Serious. Important. Good.

Overheard -

“I’m so tired. I was up until 3am binging Sandman.”
“Yeah? It’s good?”
“Oh no. It’s not good.”

My brain will not let this interaction go.
So why did you watch it?! I scream in my head.
I don’t know this person, maybe they were just too tired to articulate why they enjoyed it. Maybe they didn’t want to go have to explain themselves when the general consensus is a resounding <shrug>.

And the show IS good. The screaming in my head is relentless.

Sandman has an absolutely tonne of interesting ideas, so many beautiful character interactions, so much sweetness. In fact I found myself getting suspicious of many pleasant minor characters. I was convinced they would be revealed as monsters.
Most of the time they weren’t.
Oh… I’ve been primed by grim TV to greet sweetness with paranoia. People are cynical. Humans are cruel.

Serious games. Important cinema. Good television.
They take themselves seriously. They are grim because the world is bleak. People are cynical because humans are cruel. Sandman fights with these notions and much of the time, rejects them. But this is the dominant attitude of the Prestige TV and often, it’s just excruciating to watch.

So much of the conversation about “good television” is how difficult the latest episode was to watch - “I almost turned it off”, “it was brutal”, and “I leave the room for those scenes”.

Robert Yang wrote an excellent piece in 2018 about Queering Game Feel

“…softness and deformation are still very difficult to do in every game engine. Why is that? I argue that it's difficult because we let it be difficult, and in video games we haven't invested ourselves in softness. If there was more demand for more game dev research in softness, I'm sure we'd have a lot more tools and methods to work with! It's only hard because we privilege hardness and rigidbodies…”

In an age when serious film, tv, and games are meant to be grim and bleak, I have my work cut out for me - the silly, the soft, the fabulous, the ridiculous.

My queering of story, of games, is joy.
Joy when speaking with importance, joy while being good, joy when being “serious” (or maybe not being serious at all).
It does not belittle the work, it doesn’t trivialise the conversation, but it might stop it being so excruciating. And it might display a little more range of the human experience.

I don’t want to perpetuate the lie that every sweetheart you meet will be revealed a manipulative monster, just give them time. I want to perpetuate the notion of living life joyfully, softly, vulnerably.

I found this quite special -

The Gradual Extinction of Softness

“Softness is not immutable, but it does not disappear all at once; it slips away slowly. You might not even notice its disappearance at first…

…I learned in Saigon that there is no such thing as Utopia. But what’s wrong with creating a place of safety, where softness will not prove fatal?”

We’ll be announcing our next game very soon, and with it a video series that have our flappy little wrists even more up in your grills. To quote Yoshi-P - please look forward to it.