Untitled Game Design Manifesto, or My Brain Is The Charlie Day Conspiracy Meme
Things are bad.
Everyone feels lonely all the time, capitalism alienates us from ourselves and from each other, it feels like nothing good can happen, we’re always in a state of conformity or alienation and rarely in a state of coliberation. The only paradigm of value anyone has is their salary or their productivity and any deviation from those twin goals brings little but shame and guilt.
Games should aim to rectify this.
Love is value. People are value. We exist at our best when we are together. Games should give us opportunities to grow together, to experience ourselves and the others around us more fully. Games should make us feel like things can get better.
Things don’t have to be bad.
It’s the goal of most dominant design paradigms to make us feel helpless, make us feel useless. This is also, not coincidentally, the goal of capital. The more dependent we feel on the systems we exist in, the more alienated we are from the underpinnings, the less we think we can change anything. This is not true.
Things being bad is not the telos of human existence, not a universal truth we all have to accept. The systems that keep us in place are precarious, we just don’t know it. Games should teach us this. Games should make us feel that we have power over the world around us.
This means games should be difficult, games should expose their inner workings, games should give people an opportunity to learn and grow instead of relying on an outdated concept of affordance that gives us only one path to move forward and obfuscates anything that might give us power. There are many paths to follow, in life and in games. The best affordances are anarchic.
Politics are aesthetics are politics.
Walter Benjamin told us that fascism is the aestheticization of politics. This means that we, the producers of media, have a fundamental responsibility to fight this process at every turn. We can’t just make apolitical games. Being apolitical is a political statement. Aesthetics are political, and we have to fight for the type of politics that we believe in. This means representation, this means staunch anticapitalism and antifascism, this means refusing to create “others” and give people easy answers or false analogies.
While we’re on the aesthetics section: treat digital space like physical space. Design things the way you want to see them (especially if you want to see more Brutalism). Design things that are ugly but work. Design things that are beautiful but useless. Above all, design things that are interesting.
DIY or die
If we want our users not to be reliant on the systems they’re subject to, we cannot rely on them ourselves. Obviously, as the Joker tells us, we live in a society. We can’t escape it entirely. But wherever possible, we should learn to do things ourselves, and not rely on Google or Amazon or Raytheon to do it for us. Build your own servers. Write your own code. With every new thing you learn, your ability to act, to expose the precarity of capital will grow. Pass on this knowledge to your users. Pass on this knowledge to other developers. Open source everything that you can.
Be honest
With yourself, and with your users. We’re all complicit to some degree. Simply by being born in the west, we’re all responsible for the vagaries of colonialism, the endless subjugation of patriarchy, the crimes of capital, and the increasing environmental effects of centuries of extraction from the global south. We have to acknowledge this. If we lie to ourselves, then we start to lie to our users. They can tell. They deserve better. Expose everything about your process. Be honest about the good and the bad — admit where you fell short, what you were unable to do or know or understand. By the same token, tell them about your triumphs. We can’t expect our users to transform themselves if we’re not willing to go through the peaks and valleys of this process ourselves.
Be kind
All of the rules above are really, really hard to follow. We will fail, and our users will fail. Don’t act as though you’re above your users, or anyone else. Show forgiveness to yourself, and to them. We all have to find the line of best fit between surviving this world and transforming it. If you push yourself too hard in either direction, you won’t last long enough to accomplish anything.
Give other people a chance. Assume the best intentions. Sometimes we have to fight — universal love isn’t going to solve any problems either — but you’ll never win anyone over to the cause by getting on your soapbox or haranguing them. Pick your battles.