Link Forest

A short zine about remixes and fangame culture. It's a modest piece, but as I begin work on my first "big time" game, I find myself thinking back on it a lot. Do I want to invite other people to expand on my work? And if so, how can it be done without making it feel wanting or forced?

I got my start taking apart the games I loved - in much the same way kid inventors take apart toasters in the movies - filling the cutscene text boxes with mildly funny and sometimes juvenile remarks. I never pressed the publish button on any of these "remixes", and looking back, that was almost certainly for the best. It was just practice runs, but they did me good.

The joy of riffing on games - freely tinkering around the assets without any expectations or set goals - helped me practice and refine my creative processes, and eventually motivated me to find my own voice...
Who would I be to deny my (purely hypothetical) fans that same joy?

I love getting a peek into the way other people think, and if the previous item on this list was food for thought, this one is a whole buffet table. The linked documents discuss a variety of subjects, so different from each other, yet each is valuable on its own merits.

I particularly enjoyed the fanfic manifesto, and how it ended with "write fanfic but don't be a Fanfic Author". I can relate to that desire: to be something without letting that something be you...
Make games, but don't be a Game Maker.

A series of tweet-sized declarations of creative philosophies. It's hard to pick a favorite line, these are all so quotable.

"fight nihilism in all its forms. [...] in a world that teaches us that 'giving too many fucks' is cheesy and uncool, caring is a radical act."

"make art, not products. make imperfect things and release them anyway. use your hands. make trash. [...] (not """making""" anything is ok too. you are not your productivity)"

A manifesto that, quite simply, asks you to "make punk rock out of your games".
I'm not going to summarize or quote any of this one. It's short, and you really ought to read the whole thing start to finish. It's just that kind of piece.
Download is available but not necessary... It's all on the page's description.

Brief writing about mining games, gardening games, and the key differences between them. It is sometimes but not always literal... the more important difference is in the philosophies that guide the gameplay - of extraction versus cultivation, of colonialism versus community...

I enjoyed reading this for multiple reasons. First of all, I realized what was bothering me about most "industry games". Secondly, I realized that I've been replicating this philosophy in my latest game and I wasn't even realizing it. I'm going to begin this new phase of my unlearning, and next time I start a big project, I'm definitely going to make a gardening game like this zine describes.

The last page includes a URL to a relevant Are.na board, which is a nice touch. For those unfamiliar with Are.na, it's essentially an ad-free Pinterest for academics and intellectuals, and the board is basically a "further reading" section that links to other articles and pieces that served as inspiration.
(I guess that's the same kind of thing I'm doing on this page, huh?)
Definitely a boon to people who fixate on things and want to Inferface More with one hyper-specific topic or idea!

All the writings on Harmony Zone are pretty neat (even if the site's color schemes can be a bit rough on the eyes sometimes) and this is a good entry point. It's a bit on the longer side, but I consider that a benefit here.
If you're reading this as a minor or you're sex-repulsed or just uncomfortable with suggestive references, you can skip the "Bad Erotic Games Manifesto". Everything else on that page should be fine for anyone and everyone to read.

As the title suggests, these documents were written for no one in particular. And that's what makes them so powerful. They're just a bunch of little notes you've come across, and you don't know what to do with them, or if you're even supposed to do things with them. They're just there now, dwelling in your thoughts.

Well, someone, in fact, did take the leap and do something. They used the guidance of the notes to make a tiny game called "Enveloping Buttertown". If your brain feels like something is trying to escape from it, bookmark this game and wait a day or two to come back. Or you can just play it right after.
Or, you can play it without even reading Buttertown.
Or you could look at neither and keep scrolling down.
Or you could click away to check your Twitter feed and never return.
I can't make you read or play anything here. It's your life.
But! I think it would be beneficial if you did. Buttertown is fun, thoughtful, and as deep as you want to read into it. The written word doesn't get much better than that.
If you enjoy this you might also like Dictionary To The Known World, a piece on the personal, mostly-forgotten history of the early 2000s RPG Maker scene.

A perhaps pessimistic blog post about the political and economical state of indie, and how independent art has a tendency to - as the title says - vanish without a trace. Reading this caused me to realize I wasn't the only one: people have been bothered by these thoughts for years. I can't stop thinking about how Ellaguro is right, that there really isn't any long-standing canon for games to draw from... except all the Big Names covered by the Big Reviewers that get another medal tacked on their shirt just for showing up.

And I think about this bit too: "If we can't find an interesting/enlightening way to sift through stuff, most of this wave will disappear without so much as a peep. it'll go up in smoke without people knowing[...]with not a bang, but a whimper."
I vow to never let myself forget that the finding of a game - or conversely, putting your own game out there - is just as important as making it in the first place.
So I do my part to try to help people discover things. I make Itch.io collections all the time, mixing games together to create discoverable themed packages of the things I find ever-so-slightly interesting. For items outside of Itch.io, I'll make a list of links like this one. Sometimes they're annotated with my own remarks. Other times it's just a list of titles and I leave the readers to imagine their own connections between the items. Still other times, I just copy paste 30 or 40 URLs into a .txt file and leave it laying around somewhere online.
And not just new games, oh no... I dig through Itch and collect the old games from 3 years ago that don't have any comments, somehow, and stuff them into my playlist, focusing all my energy on getting a conversation about this game to happen at last.
I bother my friends on their social medias by constantly messaging them links to articles I read about games and post-mortems on developers' blogs and manifestos and whatever other debris I wind up caring about in my spare time.
Making my own words is great, sure, but sometimes it gets hard. I stop and rest myself, and use a hyperlink as a sort of hyper-anchor.
Can linking be a love language?
Wherever a link can be entered, I am there to copy and paste some in. Recirculate the metaphorical tapes, let these lost legends slither on.

I know that I could be doing a better job of actually materially saving these things, perhaps. Archive.org is an effective preservation nonprofit that's been around for years. But there's something about the website... Its pages are often black and white, a plain grid of items, like so many other websites these days. It still feels sterile and inhuman... and it often doesn't help with discovery that much! At least not in the way I'd like to use it for.
What I do is the opposite: as human as possible, and then just a little more. I feature very specific items that conform to my limited tastes and biased view of the world. Though hey, that's how all reviewing works in the end! Always remember... "subjective review" is an oxymoron. If someone says they can write them, don't trust that person for a second!

Okay. Wow. That was far longer than it looked in my HTML editor. My incoherent stream-of-consciousness soapbox rant can now be concluded. Thank you for still reading these words after I put you through that. It means a lot.

This is a second blog post about the economics of industry versus indie games, but I think it takes a more hopeful view. I don't blame them at all: ending things on a hopeful note is something I enjoy doing, too! That's why this link comes last, at least for now.

This article starts early on with a seemingly simple question: What is the value of a free game? The article shows some examples of free games that have had success - very often not the capitalistic, "Who-grossed-largest-at-the-box-office" idea of success - in an attempt to explain and define what non-monetary goals one might seek in development. This is probably something you could guess: different people come in this space looking for different things. And it's okay. That's a good thing.

The article more specifically emphasises the potential for free games to be accessible to greater volumes of people than paid work, and the potential for free games to form community. Man... the community bit. I feel that.
It can seem paradoxical sometimes. You're living in the age of the internet, where you can get information in seconds and you can chat with people in countries across the world. But... if you don't use Twitter, participate in Enough of those game jams, or join everyone's Discord communities? So sorry, guess you'll get to feel constantly behind!
The internet could always use more communities, more places where you just make and aren't held back by the homogenizing force of marketability. And... sites with different kinds of vibes, for different kinds of people. We simultaneously need places that can be hidden community homes and places that can get your work in front of other people's eyeballs fast when you're truly ready.
We need more Glorious Trainwrecks. We need more Domino Clubs.