Touch and a Burning World

Note: there are a lot of generalisations in this blog post, as it’s kind of a stream of thoughts. Most things are more complex than the way I word them below, so please don’t @ me saying as much - I’m well aware.

My life isn’t what I expected it to be. Not in a bad way, just in the kind of way where if you described who I’d become and what I was doing to me at age 25, you’d probably get a reaction of extreme confusion.

Back then, I wanted to make films. It was all I really wanted, and it was all I really did. I’d take the bare minimum amount of work required to pay the rent, and make movies on DVCAM and later DSLR almost every weekend. By my rough count, I did some combination of writing, directing, producing and/or editing 53 pieces. Most were short films, about half were episodes of web series (remember when those were a thing?), one was a community cable TV miniseries, and two were feature films.

I think of them these days as my ‘student’ films, though my film school was a ton of experimentation and even more DVD audio commentaries (remember those?) where filmmakers shared their experience. They varied from pretty forgettable to pretty decent, all things considered. Though there’s a reason only two are on my youtube channel presently, and one of them is a recent film I did this year.

When I run into old friends and they ask what “happened” to my filmmaking, I tell them that I still do it occasionally, but usually then joke that I tripped and fell into video game development for fifteen years and counting.

To be clear, I am very lucky to do be able to do what I do. I’ve somehow managed to pay the rent doing almost nothing but creative projects I’m emotionally invested in for a long time now - and I’m fairly confident in my skills. I’m pretty decent at what I do, despite the problem of second-guessing my creative choices more the older and more experienced I get.

But that doesn’t change the simple fact that my life isn’t what I expected it to be. Of course, the world isn’t what I expected it to be, either.

We Fucked It

I came out about a decade ago. At the time, I was ‘present’ enough online and at industry events that I didn’t feel I had any choice but to transition publicly. I even blogged about it. (This is the first serious personal blog I’ve had since then.) At the time, it was the mid 2010s, and for the most part it still felt like the world was moving in a generally progressive direction. It felt like life was only going to get easier for out transgender and queer people. It turns out that in most countries, and also just generally, that was absolutely not the case, with high profile transphobic bigots funnelling their enormous wealth into at least semi-successful campaigns to curb the rights of transgender people around the world while rich actors continue to mumble excuses or feign ignorance while supporting their work.

Almost everything else has gone backwards in a particularly unpleasant way, too.

We absolutely fucked it on the climate catastrophe, letting large companies burn our planet while making us feel bad about our “carbon footprint”. While doomerism isn’t helpful, it’s a little hard to find any shred of optimism when even many of the activists and popular science writers & presenters from your childhood are saying we’re fucked.

When I think the career I almost had as a filmmaker, I try to make myself feel a little bit better about my pivot into games. Of course, I can’t help but do this by thinking on the ongoing collapse of cinema, and how the pipeline one used to be able to take to go from indie or short filmmaker to professional feature filmmaker has been increasingly fucked for the past twenty years.

The way that Emily behaves in that scene, I have to think, is probably not too far off from the way that Gina’s character probably behaved when she was younger: rejecting certain norms, and knowing that she’s smart, and not accepting certain things, and taking control. That’s what she did. And that led to her being a CEO of this major company. To Emily, it’s not gonna lead there. There’s something that’s very true generationally about all that for me. Look man, I played by the previous generation’s rules for a long time. I took out loans. I went to school. I made a short film. It got into Sundance. That’s the dream. I went to Sundance. I got agents, I got managers, all this stuff. I wrote a script. I was ready to make my feature debut forever ago. Twelve years ago I would’ve been ready. I couldn’t do it because there wasn’t any fucking money. All of that capital that financed all those great independent films in the nineties and the early aughts was gone. Then there was a housing crisis and there was a war and there was all this stuff and it was just like, how do you do it?

Not that the games industry is even close to being all roses. In fact, it’s currently in the biggest, nastiest state of collapse we’ve seen since the Atari shock. It’s partly because of the over-investment during the pandemic era, but that isn’t a comfort to the overwhelming majority of my colleagues who can’t find work no matter how great their portfolio and references look. In the case of 1983, what resulted was the a re-birth of sorts, with companies like Nintendo and Sega coming in to try and course-correct away from some of the mistakes Atari made before them. But right now, the way the industry seems to be heading involves continuing its trend of letting indie game developers bet their futures endlessly, with more and more games being released that individually make less and less money, while digital rent-seekers keep making money hand over fist. It’s not encouraging. We were probably wrong to be excited about the alleged Golden Age of Indie Games that was going on around the time I entered the industry.

Then there’s technology. Long-gone is the time when I was excited to see the new smart phones. Apple’s latest “exciting” new OS changes are so much for the worse that I’ve been actively avoiding updating any of my devices. And even if I wanted to move away from Tim Cook’s Walled Garden, doing so on phones just takes you out of the frying pan and into the fire. Instead of the numerous smartphones and phone OS choices we had over a decade ago, we’re now functionally reduced to two, and even Android is now increasingly locked down and limited. And, of course, to live in a modern western country one essentially requires a modern smartphone to access basic services, so even the (kinda admirable) dumbphone movement ends up being not just impractical but often essentially impossible.

The Internet is fucked too. Social media, once an exciting new thing, has not only turned us inward and made us more cliquey than ever, it’s been responsible either partly in full for hate campaigns, far right political movements, and even genocide. With centralised control over Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok and the lumbering corpse of Twitter, we’re at the receiving end of a firehose of garbage, lies, and AI slop.

Oh, yeah. Then there’s “AI”. Not only the most frustrating thing in the world as a marketing coup because now even useful tools that have been around for years are lumped in the same bucket as the enormous lying machines that are burning the environment to do a worse job than the search engines of yore.

Then there’s the cost of living crisis, the ongoing rise of fascism throughout much of the world, and… look, it’s too exhausting to go on. You get the idea: shit seems to be entirely fucked six ways to sunday.

It’s Going To Be Worse For Them

It all came to a head for me in one of the most cliched but predictable of ways - the first time I saw my new niece in person. I don’t have kids, and this is the first child in my family from my siblings.

I just burst into tears. I hadn’t realised it, but one of the ways I was coping was by at least telling myself that while things were awful, I was now more or less in middle age and had gotten to do a lot of cool things. Sure, things are are fucked, but at least I got to experience a lot of good things before it all began to nosedive.

You can’t keep using that kind of selfish thought pattern as a coping mechanism when you’re faced with what parents face - the realisation that the world is getting worse and its their children who are going to bear the brunt of it.

I wasn’t sure where that left me. I’m not much of an activist, beyond the nebulously useful fact of being an openly queer & transgender person in my industry. It’s not that I don’t have strong political opinions or agree with my friends who turn up at every progressive rally or protest in my city.

Perhaps it’s despair? The feeling that one more warm body won’t do any good, despite knowing that’s not the case.

A larger factor is probably just who I am as a person. I don’t raise my voice. I’m fairly quiet in large social groups, and I tend to do better writing prose or video games than protest placard slogans.

Art

Like (I think) a lot of artists, I feel an insecurity about doing what I do. I have friends who are emergency medical technicians, nurses, politicians, environmental activists… and I make video games.

I sometimes mention this, usually after a few drinks, and get the usual comments from my friends. Art is important. Escapism is important. Political messages in media is important. The exact same things I would say to other creative people citing the same concerns as mine. These things are true, and I believe them, but if you have even a shred of insecurity about your work, it’s hard not to think “okay but MY work, specifically, can’t be that important - it’s not the IMPORTANT kind of art”.

So I’m trying to take it this way: I may not be the sort of to attend rallies or protests, but I can take all this as an excuse to do better. To use even my small, rickety platform to produce media that represents people like me. To try and encourage more LGBT people like me involved in making games.

That’s all good and well, but it doesn’t change the fact that I have to live in this world, and wake up every morning to a world that seems to get worse and worse.

Now, if this is all super depressing and you’re wondering where I’m going with this? Sorry, I don’t have an answer. I can’t fix the world, or even suggest good ways in which you can fix it. But what I now want to talk about is how I’ve been coping with this burning world, and some thoughts I’ve had on that process.

Coping Mechanisms

Technologies continues to get worse. Things that ‘just worked’ years ago seem to fail and function more poorly with each successive software update. Sometimes this is at least semi-intentional in the form of enshittification, and sometimes it’s… you know, actually, it’s probably mostly just the fault of late stage capitalism.

The latest casualty in this regard is my ‘smart home’ setup. I didn’t use much. Lights and smart speakers in each room. Streaming music when I wanted it, as I work. But for some reason, a week ago, it just stopped working. I couldn’t see the speakers from my phone, and no matter what I did I couldn’t get all the speakers to play the same music at once.

I tried to fix it briefly, then realised: I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

I moved my new Turntable/CD Player/Cassette Player combo into my home office / bedroom (yes, they are still being made now and they work pretty damn well) and changed my morning routine.

I’ve time-locked social media apps on my phone so I can’t doom-scroll from bed.

I go to my shelf full of CDs, pick an album and put it on. (CDs are about $2 AUD or less at most thrift stores these days - there’s never been a better time to start a physical media collection.)

I’ve subscribed to a few remaining print publications, so I have some articles to read in print form from my couch over tea or coffee during the morning.

When I go out, I chat to locals I’ve gotten to know when I see them out and about.

I can’t fix the world, and I’m not actually convinced any of us can at this point, but I can fix small things in my life to make it a more pleasant one. I can disconnect more frequently, steer people towards non-corporate social media and reach out to see how my friends are doing.

None of this is new advice, of course. As I’ve written about before, youtube is lousy with videos complaining about the state of the online world, with people trying to disconnect or at least reduce their exposure to the firehose of shit we’re confronted with every day.

But there’s something different which has hit me in the past few weeks as I make more active choices about my day to day life.

Touch

Putting on a CD is an active choice. It means I start my day not by the passive choice of “eh, play some music, strange internet algorithm, give me background noise to drown out The Horrors” but instead by the selection of a CD, and the act of putting it on.

“Touch grass” is a cliche for a reason, but I think the bit people often miss out on is the “touch” part. Humans are tactile creatures, and physical connection with objects can be a big part of that.

“For humans, touch can connect you to an object in a very personal way - make it seem more real.” – Jean-Luc Picard

It’s not just picking an album that’s important to me. Walking to my lounge room, selecting a CD, turning on my sound system and physically inserting it into the device is a wonderful experience. I feel the disc in my hands, the light rumble of the CD tray ejecting. The physical resistance to the power button, and the sound of the motor spinning up inside as it prepares to play the music.

It’s the same reason why I use so many analogue film cameras, and why even when I use digital cameras they tend to be more tangible and manual than the touch-screen designs of most modern mirrorless cameras.

I’m not suggesting that everyone would feel better if they began collecting CDs or vinyls or even fucking 8-tracks again. That’s a personal choice, and one that works for me. But I do think that smartphones, and touch-screens generally have taken something away from us.

When they first came out, they tricked us with the short-lived skeuomorphic design language. Tricked us in the sense that they made things look tangible, even though they weren’t. Buttons seemed to pop out of the screen, and items in applications often looked like their physical counterparts.

That has faded all but entirely from operating system UX in the past decade and a half. I’m not saying that’s inherently bad, but I do think at least it makes touch devices more honest.

They’re less human than something with physical buttons, knobs and dials. They feel less a part of the real world than even a phone with physical buttons did before, and I can’t help but wonder if that’s a factor in how bored we’ve all become with modern technology.

The internet, as has been pointed out quite a lot recently, used to be a place to escape the real world. Now it’s a toxic distillation of the real world. That world is flat, intangible. It’s a world of glass and innumerable icons that are hard to tell apart.

The world we’re presently burning is a physical one. Full of textures, scents and flavours. Reminding myself of that, and building more tactile interactions into my daily routine, has been helpful.