Something said straightforward or implicit is why would anyone pay any regard to our critics. I do agree with them; you shouldn’t, more than anyone else’s opinions. But the point that hangs there or upon which they lean is that opinions on games are irrelevant from those who cannot.
And you know what? Fair point. And if that is their criteria, I will be the first to say they shouldn’t. I cannot.
I always been as transparent as possible, so I guess I am now at a point where I can share just how much I cannot.
I worked for Alderac Entertainment as a ghost-writer/volunteer designer 2013-2015. Work was intense and uncredited. I learned nothing except how it was run by troops and like the troops; I had joined to try to soften some of the ongoing bad practices and the outright fascism of people within only pushed me to try harder to nudge the course away. But my influence was the nothing it was. It led me to a four months long depressive episode. I cannot.
For a while I made small, little games. I spent almost a year fine-tuning a game for 200 Words RPG Challenge. A member of an influential network told me they would be using it and submitted their (worse) version of my game, without my permission or consent. They made finalists that year and got a Judge’s spotlight. My own submission was listed with formatting errors; I asked for them to be corrected and I was told it was too much work. I made my own corrected version of the correction and was ignored. I cannot.
I tried to invest a lot in the Gauntlet community and jumping on Trophy hacking and writing early on. However, after the inability of the Gauntlet to address its widespread transphobia, misogyny and reliance on exploitation of unpaid labor, it became impossible to inhabit those spaces — much less work under/for the single-owner of the community/publisher and may sources of those issues and culture. I cannot.
There was a game I fell in love with, that spoke to me in an unexpected way. I made a little playbook for it — and may have poured a bit too much of myself into it. The first contact with the community, people immediately clocked something about myself in the design. I was terrified at the possibility of other people knowing, at it being so obvious; I ran away and never released the thing. I cannot.
So upset I was with the general state of game spaces, that I tried to make a massive game taking the ideas wasted by a certain toy company in a certain card game. Realmwalker was going to a game about spell-crafting, that was all about travelling different universes, making friends and using them to make wonderful, reality-shaping magic. It would use dice pool building to power increasingly complex spells. It became apparent, however, that this game would require such labor that it would be impossible without some serious exploitation labor. I cannot.
I tried to make I L Strelhado, Alhebanta?. And I was going to make it Right. I would pay everyone properly and fairly — including myself and not do more work than the one paid. It was going to be a game about my dead culture and the failure of the revolution, a Mirandese Disco Elysium, a deck-building TTRPG. It was going to be great! I had to do this. But soon I had to do all the work alone, spending the days interviewing genocide survivors, coming home and break apart, then try to pull myself together to see the space where I was going to put this out. It is too much, made me realize too many things I could not escape. When my uncle saw the game being played and realized it conveyed a glimpse into a world that was never dead, that his grandkids could find a way to connect to what was taken from us and broke down in tears, it all hit me. How huge it was all for a febble cowardly girl to bear. I cannot.
The project just codenamed Riddle of Fire was going to be the game I always wanted to exist. It wove together the Bronze Age and Iron Age history, community, queerness, taboo and social death in a powerful magic school game where the rules changed with the cycle of the seasons, as players went through being students, priestesses, women and gods before returning themselves to a state of humble learning. I took three weeks in December 2021 to work on this game. It was going to be it. Whoever, harassment against targeted my sense of transness and womanhood; it led me to an elaborate suicide attempt in February of the next year, as consequence of seeking corrective HRT from medical specialists. I cannot.
I am good at an art form that only brought me misery. I am cursed with wanting to make games nobody wants or needs. But I still cannot stop thinking about them. How they work. How they can be and how they are and how we speak about them. I am a black hole that keeps taking in, breaking things apart and making more stuff part of its nothing — save for the weird radiation that occasionally pops out.
You’re right. I cannot.
I like to think I can do this because review space is a mess in games, and this, a critical space, is just non-existent. I cannot fuck this up, nobody else is doing this; my best will have to do. The truth is, I can do this because of Brad. And others that support me and push me to go through each article. And you.
I still cannot.
But there can be value in that.