"Take ecstasy with me": a manifesto for Gay VR

Before I explain what the heck I mean by "Gay VR", let's review why Gay VR would be necessary. I gave a MVR talk on this topic at A/D/O a few weeks ago, and someone tweeted my slide above and it went mildly viral. A quick explanation:

• "failsons" (failure + son), coined by popular "dirtbag left" podcast Chapo Trap House, are a particular type of 20-30-something men who have failed to fit into capitalism for whatever reason -- they don't have promising jobs, or careers, or relationships, or futures -- and they definitely feel the shame of it. When they hit rock bottom like this, do they blame capitalism and start listening to Chapo Trap House, or do they blame women + people of color and they join some Reddit hate mobs?
• But when they buy video games, the right-wing failson finally fits into capitalism in some small way, and so they stake their self-worth on it. Instead of philosopher-kings, they are consumer-kings, who think they're so good at consuming video games that they can impose their radical conservative racist misogynist politics on the rest of gamer culture...
• ... and they basically succeeded, thanks to tacit support from the game industry. It's now way too late to reverse this deeply unhealthy attitude toward art and media, and gamer culture is never going to get "better." These toxic conservatives have basically shit the bed, and now that shit will stay there forever.

To save a newly emerging VR culture from this poisoned gamer culture, I believe that we must act now, to fortify and insulate pockets of VR culture from the inferno. Ideally, we all pursue many different strategies in tandem, and here's a tactic that I'm working on, it's two short sweet words: Gay. VR.

Bleeding between alternate realities in Metal Gear Solid 5 and other open world games

I was playing the open world stealth game Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain (2015) and I kept failing Mission 33 ("Subsistence: C2W")... The "Subsistence" label means it's a remix of a past mission, but this time you have to complete the mission without any starting loadout, and rely purely on whatever equipment you find after you begin the mission.

The goal of C2W is to destroy some buildings, but "Subsistence" means you don't begin with any explosives -- and once you start attacking the base, they call-in an enemy helicopter that will kill you very quickly. So your two options are (a) sneaking around and clearing out the base quietly so you can destroy the buildings in peace, or (b) finding some heavy weapons (conveniently, some nearby guards carry rocket launchers) and quickly blowing everything up and escaping before the helicopter kills you.

I kept failing with either strategy, so I decided to look up some tips. The online guide suggested a rather dishonorable trick... (1) destroy the nearby anti-air radar station while in "free roam" mode, outside of the mission; (2) then, finally start the mission, set your own helicopter deploy point right on top of your mission objective; (3) and basically kill everyone with the helicopter's giant overpowered chain gun, easily earning the top S-Rank rating for your performance.

My (wrong) assumption was that changing the world in "free roam" mode would not change the world in "mission" mode. In most cases, this was still true... except in this one instance, the radar station was leaked between alternate realities.

Theorizing local games cultures in a post-TIGSource era

Colin Northway tweeted this about a week ago:

This GDC I strongly felt there's a large movement of young indies that I know nothing about.

Is there a cultural nexus I can visit?

— ColinNorthway (@ColinNorthway) March 8, 2017

As Colin implies, I suspect there is actually no real equivalent of a central "cultural nexus" like TIGSource today. In fact, I've been in on the ground floor of several attempts to make new TIGSource-likes, such as Super Friendship Club and Makega.me, and both of them eventually petered-out in the end for one reason or another. I'm still not sure why, but maybe it's possible that internet forums are a poor fit for what we need these days?

The indie games moment arrived, and has now stabilized into a satellite commercial industry of the game industry. We don't need a central place like TIGSource to imagine it or to advocate for indies to exist. Commercially indie showcase events like Day of the Devs, The MIX, and Indie Megabooth have been been running for a while and will probably keep running.

Today, what would be a public game organization's "mission" now? Everyone has so many different needs and concerns. It's kind of absurd that we even imagined one global "public" that TIGSource was supposed to serve? Local games community problems here in New York City are very different from local problems in, say, Pittsburgh or Capetown or Teheran or Shanghai. One single internet place cannot hope to address all of that.

Many local communities and friend groups have Slacks and chatrooms, but most of these are private and unlisted -- they don't have the "public" face that TIGSource provides / provided. What, are you going to invite Colin Northway to your Slack now? Even if he accepted the invitation, he likely wouldn't stay very long, because Slack requires constant (hourly? minute-by-minute?) engagement and labor to function as a community -- and it'd still be difficult for Colin to understand the tone of your Slack, or what it's really about.

To me, a public games culture should serve two functions: (1) help a local community cohere together, and (2) articulate that community's voice(s) and concerns to the rest of the world.

The melancholy of screen space in "Universal History of Light" by Stephen Lavelle

WARNING: This post somewhat "spoils" the 2014 game Universal History of Light.

Stephen "increpare" Lavelle's "Universal History of Light" is a highly symbolic "adventure" game released back in February 2014. Reviews at the time hinged on describing it as an "insane dog simulator" game, which doesn't really capture what the game does, so this is me trying to offer a more robust interpretation and understanding.

Universal History of Light begins with a short lecture about the dangers of using laser pointers with dogs. Because a small red laser dot is incorporeal and intangible, a dog can never actually "catch" it -- and they will never understand their inability to catch their "prey", which will supposedly haunt them and cause psychological damage for the rest of their lives.

You then play as the lecturer at the front of the lecture hall, and you point your laser pointer at a student's assistance dog / seeing-eye dog, thus inflicting catastrophic hallucinations upon the dog. The dog now enters the brilliant burst pictured above; what awaits the dog in a new dimension of pure light and knowledge?

Turns out, it is a world of monochrome trauma. In the distance, we see countless planes, searchlights, and anti-aircraft flak illuminate the night sky. As the dog, we are basically wandering the outskirts of London during the Blitz.

"Queer Utopian VR" for MVR 2.2 in Brooklyn, 7 March 2017

Next week I'm participating in MVR, an arts-technology presentation series by Pioneer Works and Nancy Nowacek. This particular installment, MVR 2.2, is hosted in conjunction with A/D/O in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, as part of their "Utopia vs Dystopia" series. (Wow so many event series!)

I'll be doing some standard artist talk stuff for an audience largely unfamiliar with my work, but I'll also be trying to speak to the theme a little -- "virtual reality" as a historically utopian project that is quickly descending into dystopia on all fronts. I will connect this to José Esteban Muñoz's idea of queerness as a utopia itself, where we can perhaps use the "horizon" of queer performance to preserve / salvage pockets of utopia in VR.

The other presenters are Jacob Gaboury, Laura Juo-Hsin Chen, and Rachel White, also presenting on their particular practices with art and technology... Jacob Gaboury does cool research with the history of computer graphics and queer computing. Laura Juo-Hsin Chen does playful VR that engages with materiality, like "toilet VR" and physical VR masks. Rachel White explores the fuzzy intersection between internet bots and an internet of cuteness.

It should be a fun night. See you there.

Free / open to public, RSVP requested
Tuesday, March 7, 2017 @ 7 PM
at: A/D/O
29 Norman Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11222
(subway: G at Nassau)

GDC Advice for young first-time attendees, 2017 edition

I remember when I was totally bewildered and disappointed at my first GDC. Since everyone is doing little advice columns / threads on Twitter, I thought I'd chime in with my own shit. This is a bit of advice and info primarily for young people (ages 15-30?) going to GDC for their first time:

• If you are a man, assume every woman you meet is a developer. Never ever ask a woman whether she is "in games" -- don't be so fucking basic, of course she works in games, she's at GDC! Women at GDC are not your mom and they are most definitely not your girlfriend: women are your colleagues. The secret is to understand women as skilled experienced professionals. Instead, you could ask:
• "What are you working on? What's your current project? What was your last project?"
• "What do you think about [area of expertise]? What are your thoughts on [related game]? Did you go to [related GDC session]?"
• "Go to any good talks? See any cool stuff? Go to any cool parties last night?"
• This is a business conference. If you're not here to "do business" or sign some deals or have meetings, then the conference is going to be kind of boring, and it'll be up to you to entertain yourself. On the other hand, if you do have something to show, this is a great time to try to talk to a publisher about a deal / getting a console devkit / getting some VR money.
• When requesting business meetings / making appointments / approaching people, err on the side of doing it. Awkward first meetings are expected at GDC. Assume that you and your project are worth their time. If the meeting isn't a good fit, then let them decide -- they will quickly wrap it up, they're used to it... but also, use your judgment and don't annoy people if they don't look receptive.
• Business cards exist to end conversations politely. If you ever want to leave a conversation, just make an excuse, offer your card, and then leave. Everyone knows this is bullshit, but the effort you put into this bullshit ironically indicates that you do give a shit.
• If you ever have to choose between going to a talk vs. hanging out with people, you should usually choose to hang out with people. All sessions are recorded, you can always just watch it later or read a summary. (Personally, I've never regretted missing a talk.)
• Stay aware of how tired you are, take short naps in the Mild Rumpus area or the park, and remember to eat enough. If you're hungover, you'll probably just have to drink a bunch of immune boosters and coffee, and try to hold it together until Friday.
• If you are manning an IGF or Alt.Ctrl booth, it is totally OK for you to put up a "back in 30 minutes" sign and take a break, or maybe ask a friend to cover for you. Some people even just setup a looping video trailer and leave. The drawback is that you might miss some possible press coverage and interview opportunities.
• Lunch recommendations near Moscone:

On cs_ppc, "school maps", and the politics of remediating / re-mapping real-life places

[ cs_ppc.bsp ]

by: Walnut<+>Warrior

for: Counter-Strike pic.twitter.com/P8XWw0ppuD

— .BSP (@dot_bsp) February 18, 2017

The excellent @dot_bsp Twitter account randomly tweets screenshots from different levels in various Goldsrc (Half-Life 1 engine) games and this February 18th tweet about "cs_ppc" by "Walnut<+>Warrior" really caught my eye and got me thinking.

cs_ppc is really clean and well-built with good height variation and composition. The shapes flow into each other very well, and the scale seems very realistic. On a technical level, there's also clever use of masked transparency textures to complicate silhouettes with fewer wpolys, centering around a pretty huge atrium with a lot of open sight-lines everywhere -- this kind of craft means it was built relatively late in the Goldsrc cycle, when high polycounts and heavy use of custom textures were the norm.

This level has relatively little cover and probably plays strangely for Counter-Strike, but the author clearly prioritized real-life resemblance over gameplay. It made me wonder about the level's relation to the real world. Fortunately, when I loaded cs_ppc.bsp into the engine, I discovered that the author embedded a commemorative plaque at the very front of the level. It is definitely intended as a recreation of Peter-Paul-Cahensly (PPC) vocational school in Limburg, Germany.

So what?...

Apply to STUGAN, a bucolic game design residency in Sweden

Stugan is a residency program for indie game designers to hang out together in a beautiful cabin in the Swedish countryside and work on their stuff.

They call it an "accelerator", but don't that word dissuade you. If you consider yourself more of an artist than a businessperson, it's OK, they have hosted plenty of artsy experimental designer types too.

There's been some understandable criticism of Stugan's arrangements: Like many artist residencies and opportunities, there are certain barriers to access -- you're basically foregoing paid work for a few months as a sort of working holiday, and you'll need existing funds to travel to Sweden somehow.

However, I think it's worth noting that many art residencies often have hefty application fees and/or require attendees to pay for their own room and board. Compared to that inaccessible norm in the (messed-up) art world, Stugan is a somewhat reasonable deal that's firmly in the middle of the pack for art, and extremely rare in video games funding.

Of course that doesn't mean it's "accessible" -- so if you're interested in Stugan but don't necessarily have the resources, you might want to do some research into funding sources for artists, you might be surprised. Also, if you're a student, talk to your school -- many institutions offer travel grants for programs like this.

Or just cross that bridge when you come to it? You can apply to Stugan for free. Good luck.