:D

:D

Anonymous asked: I just wanted to take a moment to say that I've been reading your entries and that you seem like a really awesome and dynamic person. Social anxiety kept me from saying anything sooner, but I really respect what you do. Also, it's fucking awesome that you have an ESP F-206, I've got a F-207 myself.

Well thank you anon! And I know that feeling. Social anxiety kinda prevents me from telling people who I think are rad that they’re rad, and I think that’s the part of it I hate the most. 

I do still have my ESP, and I love that thing despite not being able to really play it anymore. Fun(?) Fact: I used to be a musician all through my teenage years and that was the Thing I Was Gonna Do but a medical condition kinda ruined the joints in my fingers and now I can’t really play without pretty intense pain anymore. I ended up pursuing a career that made me utterly miserable after that, until I packed all my shit up and moved to Toronto to try and be an artist again. That’s how I roundabout got into game development - I started trying to manifest that creativity in a ton of other ways and ended up in games (largely because it brings together so many different mediums and that’s a great fit for me personally).

Moral of the story, when shit happens that radically changes who you think you’re going to be, or when something you’ve lived your life around is taken away from you, sometimes you can find something that’s an even better fit if you keep looking instead of giving up and brooding.

Zoe Quinn’s Perfect Gin and Tonic Recipe

Place ice in cup and add 3 slices of lime over ice.

Pour glass half full of gin. 

Regard tonic with suspicion. Mutter “who am I kidding” under your breath and fill glass to full with more gin.

Drink and wallow in self-loathing.

Personal Dev Blog

This is all pretty sappy and obnoxiously close to flowery artist bullshit, so if you hate that kind of thing here’s a funny video about MegaMan instead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7dSJN5LgsE&feature=share&list=FL1J1xTptJE2kxbJKnxBz4sA

So I’ve been working on It’s Not Okay Cupid for over a year now, and production’s been picking back up as of late now that Depression Quest is finished and shipped. After wrestling around with the text parser and deciding to take a break to focus more on content, I started to feel pretty defeated. General maudlin bullshit picked up and I just kinda stared at the ceiling for a while.

Truth be told, it’s pretty lonely over here in Boston. I’ve moved around so much that I don’t have exceptionally strong ties to any one place, and I’m still getting to know this city. Going from being surrounded by amazing people at PAX and GDC back to back to sitting alone in this room fumbling with words and code makes me miss having a coworking space more than anything. Working from home in your PJs sounds really cool but before you actually start doing it you don’t expect the days like this. It’s grey and cold out, and I’m still lacking a standard coffee shop to sit down at and marathon work for a while in this city. Just about everyone I know here has a day job or hasn’t quite hit the level of closeness where I can just ask if they want to go somewhere with me and work, and I’m feeling alone and uninspired. Trying to write a game about connecting with people is difficult when you feel disconnected from everything.

So I start cruising my social networks and online outlets for interaction, for new people to talk to and learn about, and it hits me.

This is what It’s Not Okay Cupid is about, what direction the narrative has been pulling in without me realizing it quite so blatantly. Searching for this connection.

The internet has always been a big part of my life. An IRC channel completely changed everything for me a few years back, and some of my closest, oldest friendships have originated online. I find the idea that online friendships are somehow inherently inferior or less meaningful than people you’ve met in real life to be silly. Online communities have done so much for me, especially as a kid growing up in rural upstate NY. I want to put that into a game. The reasons why we go to the net to look for things lacking in our immediate area, the feelings and bonds that are sometimes easier to form across wires, those are the things I want to talk about. I want to talk about how lonely so many of us are, and what wonderful things can happen when we’re brought together despite sometimes being across oceans. I want to talk about missing someone you’ve never met face to face, or feeling like an alien just about everywhere other than online. This is how I’m making this game very personal. I touched on this a little with the character Attic in Depression Quest - Attic is actually the username of one of my closest friends that I met online. 

A long time ago in an earlier development stage I had this image in my head of someone in a dark room being lit by a computer monitor, looking unsure, with hands coming through the screen to comfort them. It’s super heavy handed and pompous, but it kinda stuck with me.

This is all pretty sappy, admittedly. It’s still going to be a comedy because so much of human interaction is awkward and fumbling, but that’s one of the things I love most about it. I’ve got to rethink a bit of how I am characterizing the dating site, and admittedly I might make it more of a general matchmaking service than a romantic one, MAYBE, but there’s something there. 

It’s something to work with, anyway.

:D

allfillernokiller asked: Hey, wanna organize an indie art jam where indies do art assets, cool illustrations or stuff?! i think it would be supacool

FUCK YEAH I DO I will jam any time any where, jams are the best

I Was A Teenage Misogynist

So, a good friend of mine recently witnessed a somewhat typical event for me: someone said some shitty gendered comments to me at a game gathering type thing. You can read about what happened here, but I want to talk about something slightly different because honestly, this sort of thing happening has been talked about quite a lot and I’m far from a unique case.

While talking to another friend after though, I was told I had a surprising degree of restraint in dealing with another man who reacted to this by saying he was just as interested in my tits as he was my games. I wanted to touch on why I have patience with people like this, and why I try to engage in good-faith discussion even when it seems like other people might not be so interested. 

Beer courage helps me write this too.

I used to be a misogynist, too. 

That’s a hard sentence to write, and a hard thing to own up to. But I feel like it’s important to do so. Another woman I’ve spoken with seemingly went through the same thing and said to me something I’ll never forget: “I think that some of the people most embroiled in making this a better, more inclusive community used to be part of the problem.”

When I was growing up, I was literally the only female friend I’d had. I was always more of a tomboy, always kind of a geek, always queer. I’d never really fit in that greatly with other girls, and all of my friends were boys. I was quickly indoctrinated in to nerd culture, and I quickly learned the lessons that come with that - largely that women and femininity were to be eschewed, and that I was “one of the good ones”. A funny thing happens when you’re the only girl in the group - part of your identity becomes being “the girl”. You internalize so many of the negative messages and make sure you remove the parts of you that seem too girly. You laugh at the sexist jokes. You don’t wear makeup or talk about your emotions. You engage in figuring out if women more attractive than you are just “attention whores”. I used to declare that I found it hard to be friends with women (as though they were the problem and not me) - as though it was something to be proud of, that I wasn’t “uptight” or “bitchy” or any of the things nerd culture likes to convince you is unique to women and wrong. It’s gross, but you buy into it because you don’t realize you’re in the wrong. When other girls appeared, I tended to treat them with mistrust, as though they had to prove themselves for some *stupid* reason. I did exactly as my male peers did, and we were put in direct competition more often than not by them. After all, there can’t be two “the girl”s. 

Another wonderful outspoken women said to me once “Everyone comes to realize things at their own pace, and it’s important to realize that”. 

As I grew up a bit and stopped being such an awkward teenager, I met more and more people. I started seeing this sort of distrust running through other interactions with women. I started seriously examining my automatic mistrust of women in nerd spaces, I started doubting the marketing. I started taking less shit from my male peers too. Getting involved in LGBTQ activism and coming out as queer did a lot for me, but talking to other women who shared the same distrust and insecurity around their identity and legitimacy in nerdy spaces helped.

Years later, and I’m trying to help women in this industry as much as I can - from leading incubators and starting organizations, to one-on-one mentorship and being there to rant and vent and cry when another one of us gets insulted, snubbed, or excluded.

So I get it. I, unfortunately, get it. I don’t think it’s anyone’s responsibility to educate other people when they’re being hurt or excluded. I more than understand when people are just angry. But I try to put all of that aside and reach out because other people did it for me once. I was shown the way and given patience, and if I hadn’t been, I’d likely still be a terrible person. 

I guess I just want to write this to demonstrate that sometimes there can be change. I am still hopeful and try to do what I can when I can (though there are absolutely days when I just CAN NOT DEAL and need to go have a beer, do art, and get away from the internet too), because I secretly hope that someday we can all be on the same page. I fully understand that this is likely stupidly optimistic, but I’m ok with that. 

Anyway. 

Drunk ramble over. I love all of you, and I hope to welcome as many people to the empathy party as possible someday.

:D

godatplay asked: I just wanted to say thank you for stepping forward on Andy's blog, and thank you for moving past that terrible event!

Haters gonna hate. I just really have to thank Andy for standing with me. Solidarity is important, and he’s a really good person for making the effort. 

Things I’ve Learned at GDC

• I have the best job in the world. 
• I am not doing enough cool stuff. Specifically, I think I’m capable of a lot more, and I think the last year being a bit shit had kind of obscured that for me. Being around a bunch of vibrant, amazing people got the idea mill in my head spinning again, and it feels good.
• I should move to Austin, probably.
• People apparently played my game!
• I am so lucky to know so many amazingly creative people and I am happy to be the least talented in my group. It’s a good place to be because I want to be challenged and to grow and improve. I’ve missed having that.
• I should probably stop blogging and go hang out with these people before everyone mass exoduses