Consumption

Letting your creations fly

At the forefront of my own creative pipeline, interactive fiction games serve as a vehicle for the presentation of a story. They make up the skeleton that holds all the components together and dictate how that story will grow and develop. If I think too closely about what "makes" something a game while developing one, it's like setting an undefinable finish line for a project. One can contemplate and contextualize, something 1 do a lot myself, but at the end of the day I try to leave this question, what makes or what doesn't make a game, for the post-mortem of a project in order to allow a creation to live, breathe and then die.

Building a sustainable future for games

Having been involved with the Toronto non-profit Dames Making Games as a co-director has taught me about sustainability and what exactly that means for video games as art and as commercial products, in an industry that seems to consume more than it prepares for longevity. A priority we take when preparing our curricula for workshops is to create a space that nurtures but also supports more marginalized populations (especially people of colour) who are at higher risk of being the targets of mistreatment and overwork in the game industry. To some, such a process may appear similar to something like radical self-care, but I see it as unearthing the potential for growth in which future generations can build off of a structure of sustainability. It wasn't until my involvement in Dames Making Games that I took the link between how we play digital games and how we make them more seriously. Consumption is something I think about almost every time I create something - I want the consumption of my art by marginalized individuals to result in the production of more art that can change the status quo. I initially began to develop more and more art...