Tag Archives: ludodecahedron

Gone Funded Me

01.17.13 – 3:42 pm

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So, this was a thing.

I was expecting, by today, to be doing a blog post in which I urgently requested my readers to take some time out of their day to look over my GoFundMe page and consider kicking in a dollar or two toward my trip to GDC, which in addition to being something of a game journo/dev Mecca also offers a pretty big career opportunity for me, as an MMO community lead wanting to work on Some Game Other Than The One For Which I Currently Work. I was expecting to get maybe 50 dollars or, at best, barely squeak by with enough donations to cover the wages I would lose out during my days on the road… I certainly wasn’t expecting to completely meet our funding target in less than 24 hours, or for the outpouring of support from friends and colleagues even after that to help improve the quality of the trip, work off Jason’s vet bills and make the conditions under which I work and try to make time for Critical Distance a little bit easier to bear. The last couple days have been nothing short of stunning and the words do not exist to adequately express my gratitude.

So I’ll try large fonts.

THANK YOU!

Critical Distance alum and very generous supporter David Carlton has written up a post making his case for why it would be nice if we can continue to see donations come in on the funding drive. The trip will likely be more expensive than I’ve budgeted and there are a lot of outstanding financial issues beyond the scope of the conference in March for which I would deeply appreciate the helping hand.

Recently I was denied for food stamps. This was the second time that I’ve applied and been rejected, and neither query was made as a spur-of-the-moment thing. My student loan repayment bills are starting to come in. My insurance has rejected every claim to help me cover desperately needed medical costs and recently I was hit with yet another large charge for unmade payments to one of my care providers. No matter how I run the numbers or how much I tighten my belt (and it’s quite tight- I’m averaging three days between solid meals and for as much as I could probably do with some dieting, that isn’t how steady weight loss works), I am just not earning the money I need to be making if I want to keep living in my current place, receiving the care and paying for the medication I need to keep functioning… far less run a volunteer operation like Critical Distance on the side. I’ve been looking into moving up to the San Francisco Bay Area for a while now but though I have a few friends up there with whom I’ve discussed getting a place together nothing has yet gelled, and even if it did, I couldn’t afford the moving costs. It’s really about as stuck in a rut as it’s possible to get.

I’m not by any means asking to be lifted wholesale out of my present situation and exonerated from all responsibility, financial or otherwise. I believe in hard work (I think you’ll find most people do) and in climbing out of whatever pit into which I’ve dug myself. Even sharing the details of my current hardship goes against everything I was brought up to believe was appropriate: talking about money is gauche, talking about not having it is humiliating, and so on and so forth. It was difficult to set up something like a funding drive. In fact, not even 12 hours prior to posting it I was having a backroom panic about needing to quit C-D, leave my current social circles, and, as these things go when one has a mental illness, take more drastic actions with myself… So the fact that we made our funding target so quickly only shows me that a great many people –friends, colleagues, readers, even total strangers– already sympathize with what I’m going through and know that this isn’t the equivalent of asking for a handout. And for that, I am extremely grateful.

Any support I receive from here on out is definitely a bonus, much-needed and deeply welcome, and if you will take the time to consider sending a little bit of cash my way on top of the amount that has already been raised I can promise you that it will be put to good use. I am thankful to all the support you have given me so far, whether in the form of a donation or sharing the link or just offering your moral support. It has all been wonderful. And I can’t wait to meet so many of you in March.

By Kris Ligman | Posted in Critical Distance, Gaming, Housekeeping, Miscellaneous | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (3)

Beyond Complete Freedom of Movement

12.10.12 – 4:50 pm

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The title of this post refers to Henry Jenkins‘s “‘Complete Freedom of Movement’: Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces,” which itself references the 1998 game Die by the Sword. The article, as well as the book in which it appears, is a valuable precursor to some of the recent discussions the ludodecahedron have engaged in regarding games as a virtual outdoors.

It’s been over two years since Roger Ebert enraged the hive, and despite the insistent hopping about from all corners that No One Damn Well Cares about the “are games art?” question, we still seem to keep trucking it out. The latest came from Guardian guy-with-a-blog Jonathan Jones, whose forays into the “but is it art?” arena are long documented, and about as neatly thought out as shoving stuff into a blender to see what happens.

He’s just a guy, though, and not a terribly interesting one at that. It’s the damned question itself that seems to take on a life of its own and clog up my reading agenda for TWIVGB every few weeks. As games blogging strawmen go, it’s probably right behind “can games tell stories?” and just before “are casual games games?” in terms of frequency on my RSS feed, and none of them are terribly fruitful lines of inquiry (if only because the obvious answers to the three are yes, yes and yes).

Given this, the last thing I should be doing is throwing my own two cents (more a haypenny) in here. But no matter how often this “are games art?” thing gets brought up, and no matter how many bloggers leap to defend the vidya, I always feel like the best argument is one they aren’t making. Where “but X is interactive, and it’s considered art” everyone is quick to mention participatory theatre, dance, and all the rest, and yet they neglect to mention the most glaring example of all:

Installation art.

Read More »

By Kris Ligman | Posted in Critique and Analysis, Gaming, Other Media | Also tagged , , , , , , | Comments (1)

To the 2012 Graduating Class of Homo Ludens

05.11.12 – 3:11 pm

My commencement was today. For a variety of reasons, I didn’t walk with the rest of my cohort. But it doesn’t seem right to let my entire graduate education go unacknowledged. So below is a sort of hypothetical address I’d wish to deliver at one of these occasions, were I in any position to do so.

One of the first online friendships I made was with a boy from Melbourne. Then, as now, the thing that really seemed to bring us together was games. We were both fans of one game in particular called NiGHTS, a sort of obscure Saturn title by the same people who made Sonic.

This was not a game you played to feel masculine. It was a game very much about dreams, about overcoming self-doubt, about standing up to your fears. It was a game for all those imaginative kids who only ever really felt safe in the comforts of their own heads. And it taught us that being a dreamer was an okay thing to be.

Now as an adult, I can say with pride that I’m still a dreamer. I think constantly of how much more the world can offer, and how much more I can offer to the world. I push myself every day to make something meaningful out of those waking hours, so that when I go to bed each night (or morning, as the case may be), I know that I’ve left the world different from how I found it. There is a pervasive stereotype that ‘gamer’ is synonymous with ‘lazy’– we all know that’s not true. On the contrary, gaming is what taught me to never trivialize a window of opportunity.

You are all gamers today because you feel a similar connection with the games you play. Maybe games help you to understand the world; maybe they help you to understand yourself. But you all recognize the potential games have to tap into something deeper, even if it’s just a sense of fulfillment you don’t get from other media. Games validate our creativity. They ask us to explore the connections of things, to link ideas, to shift our perspectives. Long before the rise of social media, being a gamer was what let me connect with people from Australia, the UK, Brazil and Japan from an early age, and I know it was the same for many of you.

But whether by accident or design, the same attitudes that left many of us feeling alienated and looking to our fellow gamers for acceptance have also been used by us to exclude others. You might be saying to yourself, ‘I’ve never excluded anyone because of their sex, sexuality or race,’ but this isn’t just about the actions of individuals here. This is about how we as gamers collectively address the systems of exclusion keeping others from feeling welcome in our community– to the extent of whether we can even say we have a community if the bar for acceptance is so high and so arbitrary.

That’s the challenge I want to put to all of you today: be the generation that actively, vocally challenges what it means to be a ‘gamer.’ Don’t stand by as others protest about being ostracized, harassed or objectified. Don’t shrug and say ‘that’s just how games and gamers are.’ We get to decide how games and gamers are. If games get to be a safe space to negotiate scenarios and possibilities we’ll never have in our outside lives then let’s see to it that they’re a safe space for everyone, from the way they’re designed all the way on down to how we engage them.

We were all ‘that kid’ once. And if the Web can allow me to meet another ‘that kid’ just like me on the other side of the world, and find a brother in someone I’d never have any chance of meeting on my block, at my school or in my city, it can allow us to make all kinds of connections we’ve never had at any time before in human history. Games have taught us to seek the unlikeliest of solutions for the toughest of problems. They’ve taught us that difference is strength and that flexibility is essential for survival. Now here’s a challenge where we can put all those lessons to the test.

Let’s not shy away from that.

(Original photo credit Pierson Clair. Shamelessly altered by your resident dire critic.)

By Kris Ligman | Posted in Fandom and Misc, Gaming, TOTAL DISASTER | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)
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