CW: Abortion

I haven’t said a thing about the Texas abortion ban yet because the words escape me for how horrifying it actually is and most people genuinely don’t understand that. 6 weeks is a practically impossible deadline for women to even know if they are pregnant. If you’re unsure how this works, I recommend learning about how female cycles work, when we are fertile and how many weeks it effectively takes to even realize you’re not getting your period. Pregnancy also doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t bleed at all right away.

The idea that video games are for kids and a waste of time is not only outdated, it’s also a stupid hyper-capitalist stance that I fully reject. Please, by all means, go and play a whole day of video games if it makes you happy. You are not required to be productive all the time. Not every minute of your life needs to be spent on productive things. In fact, the entire concept of that can go die in a ditch. Whatever - literally whatever - brings you joy, as long as it doesn’t hurt others - is a valid use of your time and you are the judge of that.

Real talk:
I don’t know about my fellow ADHD friends, but stuff like meditation and even deep breathing never works for me, but you know what DOES work? Stimming. I love sound stimming, jumping, shaking, gentle pressure pain. ADHD anxiety coping works differently. Classic advice for how to calm down and regulate myself has always made me feel broken. Stimming is often not a socially acceptable way of emotional regulation cause it is linked to looking chaotic and childlike and “crazy”, but it’s totally a valid thing to do.

Do you know what Hypernormalization is and why it is likely what a lot of us are experiencing at the moment? It’s largely a term used when people in larger society are aware that the system they live in isn’t working but are pressured to just continue to function like normal. This is true for many things we are experiencing right now: Covid times, where everyone wants us to go back to normal without changing anything to keep us safe and to protect us, asking us to work and live normally despite us knowing that this isn’t working.

The way men talk to women sometimes, I swear....

My previous landlord talks to me in such a disrespectful manner, it's unbelievable. Same dude who's son yelled at me in the move-out inspection, calling me "woman" over a spot that wasn't clean enough. Mind you, I had it professionally cleaned, which I did not owe them contractually, because I knew he was allergic to cats and I wanted to make sure he was going to be okay in the apartment. THAT WAS BECAUSE I WANTED TO BE NICE TO THEM AND THEY SPEAK TO ME LIKE THIS!

So you’re saying there’s a chance... 😏

Jokes aside, the responses have been... fascinating, sometimes uplifting and also depressing.

Also too many people interpreted this as a call to date me and I’m judging you harshly for not reading the room here 😅 A few notes:

People have compared this to other intense professions and while there are overlaps, every gamedev would probably agree that there is a VERY distinct flavour of swallowing your whole life to the way gamedev functions and impacts relationships.

If you're a major gaming news outlet and you're STILL writing articles with headlines that say things like "XYZ game looks like shit", maybe re-evaluate your values and how you're contributing to toxic gaming culture and the harassment of game developers.
It's not good enough. No I'm not linking to it because no I'm not driving more traffic to it.

Do better.

The poll from yesterday has ended and it has generated so much ruckus that I feel like I need to say a few words about it.
Over 10k people have voted, leading me to believe that a lot of people who voted were not gamedevs and next time I’d like folks to respect the assignment. But about the topic, I want to stress that neither answer is wrong here, despite the slant being very very clearly towards working with the right team. There seems to be a lot of tension between the two camps and while neither are wrong, I can see why that would be the case.

It's fucking unbelievable that making games under capitalism means people can just buy the right to abuse us for 20-60 dollars just because they play our games. I don't know why I thought I could tweet this and walk away and expect to not come back to my mentions full of abuse...

Game design does not talk enough about a principle that is core to so so so many experiences. I’d even say it might be at the core of most games, but it sounds a little esoteric. You know when we say immersion, wanting impact on the game world etc?

It’s a desire to be witnessed. The desire to be witnessed is a fundamental human desire. A longing for being acknowledged in our actions, our existence and our humanity. We crave to be represented. We crave to see things we can relate to. We crave things we can project ourselves upon.

As this is going minor viral, so many people have replied that they found reading this thread validating and it really shows how there is a deep desire to come to some kind of resolution, to not have the pandemic be without an acknowledgement of what we’ve been through.

https://twitter.com/gaohmee/status/1396129269839896577

And my acknowledgment is not enough for that. This was a global event and we all crave a large-scale resolution and I wish officials would see that.
What are you going to do to prevent this from happening again?
How will you protect us next time around?

So... France is yelling at Eurovision about Italy potentially doing coke on their table?

France knows how to bring the drama and be sore losers :P So many angry French people...

Ok, real talk? I don't care if he did cocaine or not. Our culture around drugs is stupid.

Anyways. Cyprus is first and I'm not into it. Sorry Cyprus.

I need Eurovision songs to be WEIRD AS HELL OKAY! We need to get a lot WEIRDER and a lot less mainstream! I miss Europe <3

You know, the reason a lot of us struggle to “go back to normal” as we’re getting to a point of more safety with covid is not “virtue signaling” or being addicted to the pandemic lifestyle, it’s because it’s traumatizing to reconcile that so many ppl didn’t care about our lives. It’s not a question of suddenly not believing in science anymore or not wanting our lives back, it’s a question of the idea that we should just “go back to normal” as if everything we’ve been through, everything we sacrificed doesn’t matter and has no resolution.

This happens to everyone, including all the people you feel like have "made it" in this and other industries.

Last year I bombed an interview for a director-level position that I would've really liked, but had some insecurities about. It showed and I didn't get it. *shrug*

https://twitter.com/engineering_bae/status/1395447011902636033

I wasn't sure if I was ready for it myself, I was overwhelmed by the possibility because I didn't expect an offer like that, I was unsure how I would approach certain leadership challenges and did not meet expectations for a director in a male-dominated field. All fair.

I'm super proud of BBI for this code of conduct that includes all of our channels - yes, also social media! Shaping our communities requires strength and clarity and I think this is a great approach. I love that it includes things for what we WANT ppl to do.

Proud of you, BBI!

https://twitter.com/InsideBBI/status/1395536629251534849

I'm personally a HUGE fan of including things we want people to DO in our communities, encouraging behaviour we want to see. A list of things NOT to do is not very effective.
"Don't be a jerk" is not a good directive. Pointing out behaviour to aim for and to reward is great.

So I’ve been thinking about EA putting a patent on an intricate dynamic difficulty system that in the patent refers to its use to be for player retention and while I don’t claim to know the inner workings of EA and its motivations, I wanted to take a stab at dissecting it: Thread So from what I understand, the system in question has a way of analyzing player behavior from previous games in relation to a player’s predicted time spent in one play session and it uses that data to adjust difficulty dynamically.

You’d think after all these years and all the harassment I’d know better and actually trying to explain progressive concepts to bad actors, even if they follow you, will not work and you will be punished immediately with dozens of people harassing you.
Maybe one day I’ll learn. This happens literally no matter what. Even if the person you talked to sees your point.
They WILL come after you, ESPECIALLY if you’re a woman.

My personal instinct is to not give up on people and have conversations about missteps but Twitter makes it literally impossible.

Hi. This is a weird tangent but I’m nervous about this so you’re coming on the journey with me of fighting my spider mite plant infestation by.. releasing... more mites into my plants. 😬 I bought a plant from Facebook marketplace from a local and now almost all my plants have spider mites and it was a huge mistake so here we are.

Mites that eat other mites are my only hope.

Alright let’s play a little guessing game for non-devs:

Make a guess for me for how long you believe it takes to build a full 3D character from scratch for a game. Including concept, tools, pipeline, style development with existing standard software.
Make a wild guess. I’ll let folks take guesses for a while and talk about the answer later.

In the last 24 hours I’ve screamed into my own hands dozens of times because trying to explain to people that re-purposing technology and assets isn’t just like copy and pasting something and it’s been driving me absolutely mad.
Even re-purposing assets is a lot of work y’all. Players have access to information and developers talking about their work more than ever - all you have to do is listen to us.
You want more transparency and here are so many people willing to share what we do and how we work and all you got to do is listen.