GDC 2015: The Adventure Continues

Return of the Duck Dragons

During GDC 2015, I went to a postmortem given by Warren Robinett for his 1979 Atari 2600 classic Adventure.

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It’s difficult to fully understand Adventure’s impact on video game history, or its impact on my own life. This blog’s title is intended as a tribute to Adventure, and to those rare and special games since which, like Adventure, have worked their way into my subconscious and become part of the texture of my life. All those secret adventures I’ve been on. Adventure was the game that taught me the power of symbolic visuals, the game that taught me the joy of using my imagination to collaborate with a game and meet it halfway, so that a little square could be a brave hero and a collection of pixels that resembled a duck could be a fearsome dragon. (At one point, Robinett expressed affection for his duck dragons, and joked that if he’d made a sequel to Adventure, it would have been called Return of the Duck Dragons.)

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I’ve spent so much time these past several months living in varying degrees of doubt and fear. Wondering where I belong. Sitting there in that room as Robinett talked about Adventure, I felt like I was exactly where five-year-old me might want to be all these years later. And not for the first time at this year’s GDC and not for the last, I felt so privileged to be there. I think that’s what it is, to be able to be in places like that, to be able to write about games from a place of love and passion, in a serious and thoughtful way: a privilege.

And Warren Robinett said that sometimes, we’ve got to fight for our ideas.

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Liberty she pirouette when I think that I am free

This was a very different GDC for me.

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People would see me at GDC and ask, “So, what are you working on here?”

In years past, my role at GDC has always been quite clear and specific. Go to these appointments that have been arranged for me, write them up for GameSpot.

This year, when people asked me what I was doing there, I would say something like, “Well, it’s different than when I was with GameSpot, you know? Now I can sort of go to the panels I want to go to and see the things I want to see and that’s really liberating and exciting but it’s also scary. It means that if there’s a story here that I want to tell, I have to find it myself. So I guess that’s what I’m doing is looking for the story or stories I want to tell.”

The truth was that I didn’t really feel like I knew what I was doing there, or if I even belonged there at all. I’ve always suffered from impostor syndrome but the last several months have left me struggling with doubt about whether there’s still a place for me in this business.

But they’ve also been a time when I’ve been free to do writing about games that feels more personal and honest and meaningful than the work I was doing before, and that has been exciting.

On the evening of Monday the 2nd, I saw Alec Holowka (currently working on Night in the Woods) talk frankly about the challenges of working in the indie space, and was frankly stunned by how much so many of the things he talked about were the very things I’d been struggling with as a writer.

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All the time. I’m constantly reading things other people write and being painfully aware that I could never write anything like them. Holowka showed some of the responses he’d gotten when sending this question out on Twitter. To see so many people say that they experience this feeling, too, was eye-opening. And of course, what I rarely think about is how, just as I can’t write the things that this writer or that writer I profoundly admire writes, they can’t write the things that I write, either.

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Yeah, it does. This is one of the biggest struggles for me. Am I capable of confronting the solitude of truly working on my own? At least at GameSpot, I had people around, people I loved working with, people I could talk to and who made me laugh myself sick every day.

Of working in indie, he said:

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and in a way, I feel like that’s what the work I’ve been doing these past few months has been about, too.

Later that night, a man thanked me for always “keeping it real” in my writing. I really appreciated that. I feel like it’s the only way I know how to write anymore.

A stolen moment (wish you’d been there)

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“We need games that people love.”

My one traditional press appointment of the show was with French startup Kobojo’s CEO Mario Rizzo to talk about the studio’s upcoming RPG, Zodiac.

When Rizzo took over Kobojo, the studio had been focused on making casual social games. Rizzo came from a background of working on MMOs and wanted to shift Kobojo in a new direction. He wasn’t interested in making a disposable game. He wanted to create a role-playing game that had the magic and enduring power of the games that had come out of Japan when he was growing up, and in fact, Hitoshi Sakimoto is composing the music for the game while Kazushige Nojima is writing the story.

“(Japan) is, for me, still one of the greatest places in the world for video games,” Rizzo said. It’s been my dream to make a game like Final Fantasy or Super Mario or Zelda, so when we decided to reimagine Kobojo, I said these are the kinds of games we want to make. We want to make games that are emotional, that touch people, that people remember for years. I don’t just want to make games that people throw away and then forget about in six months, because, as much money as I’m sure the guys who make Clash of Clans make, if I really wanted to make money, I would not be a CEO in the video game industry. I was in investment banking before I ever worked at Sony Online, and I quit my job, I started answering the phone for ten dollars an hour on EverQuest. Now I’m finally at the point–it takes years and years, begging and pleading, but now we can make the games we want to make. And people seem to like them. That’s as much money as we need to survive.”

“I don’t need to make Clash of Clans for us to all have salaries and for the company to be profitable. We need games that people love.”

And I agree, we do. At an event called The MIX on Monday night, I glimpsed games that made me hopeful because of the ways they tapped in to things I’ve loved about games for decades. There was a game called Starr Mazer that appears to be one part shmup, one part LucasArts-style adventure game, though just how the two parts would fit together remains a mystery.

There was Drift Stage, a game that looks like what 10-year-old me thought amazing racing games in the future would look like.

And there was Read Only Memories, a cyberpunk adventure I’ve written about before, showing off its nifty new interface and a few Neo-San Francisco environments I hadn’t seen before.

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I loved seeing Sutro Tower in the game. I’ve really come to love that tower, the way it stands proud and alone, looming and watching over so much of the city. It stops me in my tracks sometimes, I come around a corner and there it is, piercing the clouds. I like to think that it looks out for the people in San Francisco I care about most.

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While those games reflect things I have always loved about games, on the show floor I played games that made me hopeful because they confront real human experience and emotions like grief in ways that games have only recently started to do.

a•part•ment is a game about the end of a relationship. I found the specificity of detail honest and affecting, the way items in the apartment have stories of shared experiences associated with them, making the protagonist’s memories of the love he and his partner had once shared inescapable. 

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And then there was That Dragon, Cancer, a game whose grief is so real and so true, a game that, in confronting death so directly, is so full of life.

A Reason To Be

At the #1ReasonToBe panel, the room was mostly silent during the empty chair portion, as statements from women who had worked or did work in the gaming industry were shown on the screen.

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As a transgender woman who’d written for a major gaming site, being the target of gendered, transphobic hate had been a daily occurrence. But that site had also been part of my identity, part of how I situated myself in the larger gaming space. Figuring out how or if I fit in to the world of gaming media without that site as a platform and its logo on my business cards had proven difficult. I didn’t want to walk away from games–really, I didn’t know where else I would go–but I didn’t know if I had a choice. I didn’t know if there was still a place for me here.

Then the inspiring and indomitable Katherine Cross took the stage at that panel and brought the house down. Her entire speech is posted here on Feministing but I just want to share this part:

By the time I wrote this article on First Person Scholar, analysing the dangerous, revolutionary dynamics of GamerGate that situated it as an “ends justify the means” movement, I was besieged with very angry, often transphobic and racist GamerGaters who wanted me to shut up and go away. I was tempted by the yawning embrace of that oblivion; tempted to walk away from the career I’d built, tempted to do anything to make the pain stop.
So I made a choice and decided there was only one thing I could do.
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And again, I felt like it has been such a privilege for me to have shared in all of this for a while. I don’t know where all this is going, or where the line is between me writing about games and me telling my own story through the lens of my experience with games, but I know that I don’t want to stop writing it or telling it if I don’t have to, if there are still people who want to share in it. I’ll never take it for granted and I’ll never stop trying to be as honest with you as I can.

I think about how, when I was at GameSpot, commenters often railed against me as a “radical feminist” even though I brought up issues of representation in only a small fraction of things I wrote. Now, I want to own that. If it was a liability before, let it be an asset now. Let me sometimes play the part of the feminist killjoy, saying things other people don’t want to hear. Let me write from my perspective, not because I think my perspective matters more than others (though I certainly don’t think it matters less either and you better believe I celebrate myself and sing the hell out of myself in a field that aggressively prioritizes straight white male perspective to the diminishment of others) but to assert over and over again that there is no neutral, apolitical, objective perspective on art, that we all bring our experiences and assumptions to bear in our engagements with any work of art and its values. You may not always agree with me but I hope you always understand that I say the things I say because I love games so much.

I think about how I’m making it up as I go. I don’t know what the future looks like. But in the end for me GDC was about believing in games again, and believing, as Katherine Cross said during her speech, that games matter and that work about games can and does matter.

I’ve been trying to figure out where it is that I belong. The truth is that sometimes, we have to create that place ourselves. 

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The adventure continues.

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More soon.