Not on Steam Sale

Games / News

The Sea Will Claim Everything and a whole bunch of other indie games are on sale right here:

Not on Steam Sale

We love Steam. But there are lots of great games you can’t currently find there! Discover some of them here, and support indie development.

The minimum amount off is 25%, but many games – including TSWCE – are even cheaper. A great opportunity to support some of the smaller indie developers and get some awesome games for relatively little money.

If you already own TSWCE, remember that you can also get a copy for your grandmother, cat and/or imaginary friend.

Consolidate

Projects / Thoughts

Urizen

I’d been meaning to write this for a while, before I got distracted by having to take care of some important business stuff. But this is a good opportunity to look back a little and talk about where we’re going.

This has been a strange year, with lots of highs and lows. I haven’t released a game, but I’ve worked on several, and made very significant progress towards being able to make some games that previously seemed beyond the reach of my extremely limited programming abilities.

The biggest problem has, of course, been health. All three of us – Jonas, Verena, and Cat – spent entirely too much of this year being sick in various alarming ways, not all of which I’ve mentioned here (because it would get tedious). We’ve had everything from infected nerves to bladder stones to vision loss to blistered fingers. None of it was fun, and all of it cost us a lot of money, time and nerves. Getting sick sucks, and I could do with at least a few years of being relatively healthy. At least no operations, brain-scans or injections for anyone in this family for a while, hmm?

I also got overly distracted by writing about politics, and especially identity politics. I don’t mean to say I regret writing anything that I did, only that the blog became too focused on that one extremely depressing topic. And I have to say that it’s taken me a great deal of effort not to constantly go back to that, to try and defend myself against slander, to try to explain that not agreeing with a certain political strategy/analysis doesn’t mean one is against equality and human rights. I’ve come to the decision that I need to trust people to know that I’ve never held any of the ridiculously bigoted opinions that I’ve been accused of holding simply because I don’t subscribe to one specific American liberal ideology. My work and my words should speak for themselves. If you’ve played The Sea Will Claim Everything and think that my transcultural cosmopolitanism means I’m opposed to people’s bodily autonomy… then nothing I say can change your mind, because “logic is bullshit” and dogma rules the day.

But it’s hard, you know? Hard not to talk about politics all the time when such horrific events are taking place worldwide. Hard not to get angry all the time when people are complacent about governments and militaries and corporations but ready to burn every sinner who speaks a forbidden word. And it unbalances not only the blog, but my life. Which, granted, is how it should be to some degree, or I’d be complacent myself. But even under the worst of circumstances, human beings have always tried to be more than their problems – and my circumstances are hardly the worst.

This is connected to another realization, which is that we’ve been spending too much time and thought on projects that are not directly creative. By this I mainly mean The Secret Gates and our constant thoughts about finally resurrecting our film review site, Commentarium. I had a long conversation with Ivo (who co-founded The Secret Gates) about this. Originally the site was going to be something completely different, which didn’t pan out for a number of reasons, and then we decided it might be fun to create the sort of literary review site that we felt the interet was missing. The origin of Commentarium was pretty much the same: Verena and I thought it would be fun, and we thought that there wasn’t really any site that represented our taste in movies. But the internet will eat your babies. Even websites that have the full attention of their creators, websites constantly promoted and full of brilliant content, struggle to find an audience nowadays. And the truth is that, unless we had a significant audience and thus a sense of satisfaction, sites which are primarily dedicated to talking about other people’s work aren’t quite worth it for us. Ivo already spends enough of his time on academic work; why do more on the internet? Verena barely manages to find any time for her writing; why spend so much energy on reviewing movies when she could be working on her novel? And the same goes for myself.

Not that I completely want to stop writing about these things. Not at all. I find it both enjoyable and useful to analyze the work of others. But I can do it right here, without having to worry about writing enough each week or making the reviews long enough or all the other nonsense that’s on your mind when you’re trying to create a popular site. Which leads us back to the politics: I always wanted this site to be about variety. I hate how fragmented everything has become, and long for cultural synthesis; you can see this reflected in how different my games are from each other while still sharing common themes, and you’ll be able to tell even more if I ever get some novels or short stories published. I hate the idea of genre. I hate that we have idiotic terms like “literary fiction” and “art game”. In a sense, I’ve tried to make my entire career all about breaking down barriers and refusing to be categorized. This site should reflect that.

In terms of games and stories, I’m also hoping that all the hard work I’ve done this year will start coming together. Ithaka will still take a while – I know I keep saying that, but it’ll be worth it in the end. I want it to be extraordinary, and you can’t accomplish that by rushing it. As the poem itself suggests, it’s better to take your time. And there will be other games in the meantime, both free and commercial. So don’t give up on me yet.

Another thing I’d like to do is to put out more Lands of Dream content. The reason I’m reluctant to do so is that I currently feel like the audience is still very small, especially for anything that’s not a game. I know that some people love the Oneiropolis Compendium, but at the moment I worry that I’m wasting ideas by publishing them online – ideas that could go into the Lands of Dream novel, Oneiropolis, itself. When I write it, which is still some time away. I’m not sure how to proceed with all this, but I’ll be thinking about it and I’ll be open to ideas. I would love the Lands of Dream website to thrive, even if I don’t make any money off it.

Finally, there’s something I may have to do that is going to change my day-to-day life in a significant way: get a(nother) job. An opportunity has presented itself which I am likely to take. It won’t eat up my whole week, but if it works out (no pun intended), it could make a tremendous difference to our financial situation. The Indiegogo financed Ithaka of the Clouds, you see, but it certainly didn’t finance our cat’s operation, and the extra income would be very useful, especially when it comes to promoting my work or being able to attend events. It’s scary, of course, and I’m genuinely frightened that it will impact my ability to create – but it could also be what finally pushes us to the point where we can realize those projects that have so far been impossible to tackle. Actually, I’ve decided I just can’t do it right now. I have too many projects that demand my attention, and while we need the money, it would be better to get that money by releasing something. I’ve been getting so much better at all this and we’re too close to success to give up now.

I want to take that step forward: towards the stories I’ve been wanting to tell, towards getting out of this depressing city, towards spending more time creating than worrying. I hope I can do that, and I hope you’ll be along for the ride.

Links! 20/09/2013

Misc

Salonique

Hi. I haven’t been updating much lately, mainly due to a) working really hard b) the continuing saga of Health Problems. I have some, Verena has some, and the cat has some too. It’s the kitty that’s really worrying us at the moment, since it’s barely been a month since her surgery and she has too much struvite in her urine again. We’re taking her to the vet about forty minutes from now, and I doubt I’ll be able to focus enough to write my long and interesting update before then.

Here are some interesting links, though. In utterly random order:

Edited to add what I just tweeted. Cat news: some medication needed, but not another operation. Phew. Let’s hope we can get her pH balanced.

Yay! Sort of.

The Bravery of Being out of Range

Music

Ah, good old Roger Waters. The imagery at the beginning may no longer apply to the current Leader of the Free World, but the rest? This still says everything:

Just love those laser-guided bombs
They’re really great
For righting wrongs
You hit the target
And win the game
From bars 3,000 miles away
3,000 miles away

We play the game
With the bravery of being out of range
We zap and maim
With the bravery of being out of range
We strafe the train
With the bravery of being out of range
We gain terrain
With the bravery of being out of range

It still breaks my heart. So bitter, so true.

If only we had more artists like him.

Controversial

Thoughts

Why is it controversial to say that governments should not be allowed to act in violation of their own constitutions, but spying on every single citizen is just something that happens?

Why is it controversial to say that nations should not break international law, but definitely breaking international law to punish a nation for allegedly breaking international law makes sense?

Why is it controversial to say that torturing people is wrong, but incarcerating people without trial for years is simply the way things are?

Why is it controversial to say that people going hungry while there is food to feed them with is wrong, but burning people alive from the inside-out is fine?

Why is it controversial to say that the citizenry in a democracy should have a say in major decisions, but allowing those who profit from economic devastation to run the economy is sensible?

Why is it controversial to say that the economy should be organized to benefit everyone, but perfectly normal for millions of people to live in poverty?

Why is it controversial to say that people should not be divided against each other by notions like nationality or race, but claiming that members of a single species can never understand one another is lauded as progressive?

Why is it controversial to say that whistleblowers should not be prosecuted for revealing crimes, but morally acceptable to shoot children from helicopters?

Why is it controversial to say that human rights matter more than profit, but destroying lives with depleted uranium and cluster bombs is a regular use of one’s tax money?

Why is it controversial to speak, but acceptable to be silent?

Authentic Pronunciation

Misc

I’m working on making lots of games for you people, which is why I don’t have enough time to write something interesting. So here’s a video of David Mitchell talking about linguistic authenticity and what happens when you scrutinize language too much.

World English, English World

Thoughts

I love the English language. I genuinely do. I’m not writing in English because I have no other choice; location being (almost) everything, there might be many advantages to writing in German. And while I did recently have a book published in Greece and loved working on that, the truth is that I do have a thing for English. A connection, you might say. Even my accent sounds kind of vaguely British. I love many aspects of what one might call British culture, whether it’s the poetry of William Blake or the comedy of Frankie Boyle. You can see it in my work, in my influences. My games have been described as “very English” more than once, and I don’t take offence at that.

And America? Well, we all know quite a lot about America. Partly because its culture is just so damn pervasive, partly because it’s bloody terrifying. People in the rest of the world tend to know a lot more about American politics than Americans know about international politics, for example, simply because we’re scared. We follow what’s going on in the United States not because we’re afraid that the American President will say something mean, but because we’re afraid of where the bombs will drop next. That sort of thing makes you pay attention. But even beyond that, despite all the terror, there’s plenty in American history to be inspired by. The history of the Civil Rights movement, for example, is full of truly courageous people, fighting against a system of apartheid that was frighteningly backwards even for its time.

English, as anyone interested in postcolonial/transcultural literature can tell you, is a world language in a sense that goes far beyond tourism and Hollywood movies. In fact, what could be a more perfect illustration of that than the fact that as I came over from Greece to Germany all those years ago, the book I read on the plane was Paradise Lost? I write in English.  I think in English. I speak English all the time. A big part of why people love my games is how they use the English language.

All of which is fine.

There’s a thing that happens, though: because I can participate in the English-language discourse a lot better than most non-native speakers, people tend to place me in categories that aren’t really appropriate. One of the most frustrating things about the Anglophone world  is that it is often very inwards-looking. (Something to do with having so few borders, perhaps?) A lot of people, including people who would place themselves on the Left, whatever that means, seem to have absolutely no idea that systems of thought other than their own exist – it’s not that they disagree about how to best describe reality, but that they instantly categorize anyone who doesn’t follow their particular logic and idiom as a terrible, terrible bigot. And the standard response to a form of thought critical of certain tenets (i.e. that racism is only when one race oppresses another, not when humanity is categorized into races in the first place) is to call the person expressing these thoughts “privileged” and “white” – to categorize them, essentially, as a white middle-class American, the traditional bogeyman of a certain type of radical politics.

What does not seem to be apparent to the people reacting in this fashion is the ridiculous cultural imperialism behind their response – the assumption that everyone can be neatly categorized into the tiny bit of the world that surrounds them. It is a bizarre spectacle to see American radicals raging about the white privilege of people from countries like Greece or Argentina; countries in which their simplistic dichotomies of “white” and “black”, barely applicable to the societies that originated them, are at best ludicrous, at worst accidentally supportive of fascists. The only people in Greece who would seriously argue that Greeks belong to some sort of “white race” are the neonazis of the Golden Dawn. My dad’s skin is quite brown, and that’s hardly unique where I come from.

The details of my background have nothing to do with the fantasy that I am “just another white dude”, to slightly paraphrase what I’ve been called by angry identitarians who are put off by Marxism. My Greek grandmother was a Pontian refugee; she and my Greek grandfather were resistance fighters. My German grandfather also fought in the war – but on the other side. A hundred years and a few days ago, the city I grew up in still belonged to the Ottoman Empire. There are histories and complexities here that have everything to do with colonialism and imperialism and racism and nationalism – and nothing to do with whiteness or other Anglophone discourses.

The fact that I speak English doesn’t mean you can throw labels at me. I’m not a middle-class American. I’m not English, either. I’m not your bogeyman. If you’re saying these things, you don’t know the first thing about me – or the world we all live in.

But I’m not the inscrutable Other, either. You can do your research. You can understand where I’m coming from. Greeks and Argentinians and Romanians and Poles and Venezuelans are not aliens – we’re people, just not the people you’re used to blaming. It’s really not that difficult to understand that diversity means more than a bigger variety of Americans who subscribe to the same ideology. It also means understanding that English is a world language, but that that doesn’t mean the world is English.

Thankfully, though, there is one language that is truly transcultural – the language of logic and facts. Instead of resorting to labels, we can do the hard work of finding out what’s going on in the rest of the world and trying to engage with it. We don’t need to agree about everything, but we can’t get anywhere if we never look beyond our borders.

ARGH WTF LOL

News

a demon

New vet verdict: his problem is communication, not necessarily skill (though he’s not very good at handling the animal). The operation was probably necessary. It’s hard to judge as a non-expert, which is why we’ve had some really bad experiences with doctors (remember my teeth?), but it looks like this disaster was unavoidable.

Cat is recovering well so far, which is at least something.

(Edited again to add: I just realized I deleted the original text of this post, in which I complained at the universe.)

Scary Times

News

Our favourite monster.

As you may know if you follow me on Twitter, our cat has been diagnosed with a fast-growing tumour in her bladder, as well as a partially damaged kidney (which may or may not be unrelated). There’s nothing we can do about the kidney, and so far her overall kidney function is still OK, but the tumour has to be taken out as quickly as possible – tomorrow, that is. If you have a cat or have been reading this blog for a while (or have played The Fabulous Screech), you will understand how scary this situation is for us.

It’s also going to be very expensive, but that’s not going to affect our decisions. She’s family.

Anyway, if I’m hard to reach during the next couple of weeks, and some things get delayed a bit further, that’s the reason.