• he/him

I've not gotten any good at writing descriptions since I first made my tumblr and by god I'm not about to start now.


www.in-mutual-weirdness.tumblr.com

pervocracy
@pervocracy

watching The Descent in 2006, age 20: This is a movie about how you never know... what lurks... in the dark... in the depths of the Earth

watching The Descent in 2024, age 38: This is a movie about how when a group of people has let you down and lost your trust in the mundane world, do not override your misgivings to go on a risky adventure with them, because it will not be a bonding experience, it will be a living hell



MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE

so like, this is a really interesting (and painful) read but there's something that really strikes me, where he mentions how close to ship everything was coming together, and god. What a mood.

I feel like it's one of those things that would absolutely shock gamers but is just kind of Understood among many gamedevs - that when games come out bad, it's not that the developers somehow were lying or concealing something, but that many games are very, very bad for 99% of their development time and then they become good at the last minute, like putting the final piece into a puzzle. Everything interlocks and then it finally makes sense.

Or it doesn't fit. And then you do what you can and hope.

and so like, you know. you come off a game like clockwork empires, which I worked on for like 4+ years, and it's like "didn't you know it was bad?" No, I simply hoped - down to the literal last second patch we never shipped - that it would become good. You spend most of development feeling that feeling. You have to feel that feeling, because otherwise it's impossible to get through that lengthy middle bit that's just working and working and so little obvious impact from it. The fact that it never manifested sucked for me and sucked for the playerbase, but there's never any maliciousness in it. It's just so damn hard to tell whether something is going to work out or not until you do the work.

Maybe I'm especially prone to this because I work in indie, which often lacks dedicated designers. I've been on a lot of games where the development process could be perhaps kindly described as "improvisational". I imagine, or I'd like to hope, it's a lot cleaner on stuff like action games where the terms are clearly understood. But, you know, when the gaslamp crew set out to make "dwarf fortress but accessible" I think we truly were figuring out every single step as we went. That doesn't have to be bad - sometimes it works out, and I think sticking explicitly to 'best practices' can lead to really conservative games. But the tradeoffs are pretty clear, right? Ambition can sometimes be like a really cool prototype plane that looks a lot less cool when it stalls and crashes.

One of the things I truly believe is that no one on a dev team ever sets out to make a bad game. Gamedev is buoyed by nothing if not eternal optimism. And so it's really hard to know what "honesty" looks like, right? Do you go out there and say "well it's awful but it'll be good by ship?" Will anyone understand? I've been working in this industry for over a decade and I still don't think I've ever shipped a game where I truly knew whether anyone was going to like it or not when it released. So you hope, and you do your best to make it good, and you hope some more. And if you're lucky, it works out.

And if you're not... well, maybe you end up like that guy linked above and get pilloried for a decade for things your boss's boss's boss did. Idk. It's a rough position to be in.


MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE

another sort of mini-addendum I want to make to this is that when you're head down on a specific aspect of a game - and this happens to me a LOT as an artist - it can be really hard to see the big picture, to even know what the big picture looks like anymore. In the same way that when I work on a single drawing for over 80 hours I start to lose all sense of perspective and have no idea whether I'm making the drawing better or worse anymore, when you work on a game for a long time it can be really easy to become completely incapable of playing it like a normal person or knowing what that experience would be like anymore. I play all my old games that came out and I just see things I want to fix, things I'd do differently. How do you even judge the quality of that in the run-up to release? Most often the answer is I can't. I just have to trust in the process.



dorkandy
@dorkandy

I recently started learning how to drive after years of putting up w being unable to. i'm not looking to actively drive but i want to be useful to my parent and grandparent when i visit (so they do not shoulder a tiring activity on their own), and i want to be able to travel to remote places on my own.

My friend joked "congrats on not being gay anymore" when i got my learning permit. i laughed too but i also thought, well. i'd rather be independant. i'd rather have that option. if it comes to life and death, then i want to be able to drive.

a lot of the trans people i follow online are trans women. i don't know why but it's just bc our hobbies align, or bc i appreciate the things they share. it's really not that deep. but i often feel stuck wanting to talk about what being trans is, to me. because i'm transmasc and non binary, it's not like our experiences align really well (some of it, sure, but most of it? probably not) but we can still talk to each other and help each other out in our feelings. but sometimes? i wish i had more peers from my own community to draw from.

but when i'm online, i see jokes about fallout new vegas and i don't get them. i had a friend explain the "cracked egg" thing to me while i played Control on discord. i own a blahaj out of liking it as a plush toy, and only later found out its status as a trans icon. i can't do math not because of some weird gay status (that feels like ppl are talking down themselves?) but bc of a cognitive disability. i'm learning how to drive -- does that make me not queer anymore?

it's one thing to be online, it's another to make these online jokes, or beliefs, a core part of an actual community. there is no queer monolith, as each experience is unique, and once you talk to your queer siblings then it becomes obvious that there is validity in the individuality. but because people online are exposed to the same ubiquitous privileged communities, they have to fold back into themselves to find a sense of self that isn't defined by whatever quirky white lgbt+ jokes about today.

in a way, and it is something i will happily repeat, i am happy i grew up as queer in a less terminally online society. there were no apps on my phone throughout teenagehood and algorithms weren't dictating what i was seeing in my online endeavors. i built up my queerness with a very important sense of self, of finding mirror images, of picking what applied to me and cutting off the rest. i'm not saying "people these days dont know how nice it was" bc realistically, there is a bigger strength in a more accessible community -- but i want people to know these accessible communities are also the most visible ones and that might also be why they aren't as good to you as they could be. they will always betray you in a way, because they do not take into account your personal history with gender roles, race, class, etc. and they will pretend that their one size fits all memes are harmless even if they create a divide.

that divide, however, can be filled. for as many blanket statements there are, pebbles of individual lived experiences will fall in the cracks and make it a path everyone, eventually, can walk. you are not alone in being the way you are, even if the monolith makes you lonely.