i was a teenage exocolonist (and so can you)

47 min read6 days ago

game screenshots by me unless stated otherwise

I’ve realized that I’m much better at discussing broad ranging theory than individual games, just because it’s easier to find ten games that are an example of something than to, sometimes, examine what’s there, especially if a game isn’t exactly in your wheelhouse.

“Narrative RPG with card-based battles” isn’t exactly my thing, but you know what is?

I like little stories about growing up, making choices with your time, and spending time on the little mundane things. It’s why all of my games focus on the mundane; even the upcoming one, codenamed very tongue in cheekily “Waifu Death Squad,” emphasizes the mundane (with one of the characters wanting to, effectively, ‘get to the action,’ and being told the mundane stuff is actually important, no less).

Plus, I mean, this is still a game I want to make:

There is a style of game I find… distasteful: wholesome games. I’m generally pretty skeptical of them, for reasons I’ll outline before we get to the game itself.

While working on Adios, I had a number of conversations with someone about ‘wholesome games’ and their whole deal, because Pokemon fans — who, given that they like a series about good vibes and being kind to each other — were yelling at the team because they were mad about some dumb bullshit regarding 3D models.

And that’s… a pretty consistent trend! Take the television show Steven Universe, which is about a small, soft boy who, through the power of love and giving a shit about everyone around him, forges unbreakable bonds and helps others heal.

The fans of the show chased not one but two of the cartoon’s staff members off the internet, with their reasoning being that the creators had posted their own, personal art of the show, and the art showed relationships that the community did not particularly like.

A show about inclusion and acceptance, and the fans seemed to learn nothing from it! How? How could that be the case? Steven Universe is all about getting along and being kind to people; so why were the fans so angry, possessive, and hostile?

Well, it gets down to human nature, and there’s three core components at play here:

First, when people become part of a movement, they will often do so in order to give up their agency to the leadership of the group, feeling that being part of something is enough. This means that someone may enter a group with a specific set of values, but as leadership changes those values to suit leadership’s desires, the people find their own desires sublimated by leadership.

If you’re a member of a Steven Universe fan forum, and a popular power user of the forum assumes a kind of de facto leadership, and pushes for certain character relationships as canon, arguing that there are good and moral reasons for their preferred relationship to be canon, and you view yourself as a member of this community, then, pretty soon, you’ll be telling the staff of the show how wrong they are to depict characters that are ‘unauthorized’ by the fandom.

I’ve seen this happen even in communities that were not themselves the sole fan community — hell, I remember this kind of happening back in the Naruto days. There were inter and intra-forum wars. That shit was everywhere. “Our community is the true fan community! You’re all just posers!”

Because there’s no actual hierarchy of responsibility, it ends up being the pushiest, the most controlling, the most argumentative users — the ones who want to be in charge so they can weaponize their community — that dictate what is and is not permissible within culture, even if, without them, the vast majority of people would be fine with whatever the artists are putting out.

It’s the Karens, in other words.

I saw it on GAF, on Era, on rocket forums, on airplane forums, on anime forums, on discords, you name it. Heck, one dipshit who got fired as an intern from 343i tried to take over a project I had put together to make it more like what he wanted it to be, and tried to get everyone to be subservient to his design desires. They were so bad, he once came to a meeting to complain that my design wasn’t good enough, and I had to point out that every single thing he was complaining about failed to line up with my design and were, in fact, his design decisions.

He then got mad that I had a shotgun with 12 shells in the tube listed in the design documents; dumbass forgot that wasn’t my design — that was the VK-12 from FEAR, considered one of the best video game shotguns of all time.

Control freaks abound, and they do everything they can to try to make the community cater to their comfort. The goal is to control the space and be comfortable within it, and they want the community to do what they want.

Which brings us to point two: a lot of people seek comfort, and when something is not comfortable to them, they will treat it with hostility. Look at NIMBYs — literally people who say “not in my backyard.” They like the idea of helping people in the abstract, but how dare you build housing for poor people anywhere near theirs, or how dare poor kids get bused into their schools.

So, when someone seeks out something to be comfortable with, and encounters any form of discomfort — like, say, characters who look different than them or don’t date the people they want them to — those people start to get angry, because “this place was supposed to be for my personal comfort, and instead it’s got things that I do not find comfortable!”

When comfort is the primary goal, then anything that provides discomfort becomes anathema to people.

So you might have written a piece of comfy, cozy, escapist fiction, and you’re hoping it’ll convince people to be better people, but their reasoning for consuming your fiction was to avoid being confronted, which means that if your fiction confronts them in some way, they might get hostile, because they aren’t here for a lesson about acceptance and caring; they’re here to be pampered.

Now, when we discussed in two pieces about whether or not art should and does say things, the conclusion was “art does say things, but making art to proselytize often doesn’t work. The way art says things is through normalizing ideas, not preaching.”

The people who object to this tend to be fascists, but there are also people who want to view themselves as political activists simply for posting good opinions online. This means that some people will play a game, decide it doesn’t proselytize enough, and insist that they’re morally superior beings for identifying this. Essentially “I could not identify this art as Advocating a Cause, therefore it’s bad and the creators are shirking their responsibility as artists.”

There are two kinds of lazy advocacy at play here — first, there’s the person who wants to be morally good because they’re part of a specific group, as if joining a group is what makes one a good person. This would be like me joining the National Association of Rocketry and insisting this made me a rocket expert. Anyone can join NAR! Being an expert still requires knowing how rockets work, which is a path that requires lots of study and the understanding that one does not know something (how can you be capable of learning if you insist there is nothing you do not know? Learning requires humility).

So this person says “I’m a leftist” or “I’m a patriot” or even “I’m a Christian” (one of the worst human beings I know proudly brags about being a Christian. he’s also an exploitative, abusive asshole who tries to center himself as a brilliant, original gift to indie games while stealing all his ideas from other people and using underpaid workers to build the stolen work) as if membership in a group gives a person certain positive attributes.

The second type of lazy advocacy at play is the person who thinks everything has to be propaganda — that is, if they can’t see blatant, obvious persuasiveness, the work must be shirking some kind of moral responsibility.

In the earlier essays on what art does and how, we discussed how “the personal is the political” was a slogan meant to help people understand that women should be allowed to have their own bank accounts. Some people — the exhausting kind, determined to make sure you see them as True Political Activists — have transformed this into the idea that everything always and forever is some act of praxis.

This includes consumption.

I’ve known people who want to make their entire personality The Last of Us, for instance. At one point, someone said “happy mother’s day, Ellie!” and the post came across my feed. I did a quick QRT, pointing out that in The Last of Us 2, Ellie’s wife says “if you abandon me and our child to go on revenge, you will never see us again.”

Ellie decides to go on a murder spree, and returns home, and lo and behold, because she abandoned her family, they are now gone. The obvious message of the story being “revenge is bad, okay?”

Well, a lot of these people decided I was a bad person for suggesting that abandoning your child makes you something of a bad mother, suggesting I don’t know what PTSD is like (I do. I have PTSD. I have no intention of killing anyone, nor would I abandon a child to do so. I would do what I always do — make art and try to weather it, and if, one day, I can afford more trauma therapy, I’d do that too. If anyone could judge Ellie, I’m certainly one of them, much more than any of these jagoffs).

But several people suggested that by not liking the popular art they had consumed, I “just didn’t get it,” which was funny, cause I have multiple critically acclaimed games under my belt, have been brought into help people in AAA make their games critically acclaimed, and I have multiple degrees in storytelling and art. I am quite literally an expert in this field. These people were mostly just young adults who’d bought a $70 game that had been advertised very heavily and polished into a generic AAA paste.

Like, you wanna argue with me on the points, go for it, but “you would like this product if you were smart” coming from someone with no qualifications to an expert in the field is just silly.

But, and this is important: The Last of Us 2 was one of the most heavily marketed games of the year it came out. The marketing spend was obscenely high, higher than most games. Some of these same people insisted to me that it wasn’t; I actually had some people straight up tell me it was under-marketed, acting as if they had somehow discovered a game with a nine figure marketing budget.

Look, you can never consider yourself special or discerning for enjoying a product that employed a literal army of marketers in a skyscraper somewhere with the express goal of getting you, personally to spend money on the product. You’re a consumer. You bought the most marketed thing in the world. It’s like basing your personality on liking Coca Cola, the most popular soda on the planet. Congratulations on being the laziest motherfucker alive, incapable of discovering anything for yourself because you’re an incurious fuck.

Why would you ever demand respect for doing something easy? Why would you demand respect for liking something popular? It’s popular, which means a lot of people like it. By definition, you cannot be special for liking the big and popular thing!

But along comes the person who buys the game with the ads in Times Square and the commercials on the television and the standee in gamestop and the neverending press coverage (because it gets the clicks, and who’s doing the clicking? a lot of other people just like you!) and they go “I’m special! I’m special for consuming the commercial product!”

I wouldn’t consider you a discerning consumer for buying a McDonald’s McChicken sandwich every day, so why would I consider you a discerning consumer for buying the most commercial shit in the world?

Congratulations on being boring.

Now, hey, this isn’t to say you can’t enjoy popular media! I enjoy a McChicken. The Last of Us 2 had a pretty good shotgun and some nice graphics! But to suggest that you are special for consumption? That’s what is ludicrous. It’s not even serious. It’s pathetic and boring.

So what does this have to do with wholesome games?

Well, point two has fed into point three: are people who hear the name “wholesome” and then consume the wholesome game. They decide that this makes them inherently wholesome people.

So now you’ve got people who:

Are subservient to the leader, whether they realize it or not.
Do not wish to be challenged and obsess over comfort.
Have decided that liking content that doesn’t challenge them makes them innately good.

That means we have a recipe for an easily weaponized mob of assholes who would like nothing better than to ruin your day and be called good for it.

This isn’t just in art, either. We see it in religion, politics, social groups, you name it. Hell, I was on a podcast once with a guy who really resented not being in charge, so he’d send everyone on the cast after other people. In my logs, I literally have one of his acolytes messaging me to tell me I couldn’t talk to someone on twitter because “that guy hates the podcast guy.” After a little discussion where I pointed out “I’ve seen no such hate,” the person said “well, if you know the podcaster, you’d know this guy’s posting stuff about him all the time, he’s just making it plausibly deniable.”

So I pushed further — pointing out I did know the podcaster, and I wasn’t seeing any of this “between the lines” shit. “Well, you see, the podcaster told me he was doing it.”

Shortly after, without even talking to me, the podcaster started spreading rumors about me, all because he was upset that I hadn’t cut off ties with a guy he’d told me directly he didn’t want me talking to when we were in contact, and then tried to get someone else to make me cut off.

He was the leader, or wanted to be, and anyone who posed a threat to his leadership had to be eradicated. So I blocked him and moved on with my life. I still get some shit on occasion, but what can you do? If someone wants to control you, leave ‘em.

“Doc, why don’t you out this person” ’cause I’m trying to be above that shit. Outing him wouldn’t be hard, I’d just have to drop the receipts, but like… what’s the point, you know? I could spend my time on making games and paying people well instead.

This particular behavior is extremely common with the soft, wholesome types. Some of the worst humans I know were people who’d do baby talk, or censor their swears, or try to pretend to be just a smol bean, just a silly little guy, while viciously talking shit and trying to stoke flames behind people’s backs.

One guy was this super positive, friendly person, but if he ever received any criticism — even just basic playtesting with negative feedback — he’d start intimating that the person who criticized him had some darker, more nefarious secrets going on. Every team he worked on, he’d be tremendously positive about; when he turned in substandard work, he’d be told so, and inevitably start saying “actually… that team isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

The guy told me that it was abusive to say “I don’t trust you” (which is a fairly common abuse tactic; make it so questioning the abuser is a sign of a bad person), saying that a senior on a project said they didn’t trust him as much as someone more experienced on something. A few weeks later, he turned around and told me he couldn’t trust me to deliver scripts on time, ignoring the fact I’d just gotten out of emergency surgery to preserve my jaw’s structural integrity. I ended up having 12 surgeries to correct that. I need a few more, but I’ve done what I could afford.

What I’m saying is, a lot of bad people leverage wholesomeness as a way to put themselves beyond criticism, while whipping their warriors up into a frenzy to harm any threats to their supremacy. It’s particularly common in people who’ve done something bad, don’t want to be told they’ve done bad, and want to do more bad.

I’ve watched the people in their circles — genuinely good people once — go from friendly, outgoing, and positive to constantly depressed, trying to make themselves feel better than other people outside the group by tearing everyone down, doing bad things to people they’ve decided are bad because they’re good. The high never lasts. They get back to chasing it. The only way for these victims to be happy is to cut their would-be leaders out of their lives, but they are so desperate for someone to make them feel like they’re doing the right thing that they stick with the asshole. Leaving would make them so much happier, but they’re afraid they’ll have nothing if they do.

So instead, they become bullies working for a bigger bully.

Ultimately, they’re behaving just like fascists, even if they’re out there claiming to be wholesome good leftist types, or Christians, or patriots, or whatever.

They’re subservient to their Fuhrer.

this was my fourth grade science textbook

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Conservative Art 101

I grew up in a right wing, conservative household. We’re talking “cried when I took a sibling to see Godzilla” conservative. “Throwing my shit at the wall screaming incoherently about trying to find porn because they believed that’s why I wasn’t going to church” conservative. “Briefly banning Veggie Tales because only humans should be able to talk because humans are made in the image of God” conservative. “Global warming isn’t real and God is letting people be deluded” levels of conservative.

I grew up with Bob Jones educational books. I was dragged to Ken Ham’s anti-evolution discussions (and, even as a kid, pointed out that Ken Ham was going to a lot of effort to prove outer space was also six thousand years old when “the heavens” clearly referred to the sky, not outer space).

That meant I was raised on a steady diet of Christian media. The idea was, y’know, “be in the world and not of it,” taken to its logical extreme — participate in nothing, know nothing, do nothing, engage with nothing. Don’t even be in the world, or you might end up being of it. In my late teens, I pointed out to someone that doing so was like letting people without immunity to certain diseases visit a continent where those diseases abound; it’s a great way to get someone infected. Some exposure to the ‘bad’ stuff is required; if you’re cut off from everything, you won’t be prepared for what’s out there.

I was, of course, ignored. And, wouldn’t you know it, when I no longer was being drowned in a firehose of conservative Christian propaganda, I realized just how much of it was bullshit.

When you’re a kid, you trust the adults who tell you things, because they tell you that you’re supposed to. After all, not trusting them is abusive, right? And you wouldn’t want to be a bad person, so just be unthinking, just be submissive, just do what you’re told, and if you can’t make those people happy, then you’re a bad person who has to seek redemption.

So I watched a lot of propaganda growing up. Even the entertainment was propaganda.

I remember watching this movie with this girl in it who was bad, but like… she wasn’t really doing anything bad. She just hung out with the wrong crowd. She wore a cross, but it was because she liked Goth stuff (the movie was from the mid-90s, as I recall, but they were still pulling on like… early 80s goth imagery).

The pastor character sat down with her, asked her if she knew what the cross meant. She said no. So he explained it to her, which made her into a good Christian girl.

This is Derrick Cryder, from McGee and Me, a television show/video series produced by Focus on the Family, an organization run by ex-Reagan advisor and noted anti-porn swindler Dr. James Dobson.

Here’s a typical viewpoint expressed by the kind of person who shows his videos:

It doesn’t make any sense to me. These are the nicest girls you would ever want to meet. When we have written about marriage, they are eloquent in their conviction that they will wait until they find the right Christian man to spend their lives with. And yet the lure of the dangerous is strong even in a video. It’s probably not that different than the way adults are pulled to the dark side even as we profess our faith and try to stay on the right path. It’s a tug of war between lightness and darkness for all of us. These girls will outgrow their Derrick Cryder crush.

If you give them enough propaganda, they’ll definitely believe it at some point, right?

A lot of this media — say, Facing the Giants — follows the same pattern. “You have problems in your life, and these problems can be solved by simply embracing Jesus into your life.” For Christians, hey, that may sound like a great message, but hell, even if you are a Christian, you know that’s not how that actually works. There’s a whole lot of stuff about temptation and stuff; your problems don’t just go away because you’ve said “I accept Jesus into my heart.”

I remember watching the movie in theatres when it came out. I was unimpressed; didn’t think the story was particularly good. I remember driving home that evening, with other people in the van talking about how amazing and good it was that there were finally good, Christian movies out there. I pointed out how simplistic and silly it was — it wasn’t a good story, even if it might have had a good message.

The response was anger. If I said the movie was not well made, then I must also be opposing the ideas it represented.

But… it was clearly propaganda; it wasn’t realistic, it didn’t depict how humans behave. It reflected nothing. It just tried to say “embrace Jesus and all will be well. You might even win a sports match!”

If that were true, I’d win the lottery just by praying about it and being a good Christian. That clearly isn’t how it works.

“But, Doc, I thought this section was about Nazis.”

Well, that’s the thing. In the pieces on whether art must or should say things, I identified a schism — some people believe that art exists to be instructional, but we know that doesn’t actually work. The cozy-seekers come to art to be cozy, not to listen to a message about being nice to other people.

They liked Steven Universe because he could win anyone over — and they do see it as winning — by simply talking to them until they saw his point of view. These fans are the same kinds of people who believe art is purely instructive.

But art is not instructive; it’s expressive. It’s human beings reflecting on, processing, and dealing with the lives they live, which is why this media never really lasts in the cultural consciousness for long. People know when they’re being talked down to; when they’re being offered simplistic solutions to difficult problems.

Adios was about me choosing to leave a bad situation, even though I was afraid I would die. I’m glad people have found all sorts of other meanings in it, and I think that’s because I was expressing grief, and a whole lot of people understood the grief, even though they didn’t understand my situation, much less farmer’s.

I was not helping dispose of bodies for the mob. Farmer was. But his pride at his accomplishments and his grief were absolutely my own. There’s even an entire section on grief — the soda machine section, where I had Farmer voice an experience I’d had with someone telling me I had to grieve the way they wanted me to, and if I didn’t, then there was something wrong with me. “Let me grieve in my own way” was what I was feeling, and that’s the truth I put into words.

On every game I’ve done, people have said “I can’t stop thinking about it.” I suspect it’s because my art is reflective — it is putting real feelings into fiction, and letting people with feelings like that be exposed to that in a safe way.

One of the conservative types I grew up with told me that it was evil. Some criticism the game received was that it wasn’t taking some kind of political stand. It didn’t need to. It was about grief. It helped enough people for me to feel, with unshakeable certainty, that I did a good job.

These people do not want art. They do not want human feelings. What they want is conformity, and if art does not force others to conform — if it does not convey a message that they want it to convey, they consider it to be evil.

Which brings us to the Nazis.

On Nazi and Fascist Art

Much has been made of Hitler failing in art school, with suggestions that he took his anger out on the world in the form of being one of the most destructive, evil humans to ever exist. Similar arguments have been made for Pol Pot, who was held back in school so often that some believe his attempt to kill all teachers and return Cambodia to a pre-educational, traditional culture was a response to that.

I’d like to talk about what the Nazis actually made, though. Most of you are likely familiar with the heinous documentary Triumph of the Will, a 1935 ‘documentary’ by Leni Reifenstahl, which made the Nazis look exciting and powerful and worth joining up.

Now, I’ve studied a lot of propaganda, from Mao’s musicals about killing landlords to Kim’s weird hybrid of Communism and Christianity called juche. I’ve watched On the Green Carpet, a movie that is disturbingly close to Christian propaganda films — right down to the “if you accept this figurehead as your lord and savior, everything will go well,” except that it’s about a particular form of performance art called “mass games” that’s largely just a North Korean tribute to Kim Il Sung.

It all follows the same pattern: give up your identity to the leader. Do what the leader wants. If you do, you can find salvation.

It’s a lot like accelerationism (Elon Musk and Grimes started dating over sharing this viewpoint, for instance) in that regard — Nick Land was obsessed with the idea of a futuristic AI god and finding salvation by letting capitalism win. Sometimes, right wingers argue this is totally a left-wing position; just let capitalism keep growing, let all the people it will crush be crushed, and it’ll totally collapse. Pinky promise. Any leftist claiming to support accelerationism is either stupid or a right-winger in sheep’s clothing.

Defect and you will survive. Trust the capitalists to die eventually. Nick Land’s gone full mask-off since his takeover of CCRU, and we could do an entire article on his bullshit. The acclerationists present their viewpoint as good — “we all know capitalism is bad” — but they’re hoping you just let it win with the vague promise of good things happening in the future.

We have all of human history to show that this shit doesn’t spiral out of control and eat itself — it requires actual revolution to defeat; you’ll never find a version of capitalism that collapsed, but you will find a lot of bloody revolutions. It is the revolutionaries who enact change, not capitalism on autopilot. All of these fascist viewpoints work the same way; it’s the same mindset as the faux-activists we mentioned earlier, the ones who want to just slap on a label and call themselves a revolutionary without doing actual revolutionary work.

Hell, Nick Land himself, the primary driver of accelerationism even pointed out that the left-wing idea of accelerationism as put forward by Fisher was bullshit. If the right-wing shitheel who invented the idea thinks it’s incompatible with leftism, maybe you should make a note of that. Only stupid people buy into accelerationism.

“Just give up. Let our leaders run things.”

The way a lot of these types argue that you should give in to them is by saying “don’t you think life is too complex now? Wouldn’t it be easier to just go back to the familiar? The comforting? The cozy?

And Nazi Germany really, really wanted people to buy into this shit, which is why they made videos about stereotypically cozy German towns.

Which is why the Nazis made movies like The Prodigal Son, where a man goes to New York to seek his fortune, but finds he’s happiest when he returns home to his German village.

A lot of the Nazi films are about ostensibly wholesome goals — so many of them are about someone finally settling down with a wife, and the Nazis had a specific Cult of Motherhood that was all about how a good wife and mother was one who popped out babies and raised them to be good patriots.

The Kaiser of California, the first German Western, rewrites John Sutter’s — of Sutter’s Mill fame — history life to be about how humility and hard work will result in a prosperous future. It’s even kinder to the natives than most American Westerns! All of those things sound good, but it was part of a Nazi push for a specific form of pastoral conservatism.

“This imagined past is good,” they tell you, as they rewrite Sutter to emphasize his German heritage, changing history to make it more palatable to German audiences by making it sound morally correct.

The Ruler sounds like it’s got a great idea — it’s like a version of Succession, except that the titular ruler, Mr. Clausen, chooses to leave his firm to the state, believing the state will be better than his children.

Funnily enough, while we could argue that state-owned corporations are good because there’s no profit motive (see: insurance companies versus government healthcare, where the insurance companies maximize profits and the government is far more efficient since there’s no profit motive), this was a Nazi ploy.

Because, in this case, it was advocating for Führerprinzip, the idea that Der Fuhrer would totally be better at running the company than you. Just give in to the leader, y’know? He knows better than you.

In Heimat, a woman wants to be a singer. She gets screwed over by an evil banker (hmm) and ultimately decides that settling down and having a family is the right way to live.

A Mother’s Love? It’s about the sacrifices a mother makes for her children — dedicated to the Nazi cult of motherhood (there’s a lot of reading you can do on this, but here’s just one link).

Goodbye, Franciska! was about a reporter and his devoted wife, who clearly had to do his duty to the Fatherland (and she encourages him to do so). A faithful husband and wife! Duty! That all sounds good, right?

Quax the Crash Pilot is about a guy who is restless and finds purpose in being a pilot, ultimately settling down with a wife and kids.

We Make Music is an interesting one — the artist in the film wants to make music like Bach, but finds he isn’t good at it. He ultimately finds happiness in giving up his desire to make meaningful art and making pop art instead. That’s… kinda weird, right?

What’s up with that? We’ll get to it.

Nazi Germany had this thing about degenerate art — Venus on Trial was one such example of propaganda. An artist makes classical-style art, ends up going to trial, and so on. The movie was was arguing against modernist style art and pushing for the classics to return. Sound familiar?

You see how so much of this is a desire to return to a fictional, nonexistent past. It’s the same nostalgia mechanism that bullshit artist (“painter of light,” as he’d want you to call him) Thomas Kincade relied on — and his market was predominantly Christian conservatives, which is why you’d see his paintings everywhere in Christian bookstores. Present a fairy tale as a past that can be achieved — and must be returned to — and you’ll find a bunch of people who just want to be so dang cozy holding onto it.

When I told someone recently that Norman Rockwell’s paintings were designed to sell the Saturday Evening Post and did not actually reflect an accurate history of the 1930s (you know, when The Great Depression and World War II was on), he acted shocked, almost angry at the suggestion. Rockwell was creating an idealized past — when the fire that burned down his studio destroyed the props he used as reference, he started depicting more modern imagery, and that idealized world started to disappear. It was always commercial — the idea was to sell you a perfect world.

Rockwell has more in common with the people who photoshop pores off of women on the front of fashion magazines than a documentarian reporting real life. His work was always about a fictional ideal.

As you can guess, the Nazis loved this shit. They loved it because if you could lie to people about the past (“life was simpler back then! we should return to that!”) and then promise them that past (“we can get you there”) as long as you give yourself over to The Leader.

You ever wonder why “art account” people with Greco-Roman statue avatars always end up trying to convince you that European ancient history is superior to other history? It’s easy; they’re actually relying on your nostalgia. When you were a kid, if you were raised in North America or Europe, you were exposed to a lot of The Classics, which are Greek or Roman in origin. They’re explicitly using the mechanism of “I’m familiar with this from a simpler time in my life.” You likely weren’t exposed to, say, Indian or East-Asian art as much, so you have less nostalgia. That suits their (very racist) purposes quite well. Leverage your desire for simplicity and your nostalgia to try to breed a latent sense of racial superiority.

It’s comfort and nostalgia as a vector for racism.

All it really is, though? You were a kid. Your life was simpler when you were a kid. Life now? It’s pretty tough. They promise you something you can’t do — return to childhood — and claim that by taking power (which they’ll frame as responsibility), they can help you return to that. You don’t have to think so much about all the new stuff you’ve learned (like, say, pronouns!), and you don’t have to stare at that confusing art.

The conservative/fascist/cozy mindset says “Don’t be challenged, don’t deal with negative feelings, don’t do anything. Be safe, be cozy, be subservient to the leader who will solve all this for you as only a father could. Have a wife! Have a kids! The stereotypical nuclear family! Leave degeneracy behind! Your art should be representative of an ideal and noble past, not this weird modern shit.”

Which brings us to Degenerate Art.

See, when the Nazis took over, they ran a modern art exhibition, taking a bunch of modern art — not neoclassical, but stuff they thought was weird — and they put it in an art exhibition. They put it on the walls and then put a bunch of “this is bullshit” signs all around it. It was a wild success.

The idea was that you shouldn’t have to try. Art should ask nothing of you. Instead, you should look at a picture of an attractive, happy family and feel good about it.

Here’s a good summary by Dr. Nausikaä El-Mecky:

Visual symbolism was important to the Nazis, and Hitler himself had been a painter, so it is not surprising that they dedicated significant resources promoting their ideals through art. So how was the decision made? How were ‘degenerate’ and ‘Aryan’ artworks selected? If you look at the works of art that were glorified and compare them to those that were attacked by the Nazis, the differences usually seem clear enough; experimental, personal, non-representational art was rejected, whilst conventionally ‘beautiful,’ stereotypically heroic art was revered. This seems like an obvious line to be taken by a totalitarian regime: everyone will find these artworks beautiful, and everyone will feel and think the same thing about them, without the risk of unwanted, random, personal, or unclear interpretations.

The goal was to create art that propagandized a specific, clear, and desirable outcome that kept the leadership in power and kept the audience subservient.

As Eco put it in Ur-Fascism:

Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view — one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. To have a good instance of qualitative populism we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.

The fascists do not want you to have individual rights — and art that is not simply twee heroism to reinforce the Leader’s supremacy is a direct threat to that. The only person who can express is the Leader. The Leader is the augur, the interpreter, a person who claims to have no agency and does as The People will, but The People, if they truly are The People, are ultimately subservient to the Leader who claims to be doing it all for them.

Make people into sheep so that they’ll do what you want, pretend it’s for their own good, and call it a day.

On Pastoralism

Why is it that a book on comfort would be recommended alongside Jordan Peterson? Could it be because those topics are related?

Abso-fuckin’ lutely. I was talking with my cowriter Phil about pastoralism a while ago, and he was kind enough to dig up a twitter thread he’d written on it (and then reposted it on Bluesky). I have his permission to summarize it here.

Basically, Phil (who is an expert in this particular field; his primary educational background is in it) points out that the origins of science fiction are in Mennippean Satire (narrative satire), Gothic Fiction, and Pastoral Fiction.

Pastoral Fiction largely originates with a bunch of rich Roman fucks longing to live a simpler life outside of the city and doing a lot of wish fulfilment about it, and that really hasn’t changed in the two thousand or so years since Caesar got shanked by Brutus.

Says Phil: “It’s a bunch of people who never worked on a farm fantasizing about doing a Green Acres and escaping a city for a “simpler life” but now with solar panel robots.”

Phil goes on to point out that, like, hey, this shit doesn’t actually solve anything. It’s a bunch of people who have complicated lives and want things to be a lot less complex, but they don’t really consider the actual problems they might face. Simply put, it fetishizes a lifestyle aesthetic that envisions the agrarian society as one without conflict or complexity, where issues facing the city — like, say, homeless people living on the streets — are no longer an issue, and even impoverished workers don’t exist because there are robots to do everything for them.

This ad for Chobani wants you to view a simpler, better future, but like Phil points out, it is an ad. Remember when I said that you can’t be considered a discerning person for embracing a product that’s marketed to you? Well, you can’t get praxis from a fuckin yogurt company either. It’s a product being sold to you; there is no hope here, only a desire to tug on your heartstrings and make you want to spend money on the product.

So much of this stuff is about leveraging your desire for a simpler, better life into giving up your autonomy to big businesses and fascist leaders who want power. They are preying on good vibes. The people who actually try to live this way? Well… that never ends well.

7) Prepping of any kind is full of grifters. Pretty much all the YT channels you’ll be directed to or books you’ll be advised to read in the first six months of being exposed to the algorithm are CONTENT farmers, not real farmers. Their job is to get you to spend money on their product, their content, or their membership, and the way they do that is by saying stuff that sounds really dramatic, really vital, and (most important) they imply is somehow secret. If they brag about rare, secret, underground, or (even worse) illegal information, that is a huuuuge red flag. All reliable information is public; there is no secret that you’re missing out on.
8) Be super, super aware of the crunchy-to-alt-right pipeline. It’s real, it is insanely powerful, and it will grab you if you’re not careful. You’ll start this process advocating for women’s healthcare and end it telling people that taxes are theft, scientists aren’t trustworthy, and your husband is your king.
9) Self-sufficiency is a myth, and trying to reach it will hurt you and those around you. What you CAN reach is a level of subsistence production and/or storage that will give you six or twelve months of security to weather the worst of whatever stuff happens. That six to twelve months is enough to find a new job, find a new town, or get your community set up.

what is actually wholesome art, then?

So you can see why I was a bit worried when I first looked at I Was A Teenage Exocolonist’s store page. It had all the hallmarks of a wholesome game, and I’ve watched community after community after game after game go down the same route.

I recall reading about a community that was “good vibes only” going to shit because anyone who pointed out individuals and abusers who were preying on that community was ousted for ‘bad vibes.’ I was in a community where the mods would hurt people with impunity, but god forbid you point out that someone was being bullied and it should stop (I got temporarily banned for asking people to ease up on an autistic member of the community for his excitement about a game, for instance. They were being ableist fucks!).

I’ve watched people turn anything that required them to even think into “negativity,” trying to start fights and crush anyone who wasn’t just here to be cozy and fun all the time. No one got to be themselves, everyone had to make the dipshit happy, and he didn’t even care about negativity, what he wanted was to drive people he personally didn’t like away from the community. It was one guy trying to make a community for him alone, surrounding himself with yes-men who’d target anyone he didn’t like, buying the dumbest excuses in the world just to make him happy, thinking they were doing it for themselves.

I’ve watched people go “no! you can’t criticize this! it’s wholesome!” come out in droves to defend a game that sucks just because they tied their consumption of the product to it.

So when I come across a game that looks kinda twee, and everyone seems to be about getting along and having fun, my gut instinct is “oh. This is gonna be as conflict averse as humanly possible. This is not gonna be a good game.”

But if anything, I think I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is actually wholesome. Not “let’s make you feel good and comfortable,” but “here. this is life. Let’s deal with it.”

Here’s where I knew this game was gonna fuckin work:

Someone dies.

Really early on in the game, a kid dies. Not an adult, a kid. A kid your age. Just… it’s an accident, but it happens. She’s there one moment, then gone the next.

Let me back up. I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is about being a ten year old kid who ends up in a small colony on a seemingly-unihinabited world. The living creatures on that world appear to be animals. This is your new home, and you’re full of hope and determination to make it happen.

The community is small and tightly-knit; you choose to interact with various people and take on specific tasks. Picking one task locks you out of others. If you choose to, say, go with your Dad to help him in the garden, maybe you don’t get to go hang out with one of your friends training to do sports stuff.

Over time — the game takes place over your entire teenage years, ending as you turn twenty — the decisions you make have an impact. Sure, Bioware advertised that with Mass Effect, and it turned out that meant stuff like “a character you talk to might show up later and say “thank you for helping me out, here’s a gun” or something, but that was about it.

In I Was A Teenage Exocolonist, sometimes this means who lives and who dies? Maybe you weren’t as attentive to a person as you should’ve been, and they go off and get killed. That kind of thing. Sometimes it’s their choices and how they feel about stuff.

But there’s a real sense of this being a community that changes over time. People die, other people take on new roles as they come of age and can handle the responsibility. The game seems like it was designed with the progression of time in mind.

It’s really well written too! Like, the kids feel like kids. The adults feel like adults. I’m not sure if I totally vibe with the future that’s presented — there are times when characters feel a little too twee for me in their levels of acceptance and understanding, when people messing up or getting something wrong could be handled with a little more difficulty and a little less convenience (I wrote a game in which a father wants to tell his son he loves him, but cannot say everything he wants to say, because if he does, his son’s life would be in danger, so he must die with his son hating him. That should give you a sense of how I write).

It’s not really my kind of game — I was commissioned to write about it — because cards and 2D cameras and all that isn’t really my whole thing, but I kept playing it, fascinated by what was going on, by how things changed, by how people responded to things. Maybe this kid’s feeling inadequate next to their sibling, or that kid seems like an energetic airhead, but has more going on underneath.

People die sometimes.

A so-called “wholesome” game surrounds itself in the aesthetics of the nonthreatening, the good, the safe. I knew someone once who read “The Body Keeps the Score” and decided it made them the arbiter of what was and was not safe; their hostility mounted as people refused to give them the respect they felt they were owed as a self-appointed community hall monitor. Butting into conversations telling people not to talk about things — or worse, to center them — became so tiresome that people stopped showing up to talk. They tried to dominate, while claiming they were making the community safe. They made me feel unsafe, and the cutesy wholesome aesthetics almost always end up in the same situation.

But here, I think I Was A Teenage Exocolonist has two reasons for using the aesthetics it does; first, it’s trying to make you feel that same kind of nostalgia you might as a kid, and the softness and friendliness feels appropriate to a game about living as a ten year old.

But then people die. And people get hurt. And people lose hope. And bad people show up, demanding that you do what they say. The art is appropriate to being a kid, but — and the game is gentle but firm, which I love — it tells you that you are growing up.

Not that you have to, but that you are. You don’t get to choose not to grow up; you are growing up despite yourself, because you are living life, and you are becoming an adult.

You don’t get to stay a kid, in arrested development forever, giving your agency over to your parents or a community leader who wants you to model yourself after them. You are growing up, because we all grow up. That’s what being a human is.

And then the game gets you to start asking what you’re really doing here. The monsters killed your mom. You really gonna take that? There are sinister implications — what’s going on? Why is this happening?

I personally wasn’t really a fan of the character designs — they’re a specific kind of twee and they’re homogenous; everyone wears the same kind of fashion, the same style of expression, and I thought that kind of worked against what the game was going for. I got the sense that the character design was more about going “hey, here’s a possible future fashion sense,” and that’s cool, but everyone kinda… dressed the same, and dress is a chief form of expression. In my estimation, you’d want to have some people wearing conservative attire, others flaunting what they got, others picking colors they like, even if you don’t.

We’ve got a character in Waifu Death Squad who eschews the techwear aesthetic common with a lot of characters for big pink heart sunglasses. He loves ‘em! Another seems like an aging skater; when I ask my artists for characters, I really try to push the idea of personal style being personal expression.

In a game with a massive variety of characters, the somewhat limited fashion choices felt like it missed the mark. But that’s ultimately a minor quibble for a deeply impressive game.

I Was A Teenage Exocolonist does not place you in some very nice place, ignoring the grim realities of life to pontificate the way so many people do.

When Phil made his thread — both on Twitter and Bluesky — people objected to the idea because, well, the twee solarpunk thing made them feel good, and while I’m sure none of those people were Nazis, I’ve seen that same kind of objection pop up before in Christian propaganda, Nazi art, nerd spaces, you name it. There’s this idea of “well, it’s nice, so criticizing it makes you bad or incapable of hope.”

A lot of people hang a lot of expectation on the idea of hope. Watch the Rogue One trailer where the protagonist insists that revolutions are built on hope. A lot of the 2010’s YA scene was all about the idea of hope, even trying to build the idea of hopepunk. The other day, I saw someone arguing that “Cyberpunk” was a genre created where the name identified the author as expressing anger at the powers that be and wanting to fight against it and make the world a better place, which is absolutely false.

No, Cyberpunk is not related to the ahistorical belief that “punk” is just about being a good person who fights evil; punk has roots in white supremacy, and we discussed that here. punk is not an explicit moral good, nor does it have a coherent revolutionary ideology that lets a person call themselves punk and simply be a good person; to be good, you must do good, not slap a label on yourself, like we discussed in the opening section.

But the hopepunks want ‘punk’ to be an inherent, perfect good, so they’ve tried to depict ‘wanting a better world’ to be a radical act in and of itself, even though, as you can guess, the Nazis also wanted a better world.

I mean, look at this painting. Doesn’t that look nice? Yeah, that was painted by a Nazi dude in 1938. The person who painted this image is the same kind of person who advocated for forced sterilization and death camps. You cannot, you must not consume this art thoughtlessly just because it seems nice to look at. That is what they are counting on.

The Nazi idea of a better world was one of immense suffering for anyone who was not them. “Want a better world” is not sufficient enough to make something good. Elon Musk’s idea of a better world is one where he’s touted as the most brilliant businessman who ever lived while you subsidize him with your tax dollars. His “better world” is bullshit. It’s a delusional, hate-filled fantasy. But he sure thinks it’s better.

The monsters want a nice, happy world too. It’s just that they can’t envision one where everyone lives peacefully together; they believe that happiness can only be achieved by eradicating you.

That’s what makes them fucking monsters.

So you’ll hear people talk about wanting ‘hope’ as a sort of abstract concept, and argue that having the aesthetics of hope in their art — wish fulfillment directed toward a conflict-free, cozy life where nothing goes wrong ever — makes their art inherently good, which is the same thing the fascists want.

And the thing is, the only way to beat the fascist is not to talk things through like Steven Universe, because a fascist wants to bait you into an argument with them where they’ll tell you things like “words don’t matter.” I’ve argued with fascists before. Their response to “you made a specific claim” is always “I didn’t say that, I said something approximately similar with slightly different words, therefore your argument that I made this claim is completely false.” Y’know, “you’re technically wrong for summarizing my position, therefore I win” shit.

The fascists love rules lawyering, and they love telling you things like “the word fascist doesn’t mean anything,” because they’re full of shit and hoping to blast you with a hose full of it until you give up out of utter exhaustion. They want one thing and one thing only: your eradication, and they’re playing this game to win.

So if you are the “what if we just talk, what if we just avoid conflict” type, congratulations, you are their biggest ally, even if you tweet about how bad their ideas are.

The account Swiftonsecurity posted on Bluesky a while back about how they used to quote dunk right wing shitheads until a right wing shithead DM’d them to ask them for a dunk. The idea was “you get righteous outrage, I get my message out there.” The right winger isn’t actually interested in discussion; they’re interested in getting signal boosted.

So along come the people who want everything to be cozy — just like the fascists — whose idea of activism is “just quote dunk this jerk,” and they help the jerks. They empower the fascists. They spread the message. All because of their refusal to engage with anything.

They fantasize about a pastoral life, free of homeless people and suffering, a world with no conflict at all, a world where they don’t have to think, or feel, or breathe, or have a spine, or do something that might hurt even if it’s right.

And I get it. I stood up to someone, and you know what that got me? People tell me that I should die. They call me all sorts of names. They try to ruin my life. All cause I said “stop hurting people. That’s wrong. Go apologize.”

Motherfucker, you can’t have hope if situations aren’t bad. It’s not possible to have hope in a world where there is no conflict, because hope is a powerful force within you to fucking fix this shit, to deal with the bullshit, to stand tall and say “nah, fuck this noise. We ain’t doing this shit.”

There are actual good punks out there. People who will fuckin take the fight to the fascists and beat the shit out of them. While I’ll always argue against just “yes, being punk is inherently good and safe” because there are so many, many bad and unsafe punks out there. There are people who call themselves punk and absolutely are not. You cannot just slap on a label and call it a day, as I have repeatedly reiterated here.

Because that’s what this piece is really about. It’s about understanding that wanting something that appears good doesn’t mean it’s actually good. As I’ve been reading stories of people falling down alt right pipelines, so many of them are people who wanted good things. They wanted community, they wanted sustainably sourced food, they wanted a happy family, good education, and so much else.

And now they’re unrepentant monsters who want people like me dead.

Fire might keep you warm and cook your food, but if you aren’t careful, it’ll burn your house down. You must not be thoughtless. You must not be careless. And yes, you must deal with the bad things. You must stand up to the fascist, you must shut the abuser down when you see them hurting people. You have to look in the eyes of the person demanding coziness as a form of control, and you have to say “nah, man. Your discomfort with queer members of our community isn’t fucking valid.”

The shitheads don’t deserve to be happy. And you shouldn’t let them be, out of a desire for everything to be safe and conflict free.

That’s why I like I Was a Teenage Exocolonist.

We live in a world where actions have consequences, where problems arise. A healthy person is one who is prepared to face the difficulty, not a person for whom no difficulty exists.

It’s why billionaires fucking suck so much — they have no conflict, so they have to create it, to make up enemies, to try and ruin lives, because they are desperate for conflict and too rich to experience anything real.

Hope doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

Hope does not exist in a vacuum.

Hope is not simply a wish.

Hope is not “here is an ideal, nostalgic good we can return to.”

Hope is an acknowledgement that things aren’t good, a desire to make things better, and then? THEN, MOTHERFUCKER?

HOPE IS TAKING THE ACTION TO CONTEND WITH THE BAD THINGS. BECAUSE YOU KNOW, YOU KNOW IN YOUR HEART OF HEARTS THAT NO MATTER FUCKING WHAT, THIS IS A FIGHT YOU MUST WIN.

Hope is nothing if not the willingness to fight for a better future.

And the sad thing is, even the bad guys hope for things.

They hope for a worse world for you and me.

A wholesome game is one that tries to offer you a world with no conflict, and sometimes, listen, that’s okay. My discord server bans specific content to give people relief from the storm. But when someone breaks the rules, I do my best to tell them openly. One time I didn’t, and I regret that. The storm is still there; it must still be acknowledged.

Sometimes people die.

My friend Laur and I were making a game together with the rest of Mischief. She’d been through hell — took care of her partner Nicole until she passed away, was suffering from CPTSD, was trying to dig her way out of that hole. I related to that all too well; I know what that’s like, I was digging my way out. We talked about it a lot; we tried to help each other out.

I paid Laur a bit to read Waifu Death Squad. She loved it. We were working on a couple projects together — one was Horse Game, a horror project I’ve alluded to publicly without going in depth on. The other was a game I’ve tweeted about but haven’t really talked about for years.

It’s a wholesome game. Wholesome as I see it. All of my games have been in conversation with existing trends — weaponless horror, walking sims and the idea they can’t deal with violence or that they should be solipsistic, stuff like that — and this one was about wholesome games.

So it was a game about a person who, like me, like Laur, like Phil, had been through a real, actual personal hell.

I’m gonna put a character in that game. Laur was trans, but asked me to continue using she/her pronouns, so I’m trying to honor that request here. Laur asked me to make a specific character — a nice, friendly dude who runs a cat cafe — in a specific way. I’m gonna do that. I’ll name his cats after hers. I don’t even know how I’ll get it funded, but that’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna grapple with my friend’s passing and fight to get a game made as a tribute, as much as its original purpose, to give us all an avenue for healing. Not you, the audience. Us, the artists.

The fascists’d hate it.

We’d all been through so much pain, and we just wanted to fucking rest. This game was about opening up and connecting to people, but man, man, that shit was hard. There were gonna be fights and misunderstandings, because there is no world where people are just always perfect for each other. Sometimes things don’t go as well as you’d planned.

Siblings fight, you know? People who are supposed to love each other fight some times. A long time ago, my ex told me she was the reason a whole lot of people hated me on a community. Turns out, her mom had stolen her money for weed, and now here she was, a year or so later, telling me that she’d told all of them I’d done some heinous shit “because I wanted someone to hurt, and I knew you wouldn’t fight back.”

I grapple with that, you know? Do I keep turning the other cheek? Does that make me someone who gives the bad guys permission to do more bad things if I don’t stand up and do what’s right?

I’m tired, okay?

I mean I barely got anything left in the tank. I’ve fought so many battles and I need a goddamn break, you know? I wish I had a few thousand dollars to pay off all the loans I got in for being disabled and having my car totaled by an incompetent car thief. I could solve other problems by doing some shit that’d fuck things up for other people; but what good is that? I might be doing the right thing, but what’s the cost for other people, you know? How do I balance selflessness with self-care?

Being good requires a strength I am running the fuck out of. I wish I could go to some cozy place, curl up in a ball, and sleep for a few months. I could reduce so much stress if I had like… $5,000. Just put it all towards bills and like, maybe that Star Wars Outlaws Super Platinum Deluxe Game on Steam.

But… if I did that, even if I had enough in savings to take care of myself for a few months, paying for someone to prep my meals and clean my place so I could actually get the bedrest I need, I’d be selfish — my team needs pay, so I have to keep working to try to ensure they’re okay. I cannot stop. I do not get to stop.

So I get it.

Okay?

I get it.

I get how hard it is.

I get wanting to be cozy.

I get wanting to believe in a better world.

I get wanting to rest. To give up for a little while, to close the door and turn off the lights and fucking sleep.

But that isn’t wholesome. You can’t be cozy forever. You deserve some coziness, you deserve to have some peace. But to expect everything to go your way, well, that way madness lies. Look at the billionaires, who could all just go move to a perfect, picturesque island and never worry about anything for the rest of their lives. Instead they all went insane. That’s what an obsession with coziness gets you. That’s a lethal dose of cozy.

Sometimes people die. Sometimes there are fights. To be wholesome — to be good — isn’t about running from your problems, or seeing interruptions of your comfort as assault on your person. It’s about doing what you can, taking rest where you can get it, and trying to make sure everyone — everyone — around you is better off for it.

I really liked I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, because it let you grapple with the tough shit, and I think to be good, you have to grapple with the tough shit, even when it feels like you can’t. Haven’t encountered many games that let me do that.

Hope is action.

Live with hope.

So take action.

Do good.

Hey, I could use some help with medical bills and groceries. If you want to support the work I do, like this article about the biggest pitfall young writers face and how to get around it, then hey, hit up my tip jar.