(no subject)

In response to You Should Be Participating

I can’t evaluate whether Creighton is right about why his company tanked. I have no experience with the relevant financial factors. But I feel like he’s missing the point of this whole “independent creator” business.

If I’d passed my game design courses, I’d probably be working for some big game company now. Someone else would be telling me what designs they wanted, and I would be figuring out how to code them. And in retrospect, I’d probably be miserable! I wouldn’t be making the game I wanted. Even if I was, it wouldn’t be my game. I’d be interchangeable, replaceable.

Creighton frames the big company as the opposite of the community, because the community makes polished work. That’s not the issue at all! The big company can release a glitchy, unbalanced, disorganized mess, and it’ll still be a company product, so long as it carries the company’s design philosophy and style, rather than the style of the lower-level laborers. In a sense, the company is a community. And a community where the newer members ape the older members is very much like a company.

Creighton equivocates between Team Four Star itself and abridging in general, as if anyone who makes an abridged series is making a Team Four Star video. If Team Four Star is too exclusive, then that means abridging itself is too exclusive. But I don’t want to create the content Team Four Star knows how to make; I want to create the content Feo knows how to make! If Team Four Star is more polished than me, well, Bioware is also more polished than me! It didn’t stop me from writing (godawful) Mass Effect fanfic, because I thought “Mass Effect in the style of Feo” would be something meaningfully distinct from “Mass Effect in the style of Bioware.”

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether Team Four Star is inclusive or not, for the same reason it doesn’t matter whether Bioware or Funimation or what have you are inclusive or not. There will always be someone who doesn’t join anyway. That person goes off and makes their own thing, and maybe people like it, or maybe they don’t. That is fandom’s strength, that we’re still here whether or not the original creators even care about us.

(no subject)

If there’s one thing worse than postmodernism, it’s stories that should be postmodern but aren’t.

There’s this novel called The Highest Form of Killing. It’s about three people who start off as interesting and nuanced. Then plot happens, and one of the three becomes a boring villain. To stop him, the second becomes a boring hero. The third becomes a boring love interest, because apparently the author really wanted the hero to have sex with someone. It’s like they’re possessed by the spirits of bad writing, who puppeteer their bodies to follow a generic tale of science gone wrong.

If this book were actually postmodern, the characters would recognize that their real enemy was the plot. They’d fight to retain their identities, and maybe they’d succeed, or maybe they’d fail. But since it’s not postmodern, they simply go to their predictable deaths in service of a predictable ending. Any personality they started with is wasted.