Kailaria

if you didn't hear, the writer's guild of america east and west banded together to ask the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers for living wages, and were told, in so many words, "no"

AMPTP, who represent Amazon, Disney, Netflix, Warner's Discovery Home Brother's Box Office, etc etc, had this to say:

“Our goal is, and continues to be, to reach a fair and reasonable agreement.
An agreement is only possible if the Guild is committed to turning its focus
to serious bargaining by engaging in full discussions of the issues with the
companies and searching for reasonable compromises.”
-Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers

so, apparently the writer's guild had unreasonable demands, given that "reasonability" seems to be the main claim against giving them what they want and ending the strike before it started. so what exactly is it they're demanding?

generally speaking, you'll hear "better pay" and "streaming" as two key points, so let's see some examples of what writers are dealing with right now:

“I have friends who believe, ‘Oh, Alex worked on The Bear, Alex is rich now.
Alex can buy a car.’ And you know, I’m not. I’m broke. [When] I won the
WGA Award for The Bear for Outstanding Comedy Series, I had a negative
bank account. My suit was bought by my family and friends, and my bowtie
was bought on credit. All that glitters is not gold.”
-Alex O'Keefe to A.V. Club

why is this? is this because of streaming? partially, yes- let's talk about

Residuals

you know how you get hired for a job and paid for doing it? well, when it comes to creative works which will continue on and permeate culture, such as media creation, it's entirely fair for their continued purchase and profitability to benefit the writers, editors, actors, film crew etc.

it'd obviously be stupid if Netflix only paid the writers relative to TV broadcasting standards instead of on-demand streaming standards, right? i mean, one is a much more individualistic transaction- the movie airs on TV and residuals are paid

except, that's exactly what's happening until writers sue for what they're owed

“Netflix argued the WGA should accept a substandard formula the
company negotiated with DGA and SAG-AFTRA. After a hearing,
however, an arbitrator determined differently: that the license fee
should have been greater than the gross budget of the film.”
-WGAW Memo

the math(s) used to determine how to convert viewership and box office into payments is often very difficult to understand, which works to the advantage of big companies claiming they're paying you 'industry standard rates' while taking the difference for themselves. thankfully, the WGA has a residuals survival guide which, with any luck, will need some heavy revision after this strike

although...

This exact thing happened 15 years ago.

streaming isn't brand new- getting media for cheap online has been possible since you could get media online. back in 2006, Lost showrunner and writer Damon Lindelof had a realization of the obvious problem with the residuals model in the face of the internet:

"People were downloading Lost and paying $1.99 an episode. I didn’t
quite make the leap to, ‘I don’t get compensated for this at all.'"
-Damon Lindelof

it's almost as if media giants aren't all that interested in paying a living wage when they could be making more money, and as inflation increases and mediums shift they're happy to keep using precedent as an excuse.

this has always been a problem. companies have to be sued to force them to adjust for inflation.

or, you know, they'll just pivot to unscripted reality TV instead

prepare for netflix, apple, hulu etc to see a sudden shift to game shows, un/loosely scripted series, unvaulting of old media and, god forbid, "AI" generated material

And no, AI cannot replace screenwriters.

i've already explained why. but that's secondary to the fact that it's a big scary thing that hollywood can use to threaten screenwriters; if you don't work for us, we'll just get a machine to do it instead

so if you're a writer who's on strike reading this: hello! thank you for valuing yourself and your fellow writers as much as you do! also, please don't worry about AI taking your job. no matter how convinced the company that owes you money is that screenwriting can be passed off to a machine, it really, honestly, can't

it will just keep recycling the same shows and IPs over and over, mixing and matching existing media with "reimaginings" of old stories and...

...

shit that's what they're already doing, huh?

in a sense hollywood could actually replace writers with LLMs trained on old media- and then the output would suck so bad we'd all watch whatever the laid off writers banded together to make for cheap instead, if the screenwriting industry works anything like the games industry

maybe, actually, the fact that we all have to sucker up to these assholes to get media with a budget and international legitimacy made is, itself, the problem, huh? anyways.

There are truly so many additional issues writers face.

and thankfully, i do not need to enumerate them here. not sure if they have any professional writers in the WGA, whatever that acronym stands for, but their outlined proposal sheet is pretty damn concise. and, get this: reasonable

if you happen to live in LA or NYC, you can show up and show your support, or at least spot 'em some coffee and cigarettes

So, I've been absolutely loving playing CrossCode lately, but I've been missing streaming a bit more, especially since Async Multiworlds don't really feel as complete and I don't want to stream playing The Messenger's rando out of respect for a few people.

Now granted, I'm already at the beginning of Chapter 5 of ? at this point, and I've kept myself spoiler-free up to and beyond this point, but as an autist, I love doing activities at the same time as others are even if it's not actually multiplayer or even competitive (I saw a term describing this phenomenon, but I can't find it again 😓).

So, even though I'd be starting streaming this game at somewhere between 25-50% completion, I think I'm gonna do it anyway, even though I'm going at it slow, methodically, and somewhat with a goal of nearly 100%'ing it (though I likely will stop closer to like 95-99%). It's not like that hasn't stopped me from doing similar such things in the past 😅!

These are all nice things to do rather than things to avoid. I'm sure you can figure out how not to be a dick to other people. But there are some things we've all learned from other social media sites that are worth rethinking here:

• Write comments, even if you don't have anything to say! Just saying "so true bestie" or "wow great art" will make the original poster feel great. The relatively low profile of likes on Cohost makes comments even more valuable, and unlike Twitter, this won't clog up anyone's timeline.

• Tag your posts, especially if you're referring to a particular game/tv show/franchise, something that's a common phobia like spiders or mushrooms, or something that can be addictive like drugs. You don't need to add a full content warning most of the time since Cohost has the ability to muffle specific tags. (Yes this will make you more publicly visible, but Cohost has actual human moderation if people start being assholes.)

• Rehost porn! I made a whole post about this a few months ago, but the high level summary is because Cohost requires rigorous adult content tags and has good filters there's no downside to reblogging adult content (beyond the mortifying ordeal of being known).

• Post what interests you. I think people are constantly rediscovering this on their own, but it's worth a reminder: Cohost is a great place for long posts about whatever catches your fancy. There's a sense that this is a place for computer nerds or whatever, but that's just because that's something a bunch of the people who joined early like writting mini-essays about. I've seen great longposts here about ancient Rome, color theory, and hentai just in the last few days and everyone seems to love them.

In addition to the Unity starter post that we published the other day, I've been spending time putting together a big ol' resource list of free game engines/toolsets for beginners/folks looking to make a change or just dive into development.

I'm honestly really proud of this, and want to do much, MUCH more like this as part of my job: getting free and low-cost resources out to folks. I genuinely hope this is helpful for people and I'm very open to updating it with more!

This also happens to be very close to something I compile for my game design students every quarter (obviously this is a proper article version, not just a quickie list!) and, in doing what I want to do with service-y journalism at Game Developer... it just fit!

this term i'm teaching a semester-long version of what @turista and i used to call "the whirlwind tour" when we taught it to our summer program students—basically "here's a bunch of different engines all at once, think about what tools make different kinds of games, go go go"

structurally, each week i have students volunteer to scout ahead and find a game engine, make a small game in it, and then bring it back to the class and lead a short tutorial about it, then we all make games in that engine together for that week.

these have some overlaps with @danielleri's great writeup above, but i thought i might tack on the list of game engines with the ones my students have picked out—a good number of them i had never heard of myself! (at the start of the semester i gave my students @everest's wonderful tinytools.directory and told them to dig around, most are selected by them from there.)

1. plingpling / flickgame — these were my picks to start off the semester; plingpling is a simple pinball engine, and flickgame i usually describe as "hyperimage" a la twine's hypertext. i just like to start my students off with something that can get them making stuff IMMEDIATELY.
2. engine.lol — kind of a... cross between something like môsi that's spatial, and a very simple image editor? a ton of really cool constraints on this one, and i kind of love the interface that comes alongside it
3. decker — this one's a hypercard-alike! i've only played around a little with both hypercard and this, but of course slideshow-y tools have a long and cool history with being coopted to make games
4. pocket platformer — my students LOVE this one. i can't tear them away from making ridiculously hard platformer levels.
5. krunker — i don't love this one since it's kind of a walled garden and doesn't let you make standalone stuff, but one of my students has been playing/making/modding stuff in it for forever and wanted to present on it
6. herobook — this is kind of a stripped-down choice-based interactive fiction tool, less robust i think than something like twine, but interesting to compare, and i think maybe easier to embed images in the project itself than twine 2.x.
7. castle — also a little walled-garden-y, but one of the very few engines that is mobile-oriented, let alone works on mobile
8. môsi — i think one of my favorite @bitsy variants, with a really neat little music editor and a model of rooms built around continuity of space, a la a zelda overworld
9. twine — y'know. twine!
10. pix64 — a really interesting little engine that parses 64x64 .pngs that use a palette of 6 colors to make playable games
11. playdate pulp — another bitsy-like... or bitsy-lite, following the roguelike/roguelite distinction?
12. microstudio — this one actually hasn't been presented on yet, but has more emphasis on code-writing than most of these.