My New Year’s resolution was to spend less time on flaw-hiding (boring) makeup and more time on face-decorating makeup!
My New Year’s Resolution Is More Glitter
Quing’s Quest VII
I checked out Quing’s Quest VII the other day, originally for work, but I quickly realized it was too full of mature themes and games industry snark to be good for the kids. The entire game is a parody, in which my genderqueer sidekick, Guybrush, and I were flying our spaceship, the Social Justice Warrior, away from our home planet, Videogames. Then the evil Gamer Police caught my ship, and arrested us for a list of crimes, including snogging the wrong people, wearing the wrong clothes, taking too many selfies and resisting arrest. It’s a Twine game, too, which just adds to the entire joke, because experimental Twine projects seem to bring out the fastest switch from “Make your own games then!” to “That doesn’t count as a game!”
Hilarity ensues, with glitter, dancing and delightful flavortext. Quing’s Quest VII takes just a few minutes to play and is a ridiculously good moodbooster.
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The game is full of glaringly obvious references to GamerGate disasters, particularly your friend Frankie who is too exhausted from working crunch hours to really help you, and besides, if you submit quietly to the misogynerds, plead guilty and promise never to act up again, you could probably go home and get another industry job. But Quing’s Quest VII is also full of fun references to classic games, and I couldn’t help giggling when I was offered a choice between using the Konami code, escaping from Monkey Island or doing the hokey-pokey to evade my captors. All the injokes are a nice reminder of all the silliness and good times in gaming, and the dancing and ridiculous choices made it a really cheerful playthrough.
Even though at the end of the game, I hovered over the Save Videogames button but didn’t want to feel sad after my glitter-awesome adventure, and ultimately choose the Get The Hell Away From Games conclusion. There’s a lot of galaxy for adventure-seeking space pirates!
Posted in Chapel Hill, Game Reviews, Gaming Culture
Tagged browser games, flavortext, games, games industry, Quing's Quest VII, Squinky
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Visiting My Family
“Um…. It’s about an average-looking and moderately talented writer in her mid-thirties, who keeps getting overlooked, until she ignores all morals to completely destroy her rival. Uh.”
Posted in Chapel Hill
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But First…
The entire post on barriers to diverse recruitment (over on Go Make Me A Sandwich) is quite good. It’s a thoughtful look at the overt and subtle ways that tech and gaming companies fail to encourage diverse hires, and also what a completely crock it is to throw up our collective hands, and say, well, we haven’t hired any women for this project, must be because no women wanted to work here.
I’ve written about the expectation of free labour, particularly proving one’s worth as an unpaid intern for a publication in hopes of landing a job afterwards, and how that influences the hiring pool by eliminating everyone without the personal resources required to intern. This post really points out how hiring practices designed to weed out inexperienced and frivolous applicants can also affect diverse hires.
(And, yeah, we all have other responsibilities, but if a task that is substantially easier for one subset is part of the application process, we can’t then be surprised when the majority of the applicants are part of that subset.)
Ability to do free labor
If you require applicants to complete a particular writing prompt, or to read a particular game or other written work, or to perform any other activity that represents a non-trivial time investment, you are restricting your pool of applicants to people who can afford to perform free labor in pursuit of a POTENTIAL position that – quite honestly – pays like shit and most likely won’t be paid at all promptly, if at all. (Pay-on-publication is still a quite common model for paying freelancers, which is something I intend to write about later, as it is complete and utter bullshit.)
And – again – the wage gap and 2nd shift labor are going to be factors that skew your applicant pool (again) toward white, male, and cisgender.
via Barriers to diverse recruitment [LONG] | Go Make Me a Sandwich.
I don’t mind payment-on-publication, personally. Receiving my check with my contributor’s copy is no problem for me, and it beats pay-after-angry-letters-to-the-publisher or payment in exposure, but the gap between completing the work and receiving payment can be another hurdle.
Anyway, the whole post’s really good, and includes some practical suggestions for more diverse hiring practices.
Travel Essentials
Bumped off my flight home (intentional) and separated from my luggage (…not so much). Fortunately, I have all the books on my iPad and my mom’s Christmas cookies with me in my carryon.
Hello Kitty Menorah
My work Secret Santa got me Ms. Marvel comics! (This is totally unrelated to the TMNT paper my other coworkers wrapped my desk in…)
I’ve been aiming to take more pictures and post a photo every Wednesday, but I guess it won’t break my streak if I post a second one today. Secret Santa also made the most adorable card with a Hello Kitty Menorah on it. Hello Kitty really does go on everything!
In Praise of Acceptable
I did some perfectly acceptable work recently, and I’m pretty thrilled about it.
It’s not so difficult to write something great when I have a great topic, and time and space for creativity, and I’m feeling inspired. But turning out consistant work? On deadline? Even when I’m not feeling it? For me, it’s generally a lot harder to do creative work that’s consistently acceptable, all the time, than to do an amazing project when inspiration strikes me.
For my work at YD, I create regular game reviews and tech analysis for the students, and that means pulling topics from a content pool of free, G-rated computer games and G-rated tech news, and developing interesting age-appropriate stories at the required wordcount. Sometimes this just flows, there’ve been a couple times I literally couldn’t wait to get into the studio and turn an idea in my mind into a great piece to share with the students.
Other times, it’s me being three-quarters through a project and discovering there’s a way to see blood in this game, or there’s a swear on this company’s site and sighing, and starting over. Sometimes it’s cutting out massive sections of really good work to get down to wordcount, sometimes it’s realizing there’s no way to cut this down to required length. Some days, it’s producing creatively and consistently when I’m just not feeling inspired and creative. And that’s much more difficult for me than the occasional brilliant essay.
Anyway, I’ve recently written and produced a few perfectly fine creative pieces, on deadline, hitting our style, length, and format requirements consistently. And I’m really pleased about that.
Posted in Chapel Hill, My Other Writing, Teaching
Tagged games, Personal, writing about writing, youth digital studio
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IndieCade East, 2015
Quick post on next year’s IndieCade, over at Gosu Tech:
IndieCade East, the annual festival and exhibition of independent video games, will return to New York’s Museum of the Moving Image this February.
IndieCade began as an indie games festival in Culver City, California, with a focus on experimental and message games, as well as indie game post-mortems, collaborative game dev challenges, indie game awards, and game development skill shares. With the growing popularity of indie games, a second annual event, IndieCade East, was launched three years ago in New York City. IndieCade East takes place in the Museum of the Moving Image, in Astoria, and takes full advantage of the MOMI’s space and interactive exhibits to showcase noteworthy and unusual independent games.
via IndieCade Returns to MOMI – Gosu Tech
This is the not the first time I’ve written about IndieCade…
Icewind Dale Port
I’m playing the Icewind Dale port on my iPad right now. While it’s not a perfect port — not everything works well with a touchscreen, and the instructions still ask you to hit a letter key to toggle different AI scripts — some things have held up very well over the last 10+ years.
Blog Book Tour: Purgatory Origins
This book is a fast-paced adventure, with many different plotlines and characters. Some characters lean a bit towards thriller archetypes, but Dedicated Investigative Reporter and Evil Nazi Scientist appear in so many thrillers for a reason, and Olsen does a good job differentiating each character and giving them their own motivations. Readers will stay invested in different plotlines thoughout this novel, and will be surprised in the ways the different storylines connect. Not everything is resolved at the end of the novel, leaving an opening for the next novel in the Purgatory series.
Darryl Olsen is also the author of Children of the Gods.
Enter The Raffle!
I received a copy of this book from Whirlwind Virtual Book Tours for review.
