Another Post About Failure and Contrived Urn Metaphors.

Famous quotes about failure include how failure is the first step towards success, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and he who has not failed has not tried.

They're vague abstracts so divorced from reality that I think I grind my teeth when I hear them.

From a professional failure and someone who has internalized failure, here's the thing; Failure can often be a waste of time. Failure can weaken you. He who has tried can fail repeatedly and may never succeed.

That's just life.

The truth of the matter is that you often don't have unlimited attempts. You have a finite life and you can actually die after 60+ years of throwing yourself at a brick wall in the hopes that it caves. Now, I'm not saying anything you'll do in this life will take 60+ years but the attempt isn't always worth it. Sometimes you have failed.

And I don't mean just mean failed.

I mean irreparably, remarkably, permanently failed.

Imagine you're a kid, and you're tasked with one job; make sure the construction doesn't knock over the urn with grandpa's ashes off the counter. You sit there, diligently watching, but then you get distracted, just for a moment. It's not long, but in that one instance, you took your attention away and then when you look back, the ashes are now on the floor, the urn is broken into a hundred pieces and you cannot separate your grandpa's remains from the dust on the floor.

You have irrevocably fucked up.

You then have to deal with the aftermath of it. The permanent consequences. You chose wrong, and you will never get another chance at that task. You can't bring that urn back, you can't even tell if what you have in your hands is your grandfather's remains and now you're in trouble and you have no made life objectively worse for someone else.

Failure.

There's a sort of beauty in the finality of it, isn't there?

But here's the thing.

You're going to get a new urn to watch. You're going to get a five-year maximum with three attempts per subject to finish a college degree or you get kicked out. You're going to get a relationship where if you get into the wrong argument at the wrong time, you're going to mess it up forever. You have one body and you have to take really good care of it, because if you don't, you shorten your lifespan. You're going to have financial responsibility and if you're careless and mess up, you might not be able to make rent this month and get kicked out and be homeless. If you don't make a project succeed, you might get 30 people laid off.

That's unimaginable pressure to put on a singular being. No wonder we're such anxious fucking messes, entire destinies hinge upon our actions, much less our own. And if you're anything like me, you might drop that fucking urn repeatedly and never learn anything.

That's okay though.

Sometimes the urn has to drop to make room on the shelf for something better. Sure, it sucked and you ruined everyone's day, but now there's room for something better. And then you put something better there and it turns out alright in the end. Or maybe it's something slightly worse. It's not the same, but you don't have to watch it for so long. Maybe it can survive multiple falls. So you drop it once, but you dust it off and you put it back, and look at that! Instead of having this nightmarish responsibility, the stress thereof being something that very well might kill you, you instead have a much more manageable centerpiece that while it may not be as good as the thing you wanted there, might actually be better for you to have.

If you fail at reaching for a goal, or dream, or aspiration, that's okay. But that doesn't mean you'll fail at everything.

One day, you won't drop the urn.

Maybe it will mean a little. Maybe it will mean a lot. Maybe it will make no difference. Maybe it'll make a huge difference. But the important thing is that one failure, one irrevocable failure, doesn't mean the end of everything. Don't mistake permanent and life-changing consequences with dire and unendingly awful consequences.

You have to hold onto the hope that things will get better, because they do. And you have to hld onto the hope that you will do better next time, and if you don't, then the time after that, and if you fail again, the time after that until you succeed or die. And you're statistically more likely to succceed at least once before you die, so don't lose out hope just yet.

People say not to internalise and make failure a part of your identity and I guess I have failed at even that. I can't tell you the path to success and sometimes I don't think anyone really knows. I think some people rolled the dice and the ones who got lucky are really vocal about it, and the people who drew short never tell you their cautionary tales. There aren't any famous failures. You don't want to hear about people who did it wrong, you already know. You want to know about the people who did it right. You want to learn from them and understand how they did it and replicate their success but you might just never do that.

And that's okay.

"I don't know how much value I have in this universe. But I do know that I made a few people happier than they would have been without me. As long as I know that, I'm as rich as I need to be." A line said by Robin Williams in the show Mork and Mindy

You're not as bad as you think you are. I'm not as bad as I think I am. I'm trying. I hope you continue to try. I'm a klutz and I will likely drop more urns. But I usually clean up, and drop more urns and sometimes I put something nice in the place of the thing I lost. I hope you can too. I hope I can continue to. I hope I have a shelf full of nice things, even if I have a floor full of urns.

Hope you're doing okay.

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LGBTQ Characters in Videogames

I'll give Overwatch some props, you know you're doing something right if your character is so gay that their tie-in comic gets banned in Russia. Please, please, tell me that there's going to be Prohibition-era style shebeens where illegal gay Overwatch art is traded while sexy jazz plays.

But that got me thinking, where are all the queer videogame icons? You can probably name more queer film and TV characters than Avengers, and queer music icons tend to be just all round important music icons (think David Bowie and Freddie Mercury).

But the more I think about it, the more I struggle to name queer videogame characters. And I think that's because for all the gaming industry's progress, it's still struggling to find spaces to put queer bodies in. Which is strange because those are just regular places. Like offices or schools or parks, where regular people hang out, because it turns out the LGBTQ folk like to do pretty normal things when we get off the unicorns and finish drinking soy milk by the truck. Initially we were delegated to roles as villains, and queer coded characters were often antagonists. But it's gotten better, right?

In my research I've found couple queer characters and it actually surprised me how many there were, notably Max and Chloe from Life Is Strange, a game I've actually covered on the blog before. But then again, the queer identities of the characters in that game are overshadowed in my mind by the sheer piss taking that was the fucking bottle hunt mission. I got stuck there for like two hours searching for the last one. Demote whoever the level designer was, please.

But then the other memory of that game poked up, the one of actively being a queer person. I remember when the "kiss Chloe" prompt showed up and it blew the little socks right off my little feet and I was like, oh holy shitniblits, we're going 100% turbo boosted gay right here. I'm going to click that prompt so hard that the pressure will turn it into fuel to be used by future generations eons from now.

And that was a great experience.

The other one was, funny enough, romancing every member of my crew in Saints Row IV (except Keith Davis, the prude). I get that it was supposed to parody Mass Effect but the fact that I could just engage and acknowledge the sexuality of my version of The President was always just a really compelling feature. The superpowers that let me roam around the city while listening to In Flames more so, but the romance too. The issue is that in those kinds of "choose your own adventure" games, people might never even experience the queer side of the game. I know not everyone is a fan of having the sexuality of their character pre-destined but welcome to the world of every queer person being forced to play straight characters in videogames ever.

The other issue is that we often bury the lead with our queer characters. The original NieR for PS3 and Xbox 360 comes to mind, as Yoko Taro deliberately decided not to explicitly address the intersex and gay characters he wrote (although he did address more of it in the sequel, NieR Automata). JK Rowling recently caught fire because director David Yates decided not to explicitly address Dumbledore's sexuality in the upcoming Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them sequel. And don't give me that second movie of five load of wank, it's been seven books, nine movies, one stage play, seven mainline videogames as well as a quidditch spinoff game later. You're telling me that in all that not once in all that, not even a singular time, no one thought to bring up that Dumbledore is actually into the Dumbledick? You're better than that, Jo.

So we live in a world where representation could be used as justification for banning in foreign markets, China and Russia specifically, but on the other hand, queer media is so hard to come by and the enormous amount of good you do by being part of the history of representation in media can't be overstated. And in videogames specifically, we don't actually have a lot of queer experiences, at least, not a lot of mainstream ones. The political climate is so precarious that it's hard to know if it'll ever happen, but hopefully some devs step up to bat for the other team.

But here's to hoping for more Tracers, Gay Tonys, Ellie, Max-es, Kanji Tatsumis, and Poisons. Here's to hoping for more Dream Daddies and Strange Flesh-es. We can do better. So let's not bury the lead anymore. Let's not keep our characters closeted for the sake of subtlety.

And let's have more LGBTQ characters in games.

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Ending My Loyalty To Steam

Over the years I've undergone numerous phases in where I buy my games. As with everyone who grew up in the early 2000s, there was just something scary about the idea of buying things online, so brick and mortar stores were the way to go. Add to the fact that download speeds weren't as fast and hard drive space was limited, it was an extra pain in the ass to switch to digital only gaming. Not to mention that consoles like the PS2 didn't have a digital storefront, and as ahead of its time as Steam was, it used to be a goddamn nightmare to work with, sometimes requiring a full restart just so you could open it up.

As I gradually moved from console to PC and finally got the ability to use my debit card for purchasing games online, I made the reluctant move to steam. A couple friends in Uni actually got me into it, because there were just really great multiplayer experiences like Don't Starve (at least multiplayer with people I actually knew) that I wasn't going to get on console. I'm a sucker for a good LAN play, four people screaming at each other in a room all wired up to a router while the most powerful computer hosts is an experience I hope everyone in the world gets to have. And after my first Steam sale, oh boy. I didn't think I could ever go back.

Time goes by, and between humble, freebie giveaways, Steam sales, Bundlestars/Fanatical and G2A, and here I am sitting with a gigantic library and I now know the true meaning of hundreds of games but nothing to play. As crazy as it is, there comes a point where you have to heartbreakingly choose between which games you keep installed and which you leave in the cloud, and the first time a game went from light grey to dark grey was like a coming of age. A right of passage that meant I was now playing with the big boys, even if our tastes were all different.

But something that hadn't occurred to me was the cycle I had now fallen back into. See, while I was now entirely aboard the Steam train and my money was somehow moving from my wallet into Valve's, I still wasn't aboard other services. GOG, UPlay, Origin, Itch.io, etc. all mean installing another client which meant another thing to boot at startup and another program to keep running in the background. All for the 3 or 4 games I couldn't get on Steam. Plus, PSN remains inexcusably expensive without sales half as frequently as Steam. Digital Games should cost less since bandwidth is cheaper than mass producing disks, plus retro games are somehow more expensive than more ambitious indie titles. Symphony Of The Night is turning 21 this year and it sells for R120 or $10 on the PSN. That's the same price as The Last Of Us.

So I ended up putting all my chips into Steam. Sure, I did begrudgingly buy the occasional PSN title or nab a GOG/Uplay freebie, but it's not like they had much staying power. But in hindsight, that was the wrong move. Because you're not going to get the most bang for your buck by giving Valve the monopoly. Noticing the GOG sale and how many titles I want there makes me realize that I've been missing out. I don't have the best rig but my laptop often surprises me with the number of titles it can play. Which means the most mileage I'm going to get is by having the widest selection of games available to me. Which, begrudgingly, means installing those two or three extra game clients, but I'll caveat that with not setting them to open on boot and not having them constantly in the background. And multiplayer games I'll leave to Steam for the time being because there isn't enough widespread adoption, at least in my friend circle, to justify buying them elsewhere, although ones like Don't Starve that don't rely on a friend list from Steam are fair game.

And with that I end my loyalty to Steam. I'm not saying that I won't be buying from Steam anymore but I am saying that I will no longer be buying for and from Steam exclusively. Because while I may be slow, I also realize that this is one of the only ways to stay ahead as a consumer. While any money I might save will probably go right back into games, at least that means I have more games for less money which means more free time I can fill up with new experiences.

And I guess I urge you to do the same. If pre-order culture and brand loyalty are poor consumer practices, then storefront loyalty is a different flavour of the same problem. They're making money off your loyalty, money you don't need to spend. Competition also means that each service has to improve itself in order for you to maintain your patronage. And as much as I like having all my games in one central hub, I also like having games. And unlike a streaming service subscription, installing and making accounts with these are free. Plus you eventually wreck your own recommendations so it's always nice to have a clean slate to see what it is that one algorithm is burying under the titles it thinks you're interested in.

If nothing else, give GOG and Itch.io a try. GOG's games are DRM free and Itch.io has plenty of indie titles you might never see hit the Steam storefront because they're either too niche or in a market too saturated.

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