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The Legend of GayBlade

blog.archive.org

31–40 of 135 posts

Re: The Legend of GayBlade

#31
post #9

Is this Gaytekeeping? “ One thing to say though, is that perhaps you should be careful to have an accurate historical record? Queer theory did not exist until ~mid 1990s, so perhaps none of these games are LGBTQIA+ — they’re Gay and Lesbian works.”

How to frame history with understanding that didn't exist for the people in it is probably a whole field of study. Most of the letters in the acronym existed (if not by the same name) before then, though meanings have evolved.

Re: The Legend of GayBlade

#32

When I was a child, Smear the Queer was a game all the boys played. Fag was a commonly used slur. When I was in high school the state of California told gay couples to go fuck themselves. Societal progress is a wonderful thing to see.

> When I was in high school the state of California told gay couples to go fuck themselves. Except, they actually wanted them to do exactly the opposite....

Just for the sake of pedantry, I should point out that California was ok with them fucking themselves, just not each other.

Re: The Legend of GayBlade

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's an important concept to know when something is an ad or not and to, even in general, know or be able to reason about the motivations of the writer of an article. I think that's why it's important. This is especially relevant when it's a submarine ad, as the person to whom you're replying mentioned. In any case, your comment seems very aggressive.

> In any case, your comment seems very aggressive. How could that be? Perhaps because I am ridiculing that person who got nothing else out of the article. It reminds me of a juvenile that just found out the world works a slightly different way than they were told in kindergarten. There is simply a more obvious and more substantive discussion to be had about the above article, then incessantly searching for ads, you c…

[deleted]

Re: The Legend of GayBlade

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's an important concept to know when something is an ad or not and to, even in general, know or be able to reason about the motivations of the writer of an article. I think that's why it's important. This is especially relevant when it's a submarine ad, as the person to whom you're replying mentioned. In any case, your comment seems very aggressive.

> In any case, your comment seems very aggressive. How could that be? Perhaps because I am ridiculing that person who got nothing else out of the article. It reminds me of a juvenile that just found out the world works a slightly different way than they were told in kindergarten. There is simply a more obvious and more substantive discussion to be had about the above article, then incessantly searching for ads, you c…

Assuming everything is an ad is absurd; and resigning yourself to pessimism won't lead to better outcomes.

It's important to know the incentives involved in the creation of a piece of information.

Re: The Legend of GayBlade

#35
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I was in high school the state of California told gay couples to go fuck themselves. Except, they actually wanted them to do exactly the opposite....

Just for the sake of pedantry, I should point out that California was ok with them fucking themselves , just not each other.

How far back are you going? IIRC the state sodomy law was repealed in the 70s and it certainly wasn't enforced thoroughly

Re: The Legend of GayBlade

#36
post #28
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"not for profit" and "not an adverticle" Neither of those cases excludes the possibility that the article was influenced by a PR campaign in some way (author's intentions are in fact irrelevant to this question), in this case for a recently-released, and apparently not particularly great documentary by Netflix.

Well, this is a post by Jason Scott of the Internet Archive. I trust him. And he posted the source code and online playable game. (In a submarine ad, the intentions pretty much matter. It refers to an article directly commissioned or written by a PR firm).

Well, as you saw, someone brought up "Death of The Author" (i.e. I may not even know I'm posting an ad) so there's that.

But.

The blog post is 100% posted because of the Netflix documentary. It's causing literally hundreds of people to go 'Now I hope they found GayBlade! How do we find it!' and also a screenshot of my twitter account (which I had nothing to do with and became aware of after people starting pinging me) is in it.

The GayBlade stuff went up in January and was announced at that time, by the LGTBQ Game Archive (this was mostly their gig, the whole project to find and recover it).

Internally, our social media and outreach folk went "Hey, did you see we're getting mentioned a lot as people find GayBlade on the archive? We should do a blog entry about it." I was hesitant for the reasons people here seem to bringing up, i.e. cynicism that we must be doing it for money or something. But the fact is: we did it, we worked with Ryan Best and Strong Museum and LGBTQ Game Archive to make Gayblade playable (and also downloadable, when I realized nobody had taken that step). So why NOT talk about it, in case people missed it?

(It was also easier to point to the blog entry than endlessly tweet at people asking.)

There you go. Thanks for the trust.

Re: The Legend of GayBlade

#37
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"not for profit" and "not an adverticle" Neither of those cases excludes the possibility that the article was influenced by a PR campaign in some way (author's intentions are in fact irrelevant to this question), in this case for a recently-released, and apparently not particularly great documentary by Netflix.

The causal chain is obvious: the documentary surfaced interest in the game; this led to a call to try to locate the lost game; it was located and uploaded on archive.org (a library) for preservation's sake. You can consume the game with or without watching the documentary or subscribing to Netflix and no one was compensated. Of course the documentary and the release of the game are connected, but in precisely the opp…

Actually, no. We had GayBlade up and emulated earlier this year, completely unaware of the documentary. Causal chain is actually: People working with Ryan Best to tell his story at something called RAINBOW ARCADE, the world’s first exhibition on LGBTQIA* video game history at Schwules Museum Berlin. This includes multiple groups of people and museums. That's early 2019.

During that point, the story of GayBlade and Ryan Best become known to the HIGH SCORE production team, and Best is interviewed for it and his story told.

Late 2019, Best discovers some original materials and they are used to recover the game.

Early 2020, Internet Archive hosts a copy of the game emulated, and LGTBQ Game Archive does an extensive writeup on the game.

Mid 2020, HIGH SCORE is presented to Netflix, and a card is inserted into the documentary to indicate it was found. (I'm finding not many people have seen the card.)

Re: The Legend of GayBlade

#38
post #20

When I was a child, Smear the Queer was a game all the boys played. Fag was a commonly used slur. When I was in high school the state of California told gay couples to go fuck themselves. Societal progress is a wonderful thing to see.

It is a great thing to see, California is described as some sort of lefty-socialist-liberal bastion today but like you said it was only 12 years ago they (unconstitutionally) voted in a ban on gay marriage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_...

California was also considered a lefty-socialist-liberal bastion 12 years ago.

Re: The Legend of GayBlade

#39
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, this is a post by Jason Scott of the Internet Archive. I trust him. And he posted the source code and online playable game. (In a submarine ad, the intentions pretty much matter. It refers to an article directly commissioned or written by a PR firm).

Well, as you saw, someone brought up "Death of The Author" (i.e. I may not even know I'm posting an ad) so there's that. But. The blog post is 100% posted because of the Netflix documentary. It's causing literally hundreds of people to go 'Now I hope they found GayBlade! How do we find it!' and also a screenshot of my twitter account (which I had nothing to do with and became aware of after people starting pinging me…

Thanks for responding with that clarification. I'd like to clarify, in turn, that my original post was intended more as observation than accusation. No malicious intent imputed!

One thing I would like to add, that I think we would both agree on, is that regardless of everyone's exact motivations and the actual causal chain of events, the post is still, de facto, part of the miasma of publicity for the series. Anyway, I appreciate your work, and that of archive.org.

Re: The Legend of GayBlade

#40

When I was a child, Smear the Queer was a game all the boys played. Fag was a commonly used slur. When I was in high school the state of California told gay couples to go fuck themselves. Societal progress is a wonderful thing to see.

For those who aren't familiar, Smear the Queer is a playground game in which one person has to keep a ball away from the rest of the group, who tries to tackle them. It's sort of like a cross between "reverse tag" and gridiron/rugby football. (The gay-bashing element is just a metaphor, you see.)

The "queer" in the game's name probably means odd, not homosexual. As in the person holding the ball is the odd one, and everyone should try to hit them. That doesn't stop people from misinterpreting it, since queer mostly means homosexual or some other sexual minority. It's slightly more pessimistic to think that the game is teaching our kids to kill homosexuals vs. some undefined oddness.
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