A to Z: A DiGRA Letter Series -- Part 2
Andrew Grant WilsonAndrew,
I’m writing this in the back of the room during the DiGRA AGM. I’m looking forward to a day packed with astonishing panel titles such as ‘hey look at the weirdos’. I recognise and trust more of the names on the schedule now than I did two days ago, and that makes me extra excited to hear what people have to say. I’m feeling positive about the day ahead. This is a conference overshadowed by stress and despair in a lot of ways, but the talks still shine out through the gloom.
Jose just announced that this year’s attendees were composed half of students, half of non-students. I’m not sure how 45-50 students managed to get here. I talk to people and hear how worried they are about the cost of this conference. The resort food is expensive, there is no choice but to pay for a hotel room, and that’s on top of the expected cost of flights and compulsory registration for even the speakers. Last year’s conference felt younger. People flew in from as far away as Australia because they could pile onto the sofas and floors of local undergraduates they knew through Twitter. This year, a lot of the students I’m meeting are local, and the rest of them make no secret of how much of a financial toll this trip is taking.
Back to the AGM. You nudge me because they’re asking for feedback from attendees. I say I’m too tired to deal with it, passing up a chance to stand up and suggest that future conferences are held in more accessible venues. I feel bad about being silent, but my heart caught in my throat thinking about being that guy again. You and I have been “those guys” all week.
It’s strange being at a conference where at least a tenth of the attendees wore t-shirts saying ‘we are videogame historical materialists’ (only a couple of them wore the ‘videogame new romantics’ shirts) and
we’re
still finding the topic of labour politics being brushed away in favour of ‘proactive solutions’. We got subtweeted during the diversity fishbowl session for being too negative. You were asking why people weren’t feeling more upset. The games industry is crumbling, said the opening keynote. Academia is being squeezed by austerity’s extractive economy, and almost nobody who works in academia is remunerated at a living wage for their labour. There are very few options for making a living some other way and leaving time to pursue meaningful work. Shouldn’t people be angry?
Later that day you said that people were probably scared. Too scared to talk openly about the risks involved in an academic career. People are explicitly advised to study the rules of academia’s vast neoliberal system. To try to find a way to exploit the rules for personal gain. It’s depressing to think about what happens to everyone who didn’t manipulate the system as skilfully. It’s even more depressing to think that maybe the odds of success get worse with each passing year. I agree with you. I think people are scared. People who said nothing in that fishbowl came up and thanked me for speaking up.
But the panels do shine through the gloom. There was a whole panel about sex and bodies in videogame play. And during
the Blank Arcade
roundtable we did get a brief but satisfying conversation about the broken labour politics of the art world. I said something I tend to say pretty regularly: we are moving toward a jobless economy, where menial work (including menial intellectual labour) is mechanised, and other kinds of work are treated as not alienating enough to be worth paying for. People laughed when I said that. It felt strange, though I knew they weren't laughing at me but maybe with me? I don’t know. I was being quite serious. Was it a laugh of relief? People always seem to think I’m making a joke when I really just don’t know any better.
I go to a lot of conferences. Most of the conferences I go to are networking events first and foremost. It’s about schmoozing over free cocktails and convention center sandwiches. Some conferences end up being more about cementing friendships than making new ones. GDC isn’t really a good networking event unless you already have a diary packed with prescheduled meetings. But if you make plans with people you can build friendships out of it. That’s how we became friends, right? Planning our hangouts and then walking away from the convention center, towards a
nice
part of town too far away for us to actually reach.
We played Deirdra Kiai’s
Coffee: a Misunderstanding
four times over yesterday. It’s a game about meeting people at conferences. The players perform an interactive drama in front of an audience, while awkwardly staring at their phones, waiting for the screen to tell them what to say next. There’s a pause, before a player blurts out “I FOLLOW YOU ON TWITTER” or “I’m stuck in a Groundhog day type of situation, can you please help me?” The funniest threads lead to one character furiously storming off stage, but it’s possible to get the two characters to come out to each other as non-binary and then leave together for
a comic book artists’ meetup in a Denny’s.
Friendships are made over cheap food. Eating pot noodles and talking about how scary money is. Coming out to each other, being scared about things, being angry and vulnerable and afraid of the future. I do regret not realising in advance that we’d be rehydrating preserved food in our room. I know how to maximise calorie intake on a camping trip! We could be feasting on freeze-dried curries fortified with coconut manna right now.
Why isn’t this a camping trip anyway? Wouldn’t that be nice? I think that’s what everyone really wants, deep down. They even served s’mores and hot chocolate on the opening night of the conference. I think my favourite panels would have been even better delivered inside a yurt or beside a camp fire. Especially that sex panel, with all the talk about wilderness and orgasm-shaped narrative structures. Isn’t this a topic for a stiff drink and a starry night?
Last night we watched the Super Mario Bros. movie with Dierdra Kiai,
livetweeting
with parody academic analysis. I made a couple of jokes about drawing a ludicrous connection between capitalist oppression and Freudian ideas about the fear of intimacy. I was being ridiculous, but still… there’s an intimacy that comes from worrying about things together, getting upset about oppression, being afraid of the future together. Being afraid, but looking forward to it anyway. Sometimes millennial think pieces ascribe to us a stronger sense of community and closeness. Maybe that’s where it comes from.
I wonder how we’ll see all of this twenty years from now. I wonder how we’ll think about these years of not knowing whether we’ll be able to pay our rent in a few months, while our friends are unable to give enough to the work they care about because their minimum wage day job has wrecked them physically and mentally. Will we come out of this with a stronger sense of interconnectedness?
Perhaps when you’re afraid of talking about these horrible things, when you focus on strategizing your own success in a broken system, when you put on a brave face and stay ‘proactive’, ultimately there’s a coldness that takes over. You mentioned in that fishbowl that nobody stood up for Samantha Allen (and so many others) when she was driven from the industry by a combination of harassment and economic insecurity. Have those people who ignore this stuff lost something that we gained over pot noodles?
-Zoya