The Indefinite Audience & Other Happenings

Store Updates, Recommendations, and More

Hello and welcome back to the Rat Wave Newsletter. I tried to take a lot of the last month of from game stuff because of being overwhelmed with outside problems. I ended up scrapping that plan after a bit, but there’s been a general slowing down; just scraping small moments of game things between other moments. My web store has been re-opened and there’s currently a sale on items with less than ten copies in stock and I’ve also added Nemesis Retribution for order. Check it out.

While taking this “sabbatical” I ended up reading, watching and listening to a lot. Here’s some recommendations. Album wise I’ve been loving the new Clipping. album Dead Channel Sky. I’ve read a few interesting books and just finished Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon and I’d recommend it. I also finally Saw the TV Glow and posted a longer than usual review on my Letterboxd. If you enjoy comedy I had a lot of fun with this mockumentary by Frankie McNair called The Telling of the Untold Story of Tabitha Booth.

This months blog post is about some doubts I’ve been struggling with, and the idea of the/an audience. Circling back to comedy if you like this month’s blog I’d genuinely recommend checking out the stand-up special Bossy Bottom by Zoë Coombs Marr, it’s on Prime or like probably pirateable somewhere.

The Indefinite Audience

There's a Game Soup episode where I pitch an out there idea and Chloe suggests a general audience would be lost. My reply on air is a quick "Fuck the audience". I think I could refine the remark being honest. I do care about the audience of the game, I care about people actively engaging with my art and given that games are an artform brought to life through play that is obviously a relationship I give thought to. I don't care about the nebulous "general audience", the aggregate of everyone who might be even interested in something I make, the hypothetical unsolicited focus group. I don't care about the potential customer, fuck the customer.

Of course I need to sell games in exchange for money to try and escape relative poverty. So the customer matters at some point. I just don't think that point is before a game has been made. I'd rather whatever I make be genuine artistic expression, and then I just figure out how best to sell that, rather than stunting the growth of something by trying to turn it into a product before it really even exists. This is what I believe, this is how I need to operate to actually make art, but I don't really feel good about it at the moment.

I think I'm jabbing at a difference between the definite audience (the readers and players of a specific game, rather than in hypothetical) and an indefinite audience (the people who a game will be for). I think before the Transgender Deathmatch Legend II campaign I believed that every game, every work of art even, had its own audience and the question was just about finding them. I think the campaign has led me to question that belief.

It feels harsh to call it a failure when it did fund, though in retrospect the goal wasn't set well, in the sense that hitting the goal didn't feel rewarding, it felt like scraping by. TDL2 also relied on a smaller number of higher paying backers, which feels unsustainable given the state of the world and also makes me feel like the game connected to even less people than the money would have you believe.

I've gone into external factors about why the campaign struggled before, but I don't think that means I can ignore the possibility of failings on my part. The strong possibility is that I failed to sell the game to a meaningful amount of customers, that I failed to find the audience who the game would matter to. Failing as a marketeer, a role that I see as more part of the grind than the art, a skill that can be improved on. Another thing I've considered is whether the game just didn't really have enough of an audience. That's feels a bleaker thought. I'm hoping it's mainly external stress clouding my judgement. It's a doubt I'm struggling to shake though, when I consider new ideas.

It's blocking me from making any progress on ideas that feel "big". So I'm going to try more ideas that feel small; firstly I'm dusting off the first game I ever wrote which is a card based storytelling game about a band on tour after making a deal with the devil. I guess with smaller projects I'm hoping the doubts don't settle in, I'm sinking less cost into so I'm less likely to worry about if it's a worthy use of time and just enjoy the act of creation. Maybe that's a first step into rebuilding that faith, or maybe it's just a way of sidestepping it for now. Perhaps once my own situation is more manageable things will feel different, the triangle shit y'know?

I don't think this post has a conclusion. It's just an expression of fears and doubts, of a crisis of confidence. I can't write a meaningful conclusion because the process hasn't concludes. But I hope you found something interesting in the opening.

See you next month,