Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Level With Me: a new Twitch livestream show about level design, Wednesdays at 6 PM EST

Regular readers of this blog will note that Twitch continues to ban my gay games from broadcast, and their policy is intentionally vague and ambiguous, and the selectively-enforced rules are designed more to punish and intimidate small independent game developers rather than maintaining any moral code or community norms. I've complained to the internet at-large; then I went to GDC and complained to a captive audience of thousands of game developers; and of course, nothing has changed.

This calls for a new strategy: build-up an audience on Twitch, and eventually start advocating for change on the Twitch platform itself.

So that's why I'm starting a new level design livestreaming show on Twitch called "Level With Me", riffing off the original interview series I did for Rock Paper Shotgun.

Every Wednesday at 6 PM EST (3 PM PST, 11 PM GMT) I'm going to play some kind of level design-y game (usually a first person game) and offer a bunch of commentary on the environment art, the floorplan, the lighting, etc. and hopefully it'll be interesting to watch. Eventually, I might even host guests, or do some level design during the broadcast, etc.

(At some point, I also might start doing a show about sex games, but that won't be until after I figure out how to do this whole streaming thing.) 

Anyway, come tune-in at twitch.tv/radiatoryang!

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Please nominate Radiator 2 for the "Whoaaaaaa Dude" category for the first annual Steam Awards!


Hello everyone! If you enjoy pointless exercises of internet democracy, as well as artistic depictions of male sexuality, then please consider nominating Radiator 2 for the "Whoaaaaaaa Dude" category for the first ever annual Steam Awards!

To nominate Radiator 2, simply visit the Radiator 2 Steam store page and log in to your Steam account. Once you're logged in, just click the big purple box button below the video embed, and select the "Whoaaaaaaaa Dude" category.

Thanks everyone for your support! Tell your friends! Let's make Steam sexy again! Resist capitalism!

Monday, November 7, 2016

For better or worse

When I do the occasional interview about all the gay shit I do, I'm often asked, "are games getting better?" What they mean is whether the game industry as a whole is getting more inclusive, more diverse, more tolerant, more progressive, more whatever.

My standard response used to be "a little", then it was "this is a bad question", but these days I'm leaning toward "no, but hopefully it won't matter."

Some journalists hope I'll hand them a nice optimistic little quote to end their article, so that I can resolve their nagging fear that video games will never actually grow up. If you buy that next Halo game and (gasp) enjoy playing it, then are you part of "the problem"? And if you are, hopefully you just have to say 5 Hail Marys and donate to 5 queer people of color Patreons to be forgiven, and that means the numbers are getting better.

My gay sex games are not some sort of statistical outlier that magically increases the arithmetic average gayness of all video games ever made. Even gay initiatives like GLAAD's"studio responsibility" scorecards fall into the same trap -- the idea that culture is a type of math, and as long as the grades are getting better, then we can rest easy with this misleading summary of how people supposedly feel.