survival.

I don’t need to know my actions will result in a perfect outcome.

It is enough to act, and in doing so, feel the sunlight on my limbs.

and j chastain’s rat chaos won Best NPC for New Rat City

it was held in a MUD so me and j got to explore a little text world (~CYBERDATE~)

slime, twitter, thecatamites, trash, SHODAN, even…game(?)

a talk i did with terry cavanagh about cool games, queer creators, diy, curation, and fuck capitalism

list of games/quotes/recap