Thread by @LobbaMattos

so, 'cuz after giving the damn speech i felt like it really wasn't that good and i shouldn't embarrass myself in public, i have been delaying the damn notes on it since then

but i can't hold it inside any longer - and i won't learn shit from that - so here it is

speech was called "Who Fits in our Everyone: Making Games for People", presented for a Game Development Seminar at Universidade Estadual da Bahia

the actual slides are in this link, for the curious
docs.google.com/presentation/d…

the premise of the lecture is that, in the manner we elaborate our production processes, we inadvertently conceptualize people in a manner that reproduces the very exclusive and restrictive idea of people within our societies, and that the key to making games beyond this idea...

...lies in understanding how this concept comes to be, and reviewing the process of production itself, for it was built with these restrictive concepts for starters

to elaborate how these concepts are created, i refer to cities as a social microcosmos - as a physical, social and symbolic space in which the ideal society tries to manifest

the notion of the city as the privileged locus of citizenship is fundamentally an enlightenment conceptualization of the ideal purpose of these spacial phenomena, strongly anchored in the Greek Polis - or at least, in the idea of it

and the idea of citizenship, on its own, is deeply tied to the idea of humanity - within this conceptualization, human people are those who benefit from, and in turn respect laws; the notion of human rights, to a very large degree, relies on this construction

thus, the city becomes the privileged place in which people are subjected to and act upon rights, which in turn will give origin to a different question: who has the right to the City, as this privileged place - by knowing those who have this right, we know of those who are human

one of the most potent criticism which arise from disabled activists is that one of the manners by which disability is socially reproduced is by how physical spaces are build in a manner that clearly reveal that disabled people's needs weren't taken into account

these physical structures are unquestionably constructed in a way that disregards, when doesn't outright exclude, people whose needs are distinct from an ideal human form - which, being ideal, is subjected to many caveats in reality

it isn't a coincidence that small kids, the elderly, the temporarily immobilized struggle with these spaces - those people do not mirror the ideal human who will ideally occupy those spaces, and in this contradiction, an idea of who actually occupy those is revealed

by refusing to create spaces in which disable people can exist, we effectively are saying that the city - the City in which human people exercise their Rights - is not a legitimate space for them, which in turn says something about their humanity for us

and from this very empirical example, i transition to the construction of Stigma, as constructed by Erving Goffman, to discuss how the processes of actual, physical discrimination and bodily and symbolic harm arise from a previous conceptualization of the Other

as put by Goffman himself
"The phenomenon whereby an individual with an attribute which is deeply discredited by his/her society is rejected as a result of the attribute. Stigma is a process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity."

from which i elaborate in the social processes that lead to the creation of this stigma

in the actual presentation, i didn't go very deep in this, mostly because i genuinely didn't know how to do so without going deep into social theory people wouldn't be familiar with

but the gist of it is that, in the same manner as disability is created and reproduced in the manners by which we create the physical spaces, other form of stigmatization are created and reproduced not due to biological imperatives, but rather by social relationships

which led to a quote from Monique Wittig on the construction of Womanhood as a category which, to be absolutely fair, was one of the high points of the presentation - to bring a materialist, radical feminist to a game dev audience remains one of my greatest achievements thus far

from that foundation on social sciences, i then went to speak on games, and more precisely on what makes games games

or rather, what makes games not games, actually, which is a far more fun proposition to work with~

first, i did a very brief elaboration on the concept of metagames as defined here by Boluk and Lemieux, as the "the games we make in, on, around, through, before, during, after, and between videogames"

patrick-lemieux.com/projects/What_…

which, in the context of the social construction of humanity, was for me a fundamental concept to speak of social construction of people-in-games, or how the things that we use to represent human beings in games are socially constructed

but also to rely on the notion of an "ideological avatar of play", the construction of a metagame that is in such way hegemonic and invisible, it becomes obfuscate all other possibilities and represent the Right way to play

here i make a short intermission to quote @siegarettes on how the language which we use to talk about games sometimes fall short of the task of actually engaging with the subject

(give the thread a read, btw)

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from which i jump do discuss game genre, and how, beyond the limitations that come with defining genre at all, how these labels which, at first, should describe what we are playing become prescriptive to how we think that games should be

a process that is driven both by market forces - to some degree, to fit in such prescriptions allow ourselves to reach possible consumers - but also by a culture that perceive games as products first and foremost, and inform our interactions with them

and then, i tell the story about how a very personal game by @alienmelon becomes the target for virulent harassment for failing to correspond to this very narrow idea of how a game should exist, at all

her accounts of this process are in her site
nathalielawhead.com/candybox/

which leads to a brief interlude in which i suggest a possible theory of Value in games:

if i acknowledge that a good game is good by virtue of following, in the right ways, the criteria for being good, then there are two possible ways for a game to be bad

the first is a game which follows these criteria, but fall short of reaching the acceptable level of technical expertise within them

and the second is the game that eschew these criteria entirely, and go towards something which should not exist within the field of the possible

this distinction is important because, when met with games that defy their understanding of what games should be, people often disguise their discomfort with the incomprehensible by pointing out the ways in which the fail the reach criteria they never intended to follow

which is an act of social control of the possible

the message is quite clear - your game shouldn't exist because it can't exist, and rather than confronting the fact that i did not account for its possible existence, i'll blame you for not following my idea of what is right

which then leads me to consider the idea of an Occult Player

which is built as a player who is, first and foremost, the consumer of the game - and here i build upon the amazing criticism @thotxcouture build on her essay Kill the Player

mattiebrice.com/kill-the-playe…

and as a consumer, should be conceptualized as a "targeted audience", which is a means by which complex populations are abstracted as a number of shared characteristics for the purpose of optimizing branding, marketing and production efforts

but when this targeted audience is defined, you often can't have too much specificity, at the risk of inadvertently alienating other groups - there are situations in which this alienation is desired, but for most part i doubt most game devs intend to alienate, say, Black people

but by not defining specifically that Black people are a target, you're left with it's negation, and as cultural studies will point out, all identity is build upon negations - it's not only about who you are, but rather about who you aren't

increase the degree of specificity of to whom this game ain't for - it ain't for Gay people, for Disabled people, for Black Gay people, for Black Disabled people, for Gay Disabled people, for Black Gay Disabled people... - and suddenly the actual range becomes very narrow

by avoiding to actively acknowledging the specific needs of those people in our production processes, we eventually reach a game which is build for the negation of all of them

and in the same manner the City tells us who is human by showing us who have the Right to exist in it, games shows us who is our everyone by prioritizing the needs of very specific groups, which are then taken as representative of everyone when they are quite restrictive in fact

thus, the Field of Possible Experiences is revealed as a very narrow field, and we're left with a lot of people who ain't Human, for the purposes of our production processes, because when we started thinking the theory by which games are developed, this "specificity" wasn't there

in that situation, i propose two possible approaches

the first, in which i allude to Black Panther, is to make Good Games which incorporate these marginalized groups in the production process

we still need to pay bills, and as such, bringing people from the groups which have been historically set apart and giving them creative liberty to experiment with the already consolidated forms is one way to create people that further expand the idea of Everyone

the second approach, and my personal favorite, is to make more Bad Games

not as more good games that ain't quite there, but rather games that forces us to reconsider the very way we conceptualize games

we need to embrace the odd, the strange, the bizarre, the incomprehensible, the absurd, the unbelievable, the unplayable, the uncomfortable, that which defies existence

we need to be bold enough to break through the very narrow definitions of what games are, and start thinking of what games could be

with radically new production processes and good practices and good design standards, which extend the ideal Everyone to the actual Everyone

ideally, such processes should be done in parallel, since, again, we still need to pay bills, but

unless we actively work towards this cultural shift - which ain't just a content shift, but rather a process shift - i don't think we'll be able to make games which...

actively reflect the unbelievably plural world we are so fortunate to live in

aaaaand i think that's about it x3

tagging, hm, @EliAllen, @iseecarlos and @wasnotwhynot, since y'all showed interest in this when i previously scouted the matter

please, do add criticisms and commentaries on this thread - i am deeply curious as what you feel about it <3

hm, @whatsubon, @TBSkyen, @Iron_Stylus, @danielzklein, you might also find this interesting