It feels like looking at a black and white picture of Germany in the ‘30s.

But I’m grateful for it: that picture woke me up. The fact that these fucking guys are chumming around at the dawn of the new dystopia they’ve aided and abetted? It was time to cut these fascist collaborators out of my life.

X and Amazon were relatively easy deletes as I didn’t use either that much. But Google was another story. I hate that I loved it: calendars that sync properly, document creation that is collaborative, video distribution that is everywhere, and information that is useful. As an organization nerd it gave me tools – free tools — that I was grateful for.

And it didn’t end with those tools. In the last fifteen years I got… pretty deep into the ecosystem. A Pixel phone and two Google Home speakers deep, in a moment of weakness during the pandemic. I am not proud to say that I chose to parrot a company name for the negligible value of having my gadgets turn on music and capture shopping list items. (As an aside let me tell you — mood lighting that’s activated by “Hey Google, it’s sexytimes” is a libido killer.)

I always knew in the abstract that my data goes through US data centres. But now they’re accessible to the Trump government, who Google has already demonstrated they are happy to collaborate with, Google users have gotten a lot more vulnerable. AI coming into the picture means that they can spy at an unprecedented and granular scale: why wouldn’t they build threat profiles on every Gmail user for “national security” reasons? They’re going through our phones already, this would just automate it.

This puts billions of people at risk. BILLIONS. Google is so huge it’s perceived more as a public utility than a company, and they benefit from that confusion. Kids have grown up with Google accounts at school, Googling to research, and getting Gemini to write their assignments. Google makes plays to take over city infrastructure like Sidewalk Labs. But they can’t have the public’s best interests at heart: they have to serve their VC shareholders and this inexorably leads to enshittification. Cory Doctorow, who coined the term, hosts this podcast about why Google Search was deliberately made worse by Google itself, despite many Googlers trying desperately to follow the “Don’t Be Evil” motto.

Governments aren’t perfect, but they have a lot more guardrails and checks and balances to prevent abuses of power, while even a model company that manages to be guided by ethical standard while growing their user bases can still be sold to Nazis when it’s time to cash in.

Boycotting is only one tactic amongst many, just as voting is only one form of civic engagement. But it’s a positive action I can take.

THIS MACHINE KILLS PEOPLE

Before I started the big job of extricating myself from Google, I warmed up with a quick and easy win: Spotify. At first, I enjoyed using it a lot – an enjoyment that was reduced substantially by the news that they were paying artists unfairly. But when I learned that the CEO had taken the money he’d made exploiting artists (and people’s love of music) to invest in military AI? Out, damned Spot.

Luckily there’s a drag-and-drop replacement. Qobuz is a French company that has an almost identical library, makes it easy to export your Spotify playlists to their service, and pays artists 5 times more than Spotify. I’ve been using it for a few months now and aside from having to cut and paste my Spotify friend’s music suggestions rather than click a link, there’s no downside that I can see.

Breaking up with Google was messier. But it lead me to some interesting and inspiring corners of the internet!

THE GORY DETAILS

Proton Mail seemed like an ideal replacement at first, as they offer a similar suite of services to Google and an easy migration tool to import your Google data. But the biggest deal breaker was the inability for the web client to search the body of my emails without downloading all my emails locally (in my case, 40 gigs worth). This is due to the strong encryption they offer, so some people might find this compromise acceptable. They refunded my money within the first month as promised.

I switched to Fastmail, which offers a very Google-like experience and also offers a migration tool to import your email, contacts and calendars from Google accounts – and a free month to try it out. They are not as private as Proton but I’m willing to make that compromise for web search access to my 20 years of email — it’s essentially my outboard brain. And while they have servers in the US, they are governed by Australian law and so are less vulnerable to being spied on by the US government.

Both of these alternatives cost money to subscribe to, but I prefer that to my data being brokered or my eyeballs being leased for advertising.

Protip: instead of having to inform people of your new email every time I go to a new email provider I have registered my own domain and just point it to Fastmail or wherever I go. This costs about an additional $10-20/year but is well worth it to me for the consistency and not feeling locked into a certain email provider.

EASY PEASY

Some swaps were simpler than I thought they’d be.

• Vivaldi Browser replaced Chrome (Chrome-extension compatible!)
• Here WeGo maps replaced Google Maps (on desktop and mobile!) [GmapsWV from FDroid also anonymously scrapes Gmaps]
• Duck Duck Go replaced Google Search (no ads! You can turn off the AI smart search!)
• TickTick replaced Google Tasks/Keep (there’s a browser extension and an app with mobile widgets for quick capture) [Tasks.org is also great]
• FreeTube replaced YouTube (SmartTube for TVs is similarly ad-free)

THE PIXEL FIX-EL

I’m on my second Google phone, and I kind of assumed I was stuck with it for the meanwhile, but then I discovered GrapheneOS: a community-built Android operating system that you can replace the existing one with. This was a big surprise as I had thought I wouldn’t be able to escape the OS itself. But this open source project is super slick, bloat free, and also gives you access to most of the Play store apps — anonymously via Aurora!

My gotchas were that I couldn’t bring my paid apps along without activating Google Play to confirm they were paid for, and my banking app required Google services. But there’s even work-arounds for this: you can install a sandboxed version of Google only for these apps that and they can’t see anything else going on outside the sandbox.

Secondly, Authy wouldn’t work and they don’t make it easy to export the 2FA you’ve established — I had to do it manually and it took a few hours (on Bitwarden now).

As the above techy jargon implies, replacing the OS is a bit of a hobbyist project, but I found it fun. If I could do it again I’d set aside a full day to do it. Remember to manually back up contacts, messaging data (especially Signal and other private messengers – I lost some message history, learn from my mistake), and everything else Google usually does automatically for you — rifling through your data in exchange.

DISCOVERING THE UNWALLED GARDEN

Perhaps my favourite part of these changes has been discovering YunoHost in my research to replace Drive and Photos. They are another inspiring community project that provides a beginner-friendly way to convert an old computer (in my case, a 15-year-old laptop that no longer holds a charge) into a server that can host a number of useful open source applications.

One of them is NextCloud, which together with Collabora provide a local cloud file server with a writing/spreadsheet/slides substitute that is accessible wherever there’s internet. (I’m writing this post on it now!) I have it set up to sync all my important files from my local machine and photos from my phone so I have a backup and can access them remotely, too. My space is only limited by the hard drive space I have on my server and doesn’t require a subscription, though it’s more work to set up and possibly not as stable as an off-site server. (For people who don’t want to host their own server: OnlyOffice is pretty solid alt for docs, and gives you 2G of free storage that’s upgradable. Ente for photos gives you 10G of free storage.)

But to get back to YunoHost – they self-describe as “a non-profit technocritical project, developed and maintained by volunteers. We advocate a decentralized Internet, with open, interoperable technologies that respect privacy and empowers people.” They do an incredible job providing straightforward and human how-tos and tutorials on how to set things up, and also have a forum and a chat channel if you get stuck.

I have been tinkering with computers for decades but rarely like to bother people with my questions, focusing on endlessly searching forums and the like to find how similar problems were solved. But they make it very approachable with tools that capture logs to share and protocols to ask for help, so I thought I’d ask. Within a few hours a few different users had made suggestions, and one of them worked! It was a sweet taste of mutual aid, something I’m often offering but rarely partaking of myself.

PURITY IS NOT THE POINT

I still have some goog-artifacts around: I will need to use it in some work and collaborative projects, and my projector runs on GoogleTV (though I have signed out of my account). I use my Google Homes as basic Bluetooth speakers, though I’ve deafened them by muting the mic: the white LED lights turned Cylon-orange as if frustrated they can’t eavesdrop endlessly.

Although the inauguration picture lit the fire under my ass, I mostly started this project because I just didn’t like being so reliant on a company that didn’t – maybe even couldn’t, because of its structure – have my best interests at heart. It had too much control of too much of my life. That’s why going forward I don’t plan to put all my digital eggs in one basket, even for a company like Proton that seems simpler on the surface.

The internet, after all, started with this “distributed-is-safer” principle – a communication network of computers that would withstand being bombed by our cold war adversaries. Let’s go back to this basic principle and reduce the toxicity of concentrated power in the process.

NEXT DECEMBER

Now that I’m mostly Google-free, I’m tempted to keep going: keep crossing off my hit list of the techno-oligarchs in that creepy picture. The last big one for me is Meta as I’m on Facebook and Whatsapp for many family, friend, and event purposes. But I’m going to leave that ‘til Divestment December 2026 and try to make it a regular annual part of my life instead of a “big gesture” purge. I’d also like to couple my divestments with a parallel push to invest in the kind of projects and people who are inspiring and enabling a decentralized and open internet.

Want to join me next year, perhaps with different divestment goals? Shoot me an email at info (at) jimmunroe.net (my forever email!) and tell me why and I’ll add you to a special list of co-conspirators.

Thanks to Matt H, Matias dP, and Heather M for editing feedback and support!

I’ve come to appreciate summer wear late in life. For years I was one of those folks who wore the same outfit day after day, regardless of season: black jeans, black socks, black shoes, button down shirt. It had something to do with believing that I was not the kind of person who cared about clothes, and so preferred to think as little about it as possible. Of course I was hot in the summer, but for some reason that was better than changing my routine. Instead I walked the streets in the nighttime to get some outdoor time, pretending I was the last lone survivor of a zombie apocalypse.

Today I write to you dressed in a pair of shorts that doubles as a swimsuit, a safari print shirt, and a pair of strappy sandals. When I walk down the street, I feel the summer air on my skin. When I walk through the park, I feel the contours of the earth under my soles. And I owe some of that to Jeremy, AKA Spider, a man who gifted me his sandals after he died.

A few weeks ago I was at a Burning Man regional — kind of a mini Burning Man put on by locals near Montreal named L’OsstidBurn. Instead of a desert, it was in a forest that sloped down to a beautiful cold stream. It was only 1/100th of the population of the big burn — 600 rather than 70,000 — but they shared the same ten principles and, critically, the same culture.

I have spent my life obsessed and engaged with subcultures, and the burner subculture is special. Other subcultures have a narrow band of expression in comparison: burning man really has a spectrum that embraces the hardest of the hardcore punks to the softest of the loving hippies and a huge messy swath in between. When you arrive, a Mad Max looking maniac will stop your car with a glare and a gloved hand and wave you on when — and only when — it’s time to go. No fucking around.

But then when you do get in, you might encounter a gentle, radiant soul who greets you with the most genuine hug you’ve had since you were three. As you explore Black Rock City you may benefit from the mix of brilliant grumpy gearheads fixing your bike and the sweet, free nature’s children providing you with a pillow lounge to rest in — because a city needs both infrastructure and joy, soothing and boundary setting. People’s tendencies and their talents are all needed and valued here. Most subcultures are stuck in a reactionary relationship to the dominant culture, while burner culture almost creates a through-the-looking-glass alternate reality that manages to mirror a broader range.

What this has meant for me — someone who’s chafed by both punk’s self-seriousness and hippie’s lack of rigour — is that I feel a real freedom in range of expression. Because we all contain multitudes and contradictions. At any burner event, you could encounter a joke about shitting your pants one moment, and a performance that invokes a deep moment of reverence the next: the sacred alongside the profane. Which brings me back to Spider’s sandals.

Each burn has an effigy (the titular Burning Man) and a temple, which is a place for contemplation and grief. There are sharpies hanging there in the temple for you to write something on the walls that will soon be aflame. People write heartbreaking things here, put photos and tokens of lost ones on the walls, and they are free of the rote words and sentiments you would see in more conventional settings.

One year I came across a framed text exchange, the colourful speech bubbles incongruous there. It was a conversation between two unknown people, one of whom was supporting the other kindly through a hard time as a good friend would. Below it revealed that it was not a good friend — it was the person’s father, and this was the last exchange they had before the father died of a long illness.

I was overwhelmed by a sudden feeling of grief — not (as might be expected) for the person’s loss, but by my own shock: this was a father? A father could offer this kind of support, and love? I had never mourned that lack in my own life and had never really been conscious of it. But that day I broke down and sobbed and sobbed until I was spent, and then was distracted by a man wearing a soldier’s helmet made to look like a disco ball.

But I had no such experience in the temple this year. This year, I came out feeling contemplative but not shattered, and then came across a large tarp with a selection of clothes and items as if at a yard sale. My first thought was that it was one of the “free thrift store” style of burner offerings that was common — such a great way to experiment with clothes for an afternoon that you neither have to buy or bring! — but it was not that.

There was a small sign that revealed that this assortment of things used to belong to Jeremy, a burner who had recently died of cancer. His friends had brought these things to the event because he would have wanted other burners to have his stuff. So now his hoodies and pants and… you guessed it… sandals were up for grabs.

I kind of needed them right then, too — I hadn’t brought a good pair. I sized them up — close enough… in good shape too. I strapped them on and immediately they felt good. I took ‘em.

Is it a little morbid? Ghoulish even? Let’s face it, any thrift finds have a good chance of having belonged to a corpse… there’s just some plausible deniability once they’ve become commodified. 

Like so much of burner culture, it’s a combination of darkness and light that is contradictory and yet more completely human. Personally I get a little transgressive thrill telling people these are a dead man’s sandals… gifted to me from beyond the grave, washed clean by the transformative power of community.

So happy to announce the release of my new sci-fi rom-com graphic novel, Zeroed Out!

What if shapeshifting aliens came to Earth, but instead of taking over they just fix all our problems?

Matias might be living in a utopia, but being dumped still sucks. So he distracts himself with his work, taking the weekend overtime his new alien boss offers him.

That’s when he discovers that his shapeshifting boss, who’s an alpha male during the week, is something quite different on the weekend…

It’s a collaboration with illustrator Eric Kim, who brought his fantastically expressive drawing talents to the manga-styled project. You can buy it now at our publisher At Bay Press and check out the first ten pages via the Preview link there too. (And if you are one of those rare and beautiful humans who review books, email me and we’ll get you a review copy!)

You can also get a signed copy in person at a few events…

Firstly, Eric and I will be tabling at Toronto Comic Arts Festival June 7-8 — if you’re not going to TCAF religiously already, it’s a great (and free!) comics event you should definitely check out.

Then during Toronto Games Week I’m doing this:

The Playful Page: A Sci-Fi Rom-Com Conversation
Mon June 16 (6:00pm-8:00pm)
Palmerston Public Library (Lower Theatre), 560 Palmerston Ave
Holly Gramazio (game designer turned novelist) and Jim Munroe (novelist turned game designer) chat about writing, games, fiction, Jim’s new graphic novel Zeroed Out, Holly’s book about an attic full of endlessly spawning husbands — and how The Husbands has been greenlit by Apple to be made into a TV series by A24 starring Juno Temple (Ted Lasso). Books for sale through Another Story. Free! Facebook Event

For a fun preview of our discussion, check out Holly’s piece in The Guardian where she interviewed myself and a ton of game/book crossover writers.

Then, on Thurs July 3 at 6pm we’re going to hang out at the delightful Beguiling to talk about utopia building and sci-fi rom-com comfort food in a time of non-stop dystopian reality. Come early between 4-6pm to chat with us and get your book signed.

Also, on Wed Sept 24 7-9pm I’ll be co-launching the book with Jason Turner at Lucky’s (3128 Main St) in Vancouver!

“Is it a sci-fi story with the beating heart of a romance? Or is it a romance with a compelling sci-fi premise? Either way, Zeroed Out is smart, empathic, and gorgeously drawn.“

Ryan North, NYT bestselling & Eisner-winning author of Dinosaur Comics and Adventure Time comics

Last year, my daughter gave me a fun blank notebook with SCHEMES on the cover. I vowed to her that I would fill it with schemes. I now have close to fifty.

Every week, I explore a new scheme on two sides of a single page. Things like:

• Spend a month a year living somewhere else
• Make a sci-fi radio play about a masculinity detox centre on the moon
• Create an elder ritual for myself
• Attach a tiny scroll of protection to random bikes

It takes about 20 minutes, and it’s silly and fun. I look forward to having a coffee and writing some crazy shit down. When I talk about the ideas with friends, some schemes are naturally more contagious… I can see people’s eyes light up.

And often afterwards, people will say: Man, I need a Book of Schemes!

So as we approach the beginning of the new year, I’m building a SCHEME TEAM to run through 2025.

Members of the team will write a scheme each week. At the end of each month, we’ll have a Scheme Team meeting. The exact format of the meetings might evolve, but they hopefully will provide an accountability structure and an opportunity to speak our outlandish ideas aloud.

What qualifies as a scheme? They can be: life schemes, creative schemes, preposterous schemes, political schemes, romantic schemes, so-crazy-it-just-might-work schemes…!

They are not: plans to execute. They are not projects. You NEVER have to do them. You probably SHOULDN’T ever do them. They are untethered, tantalizing flights of imagination.

Put down your task list and pick up your Book of Schemes!

For me, it has become a much needed creative practice in my life for turning seeds into seedlings. Some will be the basis for a project I take on. Some have already become reality. Most will be the fertilizer for other ideas.

If you are a doer, the temptation will be to immediately start to try to realize your schemes. But my invitation is that you push yourself to stay longer in this ideation phase. The whole year if you can manage it! Then you will have close to 50 schemes to choose from!

And I have a scheme for what might happen after that…

Last month I curated a selection of nine games at the AGO, one of the largest art museums in North America. After the audience had a chance to play them, I went around to each game and explained the cultural value I felt it offered. Seven of the nine games had creators attending them, so I was able to ask them a question about their process. This format encouraged the audience to engage with them afterwards, sometimes their first time talking to a game artist — I was happy the audience was a broad mix of game-curious art patrons, students, kids, and game community members. I’ve documented my selections and rationale below — for further context, feel free to read the AGO’s Foyer piece.

Electro-Vivisection (Luis Hernandez, Canada, 2024)
Luis previously co-created indie hit Jazzpunk ten years back, but this project is wildly different. He’s taken some classic consoles and modified them physically almost to the point of breaking, but still able to run playable games that have become abstracted ghosts of the originals. (Artist in attendance)

Untitled (Jessica Mak/Annapurna, Canada, Unreleased)
Jessica’s first game Everyday Shooter was very much an auteur game with her doing the programming, music, art and design. On the strength of its success, she was able to start a studio with collaborators to make Sound Shapes, which came out for all the consoles and featured a track by Beck. Now she’s back to solo development by choice, as it was a better fit for her. She has been working for the last ten years on a project which will be published by Annapurna Games and she’s been kind enough to share video gameplay as a preview which features its truly stunning procedural imagery — art starting with simple primitive shapes and modified by math equations. (Artist in attendance)

A Short Hike (Adam Robinson-Yu, Canada, 2019)
In this game you play a bird going on a short hike, with gently comedic writing that respects the players time and a dreamy flying feel. It’s a lovely homage to a simpler era of cozy exploration games but is much more than a slave to nostalgia. (Artist in attendance)

And Other Stories (JohnLee Cooper & Austin Heller, Canada, 2020)
There is a vibrant scene of people making narrative autobiographical games with accessible non-coding tools like Bitsy and Twine. I found out about JohnLee’s games through the Paradise Discord community started by Alexander Martin, and was really intrigued by the way he chose to link the controls to move all the characters simultaneously through four different — but thematically overlapping — game environments. (Artist in attendance)

Été (Impossible, Canada, 2024)
In this game you paint your way through Montreal in the summertime. As you paint objects in the game world, you’re able to use them in your compositions. You’ll find yourself making abstracts to sell in the cafe to make money, or you might do a painting for a guy you met in a trainyard who wants a flag for his anarchist vegan commune. And while you’re given some constraints — you might have to use vegetables in the flag, for instance — there’s a broad range of creative choice that the player has in the composition. It matches its mechanic to a good degree of expressive agency. (Artist in attendance)

Unleaving (Orangutan Matter, Canada, 2024)
Unleaving is a melancholy puzzle platformer made by a husband and wife team that uses acrylic painting on canvas to create its visuals. They brought a collection of the original artwork to give people insight into their creative process. (Artist in attendance)

Cuphead (Studio MDHR, Canada, 2017)
One sign of a medium’s maturity is its ability to engage in conversation with other mediums, and Cuphead is a great example of this. Its mashup of this golden age of animation with a challenging run-and-gun shooter was hugely anticipated and executed with an unparalleled level of skill, engaging a wide variety of arts professionals from multiple disciplines. (Artist in attendance)

Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy (Bennett Foddy, USA, 2017)
I chose this game to because it pushed back against the monolithic view that games should be fun. It’s a punishingly hard, frustrating, unforgiving, but undeniably engaging game that is part of the masocore (masochistic hardcore) genre alongside the Dark Souls series. In the first minute of the game, the creator’s voiceover admits. “I made this game for a certain kind of person… to hurt them.”

Nothing Good Can Come of This (Cartwheel, USA, 2024)
So on the surface this is a fun competitive game with tight controls and nice gamefeel. Players race for the gun that drops and try to murder each other. But what happens if you resist the gun? After a little while, a secret door opens and the players can escape the cycle of violence. An interesting meta-commentary!

Special thanks to AGO organizer Nathan Huisman. Thanks also to Paolo Pedercini, Marie LeBlanc Flanagan, Alexander Martin, Raigan Burns, Get Set Games, and Lynn Hughes for their thoughts.

Photos: David Hermolin (top), Paul Ayers.

When I describe what I do in co-organizing Toronto Games Week, people often say that it sounds stressful and like a lot of work — as opposed to writing or creating stuff, which people think sounds like fun. But they’re both fun in certain ways, stressful in others. 

When my organizing schemes are going well, I wonder to myself: why doesn’t everyone want to do this? It’s so fun! I’ve always felt my creative side and my organizer side were complimentary, but now I’m almost wondering if I may have become an artist so I could be a better arts community organizer.

More on that subject later — but Toronto Games Week starts Thursday, so here are my top picks for you rated with difficulty levels…

Easy mode. Games X Movies, at a lovely licenced rep theatre!

FRI JUNE 14, 6:45-11PM
Moon and Double Dragon Screenings
A free screening of working class sci-fi flick Moon paired with a presentation by Trey Smith, creative director of working class sci-fi game Hardspace: Shipbreaker (free tickets here)! Then the legendary Blackbelt Cinema presents 1994’s Double Dragon ($ tickets here, event trailer here). Sponsored by Continue. (Facebook event)
Revue Cinema
400 Roncesvalles Ave.

Medium challenge. Explore a rambling historic building filled to the brim with game-related amusements. 

WED JUNE 19, 7PM-12AM
Toronto Games Week Closing Celebration
The final event of the week features a select videogame showcase from Toronto Game Jam, performances by Hypergame Storytime and the Suspicious EXE Files, and a ’90s video dance party presented by Mighty Yell! Visit the tiny but mighty microMix arcade, a collection of 30-second microgames concocted by Sheridan students and hosted on the Hand Eye Society 2UP Bartop Torontrons. Navigate the digitally-corrupted landscapes of (Jazzpunk co-creator) Luis Hernandez’s Electro-Vivisection, where classic games have been modified beyond recognition. Bring your game on USB and Render File will improvise music as people play it! Plus, a zine launch by Paradise! Tickets here. (Facebook event)
St. Anne’s Parish Hall
651 Dufferin St.

Hard challenge. If you like videogames, exploring the woods at night, and frolicking amongst guerrilla art, you may be up for this epic adventure.

SAT JUNE 15, SUNDOWN TO ?
Night Parkcade: Forest Frolick
The sequel to last year’s pop up arcade after dark in Trinity Bellwoods, in a new secret location! Featuring a shirt that you can play Frogger on and leafcore videogames like Klei’s Rotwood and A Short Hike presented by the creator Adam Robinson-Yu (who ~might~ have something new?). But in a city blessed with many glorious ravines, where could it be? Only TGW newsletter subscribers will get the treasure map the day before the event! (Facebook event)

Bonus Level for people with kids! A perfect Father’s Day outing!

SUN JUNE 16, 12PM-4PM
The Dream Game Museum
Get inspired by playing one-of-a-kind games, draw your own game cover and concept, then watch as Hypergame Storytime improvises a theme song right in front of your eyes and ears! An all-ages kid-friendly event in the back room of the last weird video rental store in the city. Free. (Facebook event)
Eyesore Cinema
1176 Bloor St W.

Full Toronto Games Week schedule here!

Some further thoughts on the interplay between organizing and creating:

If I love a piece of art, I’m curious about the person who made it and often excited to try my hand at working in the medium. Then I like to share my work with the people whose work inspired me. If we consequently become friends, it’s natural to collaborate with them. And often it doesn’t make sense to collaborate when you have the same writer role, for instance — so instead, I start something like a writer’s group, where we can support and grow alongside each other.

I think often people view arts organizing as serving artists, but because I create work in mediums that I organize in, it feels to me like I’m helping my peers. So I get both a feeling of usefulness and a feeling of connection.

If art is more about feeling seen, and organizing is more about feeling connected, I think the latter is more significant to me just because of my personal emotional history. So while many people see community organizing as a way to advance their art career — and it has that benefit, absolutely — to me it’s the main course. And in some ways it’s easier to get attention and support for organizing — it’s less glamorous than art making and so it’s much less crowded than any creative space.

So as I’ve bounced from medium to medium, I have discovered a recipe that seems to work:

1. Make a thing. 
2. Wish there was a community resource that could have made making that thing easier. 
3. Find the other people in that medium who feel the same.
4. Make it happen with them.
5. Repeat.

When I was in publishing, I started the Perpetual Motion Roadshow touring circuit that sent 100 indie creators on the road. In film, I started a DVD zine and we established an egalitarian profit sharing model for the multi-director feature film I wrote. In games, I co-founded the world’s first videogame arts organization (the Hand Eye Society) and now help run Toronto Games Week. Making these projects, structures, & institutions is absolutely a kind of creative act — building something new and useful that helps artists, and giving it a name and and aesthetic that inspires them.

—

Convinced? If you’re inclined to want to organize an event in the games space, we’ll be looking for new organizers to support next year — subscribe to the newsletter to find out how to join us!

TGW Poster: Nicholas Di Genova
Moon Poster: Brandon Lim
Photo: Kyle Chisholm

So it turns out that “I don’t want to teach” is just another example of The Joy of Being Wrong, a series of self-limiting beliefs that I’m crossing off one by one. Turns out that with the right conditions I like it quite a bit and I will probably do more of it when opportunities present! In the meanwhile, I’ll be helping organize Toronto Games Week, prepping my next graphic novel for publication and keeping my antenna up for interesting collaborations or jobs. If you’re interested in my teaching experience, here’s the full story…

This fall, the fall of my 51st year, I went back to school. I had always been fairly determined not to teach, but this September after being laid off from my game industry job and after being encouraged by some old friends who worked there, I ended up in front of nearly a hundred first year students in a lecture hall at York University.

It had been thirty years since I had been there as a student, but I remembered well my skepticism as a teenager — now the tables were turned, as they always are if you live long enough. I’ve done more public speaking than most, and know that even the slightest whiff of bullshit or talking-for-talking-sake from my own breath grinds me to a halt. But I’m a moderately engaging speaker if I care about my subject, and care about communicating it to an audience — people respond to urgency and passion.

Luckily, the subject — Writing For Games and Interactive Media — was something I have been challenged by over the years, and have some hard-earned insights to show for it. So week to week I built a curriculum that started with these core concepts and then led into putting them into practice.

I discovered the pleasure of breaking down narrative design insights into engaging slides, and then the satisfaction of seeing these ideas “land” with my students. (I also experienced the opposite, where I completely fucked up a tutorial and left most students confused. But I was able to pick up on it and address it in future classes.) Most of my previous speaking gigs had been about my creative work where my self-consciousness distracted me from registering the audience reaction, aside from negatives like people leaving or yawning. By lecturing every week for twelve weeks I became aware of a combination of micro-movements and gestures — a focus, body language, and response to questions — that gave me a better idea as to what was working and what wasn’t.

It really helped that the students really wanted to be there. When we did a survey 70% of them wanted in-person rather than remote classes. Plus, it was their very first semester at university, after missing a chunk of their high school experience due to the pandemic. It also doesn’t hurt that it’s about videogames, which many of them love but had never got to look at through a critical lens. I would have loved a class like this that combined writing and games. These ideas might be really helpful for them if they ended up being game creators, and if not would also give them new ways to appreciate narrative design in the games they played.

So I think it really comes down to the subject. When I thought about teaching before I had only thought about creative writing, which came to me easily and I don’t enjoy thinking analytically about. Narrative design and game design in general is a second language, so to speak, so I had struggled more with it — and consequently enjoy helping others along, and have some tricks I learned to help them along the way. 

I had two excellent TAs who ran the discussion labs in smaller groups and did the marking which meant I could focus on prepping and delivering the lectures. Because they did this front line emotional work, I could be more distant, providing mostly higher level guidance. In the future I might choose to get more engaged with the students individually — I could see how that could be interesting — but this time I was relieved to have a certain amount of space. I did make a big push for my students to engage with the community, so I look forward to seeing some of them filter through to the events I attend and organize — as peers, where I have less authority and responsibility over them.

Thanks to my pals Taien and Patricio who tipped me off about the job, and to my union which means I have an excellent benefit package a full five months after my contract ends.

Is there a thing you know you should do, but don’t? With me, for years, it was paper prototyping. Paper prototyping is the process of sketching out a game design, literally, with pencil and paper, and then playtesting the design ideas you have before you ever sit down in front of a computer. Instead of a computer modeled character you can use an action figure. Instead of generating a random number you have dice throws. Most games have many mechanics that can also work in a board game context, though there’s obviously lots of gamefeel related aspects that need to be digitally tested.

It’s the same as the filmmaking principle that “paper is cheaper than film”, that ideas in a paper script can be added and removed and problems solved far more easily than after a scene has been shot. I would never dream of shooting a short without a script, but it took a familiar motivator to get me creating my first paper prototype:

When it’s hard for me to do something for myself, I can often do it to help someone else.

At a previous job, I took on the task of running a series of ideation sessions for new games, and as part of it I had the team members make paper prototypes from ideas they’d brainstormed. In order to demonstrate it I made my first paper prototype, a Lemmings-inspired game set in an travelling amusement park called Bilk the Rubes. My team members decided where to put their drunk carnies and then find out how much money they made at the end of the day. Putting them on the games of chance rather than the rides might result in fatalities and having to pull up stakes. It was fun to see how it played out and I made some changes for the next iteration.

A few months later, I was thinking about the upcoming Toronto Game Jam. (Jams are time restricted game creation events than can be on or offline.) TOJam has run since 2006 and I’ve done it several times before to make fun little games with friends or relative strangers who are up for it.

Often I start with just bouncing ideas I have off people. One year I was really obsessed with the idea of orphan gloves, those sad single gloves you see abandoned in the street during the winter. All alone! Useless! Doomed! But I would rarely have a game design and rely on the strength of a weird concept, the idea that it was only 3 days, and the modest social capital I have as a community organizer and creator. I relied on my collaborators to take it on faith that I had an achievable vision, because they often couldn’t see how it was a game, exactly.

So before I reached out to the people I wanted to work with, I created a paper prototype for a game idea I had. Punk House is a tiny resource management game set in 1999 where you distribute dumpster dive finds every morning to feed your roommates and inspire them to make rad music and zines.

It looked terrible, of course, because I’m a terrible artist, but when I got on a video call with Matt Hammill and Jay Bond I was able to play it with them — they enjoyed it and, just as importantly, instantly saw how it could be a digital game. When I asked if they were up to do it during TOJam they were happy to jump aboard.

I realized then that I’d overlooked that a paper prototype wasn’t just good for design refinement, but it was an incredible communication tool for other members of the team — the way a storyboard sketch can be between a director and cinematographer.

I worked on revising and getting feedback on the design document so that when we started the jam we were able to just execute on that for two days straight. It was an enjoyable time that I spent mostly sourcing fonts and sound effects, and this is where we got to.

We didn’t complete a game loop, which allows you to test the basic mechanic, but I found myself quite relaxed about it.

Which was strange for me — because I am a compulsive finisher. I never wanted to be that guy who talked about stuff abut never did anything. And it’s served me well in much of my life, but like any extreme, has some sharp edges. Normally I would shift into a fundraising mode to hire my collaborators (or other folks, if they were unavailable) to continue working on the game.

But I assessed the situation, strategically: there was no commercial potential in a quirky mobile game, which would have made industry funding unlikely. And there was very little experimental artistic value in it, which made it a long shot for any arts grants. 

It was just a fun little thing I did with my friends on a weekend! What a wild concept. Really, the best thing I took from it was how valuable paper prototyping is as a communication tool. (I imagine snapping it into a utility belt that would put Batman to shame.)

As I walk out of the Punk House and on to other adventures it occurs to me that maybe it’s my compulsive finisher tendencies that kept me away from paper prototyping in the beginning — a younger me would view that first step of a project as an implicit commitment, before I plotted out any way to progress beyond the paper.

Hopefully now that I have a willingness to doodle and leave the napkins on the table, I’ll be freer to start a thousand whimsical maybe-projects and let them land where they may.

Let the seeds fly!

Thanks to the many super awesome people who sent in #RaccoonsInTheWild pictures of themselves with their covers. While the unique hardcover edition of We Are Raccoons are all sold out, it’s available as a pay-what-you-want ebook now!

Since the novel is about international game pals (like the ones pictured above!) I’m having an ebook launch for it as a part of Toronto Games Week, a series of events I’m helping organize.

There’s over a dozen events between June 1-7th, kicking off with a Dirty Rectangles party, but here’s some highlights below!

FRIDAY JUNE 2, 9-10:30PM
Night Parkcade
Trinity Bellwoods
Pop-up arcade in a park after dark! We’ll be projecting videogames for people to play near to the tennis courts close to the Queen St. W. entrance of Trinity Bellwoods. We’ll start at sundown and go until our batteries run dry! Featuring queer games curated by Sagan Yee and Lee Wilkins. FREE.

SUNDAY JUNE 4, 9:30PM
Saturnalia talk and Blood & Black Lace screening
Revue Cinema
A talk by Pietro Righi Riva, the Italian director of the survival horror videogame Saturnalia, followed by a screening of a classic of Italian Giallo cinema that influenced its visual style, Blood & Black Lace. Supported by the Italian Cultural Institute of Toronto and the Sardegna Film Commission Foundation. Hosted by Rue Morgue and Stompbox. Click through for more information and tickets.

MONDAY JUNE 5, 6:30PM
“If You Don’t Like the Game, Change the Rules” Comic Launch
Palmerston Public Library Theatre
Join us for a lively conversation about games and work! At the launch of a comic exploring alternative labour modes like co-ops and unions, attendees will read the comic and then participate in a panel discussion with co-op studio workers and union organizers. Hosted by Marie LeBlanc Flanagan (Game Arts International Network) and featuring Pablo F. Quarta (Matajuegos Coop, Argentina), Michael Iantorno (Concordia University), D. Squinkifer (Soft Chaos cooperative, Montreal), Skylar Hinnant (Zenimax, USA), and Daniel Korn (Game Workers Unite Toronto). Supported by CMF.

My first full length prose novel in almost two decades is available now as a uniquely published hardcover.

We Are Raccoons is about six game designer friends who get a non-player character to work in each of their very different games—and accidentally create the first superintelligence in the process.

Since it’s about AI, I used the Midjourney AI to generate art from quotes in the novel so each of the 165 copies has a one-of-a-kind cover, never to be repeated.

Find out about how to get it in time for the holidays, pick your own cover, and more! I also reflect a little about AI art generation as it relates to my practice, below.

A big part of my artistic practice has been about playing with new forms. In 2003, I made a silly short video about My Trip to Liberty City, where I walked around the world of Grand Theft Auto 3 trying to stay out of trouble as a good Canadian tourist would. I did it to subvert the violent directives on one level, but on another level I just wanted to show friends unfamiliar with open-world games how beautiful it could be to watch a fake sunset from a fake rooftop.

I’ve been similarly fascinated by the AI image generation we suddenly have at our fingertips. As someone who’s never been able to draw, it’s wonderful — and slightly disorienting — to be able to conjure up images with mere words. But at the same time, many illustrators are fearing for their hard-won livelihoods.

While I empathize with this fear, photographic technology didn’t replace realist painting; databases of stock photos haven’t replaced photography. Kevin Kelly’s article in Wired places us at level 3 of the Tech Panic Cycle, and that feels about right to me.

In the past, some of my favourite collaborations have been with illustrators. I’ve written multiple graphic novels and felt honoured that these talented friends have been willing to work with me. But these collaborations have been complicated in some respect, because there’s so much more work placed on the illustrator: on one project, the artist did 80% of the work. To address this I’ve tried experiments where I’ve spent an hour and an illustrator has spent an hour to make a tiny little projects, mostly because I want to play with other artists, not manage or exploit them.

Beyond livelihood or labour issues, there’s an underlying distaste of quality of the “sludge” produced by the generators, and to me that gets into the tension around “the right way to art” that’s existed for a long while. With Sword of My Mouth, Shannon Gerard’s process was to take my script, stage and take photographs, then trace the photos to create the illustrations. At TCAF 2010, the two of us ran a panel about that with David Malki, Ryan North, Emily Horne, and Sonja Ahlers called “Tracers, Photoshoppers, Cut & Pasters: Cheaters or Revolutionaries?”:

Comic artistry has traditionally valued drawing things with nothing but a pen and raw illustrative talent. But people working from photoreferences, using digital tools and collaging techniques are producing some of the most innovative and beautiful work in the comic world. Does this diversify comic expression and represent an unshackling from the draftstable? Or is it just cheating?

Another tension is the fact that every piece of art has been influenced by other creators it doesn’t compensate, whereas the capitalist system only rewards individuals, while art and culture are intrinsically a collective effort. Tackling that bigger issue, ideally through something systemic like Universal Basic Income or collective unions and guilds rather than a patch-job like microtransactions, would be amazing. 

Especially if it could happen before the AIs come to steal my job, too.