Traverse Fantasy

I've been struggling with how I kinda really hate game design. No matter if I play things or run things or design things, the number one thing I hate is cruft masquerading as complexity. I like messing with dynamics and seeing what happens when multiple intersect, but I don't like having lots of levers and dials that you need to optimize in order to play well, especially when it all turns out to be a "solved game" of knowing what to do every time. This makes me more of a cutter than a creator, sometimes, like how my personal  D&D  rules boil down (my idea of) the game into extremely discrete, structural dynamics. This has proven a blessing and a curse for  Resourciv , my civ-like computer game, in that I'm terrified of adding anything for fear of making it needlessly complex—but then I don't add anything at all. I've been constantly saying over the last few months that I am running up against game design, and now I'm standing in front of a wall. Le...

There's a cliché quote often falsely attributed to Oscar Wilde: "Everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power." Thankfully, this isn't a boomer's Facebook page, so we can have the same point restated by Deleuze and Guattari and seem all the more intellectual for it: "The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for the libido to go by way of metamorphoses. Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused. A revolutionary machine is nothing if it does not acquire at least as much force as these coercive machines have for producing breaks and mobilizing flows." I've been ruminating on a handful of things lately, which I realize are interconnected. The angels ...

Talia Bhatt wrote a really good essay called “ The Third Sex ”, about how the third-sexing of individuals who display male-to-female cross-sex behavior/characteristics marks them for ostracization and violence in their particular societies. In other words, taking traditionalist Hindi society as an example, the classification of MTF individuals as hijira is not motivated by an enlightened sense of gender diversity (especially as opposed to ‘modern’ notions of transness), but rather by a patriarchal imperative to punish those who dare to forsake the male pedestal and instead associate with the female sex, since doing so problematizes the base assumptions of patriarchy that sex is immutable and that the male sex in particular is superior to the female sex. “The ‘gender binary’ is a misnomer,” Bhatt argues; “gender has always been a hierarchy.” It’s a really good essay, one that speaks to how ‘pre-modern’ patriarchies rationalize the existence of trans people as well as contextualizes ho...

I was reading the so-called ‘Blue Book’, a cheeky nickname for Fight the Constitution , a collection of essays published by Cosmonaut , the magazine of the Marxist Unity Group, a Kautskyist caucus within the Democratic Socialists of America. Whew. You get all that? Anyway, I didn’t particularly care for it. The essays kept feeling like they were explaining the same concepts over and over again, so they lacked systematic cohesion in contrast to (say) the Little Red Book (which is impressive in that it accomplishes more despite being... littler). I joked with Ènziramire that I was tired of Marxist groups saying they would offer a practical program when instead it just vomited more theory. I don’t know that “We need to recruit more people” is a strategy as much as what you’d want to accomplish with a strategy. It felt less stupid than PSL’s Socialist Reconstruction , at least, but only in as much as it didn’t suggest outright stupid things. But it gets no points for lacking ambition. Ènz...