Three cheers for fringe weirdo stuff!
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Trigger warning for mentions of sexual misconduct and harassment in the spoilered text.
That particular comment was pre-university, actually- though there were similar issues with the TAs (one of whom got fired for multiple reports of harassing female students). I do indeed fill out prof evaluations, and am unfortunately familiar with how little gets done as a result of them sometimes- I am grateful for the womanhood and solidarity there is among my cohort, as it was an upperclassman who told me in the girl’s room that I should be careful near one of the instructors (who had been stripped of some credentials for having sexually abused a young female student in the past.)
On the bright side, stuff does sometimes get done as a result of those, though the process can be so exhausting- having had the unfortunate personal experience of having to escalate up the chain of command and eventually getting a professor fired and ousted from the university for their sexual misconduct. The meticulous documentation, process of reporting, letter writing, and having to defend myself before people in positions of authority over me was horrible, and I would have stayed silent about it, kept my head down, and just try to move on, had I not had the support of my loved ones and a few amazing professors. There have been subsequent changes in some of the internal legislation-y nonsense to make the process easier for others to come forward as a direct result of that ordeal- but God, it really is not one I’d wish on anyone.
Academia can be quite hostile at times. My experiences are part of why I find it so important, personally, to allow others to make the informed decision on whether or not to engage with potentially distressing materials, and I’m glad that in more recent years, it seems to have become more of a norm to put up content warnings in IF as compared to the mid 20-teens.
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Amen.
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It’s so easy to second-guess yourself about any of this. Anything new probably feels like fringe the first time you do it, and no matter how fringe it is, there’s fear of putting something odd out there and having people say “what the heck is this?” There are no guidelines of how far to push the envelope.
Certainly I fight with the worries people will say 1) “man, this work is too weird, Andrew’s gone too far this time” and 2) “there’s nothing actually original in Andrew’s latest work.” Whether or not these fears are justified, they are there.
It’s hard not to be crushed by contradicting worries, but it’s a thrill to kind of split through them and realize you wrote something you wanted to. It’s more of a thrill if it turns out okay, or more than okay!
I think that applies whether games are abstract or concrete, big or small, with many NPCs or just one, realist or surreal. There are a lot of different axes like this and if we definitively make a choice of being on a certain side of, say, 10 of them, that means our game is in one niche of 1024. That’s oversimplifying the number-crunching, but if we have a specific vision, there is a worry it is too specific and won’t have mass appeal.
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