A Conversation with Nathalie Lawhead

Nathalie Lawhead is a non-binary net-artist, software creator, and game designer. They are known for experimental art that challenges the way we live and work in our digital era. Their art exists in the controversial intersection between art and games.

Lawhead joined us on Zoom to talk about their work, interactive fiction, internet subcultures, social media and lots more.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Grace: One of the big reasons we wanted to talk to you is that Phoenix is working on a big thing about IF games that use desktop interfaces. You're kind of in a weird and interesting intersection with this space. I wouldn't describe EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OKAY as interactive fiction. Lots of it is non-fiction. There's all these visual components. But there's also a premium on text and parts of it are fiction. What do you see as your relationship to IF as a genre? Do you see your work as related?

Nathalie: Definitely. I love stuff that really embraces text and writing. A really long time ago I made Blue Suburbia, that was the late 90s. That was poetry, which kind of came into the label of game. I think you get really interesting reactions from people when you present writing. With heavy writing that is packaged up to look really pretty or to look game-ish the reaction was "oh my god, I have to read, that's stupid." The reading was a hang up. It still is. I think it is really cool that now we have these works that are more popular, like IF or visual novels, because I think words are underestimated in games. People like visuals and eye-candy. Reading feels like work to people. I think it is cool that you have this space presenting writing in intriguing ways that draw people in and that almost make people forget that they are reading. I think that is really wonderful. I wonder, as things get so visually complex in media, especially interactive media, are we gonna lose text altogether? Even when you are interacting with the internet it's video or images most of the time. It's cool to have this entire space that's exploring how text is meaningful and how it can have more meaning given to it through interaction. I think it's a very beautiful thing.

Phoenix: I agree.

Grace: It's really interesting that [people] were annoyed with the text component of Blue Suburbia. Is that something that is threaded through your work? Did people say that about other games you've worked on?

Nathalie: Yeah! I find that so fascinating. I do understand it; reading is work. You want to sit back and just be given things to look at. Like a movie. You just sit back and you watch it. But reading means that I have to actually intellectually engage with this. You have to think about and process it. It is not just given to you through visual stimuli and metaphor. You have to mentally think about what is being said. It engages with you on this different level. Some of my recent ones, like A Butterfly (which is a poem). People look at that and think "That's text-heavy." There's this little gap [you're] trying to bridge where people don't notice they are reading. You are still having them engage with writing in a way that is personal to them.

Grace: Part of it is that text is cheap. You can conjure a lot with a little and that's part of why it lasts. The simplicity of the tools, like Twine, is a huge boon, but it can have this alienating effect for people looking for AAA aesthetics.

Phoenix: You mentioned the simplicity of text and the fact that there are tools that made it a lot more accessible to make text adventures. But, in the 2010s, there was a merging with graphics, not heavy with graphics but just enough to give it a specific aesthetic to go along with the text, often that recalls a specific era of technology. The issue looks a lot at 2010s interactive fiction. When I was looking at your work and work throughout that era, I saw an emphasis on text... how do I put this. When I look at one of your works like Love Story, which is a romance between two file formats. Is using text in terms of a desktop format specific to 2010s IF? Or has that kind of interface always been there?

Nathalie: I feel like it has kind of always existed, but it became popular then. I think people spend a lot of time on computers, so now we have a tech literacy or a tech nostalgia. People grew up on this and it's part of our collective imagination. Way back when I did fake OSs, the reaction was kind of funny like, "Why are you simulating Windows XP? We are on Windows XP."

Phoenix and Grace both laugh

Nathalie: They did not get it, because it was too now. Even the stuff that that threw back to computers in the 80s was too now. "Why are you making me go through this," you know? But there's this aspect now when as you grow up, you start to miss it and it becomes part of this collective fantasy. In the 2010s, it really took hold as a collective fantasy. I don't think that's going away. This kind of aesthetic or UIs is always going to be a part of our storytelling. But I think people are going to try and take it further and make it kind of a sci-fi concept, exploring what computer UIs might mean in the future. Things like Mini Mini Golf Golf are fascinating with how they are entirely in computers and UIs. There's lots of text but it is futuristic. I feel like that is reflective of where the interest in this type of aesthetic is going. It's a nod to the past, but also a fantasy of the future.

Phoenix: That was sort of an attendant question I had. With the different games I've been looking at so far, including your work, that there is a line between... how much nostalgia for older tech is too much? Or how much friction of the older OS you are trying to emulate should you keep in?

Nathalie: Sometimes when people do nods to older tech, it is just nostalgia. There's not much more to it. I think the key is to realize that it is a part of a collective fantasy; it's not about nostalgia. I hate the word nostalgia, because to me this is more. It's our collective fantasy. It's a type of reality. When you are making things with old UIs, they have their own language. There's a type of expression in when a computer glitches. You have this emotional language you can bring into UIs. Make it a little weird. Make it break. Make it a little frustrating intentionally to create a mood. Especially with interfaces in the 80s where the people playing it might not have been alive then, it becomes a fantasy of a past. It's so alien, it's almost like looking into the future. I think that's the appeal. It's just so strange and different. It is such a strange and different way of existing in a digital space that you have this whole world of language that you can explore for giving people stories. It's almost like you're in this alien device. You have to figure out how it works and learn its language and emotions almost like a person. To me, that's what these older interfaces are.

Grace: I think that's something that relates back to the early history of interactive fiction. The parser that you use to interact with the game is essentially command line. It's the same kind of thing that you use to interact to with the computer. That connection has become fuzzier and fuzzier over time. So there's maybe an attempt to bring it back to that? You're exploring the narrative in the same way you are exploring your computer. Disco Elysium also does this because the text scroll is like a Twitter feed. It is incorporating modern UI, but not in an explicit way. It's not a game about social media, but it has the interface that pulled from that. It's also trying to make people tolerant of it being text. It's in a format that's familiar.

Nathalie: That's a really cool example because if you do nods at social media outlets like Twitter or BlueSky... It's incredibly opinion-heavy to the point where it is too much or annoying. When you chose something that opinion-heavy, it's almost sarcastic. It's kind of funny, you have this whole history of text-heavy games, the old ones like Zork. I really miss the possibility space around that. It's not so much the work itself, it's what it could have become. What more could we do with this? How do we push text or the delivery of it? There's this push and pull of being creative with text and also holding it back. When flash sites were a big thing, everyone was making really elaborate interactive experiences that were heavy on atmosphere. But they were also doing really interesting things with text and exploring what a UI means. You had this push-back against it, like that guy who started use-it.com [Lawhead is thinking of usability consultant Jakob Nielsen], "flash is evil because it is hard to read." I remember his big deal was that a website should only have text wrap from one side of the screen to the other, no decorations, nothing. A really puritan way of delivering that. It's so interesting to look back on those conversations. You see it today too in the way text is presented in games. A lot of indies go very... text is just text. It kinda just fades in and out. Maybe it has some effects, but not too much. I think when you have people who understand that the way you portray text is a whole language of its own. It can be a nod to something. The way you show it can be a story in itself. I think text is such a misunderstood thing. To most people, it's just the utilitarian thing. It serves a function. It's not the expression itself. I think you have this whole history of exploring showing it in interesting way, but that has gone away. It still happens today, but not as obnoxiously. You have concerns trying to understand what usability is, how that fits in, and how you keep it that from holding the creativity of the text back.

Grace: That ties into a lot of things. I feel like the digital age is a sans-serif age. The ornamentation of handwriting is gone. I remember being in school thinking, "why am I learning cursive? This is so stupid." Now, I wish I knew how to write in cursive! I can do it but it's ugly. I think handwriting is meaningful. I'm loathe to mention a Microsoft-published game, but that was something that really struck me about Pentiment was how much it cared about the fonts. You're exactly right there is this push and pull. I'm thinking about how every Nintendo game uses the same font and the same UI. I find that really depressing. But there is also this world in zines and other places exploring the abrasiveness of the old websites that is in contrast to the mainstream industry.

Phoenix: I happened to watch your art talk at MacKenzie art gallery. You mentioned that you feel that the desktop is one of the last spaces that has not been overly gentrified by corporations. I was wondering if that plays into your work? Do you want to express that our desktops are one of the last places we can keep that kind of flash mentality of like having a individual way of expressing stuff?

Nathalie: Definitely. You have these small relics of what computers and the internet used to be. Creators, especially those who have more of a knowledge of the technical history, including that passes the knowledge onto the next generation. I think they grew up in walled gardens and the cloud and have no concept that the computer belongs to me. I can dissect it, pull things out, and replace stuff. I know what a hard drive is; I own my data. Wow, what a revolutionary concept: I own my information. There's no concept of that [now]. It has been slowly eroded. I think it is a responsibility to pass on the idea that computers belong to everyone. There is an internet where you can create whatever you want, post whatever you want, make websites as wild and as imaginative as you want. It's not just social media. I remember I heard someone saying, "I was browsing the internet" and I was thinking, "oh you put in a URL and you found cool things. You were following a bread crumb trail of URLs." No, they were scrolling. That's the way of browsing the internet now. You have this responsibility to pass on this knowledge. This stuff still exists and you have a right to use it. If you use it, you maintain that it still exists. You maintain that understanding and evolve it forward. I think it is really cool to see kids find my work and then they get into other stuff and then they get into programming and making websites and you're like: YES.

Grace and Phoenix laugh.

Nathalie: No matter how hard you try to gentrify the internet or to control computers, there's this fundamental layer, the core of it, that's not control. It's too late to take that away. You might think that social media is the internet and you're stuck in this kind of hamster wheel of churning out content and burning out. But if you understand that you can make your own website and you can post it yourself or find a host. It opens up this whole other way of existing on a computer that you might not have thought was possible. There's something really liberating about seeing people understand that and watching them do it themselves. It's something that doesn't die.

Phoenix: Yeah, definitely. Even when I wasn't doing any game design, being able to set up a blog easily was a big game changer for me. I used to think that you had to be an already-known writer to put up a blog. I browsed a lot growing up. I was a nineties kid too. A lot of it was just exploring and seeing what was out there. With stuff like Blogspot and Wordpress, I started to know that anyone was putting up a blog. It was a big deal for me to go, "I have thoughts about games. I'm not really sure where they are going or anything, but I'm going to make a blog and just start typing.

Grace: That was how I started too.

Phoenix: That's awesome. It leads somewhere!

Grace: I'm still on the same Wordpress site I made eleven years ago. I think these are interconnected worlds, the independent internet and independent games. Part of the appeal of tools like Twine is that you can run them in a browser. It's lightweight. That's something you've done with your own work as well.

Nathalie: It's kinda funny to hear you both say that you both had that start that lead to you being here now doing these wonderful things. There's a misconception, especially with younger people, that doing this yourself is way too hard. You need to be a genius. You need to know all this really difficult things. Tech terminology is so fancy. The words are complicated, but what they mean is actually stupidly simple. The tech industry has this talent of self-inflating to godlikeness. But it's just the Wizard of Oz, some idiot behind a curtain. You can actually show people. You can be stupid as a Elon Musk; you don't need to be smart to do this. It opens up this door. The greatest lie put out about tech is that it is way too complicated to understand and that you need a team and scientists to do something. It's not. The simpler the tech is the more freedom it gives you.

Grace: That reminded me of this Orson Welles thing on a talk show, where he's like you could learn how to make a movie in a day. It's because that directors are self-important that they make it seem hard to do.

Nathalie laughs

Grace: There's something to that. The thing of if you are writing, you are a writer. There's not a level of legitimacy you have to obtain to be something.

Phoenix: I remember going to a workshop in grad school. The game designers that were running it were also in academia. They were irreverent and they wanted to break down barriers of game theory and how everyday play. One of the things that stuck with me was how game designers make features because of something they notice playtesters doing. Autosaves are because of players. A game designer didn't sit down and go, "do you know what would be cool?" They looked at the fact that people were constantly manually saving and then realized they could save them that trouble. It all feeds into each other. People think that the game designer came up with all things and we just consume it.

Grace: I'm kind of two minds about this. There is such an auteur side to the way games are covered. But it's limited to certain figures and studios. Every Ubisoft studio is faceless. There are a couple guys you have broken out of that I think, but it is seen as a horde of people out there. That's also the value of making something idiosyncratic and personal is that... video games are seen as this highly technical field that involves a lot of people, and in some ways they can be, but they can also be a love letter or something every intimate. They can be easy to access.

Nathalie: When you do this stuff you are part of this creative conversation and history. It doesn't start and stop with you and your great ideas. It's this conversation of someone does something, someone responds to it, it becomes incorporated into how we do stuff, players do this. Like the save thing you mentioned. When you do games, it's only the game bubble. But when you step outside, you see this as applied to all of tech. Games are an extension of tech. Text on computers is part of a history of how we handle text and how we created that in a digital space. There was this talk at a NetArt event here in Austria. Something artistic and poetic about the internet. The person showing talked about where the pointy finger came from that you see [in computer UX design]. It came from old medieval scripture where monks wanted to indicate which way to turn the page. It stayed and it kept being taken out-of-context. It's just something we have now. It's this whole history of solving problems and forgetting why we solved that problem because now it's normal, it's just how we do it. Then we rediscover it and then reinventing how we could do it. It's this whole creative conversation. We make a mistake when we think it is just this bubble we're in now and now is the peak of everything. It's a long history, you know?

Phoenix: That's why I always tend to grit my teeth whenever there are conversations... I shouldn't say conversation because it's just general speeches that you hear from people like Geoff Keighley at the game awards or something like that. They'll say something like, "it's the pinnacle of the bleeding edge and blah blah blah." And ok. On one hand, yes, it's good to look at how far we've come. But people are thinking about what's the "best" thing right now. Instead of thinking, where did this one feature come from? I just wish sometimes that industry conversations wouldn't always focus on comparing and contrasting the past and the present, rather than viewing things as a chain with a lot of interconnections. Like you said about Zork, Nathalie, there's a possibility space. It could have gone in a lot of different directions and it still could, as long as we don't have this want to optimize gaming in a specific way for a specific user. Let's allow ourselves to really think about all the interconnections, instead of it just being about the game of the year this year.

Nathalie: It's so funny. There's these major problems in games that hold it back from developing a more nuanced history. The turnover rate is so high. You have these people who are established experts who have been here forever being replaced with someone who's saying, "well, games are art right?"

Phoenix and Grace laugh

Nathalie: We've had that talk already, but they didn't! They didn't have the talk. These revolving doors are a problem. It fits into the bigger problem in tech where everything has to be a hype cycle, everything has to be the next thing you sell to investors. You inflate this bubble and then it pops. This technology that you forced on everyone is useless and fades away. Nothing stays long enough to establish as something you perfect and you have masters of it, like master of craft in blacksmithing. You can't have that in tech, and by extension in games, because it's all so tied into this darker aspect of capitalizing where you have to move, move, move. Go, go, go! We are stuck in this one frame of time where you don't have a history. I think that's an interesting problem specific to tech. It always has to be the best ever and like nothing else before. We're gonna be stuck for a while.

Grace: I have a couple questions in relationship to this. Your work is in the MOMA. You have a well-documented relationship to visual art. I'm curious about how you see your work in conversation with literature? Are there any writers that you feel drawn to or that you feel you pull from in your work?

Nathalie: That's an interesting question. Writers is tough. I'd have to sit down and actually think about that one. I do try to look at and draw inspiration from the bigger contexts of art. Games are so much in a echo chamber... I don't really know where I'm going with this. It's a good question. I wish I could name a bunch of cool writers.

Grace: It's totally alright.

Phoenix: That's okay!

Grace: I do think that is hard to find games that are keyed into a broader space. Games like Disco Elysium are an exception, that's clued into the detective novel, for example. But I've been sort of a defender of video games being interested in cinema. There's kind of a game studies line or a new games journalism line that's like, games aren't really like movies. They're like theater or architecture. That's true and those are worthy things to explore games with. But I do kind of think that games, especially PlayStation-era games, are really meaningfully cinematic and pulling from film in interesting and strange ways. IF obviously has this very direct relationship with literature, not just in the sense of reading but in the way that the people making IF early on are principally writers interested in computers. Games are kind of a gesamtkunstwerk. They are this very broad and inclusive thing. I think it is worth pulling from everything and trying to dig into every nook and cranny. Because you can do that.

Nathalie: It's interesting that you compare them to movies. I feel like a lot of this is really trend or era-specific. In the PlayStation-era, it is really safe to say that they are a form of movies. In Hideo Kojima's work, you look at it and then you watch Escape from New York and you're like, "oh my god. That's just a copy of the movie."

Grace and Phoenix laugh

Nathalie: It's so obviously inspired by nineties action movies. You start moving away from consoles; you get to mobile, it becomes something else and is inspired by other things. I think now the focus is talking about it like theater, because so much of the focus is on it being a live thing. So this cinematic aspect changes. The way we talk about games is heavily influenced by how we make them. And how we make them is based on what's selling. It's constantly evolving with what we are chasing.

Grace: Yeah, that's the thing in Roblox and Fortnite with concerts. They are also trying to be a form of social media. That creates weird synergies there... I've never thought about Fortnite as theater, but that makes sense.

Everyone laughs

Phoenix: Even the events!

Grace: Yeah totally. Streaming plays into this too obviously. That has a theatrical or performative element.

Phoenix: I can't remember if it was the Ariana Grande event or the Lil Nas X one, but I remember seeing something from one of them. It's not just about whoever the "performer" is. You kind of also go through a playscape that is themed to the performance. You are... not a back-up dancer, but you are floating around him as he performs.

Grace: This ties into the thing you were saying Nathalie about the internet and the feeling of being siloed. Fortnite is like going to a concert. People dress up. They put their best skins on or buy specific skins to go to it, but it's all in the ecosystem. Here in Chicago, Lolopaloza was a couple months ago and so I was seeing on public transit people dressed up. Maybe some are wearing big brands or trying to show off in that way. But also people are thrifting. There's an alternate scene in relationship to that. In the modern social video game space that alternate scene doesn't exist. It's the differences between Team Fortress 2 and Overwatch. You don't have community servers in Overwatch. It's all siloed into a specific kind of user experience. There's a subculture but it's channeled through a network.

Phoenix: That's especially true for Overwatch. There are really no outside networks for it.

Nathalie: I feel like it was easier to find subcultures or counter-cultures in older massive online things. Second Life had really good weirdos.

Phoenix: Yeah, true.

Nathalie: I think the problem with modern ones is that they are run by really big corporations. They're controlling their brand, meaning you can't give too much freedom to players because they'll fuck it up and be weird. So, you're driving a public image and way of being inside of this thing. It is control. The less we have run by people where anyone can participate and it's open source, the more it is going to be very polished and controlled experiences.

Phoenix: Do you think that's the part of the blowback to interactive fiction and it being text-heavy? Do people feel that it is pushing against AA and AAA games? Do people have a knee-jerk reaction to trying to "make it retro" or it being "only text"?

Nathalie: It's funny. The fact that something exists that everyone else can participate in and create in automatically makes it a threat to the highly polished mainstream thing that like a thousand people worked on together. Some of my favorite games are ones that a kid made with scribbled, MS paint. But it's so beautiful for how weird and stupid it is. It's just a good experience because it is someone's thing! In contrast to this polished, intentional thing that looks like the last intentional polished thing. The fact that anyone can come and make games automatically creates a counter-culture to the mainstream. The mainstream thing is always going to be a little threatened and look down on the things kids can make. I remember when I was working in games, there was this reaction of "why are they spending time with this when we could rope them in and have them creating in our thing or our IP." To them it's a waste, because you could be channeling that labor to create content and value for you. With the system we have, that's always going to be a form of tension. How dare you do this for free and make no money on it, when you could be doing it here and make money for me?

Grace: How do you feel that ties into the payment processor issues and itch delistings? Now, on itch, you can put most NSFW stuff on if it is free, which sidesteps the payment processors. But part of the crisis of it is that people want to make money or be able to sustain their work. I think we find ourselves in a moment where the relationship of finances to the space is going to be more in question.

Nathalie: This is a lynchpin moment or something that's really defining. It's a cold splash of water in a lot of people's faces, because we had this whole understanding of a space where anyone can come in and make money. There's a sense of freedom. Overnight that sense of freedom is taken away. It's a terrible situation to be in as a storefront or a creator, because suddenly you are being crushed. I think that American fascism has a lot to play in this too. The tech industry is so responsible for fascism in America. I'm so pissed off at them and it doesn't get talked about enough. They are the reason this is happening! They fed this and they channeled this. They took advantage of it. I'm banking on hosting your own stuff being under threat. Anything that represents freedom or creation is going to be under threat. The fascists are moving in and a lot of the fascists are tech people. It's a huge shock for a lot of people. I think there is a lot of misdirected energy turned towards each other.

When Trump was elected, I backed up all my work from itch. You knew this was going to happen because they were talking about it. Places like Google have been discussing this stuff for a long time. The moves are being made. We are at this moment where it is incredibly important to make our own stuff and keep pushing our own stuff. We have to understand that this is happening because of this bigger problem. If we don't direct our creative energy and our own anger in the right way, they are going to win. We're going to have less freedom digitally. I'm being a bit rambly, but I think this is a key moment to observe. It's a really important time to keep making your stuff and keep putting it out there. Just a bit of a ramble more.

The AI bubble ties into this too. It's going to replace writers, it's going to replace artists, humans aren't necessary anymore. A lot of this hype is fueled by AI companies trying to get investors. And a lot of AI fear is also fueled by companies trying to get investors, because if you think this is the singularity that is going to crush humanity, the investors are going to give them money, because they are the responsible one who will use AI in the right way. You have this whole horrible thing put on people. You don't know what video online is real or not anymore. It's happening so fast that you can't even tell. But the reaction is hard to seize. When artist go, "I quit making art because it is just going to be used to train AI." That's a sad thing. If all human artists quit than the art dies. We have no more art. We have no more writing. The response to this really should be to create more art and to create art that's in response and rejecting these systems. You have websites where you hide a bomb for AI crawlers. If we understood how this stuff works, we could together keep creating art that pushes back on this systems and entities that benefit from us turning on each other. It sounds cheesy. But all of the responses to things that are happening, like quitting art altogether, quitting games altogether, are really not the solution. That's how that whole system wins.

Phoenix: You mentioned that they are banking on us turning on each other. That's something that I keep ruminating on. Yes, there might be legitimate things that are getting people into feuds online over ethics or whatever it is. But the plot is lost so quickly. Social media is made to be very confrontational. People get more clicks if they are more sensational. I find it grating to see how easily feuds get out of control. People can't say, "let's take a step back for a moment and have a civil discussion," not to sound like a school teacher. It's so calculated to make people focused on fighting with each other that any nuance is lost. That's what bugs me the most. There's so much focus on big feuds that are actually micro-interactions, when we could be looking at the bigger picture. People want to be able to say that they destroyed the other side and that they can't say anything ever again. I see it happen so often with the discourse about anything. "Who is going to win this debate?" That's not really the point. Or it shouldn't be.

Nathalie: It's not to far off to say that social media is a tool for fascists. The way it is designed and the way it grew into this very polished, addictive thing is meant to keep you engaged and obsessed with it. There's plenty of documentaries and writing about it. That's hardly news. In the Obama-era, one of the big mistakes was to put tech companies on a pedestal and act like they are the neo-liberal bastion of open-mindedness. They're not racist. They're not sexist, well maybe a little, but they are the good guys. It was impossible to criticize Google, because if I criticized Google I'm being regressive and anti-tech. Trying to say to people that Google was fascist and sexist... "Where's the proof?" "Look at their hiring practices." "That's just growth pains!" We put them on a pedestal where they escaped a lot of criticism for how they built their systems and how they built how AI is trained now, the racism and sexism that is intrinsically built into AI models and datasets. It's baked into this systems that we use everyday, without understanding how much they manipulate us and manipulate us against each other. There's a lot of writing on that; it's hardly a conspiracy theory. When you use things like Bluesky...We made a mistake at the beginning of Bluesky, acting like they are the startup sweetheart, new kid-on-the-block that got rid of Jack Dorsey. It's the same thing! They have a algorithm. They have their goals. They want to sell. They are the same thing. It's like we are still on Twitter, they was we fight each other and it's because of how these things are designed. I can't even be mad at people because it is incredibly addicting to put out a quick, jabby thought and see the numbers and the hearts and the validation. You lose track that the hearts are not real validation. It's a whole machine that gets you stuck there. We are not mentally prepared for how fast all this hit us. We don't have ways to deal with it. All this came out of nowhere wrapped with fascism and the AI bubble. We're still mentally catching up to how messy and complicated this is and how much you can't trust these companies.

Grace: Something that I think about a lot is that we are all swimming in this cultural soup or ocean of misinformation. None of us are really immune to it. I think social media can encourage this posturing of "I understand, I'm engaging with it critically, I know how it works."

Phoenix and Nathalie laugh

Grace: I do this too. But it can be a real danger and it is something that people can use against each other. We need an awareness of... we are all in the system and we're all shaped by it. That doesn't make us bad, but it make us have to be aware and give each other grace when we slip up.

Nathalie: Yeah, absolutely.

Grace: Much easier said than done.

Phoenix: As a final thing about social media, I was thinking about Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP and its Twitter function. I think at the end of every chapter you could tweet out a line from the game.

Grace: It was something like that.

Phoenix: But they decided to disable it. They made a very public statement about how they thought Twitter was too toxic. This was well before Twitter had really gone downhill. In regard to what Nathalie was saying, people will [paint you as regressive for criticizing tech]. I'm sure there must have been people who said that to that developer at the time. In hindsight, it didn't really harm the game to remove it. It continued to be it's own unique thing without the Twitter function. In terms of tech being put on a pedestal, it was interesting to see that there were developers who [rejected it].

Grace: I was just thinking about the studio that made Tenderfoot Tactics who took it off Xbox. I think it is tricky because people are not following suit on that. I do think it is meaningful to say we will not longer participate, even if it is just one person. This ties into a lot of what you were saying Nathalie about finding ways to feel that you are an artist and that you have the power to do something about the way the world is and to make it better. The small scale of that is an advantage and not a failure.

Nathalie: Being presented with the scale of the internet and social media, you see so many big numbers and engagement. It convinces you that it's no use. I'm small. It doesn't matter. I can't do anything. It's designed to be dis-empowering like that. The fact that you did it is enough. It has an effect on people who find it and play it and then make their own things. The way our systems online are designed are made to make us feel really dis-empowered. It's really important to understand that these things are built by individuals and that individuals can have a really big impact on this just by deciding to go do something different. Removing a game for Xbox is a huge step and it speaks to other people. It's not just a small gesture. It does have some kind of effect. It's really easy to give into this fatalism and think none of it matters. Just being creative and putting out your own work matters a lot.

Grace: Audre Lorde says something about poetry being accessible to everyone because it is brief and you can scrawl it on a napkin during your work shift. Trying to find value in the stuff you can create when you only have limited resources. That is maybe something that is interesting about text games as a format. Text is the most basic thing and the most accessible. Most people can write and type and that broadens the amount of people that can do something with it and share it with other people.

Nathalie: I'm enjoying this last thought. If you think about it, text is the oldest technology.

Grace: Yes! One hundred percent. I think about the handprint on the cave wall a lot, this so human gesture. If you were allowed to touch the cave wall where the handprint is, you could make your own. There's something deeply animal and human about that.