let it leave me like a long breath

thoughts on making things and also the beginner's guide, with a bunch of spoilers but only really at the end when i actually start talking about the beginner's guide.

so i guess i consider myself more popular as someone who writes porn than as someone who makes games, partly, because, i have actually finished more porn than games. so mostly when people are ENGAGING W/ MY PRODUCT it is in the comments of porn fic rather than reviews of games.

and like actually i don't really want to engage with people re: my porn? or i am of two minds, since on the one hand i like undirected adulation but on the other hand actually the kind of people who write comments on porn fic are frequently creepy and also thinking w/ their dicks and they kind of project that back onto me. i am a salacious kind of person b/c i write salacious porn.

generally i assume the people following me on tumblr have a better idea of the kind of person i am so i'm not really going to explicate on why exactly that is wrong. it kind of goes without saying.

and so that mixed impulse also kind of leads me to write SPITE PORN, you know, the stuff with the zombies or the stuff that refuses to play to fetish rules, precisely. things to be offputting and weird even as they are still, nominally, pornographic. but then (of course) that's not really something most readers pick up on; they are kind of failing to engage with it on any level aside from seeing if it passes the "can i get off to this" test. lots of "that was hot but i liked the knotting in the first part more i hope the next part will have more ;)" kinds of comments

which is kind of my goal and not my goal at the same time. for all i don't want to present my actual personality and socialize w/ furries or whatever it still stings when people treat me like a machine generating pornography.

like i never really care that much about my writing or seeing myself as a MEANINGFUL AUTHOR or w/e; i started writing b/c i wanted to write fic and i posted fic b/c i had finally finished a thing and wanted other people to read it. i write out of habit or because i have ideas or w/e; it's not really something i've ever really invested a lot of myself in (CODING on the other hand)

(and this is part of why some of the amazon stuff has been so stressful for me, b/c it's not like "yeah i can just post it and if people like it they like it and if they don't they don't"; i have to for once at least pretend to care about how it's received. i mean, i say "pretend" but like, concretely, financially, i kind of care there. but "pretend" in that i have to guess and second-guess to go "ah yes what about my work is ALIENATING or DISTASTEFUL to other people and how can i change it", which, you can probably guess, is not really a thought pattern i enjoy or am good at)

so it's like, okay, i wrote a thing, it's a work unto itself; have whatever kind of feeling you want about it but recognize that the processes that lead me to write it weren't just "i think i'm going to write things that are hot for an audience to get off to"

which brings me to the beginner's guide

so the thing with coda and davey plays out, and i've heard a few people talk about their dynamic as a few different things: a literal process of making amends with a fictionalized version of someone they had a similar kind of falling-out, maybe. or coda as an idealized creator who is making things from their own self-directed desires, versus davey's very much externally-validated viewpoint. but the one that resonates the most with me is as a way of splitting up those two minds i have: the part of me that goes, no, attention and validation is good! don't you want people to look at your stuff and enjoy it? don't you want an audience?? and the part that is filled with inchoate and complex motivations, the one that has some huge ball of concepts all stuck together and is trying to spin out fragments of it, just to crystallize yr own thoughts or because you have this deep and abiding compulsion or fixation. and they are at war, because those two drives -- audience and personal clarity -- are so often at ends.

that being said just taking it literally and watching someone play through it a second time, though, wow. like it is very much a personal drama between two people, even disregarding the metaphorical trappings.

davey's fixation w/ things being Playable and having clearly-defined Endings. if something takes too long or is unfair or violates some gaming convention it needs to go. games are for the people playing them after all.

the succession of house/prison sequences that davey is so negative about, and then the housecleaning segment that, we are told, originally went on forever with no ending -- that's clearly the final "prison" game, and also that probably they were never really about prison quite so much, probably.

and then the classroom one where davey talks about coda encapsulating this feeling of putting people of pedestals and ignoring the aspects of them that you don't want to deal with. the writing is on the wall.

and of course the increasing focus on how long it took to make the games, when it's clearly more like... each one is a part of a conversation coda is less and less eager to continue, b/c davey is being so weird about it all. that mention that the tower was the first time coda actually reached out to send him a game, which implies that all the other games he got while in communication with coda, presumably with a lot of badgering about when the next game would be out. and the games weren't "games" so much as an interactive letter. like god the one about the game jam, on the stage. here's this woman that makes video games. ask her to give you some wisdom about how to be good at video games. have an instrumental interaction that enlightens you. actually, what would be better: if you left and went far away. NOT QUITE A CRY FOR HELP AFTER ALL.

and then the games that are impossible to complete. first the "close your eyes" one, and then the one that's genuinely impossible without cheating, because at that point there is just this understanding that whatever trials or constructions that coda makes davey will just cut through them if they're, you know. boring. not gamey enough. everything needs to have an Idea and a Concept; it needs to be a Game to Communicate something. it can't just be... a thing you make. it has to be something big and important. it needs to have a solution. people need to have a solution. if a relationship isn't working, you can just... solve it, right?? there's a dialog tree to fix things.