Before I got myself banned for being a bit too rude about a subject, I still believe was totally okay to be rude about, I spent a lot of time in the Food channel of a larger videogame site’s discord community.
It was a nice place to post and look at pictures of nice food, get ideas for recipes and get angry at strangers because they decided to turn such simple pleasures as making coffee, or baking Pizza into incredibly tedious exercises in authenticity.
People were talking about Pizza stones and how to adjust the amount of grams of ground coffee to improve their “brew” (I don’t trust anyone who refers to their coffee as ‘brew’, I’m sorry!), which in of itself is okay. Everyone can be weirdly obsessed about some niche subject and just spend way too much time on it (I do that with baking myself!). Where it turned from some weird interests into something much more infuriating was when this whole space started to feel like, whatever you do isn’t worth a damn, unless you make it as authentic as possible. Better spend a bunch of money on a good coffee grinder, a scale, a very specific kettle and do not forget to also buy that one specific type of filter, or else your coffee might as well be just brown piss! Doesn’t matter that you and the people in your life enjoy it, you’re doing coffee not the way that one british dude on the internet was telling me to, so it’s bad and wrong!
Aside from me holding a lifelong grudge against coffee snobs from now on, this experience nicely demonstrated to me how authenticity is something that you only get to, when you’re able to afford it. Doesn’t matter how good you are at a craft, unless you have the resources to spend (be it time, or money), all your ability isn’t worth a damn, because it’s fake.
Strange tangential ranting aside, the reason why I bring up this story, is because today I saw some tweets talking about how the current trend of “PS1 style” 3D indiegames actually isn’t “authentic”, because of some reason.
It’s the same kind of argument you see with pixelart, where people are complaining about folks using gradients (ever looked at Amiga games?), or that actually pixel art was never meant to look that chunky, because it was made for CRTs and my friend have you heard of the Game Boy?
I don’t want to go into details why this argument is misguided and wrong. What I want to ask here is, who is this authenticity crap serving?
How is this discourse helping anyone who’s just starting out, to experiment and find their own style? How is this encouraging people to try different styles and maybe finding something new and unique?
If we define the quality of a thing in ways of how well they replicate something that already existed, the best thing we’ll get is a good copy of the past, but nothing new and nothing with a personal touch.
People who yell about authenticity (unless it involves cultures that have been subjected to colonialism, then it’s perfectly fine to yell about that, especially when said culture is being appropriated by white people!) usually do so, because they are really pissed that other people are making things their own, without having been given the permission to do so.
The most important part when it comes to get people to try out making something on their own, whether that’s Pizza, or a videogame, is to make sure that the path from “I would like to try this!” to “Wow I can’t believe I’m actually trying this!” is as short and uncomplicated as possible. If said path involves you giving someone a list of eight dozen things to keep in mind, because otherwise they’re doing it WRONG, then my friend, you are a gatekeeping fuckhead and should go away.
Anyway, no hate on people that use Pizza stones. I know they might be useful, but they are heavy and expensive and it’s too complicated. And if you grind your own coffee and have a whole “brewing station” that’s cool, but please don’t expect other people who just want to drink their wake me up juice in the morning to join in.
And please don’t tell people the way they are doing art is wrong, if said wrong approach to art is how they find enjoyment.
Have nice one!