I played "don't take it personally bro, it's just not your story" a long long time ago when I was Coming Of Age and it had a really outsized impact on me and how I saw like, surveillance and the ways one should relate to others and voyeurism and stuff. But now it seems to be gone from the internet and there's very little evidence left it ever existed. Sometimes I wonder if I just had a dream a long time ago where Christine Love made a visual novel about reading the DMs of teenagers? I'm curious if there was a specific thing about it that made you decide to take it down, like a major change in perspective on the issues it handles, or if you just don't feel like it represents your best work anymore.
I actually haven't removed either don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story or Digital: A Love Story from the internet, I just don't link to them myself anymore. I didn't want to ruin anyone's links or anything, and I know what it's like to be so interested in an artist that you look up even their older shittier work, so I'm not gonna try to prevent that. But also, yeah, it's not work that I think speaks for me anymore, and I would prefer as few people read them as possible. To anyone who's seeing this post, never heard of those two games before, and are curious, my simple advice is: don't bother!
I mean, I do think my thoughts on surveillance have changed a great deal. To summarize, the central thesis of DTIPB is basically that "privacy" as a singular umbrella doesn't make sense: everyone knows that the social media service AmieConnect is a space where they're being monitored, so they adjust accordingly, putting on a performance that keeps this in mind. And when they want something to actually be hidden, they do it out of band—Charlotte locks her nudes with a key nobody but Kendall could have to hide them from John, people come to John directly for advice rather than post online. And John is basically an outsider who acts like he's a friend to the cast just because he's read all their posts, but has a rude awakening when he's reminded that he's really just voyeuristically looking in. I think this read has basically played out more-or-less accurately. I think it's pretty familiar for people to have a side of them that they expose to Twitter, performing to an invisible audience, and then a side that they only show their friends in person, or in private Discords.
...but you see where I'm going with this, right? The thesis of the game was that it doesn't matter, but after 12 years of putting on a performance, I think a lot of people are actually extremely traumatized by Twitter! Just because you know you're putting on a performance doesn't mean that constantly performing isn't still damaging. And who can afford to be constantly confronting every John Rook who's projected a parasocial relationship onto you? In real life, when there's a shock to the gap between the image and the real person, it's just as likely to cause knives to come out than introspection. I think these are the real things that it misses, and I don't necessarily blame myself for not coming to this realization in 2011—as my favourite science fiction lit professor-turned-Digital-cameo was fond of saying, "science fiction isn't a crystal ball." I'd go one step further and say it's a crystallization of our present, what we believe our future is going to be. I'm glad that I've got a touchstone for what I was thinking back then when I made the mistakes that would shape my attitude towards the website that will surely take years to recover from having spent so much time on. But also, the damage that Twitter has done to my way of thinking by framing everything in terms of safe performance, I haven't even begun to understand the true scope of it yet. So yeah, safe to say my perspective has changed.
On top of that I just don't think either Digital or DTIPB are very mature works. I mean, of course they're not, I was 20 and 21 when I made them! Practically a child! They were made over the span of a month, they're largely not edited because they were jam games, I've learned so much about art and writing since then, and there's a lot about their writing style and sense of humour that makes me wince now. Digital I think gets off a little easier because it can lean harder on its diagetic interface gimmick and there's a smaller quantity of writing, but DTIPB lives and dies by the writing itself, and it just feels really bad to me to read now. I understand the artistic decisions that went into why it's like that better than anyone else on this earth, but I sure don't agree with them anymore.
I do get why they resonated at the time, though, what would have been fun about hanging out with these characters and having a parasocial relationship with them mirrored by the protagonist. I think I could do better now with those stylistic goals, and I don't think in ten years I'm going to look back with the same embarrassment on what I'm most proud of now—I think the stuff I did during this era was just immature. And I was extremely immature too! That's just part of being 21. So you know, whatever.
Anyway, I'm flattered and honoured that it had an impact on you and others. Finally, this has all been kinda negative, so here's a memory of the project I really like: the reason why the game mostly uses stock sprites with just a few extra pieces of original art was because I still didn't feel very confident in imposing on other people creatively. But my late friend and long-time collaborator Raide originally reached out to me while I was working on this, and that's how we met—he didn't do any art for it, but he did handle the sprite direction in the conversations, and I was blown away by how his approach manged to make things feel so alive. We spent the next five years collaborating on visual novels together, and neither my career nor my life would be the same if it wasn't for that completely private relationship we formed while working on this one.
