dumbthingswhitepplsay:

alexandraerin:

Let’s talk about Arkh a little.

For some reason a number of people seem to be changing their minds about it in a hurry. I’m not sure why, when nothing’s really changed. It’s still an early effort. The fundraising that’s going on now is being done to pay for the services of professionals who, along with the volunteers, will bring the game to fruition. None of us on the outside are privy to things like what money is being spent on individual pieces of artwork or things like whether any of it is “wasted” on pictures that need edits. Nobody actually needs to know that… if you donate money, you’re a donor, not a shareholder, and trying to figure out how to micromanage the costs in order to please the greatest number of people the most would be a great way to make sure the game sucks. Figure out if you’ve got your money’s worth out of the finished product.

And people are calling it a “mess” because the initial concept pictures need to be tweaked? People, this would be the perfect place to drag out that old metaphor about watching sausage being made, but frankly, this process isn’t nearly gross or unpleasant enough to even merit that. Pick your favorite game. Try to imagine how much the final finished product might differ from the initial concept sketches. Heck, sometimes you don’t have to imagine. That’s the stuff special feature are made of. I guess it’s more palatable when you see it after the fact, for some reason?

Anybody follow the development process of the game Borderlands? They changed the game concept, the art style, and even the core concept… it started life as a multiplayer analog to Fallout. And it ended up as something else. Something awesome. Super Mario Bros was going to be a shooting game. The whole stomping on enemies was almost an afterthought. The size change mechanic came about in a similar fashion. If I recall, they started out with a small Mario, then realized they could use a bigger sprite, then realized they’d designed levels around a small Mario. 

Sometimes we see glimpses of this story in the publicity surrounding a game. Sometimes we see more than glimpses. Sometimes we don’t have a clue how many happy accidents, detours, and wrong turns are dreams are made of.

Arkh is being developed out in the open. The ground floor has glass walls. We’re seeing it all. I think this is a feature rather than a bug, but it’s throwing people off because usually by the time we see or know anything about a game, the art is solid and the game itself is actually under construction. Usually there’s something playable at least at a proof of concept level before any publicity really goes out.

And so people are saying “Why didn’t Arkh wait for that?”

Well, that’s kind of a silly question. No game waits for that. You can’t wait for it. You have to get there. The Arkh Project grew out of public conversations that happened in the ether of Tumblr, and it got momentum because of the interest those conversations generated. What are the project drivers supposed to do, say, “Okay, now we know people are interested, let’s stop talking about it until months from now.”?

And the complaints that are being made… you know, I’m fat. And I care deeply about fat acceptance. I used to have a fat acceptance blog (THINstitute, a satirical “health” research organization). So would I love a game that has a fat action hero? Yes. But “I want a game with fat characters.” is an aspiration for me, it’s not a complaint about Arkh.

A game can’t represent everybody, and a game that’s being made by a marginalized group for marginalized people saying “This game can’t be about everybody.” isn’t the same as a big multinational corporation with the resources to develop multiple games simultaneously and to shape and create market trends saying, “People don’t want to buy games about those people. Let’s make games that speak to our core demographic.”

Seriously, it’s not.

Other complaints go along the lines of this: “A Japanese person in a qipao? How’s that groundbreaking?” 

This is in the same territory as the demands to represent everyone. Is every aspect of each character supposed to be all-groundbreaking, all the time? Part of the mission of Arkh is to ground the characters in actual real-world cultures. That’s been part of the mission from the get-go. Putting Haruka in… well, I don’t know what the person who put that particular complaint forth wants to put Haruka in, but putting them all in “groundbreaking” costumes that are specifically chosen for their ability to break with all ground ever trod upon before isn’t going to accomplish the goals here. This isn’t a dada art piece.

It’s not groundbreaking because an Asian analog character is wearing Asian analog garb. It’s groundbreaking because a genderqueer character is shown as being comfortable in feminine clothing that expose their masculine-coded arm muscles… along with masculine coded clothing elsewhere in the game. We could trade in the dress for a raincoat made of aluminum foil and bees with a margarita pitcher for a helmet and that would be pretty groundbreaking, but what would it say?

And I’m not going to say much about any specific stuff that’s being said about Riley. 

I am going to say something about something nobody has said about Riley.

I suspect that Riley sneaks into my house every night and personally urinates into everything I’m going to eat or drink in the morning.

Okay, I know that isn’t true, but for the sake of the paragraph after this one I’m going to assume that it is. Got that? Read the next paragraph with the understanding that as I type it I’m assuming Riley has made it their mission in life to make me drink their pee and laugh behind my back.

Arkh really seems like an awesome idea that could use my support.

Yeah, that was the paragraph. It works just fine for me with or without the assumption. Riley’s not drawing a paycheck from the Arkh Project so it’s not like I’m putting money in their pocket or anything. Plus, the bigger Arkh gets, the less it’s going to be any one person running the show.

Some people are circulating what (if I’m following the story right) are old blog posts Riley made during a time of their life they have utterly repudiated. I don’t know if that’s actually the case or if I’m getting the story wrong, but I don’t care. I’ve thought about asking Riley, as a friend, to clarify… but then I thought what it would be like if Riley pulled up some random thing I said on the internet some time and asked me to explain myself.

Hoooooooo boy.

Man, half of Riley’s posts today remind me of some egregious shit I said or did when I was a kid. Or when I was 25. Am I going to stop supporting myself? 

Of course a lot of people object to the things Riley says today, and I’m sure those people are happy to spread around the other blog posts they supposedly made. 

Are there some legitimate concerns about things like the “disability metaphor”? Yeah.

Listen folks, The Arkh Project is going to get things wrong. It’s not the holy grail. It’s not the perfect game. It’s never advertised itself as the game that will right all wrongs, avoid all harmful tropes, and unite all marginalized people under a single banner.

But you know? It’s early, and while it’s going to get things wrong, there’s time to get things right. But don’t misread me there… things are still going to be wrong. And because no group of people is a monolith (or even a single group of people) there are going to be things that make some folks go “YES, EXACTLY RIGHT!” and some folks go “…NO, THAT IS COMPLETELY WRONG.” No matter what, that’s going to happen.

If your criteria for supporting a game is that it makes you completely happy and makes no missteps along the way… well, then it’s probably a good thing that all games don’t have such a public infancy. But also, it means you’re bound to be disappointed. Which makes trying to please you a losing proposition.

TL;DR -  I still support Arkh, and will happily throw money at it in the next few weeks, when I have some. Even if I’m the last person to donate $10 to a ship that everyone has deserted, I’ll still call it money well spent.

And here’s a plea to anyone who says that they’re excited about the idea but they have doubts: wait. That’s all. Just wait. Don’t sit there picking away at it. Don’t try to be an evangelist for your doubts. There are plenty of people who want Arkh to fail for the worst reasons, and there are even more people who aren’t sure about the whole thing because it is so new and different and because one of the people involved has a habit of not caring what people think of them… I can see the Arkh ask box (intermittently, I think Tumblr glitches on me sometimes) because I was asked to help deal with the spam, and you folks have no idea the level of hate and the level of repetitive questioning on points that are right there in the blog, have been answered multiple times, and/or are hitting on something that doesn’t really apply because the querent didn’t stop and look at the actual situation before asking.

So I’m going to say, if you don’t think it’s a “real” game project until some milestone is passed… it has a design document, there’s gameplay footage, whatever makes sense to you… let’s just make a deal. Pretend that it doesn’t exist until we get there. Pretend it’s being developed in a closed shop. Pretend that it’s not even a rumor.

When we reach the point where it’s real, acknowledge it. See if you think it sucks or rules or has promise or has problems. But until then? Just ignore it. That seems to me like an “everybody wins” situation.

Edit To Add:

I seem to have misunderstood the exact criticism about Haruka’s dress. I was guessing at the problem from context instead of looking up where I was ignorant. So that might be more of an “Arkh won’t get everything right” issue. But a lot of the complaints do fall into the “needs to be more groundbreaking”, like the idea that the characters aren’t genderqueer “enough” or that the gender roles are otherwise too typical.

I’m leaving the original post above untouched, for the sake of a clear record.

I should mention:

Haruka is in a qipao because a Chinese friend specifically asked they be put in one. We’ve been thinking about changing it for a while reagardless of that.

Edits are actually free. That’s why the initial cost of the images is so high. You did not want to see these characters in the edits that weren’t shown.

Any people complaining about how the characters aren’t trans* enough can get themselves to a damn stadium.

Everything ground-breaking that comes out, there are going to be people who think it needs to be made more ground-breaking. But where are the people buggering the major companies for this? Nowhere. They know it’ll never happen. So they give US absolutely no help, but they complain that it’s not groundbreaking. If the main character was a fat, short-haired punk, one-armed blind negro samurai mermaid, it would not be ground-breaking enough.

Long story short: Game development involves making mistakes, and fixing those mistakes. Even the GDD that gets released at the end of the month will not be complete. It will be a starting point for the final GDD. If we rush, people will call it shit and say we mismanaged. If we move too slowly, people will call it shit and say we mismanaged. Between those cases? We’re going to go as slowly as possible and perfect it as much as can be perfected, and ignore the haters. We’re literally spending more time dealing with haters than fucking working on the project. And yet people still want the project to be done.

It’s amazing. People know we aren’t a major company, but they expect much more from us than they do any major company. They talk shit about how they reblogged something…uh, we aren’t on tumblr ALL DAY. There is no way we could see every reblog. That’s why we ask people to send EMAIL.

You reblog something on a massive site that only leaves the last 15-20 reblogs on a page and expect us to spend all day searching for critique instead of actually working on the things people claim we’re not working on?

Jesus fuck, we’re not heaven, we’re not god, and we’re NOT omniscient. SEND A DAMN EMAIL. Everyone’s who sent an email with critique has gotten a response, along with severe thanks for actually giving us something we can be sure to read. Reblogging and complaining we didn’t see it is essentially being angry with us for not doing exactly what we shouldn’t be doing…not working on the fucking game and spending all day digging around tumblr for things to reply to. Y’all ain’t new to tumblr. You know this shit gets mad busted and makes things disappear, and yet you expect us to magically…control things we can’t possibly control. Right. Gotcha.

About the “anti-white we don’t let white people on the team” shit. Uh. The PoC writer thing we put up is because at that point in time, MOST of the writing team was white. And we wanted to balance it out. Once again, people talking shit when they have no fucking clue.

As far as “OMG AAA GAME ON SUCH A TINY BUDGET!!!” We’re aiming high. Perhaps not AAA-level, but we’re aiming as high as we can. The POINT of this project is to aim high. Because there’s nothing like this at a high level.

So long story short, what people are asking us to do is:
—Stop working on the design because they need us to somehow bypass Tumblr’s faults to answer questions about why the design isn’t out
—Do things they want better and faster than major companies can do them
—Include every possible person who could possibly ever exist on this planet
—Give detailed business numbers where we’re only spending money on one thing at the moment: concept art, which is ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY to get accurate estimates on 3-D work
—Give detailed programming estimates, before we finish the design, without actually shutting up long enough to let the design get finished, while complaining that it’s moving too slowly, while harassing everyone who is even tangentially related to the team, while asking for full transparency about everything.

This is not going to happen. Not in a bajillion years. At this point, there’s one thing: People have to wait. The end.

(via karnythia)