the itch.io adult content ban

[some posts written fitfully after the announcement that itch.io would be de-indexing and in some cases removing 18+ games, at request of credit-card companies and right-wing lobbyists Collective Shout]

congratulations to all the virtual women no longer being trafficked through the itchio servers. our placement agency has found them new work at the Meta platform content moderation farms, where their job is sorting through 20,000 videos of apes being disemboweled in search of moments that are “react worthy” for 2c/hr

i like the formulation Women And Girls that all these ngos use. it makes me think of some schrodingerian wave/particle entity which is simultaneously a small child and an adult, and so permanently cancels any distinctions we might situationally apply between “small child” and “adult”. do Women And Girls get to go to a bar, or participate in anything but the most supervised-playdate versions of public life, competition, art? i guess what’s left is “homeschooling”.

thoughts on itchio and infrastructure:

i think itchio is a twitter era site, from back when it was a positive to have a stripped down page with minimal “community features” (newsground badges and what have you) that you could just link to from a socmed profile. guest checkout, fast payment, no fuss no muss. the expectation has been that finding and talking about a game happens somewhere else, and this maybe needs to be reconsidered now that every social site is doing its best to stop people ever leaving a curated feed.

itch was also built around access to payment processors. i remember this being relatively unusual by the standards of freeware-focused game hosting sites at the time. and i think many people, myself included, are guilty of the indiscriminately peppy charge :clap: for :clap: your :clap: work rhetoric that was in vogue at that time. the advantage of charging for your work is you get money (sometimes, extremely unpredictably); a disadvantage is that your work ends up built around the extremely narrow sufferances of a credit card company; and i think another disadvantage is that many of the people you have most in common with will never play your stuff, because everyone’s broke. the people who most need to charge money for their games are also people who don’t have a lot of money to spend on other people’s games. i do think it’s kind of led to people being alienated from their own peers a bit - to a landscape where students, broke people, people excluded from the official economy end up all trying to hock games to the same nonexistent middle class consumer, while having their own time and shared terrain eaten up by f2p, fortnite, roblox, gacha and anything else without that upfront cost.

and i know, i know, “how many peers can i exchange for a cup of coffee”. the answer is none; it’s not an economic relationship. it MIGHT, fitfully, unreliably, overlap with the economic: mutual aid, knowing someone with a spare room or a gig. this stuff is halfassed and indirect, but the indirectness also means it’s a little less exposed to a storefront’s ability to wipe your entire body of work with a single policy change. it also seems to me that the precondition to collectively working out something less fitful is trying to build these networks with each other, rather than everyone being in the one relationship of tenant-to-storefront.

the wonderful power of friendship is not a substitute money, and i don’t actually want to discourage anyone from charging for their work. but i do feel like it’s increasingly important to be specific in the ways we engage with the official economy, and to wind back the kind of indiscriminate blurring of personal, artistic, financial that was the twitter-era mode, the idea that you should expose as much of your life as possible to payment mechanisms to maximise the chance that you might get the golden ticket. every part of your work that touches a storefront is one that storefront can fuck up. i think it’s good to start thinking about spaces-without-markets that could interface with spaces-with-markets in limited and deniable ways, so that we at least retain SOME infrastructure when the latter inevitably go under; i think it’s good to distinguish work-for-peers from work-for-a-consumer-audience and give both their place. a peer can potentially be a comrade, a storefront will only ever be a fitfully inattentive enemy.