Shadow Hog

I already saw this Aftermath Pokemon Lawyer article getting passed around on Cohost, but I don't want my reply to read like a callout post to that person, so I'm posting it for myself.

I also tweeted something similar, but I think it's important to be said in places other than twitter:

I'm the founder of SAGE. You know, the big bi-annual celebration of fan games and, increasingly, indie games? The event that is probably directly responsible for why Steam seems to have a new demo event every few months now? Yeah. I started that over 20 years ago.

Nowadays, demo events like that serve as important milestones for indie and fangame developers. Real game development is full of many such milestones -- you have to prove to the suits that you're working hard, meeting deadlines, and staying on budget. Solo developers and newbies don't really have that, so it helps to have things like SAGE as a way to show your work, test your concept in a public setting, get feedback, eventually catch your breath a little bit and regroup before continuing the next leg of development.

But back when I started SAGE in high school, the primary thing I was concerned about was just, like... being able to talk about projects me and my friends were working on to people outside of our little fangaming community. Because... nobody wanted to. It was an easy way to get dirty looks, because a fangame was often lumped in with, like, Chinese bootleg carts. You were on the same level as, like, Crazy Bus or Super Mario 14. Fangames were illegal piracy.

Which they are, but only in the same way that fanart, fanfiction, and fan music is illegal piracy. I wanted to drag fangames out of the darkness. Get more people talking about them. Prove they weren't this shady, illicit thing. They were fans expressing deepest love for their favorite characters and worlds.

When people read this and think "Oh Kotaku is doing a bad thing by promoting fangames" -- they are not. Things are absolutely better now. It took years of normalization to get this far. Yes, you hear about takedowns more often, but the negative press from such actions is getting louder, and louder, and louder.

The DM in this quote, Don McGowan, even says at the end: "No one likes suing fans." They know they are biting the hand that feeds them. And the more you talk about fangames, write articles about fangames, spread the word about fangames, the clearer that will be and the better things get for everyone. Do not be cynical about this.

Just pay attention to the other thing mentioned at the very end of the quote: "You wait to see if they get funded." As the gig economy continues to normalize creator services like Patreon, SubscribeStar, OnlyFans, I have been watching more and more think they can work on fangames as a job. That is the mistake, and that is what we need to be focusing on as the wrong thing. That is when the line gets crossed and toes start getting stepped on. Creating fangames is not a career. If you love a thing, you do not take away what allowed that thing to exist in the first place. You do not directly compete with that thing. In doing so, you not only put yourself at risk, you put whole entire communities at risk.

Because, again: all of this, by the strictest letter of copyright law, is actually illegal. Fangames continue to exist as loving tributes, not as ways to get rich playing with somebody else's toys for free. In terms of "biting the hand that feeds you", you need to also be mindful not to bite them unprompted, either, you know? Be smart, but always be respectful to the source material and pray for their kindness, because it is and will remain all we have in this arena.

For those unaware, Medieval Times is a dinner-theater that specializes in a medieval ambient experience. Beginning in 2022, two of its locations unionized under the American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA); and since then, Medieval Times has been waging one of the most vicious anti-union campaigns in recent memory. I am saddened to report that this campaign successfully concluded this week, preventing the union from ever negotiating a contract.

The full details can be found in this Huffington Post article on the scale of the effort. But to summarize how devastating this campaign has been from Medieval Times: last February, 27 workers went on strike against the company. Today, only 7 of those 27 strikers have jobs with it. So many members have been purged or replaced that a looming effort by the the anti-union National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation to decertify the union has finally gotten it to stand down at both locations. This is ultimately an important and cautionary tale in how winning a union is only the first, not last, stage of the fight:

In fact, it's not even a very important stage, in my opinion. Certainly not one to rush for as a goal.

The NLRB has almost 0 power. All the power comes from the workers. The workers are the union. The core of that power is in the ability to withhold labor; but it must also be backed up by deeper solidarity. The solidarity to say, no, we refuse to recognize your having fired our fellow worker for engaging in a union action. To donate to keep them supported via mutual aid until the employer can be forced to disgorge a wage again. The broader networks of solidarity to support those who can't get back in at a particular workplace, to give them somewhere to move on to, etc.

The only important thing in a union is the union. The workers themselves. The workers in and out of the particular workplace together in solidarity. If there's strong solidarity to rely on, the union is strong. If people can be fragmented off and dealt with one by one, or in handfuls of 5 or 10 or 20, then the owners will outlast us because they have the treasure to bribe others to look the other way, to make propaganda to lie about the ones they're ruining, etc.

I realized the moment I fell into the fissure, that the bricks would not be destroyed as I had planned. They continued falling into that starry expanse, of which I had only a fleeting glimpse. I have tried to speculate where they might have landed, but I must admit, however- such conjecture is futile. Still, the question of whose feet might someday step on my Myst bricks is unsettling to me. I know my apprehensions might never be allayed, and so I close, realizing that perhaps, the ending haOUCH, GOD DAMNIT, I HOPED I'D HAVE AT LEAST ONE MINUTE WITHOUT STEPPING ON ONE OF THEM!