On the flight home from GDC2013...

This is what I was thinking:

[I went to this one talk in which Tom Bissell said: "videogames are not a storyteller's medium..."]

Videogames aren't a storyteller's medium?!...I fucking disagree! It's up to us to redefine the relationship and perception if or relationship to our audience...even in a book the connection is my imagination to yours, mediated by an asynchronous technology I which we believe we have authorial control...but the that's an imperialist and archaic idea and asumes the audience is a bunch of idiots who aren't playing an interpretive and co-creative role!

[I can't even count the number of times I heard/read/saw the term "gamification" bandied about like it's the new key to everything...]
Fuck gamification. It's playification!
We already have rules. We have incentives and rewards. We have narratives - our own and others'. What we need is the spirit of play to invade what we do, what we define as "work" and remove the fear of failure, experimentation, and refinement. Lets not hide our weaknesses and keep them tucked away in the dark hoping no one notices...lets bring our curiosity and questioning and most importantly mistakes out into the light to be morphed into strengths. Augmented by the contributions of others, we all get better together

[Naomi Clark is a fucking badass, and she ranted on a topic very close to my heart: activism in storytelling/game design/media in general]
Following on what Naomi expressed at GDC, we as makers of media in the public eye must consider the symbols we put out because they say something whether we like it or not. So we have to use those symbols consciously. It's not just what big boobs say about women's value, or men's muscles and big guns. It's fear of aliens over and over and over - the brown folks of the new millennium - as if that xenophobia isn't influencing immigration policy worldwide. It's technology as the deus, deciding our fate as if we didn't make that shit with its killer instinct in the first place! It's "dystopia", as if utopia isn't an even worse fantasy. It's "evil", as if anyone is truly good.