Mads

an underappreciated game design skill is the ability to just... sit and think through all the implications of a system by simulating the entire game in your head. you can't just think through the consequences of a change; you need to think through the consequences of those consequences

This is so much of my work as an accessibility design specialist!

"This cue needs to be extremely clear to players with an audiovisual pairing. It also shouldn't play continuously or be too large because that draw too much focus for various cognitive disabilities and potential motion sickness risk. Oh it's using a symbol? That's good for quick identification but where is the player taught that symbol and how easy is it to reference? Is the symbol high contrast but not so high contrast that it causes astigmatism issues? Is it large enough to be seen with low vision without obscuring other important information?"

The knowledge and ability to consider how design decisions affect players with very different access needs at the same time is why my job exists at all.

Absolutely! You need to frame every possible interaction against every possible use case, which is a TON to keep track of

So one of my long-held interests is webcomics with extremely long archives. Part of this is that it's nice to get lost in a story that someone's cared about for a long time, but another vital part that, through the lens of one person's long-standing art project, you get to see the whole of society change over decades. If you ever want to be reminded that Francis Fukuyama was wrong about history, just do a webcomic archive binge.

To that end: Sabrina Online is a furry webcomic about a skunk named Sabrina who loves Amiga computers and Transformers toys. The plot, more or less, is about her getting a job doing IT at a porn studio, falling in love with a fellow geek over IRC, and trying to keep her family from finding out what she does for a living.

(Beyond this point are major spoilers for Sabrina Online, so if you wanna give it a fresh read, the archive is here.)

Because the story starts in '96 and continues to present day (that's right, it's still updating!) we get to see the world change over decades. We see Sabrina deal with the dawn of the modern internet, the Bush administration, the Obama administration, the Trump administration, vtubers, the pandemic, and more, while she goes through her own life. There's even a wild 9/11 tribute that I'll post at the end of this.

Also the comic is, like, surprisingly okay about sex work and porn? Not completely perfect, but a LOT better than you'd expect from the late 90s. The gag-a-day nature of the comic means that about 60% of the jokes are about Sabrina's pornstar boss, Zigzag, being promiscuous, but she also pretty strongly feels like her own person who cares about what she does and is proud of it. Her work isn't a tragedy; it's a triumph.

This is the arc that a lot of characters in the comic go through: Sabrina falls on hard times and gets a job at a porn studio; Amy gets a job at a bar; Thomas gets a job at a weed dispensary. All of them eventually find meaning in "demeaning" work, finding pride in doing their best regardless of the circumstances.

Recently (well, sevenish years ago), the comic changed its format, going full-color with portrait pages, and focusing on longer plot arcs with fewer immediate gags, though that thesis is still very much at the core of the comic:

Overall, it's a pretty neat comic! Not without its problems, but, y'know, that's 90s furry webcomics for ya. I'd recommend it if you wanna lose yourself in a gag-a-day soap opera for a few hours, or if you wanna see history get unended before your very eyes. You can find it here.

Some various uncollected thoughts:

• The best plot arc is Sabrina having a baby
• The worst plot arc is the one where Sabrina starts a webcomic that everyone hates, so she gets depressed, quits, gets mugged, ends up in the hospital, her boss finds the mugger and beats him up, and then she goes to court-mandated therapy
• The most ??? plot arc is where a foxgirl dyes her fur to look like a skunk to get free amusement park tickets, then gets cancelled for appropriating skunk culture. Like a lot of furry webcomics that try to use species as a metaphor for race, it ends up really weird and muddled in that direction, except in literally one case (the plot arc where Sabrina has a baby, which results in one of the most poignant moments in the whole comic)
• There are like fifty subplots about the Transformers toys actually being alive and literally all of them are skippable imo. I think some of them are election pastiches, but I couldn't tell you more than that because my eyes glaze over as soon as the Transformers are the only things on-panel

And, as thanks for reading this whole post, I now bestow upon you: the Sabrina Online 9/11 picture.

I think cicadas have it figured out. Sleep for thirteen years, wake up and immediately start screaming, fuck (while screaming) continuously for a few weeks, then die (screaming)

Here are two screenshots. One is of John Madden Football 1994, and the other is of Madden NFL '95. In every Madden game up to Madden '94, all the players were white; Madden '95, meanwhile, featured a number of Black athletes (including placing Erik Williams and Karl Wilson on the cover). This was, by and large, due to the work of Gordon Bellamy: a Black, gay game developer who worked to make the game better represent the demographics of real-life football.

There's a Netflix miniseries that interviews him about this experience (and other game developers about their own experiences), called High Score. You can check out the trailer here.

This is far from the only thing he's done: he was the head of the IGDA from 2010 to 2012, helping to expand the group's scholarship program, and has held a number of leadership roles throughout the games industry. When I met him a few years ago, he was a college professor: a position which he holds to this day.

His most striking attribute when we met, aside from his relentless positivity, was this... galactic big-picture perspective. A rare clarity of vision. A design choice in a game wasn't an end in itself to him, nor was it a means to an end; it was a means to another means to another means. Every game was building to the next one; every business decision was setting up the future.

To quote him, from the trailer to High Score: "Video games afford you the opportunity just to start over. In games, we all start at the exact same place, to play together, because we're all playing by the same rules."

We met during the midboss years, I lived under an hour away from him (not awful amount of distance in LA) and I remember the first time I visited, he literally had a closet full of incredibly rare, unique and utterly random game goodies, of which he just ust let me pick whatever like I was given the wish to pull from the one piece

He has SO much positive energy and charisma, it's hard to not get swept up! He's the first to make you smile as often as the guy who makes you think!!

If you ever run into him at a game con or like gdc, go say hi if you can you'll have made a friend by the end of it 💪🏻