Sometimes it's good to talk about things from 10 years ago
On July 11th, I had the pleasure to give a talk about "Evil Game Design" at the Glasgow Independent Games Festival. The talk itself should be available online soon (I hope), but I also had more general thoughts during my trip back to hot, sweaty Germany that I wanted to share. Most of this is straight from my notebook, so apologies if it's a bit all over the place:
Everyone was really kind!
Part of me wished I could've met more people, but I also was pretty much done with socializing at the end, so maybe it was actually enough.
I think making Zines and bringing them to Events like this is nice. You're sharing something very specific and personal with others.
I want to make Zines so that I can bring them with me, should I ever go to another one of these.
The event overall felt almost like it was out of time in a way?
I feel there used to be more smaller games events around that had a mixture of talks and games at display, but most of them vanished.
I think having more of these would be nice.
The one thing I didn't particularly like about the event was the fact that the venue was constantly blasted with music coming out of a speaker system.
It felt distracting from the games and also the type of music made it feel like some strange fashion boutique, which was kind of grating.
Same goes for the parties. I appreciated the effort the band put in, but I think this wasn't really a place for a band concert? People were still trying to play the games that were on display while fairly loud music was playing.
In general, I think events like these need to have a quiet place where people can just sit around and talk, or do nothing.
Sometimes it was hard to find a place to put myself where I didn't feel like I was in the way of someone.
But some of that is also due to the venue, so I don't know how much you could do there, really.
Speaking of venue: I liked the area around it. I didn't expect to run into a whole weekend market on Saturday and it was nice to occasionally wander around and look at things. It also made getting food much easier.
Next time I would pick a Hotel that's a bit closer though. Turns out that having to walk around 8 kilometres a day AND spending a lot of time standing and walking around an event is pretty exhausting.
About the Talk(s)
I wish I had gone to any of the other talks. You had to pre-register for them and I wasn't sure if it would be okay for me to just go into the room with the assumption that as a speaker, I'm entitled to sit in every other talk that was going on.
The talk itself was fun! It went a bit differently than when I practised, but that's usually the case with these.
I was a bit concerned initially, because when I watched some of last year's talks on youtube, they all seemed very "professional", when mine really wasn't.
I also repeatedly heard that my talk was the first to be fully booked and each time someone told me, all I could think was "boy, I hope you get what you wish for"
I wasn't scared of the speaking part at any moment. While it's sometimes a problem, being very oblivious of other people does help a bunch when you're doing public speaking.
My main concern was dissappointing people in some way. When you give a talk, you automatically assume a degree of authority over the subject you are presenting and there's a long list of talks and essays about games culture where things are presented as novel, or revolutionary, when they really aren't.
This was one reason, why I wanted to make sure to mention that while my framing might be new, the core subject of the talk itself really wasn't.
Talking to other people afterwards made me really nostalgic of the #altgames days from 2015. While I was already covering games in German before that, it was that hashtag and the people who wrote about and made games within it, that made me want to get involved myself. It was during that time where I made connections to people who I'm still in contact with today and to others who I wished would still be around. Not to mourn people who hopefully moved on to more rewarding things, but I do miss a lot of them and if I can get myself together, I want to try and reach out to some who I feel personally indebted to.
In a way, "Evil Game Design" is just an extension of what people were doing back then and I'm glad that I was able keep this connection.
I changed the end of the talk on Friday night, during the pre-event "VIP" party. I originally had planned to say something along the lines of "please don't call yourself and Evil Games Publisher, or you will make me cry.", and instead decided to directly address the people who are already doing the type of work, that my talk was supposed to encourage.
Making things on the margins of a larger cultural space is really hard and can sometimes feel very lonely, because the main lines of communication we have (social media) constantly push you towards maximum reach and attention.
At least I felt lonely, and I only really noticed in Glasgow, how lonely I felt. So instead of threatening imaginary businesses for taking "my" ideas, I tried to address my friends to tell them, that I want for them to keep going for as long as they can, and to ignore all the worms around them.
After the talk was done, I had someone approach me who told me that she found the talk "eye-opening", which I found both very kind, but also deeply terrifying, because I don't think anything I do is ever going to affect anyone. Thinking about this now a bit more and I'm slowly getting around to the idea that maybe it's okay to occasionally say things that have already been said 10 years ago, or 20 years ago.
Videogames forgets very quickly, especially when it comes to the work of people on its margins. So if what I did, had a similar effect on them as it did on me 10 years ago, then maybe it's actually okay to repeat things every now and then.
It's also interesting how this talk I gave in front 25-40 people felt so much more real and meaningful then anything else I've done over the past years. I occasionally had blogs of mine make larger rounds over the years, especially during the cohost days, but it's so funny how "you've reached 40 people with your message" feels very different when it's 40 different faces in a room, vs. a number underneath a post.
This whole trip in general was really enlightening to me in how much we tend to create images of people in our head, based on how they post and behave on social media and how rarely these images are an actual reflection of who these people are when you meet them and talk to them.
I think I made some friends this last weekend and I hope I can meet them again.
And who knows, maybe next time they will let me pay for my own food for once.