Wildly interesting political manifesto for building videogames in Twine.
Only nitpicky part for me is this: the suggestion that capitalism doesn’t want new people to create things:
Like I wrote here, “Under our capitalist system, to accept other ways of communicating is to devalue the cash value of the communication style learned in college.”
They don’t want your stories because the idea that someone can tell a story without going to college or someone can make a game for free is a betrayal of capitalism, it’s a betrayal of an industry that says creativity can only be imparted for money.
People are taught to believe they aren’t someone. Taught to believe they aren’t a Creator. Not an Artist, not an Intellectual. No one is taught that more than minorities.
The idea that creation is a mystical white process. That you need to go to their schools and read their books and worship their idols.
We’re supposed to be crippled by our unawareness of the previous body of work which everyone knows but us, the required reading list of straight white dudes, and the Latin of academic theory.
I would rather suggest that individual capitalists don’t want new people to create. They always protect their interests above their class peers. That much is for certain. The old videogame industry will claw, tooth and nail, to keep their marketplace subdued and amenable to their commodities. But social capital (as Hardt & Negri term it) does because social capital (the collective power that represents capitalism as a whole) is predicated on continual destruction and renewal of the means of production.
I do think that creation – especially creation outside of the established studio system (controlled by, of course, white dudes) contains within it the seeds of radical emancipation from capital, but we need to be very honest with ourselves that capital is always ready to reincorporate new productive capacities and bodies into itself.