Dream Daddies and Fearful Fathers: How Indies Can Cope with Being Terminally Online

[Music] hi I'm Layton blah blah blah I'm currently the art director at Fulbright and him the co-creator co-writer and art director of dream daddy a dad dating simulator the dating sim where you play as a hot dad and your goal is to meet and romance other hot dad's but honestly maybe that's not the best way to introduce myself let me try this again hi my name is Layton and I'm terminally online and I bet you are too if being logged on all the time instills a gnawing sense of existential dread that permeates every aspect of your life until the ennui is so overwhelming that you wish you could just chuck your phone right into the ocean then you are probably a fellow sufferer of terminal on Linus the internet was supposed to make our lives better it was supposed to connect us to each other in new meaningful ways we were supposed to be surfing through space on keyboards by now and instead it makes me feel like I've opted into an additional mental illness cuz as it turns out it's not

good actually and yet none of us would be so logged on if it wasn't at least kind of good I wouldn't be standing up here today if it wasn't for the Internet if it wasn't for Twitter or tumblr we would have never made dream daddy I wouldn't have any of my wonderful friends most of whom I met online and I imagine none of you would be here at GDC this week without the internet I mean how many of you got your jobs by networking online or are using socials to meet up with friends this week I mean the indian's community would not be what it is today without the internet so I don't feel like I need to sell anybody on all of the incredible things that the internet does for us and how it quite literally changed the world it's essential to the work that we do here and how we live our lives so it's good actually most of the time the thing is we just don't have the luxury of logging off when things get bad have you ever tried to complain to somebody about the internet and then they very helpfully tell you to just log off or haters gonna hate or it's just the Internet or they're probably 12 and living in their

mom's basement it's like getting cuts all over your hands and then you ask someone for some band-aids or like I know to stop cutting your hands and instead of helping they're like just stop chop em off are you even using those for anyway kids these days so addicted to their damn hands so yeah it's not that simple the Internet is no longer some sort of secret geographical place you access on the family desktop to look at websites about Bigfoot on websites that have a black background and green Comic Sans text on them now it's like this weird layer on top of reality that we can access anytime anywhere and need to do our jobs especially as Indies no no the bit and despite it being something that is so embedded into the fabric of society I feel like we don't spend enough time talking about how it affects us psychologically emotionally and how it shapes culture and the way that we talk about media and we do this sometimes and that's great but a lot of the time it looks like this and what

these are all really saying is just we live in a society and they aren't engaging with the real nuanced issues of the internet of which there are a lot so with all this in mind today I want to do a bit of a sequel to the talk that I gave here last year it was about how understanding the historical origins of internet culture can help you make your game something that people want to will want to share online and how we use the concept of meta modernism to make dream daddy a bit of a viral success so one second gotta get my gamer voice on so I'm gonna do a quick high-level speedrun of the stuff we talked about because it's relevant to this talk here we go what's up gamers modernism sincere post-modernism is cynical deconstruction of modernist ideals post-modernism is dead long live meta modernism what's that the art period we're currently in the entire idea is that it combines both modernism and post-modernism so the guy named Ted guiding Tennant is sincerity

wrapped in cynicism like a nice empanada and just like how modernism was spurred on by the Industrial Revolution and post modernism was spurred on by the proliferation of broadcast television meta modernism's biggest influence is the advent of the internet a lot of the most popular media today follows this guiding principle of sincerity wrapped in cynicism like these things Wow Wow Wow Wow Wow but what I didn't talk about last year is that sometimes when your game gets really successful when you kind of thought like for people max we're gonna play it it breaks your brain a little bit so now that we're caught up today I'm going to talk about how I had a nervous breakdown after a dream daddy became a success and how that breakdown forced me to reevaluate my relationship with the internet my work media criticism and myself so before we get into internet theory stuff I want to also do a speedrun of what happened after dream daddy blew up my friend

Vernon and I both love hot dads and are clinically depressed neither of us had ever made a game before but we decided to do a game about hot dads who kiss each other anyway excuse me we wanted to make it silly on the outside and sincere on the inside and bananas we wrote the game together across the country from each other using Skype and Google Docs we formed a ragtag group of cool game developers who are actually some of them are sitting in the front row and they're great and we worked out a publishing deal with our friends the game grumps blah blah blah here and a half of development goes by yeah all right so as a bisexual woman and Vernon being a straight dude but a good Ally we were fretting a lot about getting the queer representation right so we were constantly showing the script to people getting perspectives from other queer folks researching having sensitivity readers look at it and a lot of the crew is queer so we were feeling pretty good about it our mission statement from the beginning was to contribute something that was just a nice funny positive

queer thing that was more focused on the romance angle than having to navigate being queer because so often narratives about queer people or either really insensitive or are just hyper serious and angsty and all about struggling with your sexuality and I do enough of that in real life so we announced the game on Father's Day only a few weeks before it was set to come out the response was immediate and ridiculous and really unexpected for me we spent all of announced day just trawling through socials reading everything which is not a good idea at all the issue was that we had still not completed or QA to the game when announced and we were kind of racing racing to the finish but we did not anticipate the response so now there was this added pressure of our 70,000 Twitter followers and lots of conversation and many many articles about it and there was already a lot of controversy and not just from who you or even I would have expected either ie

alt-right homophobe gamergate types and we got some of that but it was overwhelmingly kind of calls coming from inside the house the people that I had always wanted to be stoked about this game were the same ones who were really upset about it and that was like a knife in the heart because my time line was still all dream daddy stuff but we also had people adding us non-stop with everything from this is going to be homophobic and you should give money to actual queer creators instead of this game too this is clearly just a cash grab to Layton is not actually queer to tell us exactly the sexualities of everyone on your team - the one that I cried in corners about most I'm queer and I want to be excited for this but I know it will be bad and hurt me and because the game hadn't come out yet and honestly wasn't even finished a lot of this was just speculation and we knew we couldn't address any of it because we wanted to let the game speak for itself but the interim was torture and extremely overwhelming and like I totally get the reaction as queer folks

online and honestly as any sort of marginalized folk online we have to have our hackles up about this stuff because it's so often harmful and exploitative so we're just trying to protect ourselves and when something that comes out that's billed as queer we put a lot of scrutiny on it because it can be really frustrating when you're desperate for media that represents you and you never get any and finally something comes out that might speak to that but actually it's something you're not even remotely interested in or in our case for a lot of folks made it seem like they were the bots of the joke and it's even worse when it seems like everyone is excited about it but you and that can just feel like a slap in the face to players and having spent years being an extremely logged on teen denizen of tumblr i've seen it from both sides and the skepticism of the community is almost always valid and makes a lot of sense but what I didn't realize until it happened to me was that when you have thousands of people piling on with thousands of different takes and accusations and speculation all at once

all the time it's overwhelming as hell and it hurts and most of all it hurt because I felt like I was letting my community down I didn't want to be that guy ever so I had dropped out of school temporarily and flown out to LA to help deliver this weird dad baby with the rest of the Dream Team they're great please thank them because there are wonderful people and very talented whoo they're good anyway uh shakin so anyway I flew out and it was hellish this isn't a crunch talk but we were wrecked all-nighters only going off of coffee and Soylent the nicest people ever snapping in each other because everything was breaking you know the drill to compound this at the last minute we had to delay the game twice due to game breaking bugs you know crunch works you even were yelling at us while we're all having some of the most stressful nights of our lives so while we were getting non-stop tweets about how we didn't care about the fans that this was evidence it was a cash grab etc we were all literally in tears trying to

make this extremely hard decision to give ourselves more time partially because our bodies were breaking down on her distress in long hours completely full disclosure that month I had a period that lasted for 12 days because of how hard I was pushing my body there was a point where I was throwing up from the stress it was great so that night after the second delay Vern and I were both convinced that this whole thing was over our careers were ruined and we would get laughed off the internet we were basically like well we had fun making it that's kind of it you're here to have to own the drain but hey I'll be fine eventually I guess and the next morning dream daddy was the top-selling game on Steam globally and people really loved it so that is a thing that happened everything that came next was kind of a blur and a ridiculous whiplash from well this whole thing is over and I can never go on the internet again - oh so my entire life just changed overnight and I can drop out of art school and fulfill a lifelong goal of moving to California now

question mark I don't know where we were suddenly absurdly successful and yet I didn't feel any differently than I had for the past month I just felt kind of Numb because of how surreal and sudden it all was I flew home I dropped out of school I moved into a futon in my dad's spare room my body was destroyed I was exhausted crunch in the internet stress [ __ ] me up so bad that I was like sick and recovering for months we continued to read everything about the game obsessively which was again never a good idea ever and the funny thing about a lot of people loving a thing that you made is that not only is it a real dissociative trip mentally but it becomes really easy to tune the positive stuff out and only focus on the negative because for some reason the negative stuff feels more true somehow and there was a lot of it so if your self-esteem is like a bowl that holds all of the wonderful positive things that people say each bad tweet or email or message pokes a hole in the

bowl until it's basically a strainer and it feels impossible to hold on to a shred of the good stuff the imposter syndrome was really strong and as my career in the games industry started to form around the work that I did on dads the more I felt like I was still just a stupid art school dropout who had no idea what she was doing because I kind of was and due to all the criticism I was suddenly faced with the fact that even though we took all these steps to be as sensitive as possible we [ __ ] up there are a lot of slip-ups we made that I still don't feel good about and now looking back I know that there's no such thing as positive representation and there never will be which doesn't mean that we shouldn't try but being forced to face that stuff over and over and over every day was a big learning experience for me and now I'm even more committed to advocating for thoughtful representation and holding myself to a higher standard than I was before but it still felt and feels just awful anyway I had always thought that being successful would instantly make me happy and cure

my depression and when it didn't it kind of tore me apart frankly I was a wreck I had to make my friends go through and clear my notifications and inboxes on every I isolated myself in real life I ate junk food compulsively stayed in bed all day smoked too much weed had to double my antidepressant dosage and get back on xanax and yeah we had done it and I felt like a failure when I was in art school I had this recurring nightmare where I'd be in a critique but instead of my art I'd be the one being critiqued and everyone in the class would tear into all my personal flaws but then when I left class they would follow me around campus and then huddle around my bed at night Stoker T king and that's how being online felt for a really long time even my subconscious is extremely on the nose so the good news is that even though it took a lot of time of me being completely miserable I'm in a lot better place mentally than I was a few years ago and I'm a lot stronger for it too I still struggle with my mental health

and the imposter syndrome all the time but that's just kind of how my brain is through a lot of intensive therapy and getting heavily medicated and a ton of self-help in psychology textbooks I bought on Amazon Prime I found a lot better coping mechanisms to help me get through it and at the end of this talk there'll be a page with a link to a breakdown of all those practical self-care tips I learned but while I'm up here in person I'd rather talk about the biggest thing that helped me get through this and because I love to overly intellectualize my feelings that was trying to understand why the internet works like this as we struggled with this we discovered that actually this experience is extremely common among people who make popular pieces of media we were lucky enough to be able to talk to people who went through it and came out the other side in one piece and I was ridiculously comforting but we don't talk about this stuff in public spaces because it's basically admitting that all of the angry emails and tweets worked that you let it get to you you're

successful who cares it's what you signed up for it's just the internet right and the idea of being vulnerable and real online after going through that kind of experience is kind of terrifying it does make you want to log off entirely just so you don't have to deal with it anymore honestly it's pretty scary talking about it up here today but my intent isn't to throw some sob story you to get pity or even cast aspersions on people who didn't like dream daddy because it is completely allowed and valid actually but I tell you this because the experience forced me to re-examine the way that I engage with the Internet I love to feel like I'm drinking half-and-half whenever I tell this sordid tale at conventions I always hear the same thing and it breaks my heart more and more every time when I'm talking to young game designers I always hear that based on the public reaction that creators get when they try to put out work that attack attempts to tackle any sort of serious complex issue and

makes them afraid to even try to put their work out there and that's the worst possible outcome because if the ultimate goal of discourse in Brigade increate creators and calling them out for their fiction is to make represent representation better more diverse and more respectful than we've failed if we have kids who are so afraid of being dogpile by their bite not only ignorant idiots but also their own communities then we're essentially bullying them into virtual non-existence and then we're losing those stories entirely and to be clear I'm not saying that anyone is immune to criticism or that we should eliminate discourse having public critical discussions of work that analyzes the ways in which it's successful and ways in which it's harmful is literally the only way we can move forward what I am saying is that the way we have these discussions matter flattening complex issues into the hottest take possible is not productive Twitter should be used as a tool to facilitate discussion not just to shut

it down and like any tool it can be used for good and bad you can use a hammer to build a house but you can also use it to smash someone's kneecaps in metaphorically part of learning how to do better is by admitting that you don't know what you're doing part of maturing is having space to fail without getting cancelled and part of learning about yourself and about others is to explore the shades of grey between black and white and by wading into the things that you don't know you don't know together and there's a lot of value in work that fails it's a collective learning experience rather than a personal one but we shouldn't be robbing ourselves of opportunities to get better just because we want to be capital our right and unfortunately marginalized creators making work about their own experience that is messy or dark or imperfect are disproportionately targeted not only by the ignorant [ __ ] we'd expect but also by their own communities and to be extremely clear I do not mean this is like a boo both sides are just as bad

thing at all because that's a stupid and dangerous rhetoric and that is not what I'm trying to say but we have a responsibility to hold space for that and protect the most vulnerable members of our network online just like we need to do in real life and our fiction and if we're ripping people to shreds over not being perfect and not making perfect work that perfectly represents everyone we're just eating our own tails here this is especially discouraging because IRL queer spaces are being eliminated on mass through a combination of gentrification the proliferation of dating apps and the fact that young queer people have more access to each other online honestly this is a whole talk in itself so I will stop but there is no replacement for physically surrounding yourself with people like you there is safety and strengthen that there's no replacement for activism and organizing in person and there's also no replacement for having these important discussions about complex issues like queerness in person and especially in this goddamn political climate the fact

that we're replacing the warmth of IRL queer spaces with fighting each other to the death online over fictional characters makes me want to cry and aside from existing unconscious bias I think a big part of the reason this happens is because of the sheer access smaller creators especially indie creators who rely on the attention economy and by branding themselves online are particularly vulnerable there's a higher likelihood of a tangible result of adding them say than there is of repeatedly adding Marvel or any other big celebrity who are perceived as inaccessible and by getting someone fired getting their project cancelled or just getting them to delete their account that's a tangible outcome that rewards that behavior and we've seen over and over how this approach has been utilized in a positive way I mean you can just look at the me2 movement but we can't immediately go from a nuanced critique of a piece of media - jumping to conclusions about its creator in the same way we asked predators because it's then it's not actually about discussing media or even keeping the community safe anymore

it's about the exchange of social capital but we'll get to that in a second so this sucks you ever hear the crab bucket mentality it's the idea that when crabs are trapped in a bucket any of them could potentially escape but instead what happens is the ones that get close to escaping get pulled back down by the other crabs it's very much like if I can't have it then neither can you and that's exactly what's happening on socials especially Twitter and while this is pretty basic human behavior the affordances of the Internet are exacerbating it namely context collapse temporal collapse parasocial relationships in the game of fide exchange of social capital and learning about these concepts and how they're in play on the internet helped me find a lot of peace with this stuff as I said overintellectualizing feelings it's a thing so let's talk about it the way we present ourselves changes based on who we're with right you could say that our identities are contextual the way you

talk to your parents is different from the way you talk to your friends romantic partners your boss colleagues or strangers on the street you can't have a personality in a vacuum it's not that we fundamentally change ourselves when we interact with different people but that we display different facets of ourselves in different situations because it's based on knowledge of who we're presenting it to this is why it's so annoying when people comment on how social media is inherently performative like that's a bad thing existing itself is performative that's not a problem that's awesome but what is a problem though is that self performance online can't be regulated in any meaningful way because you don't know who your audience is at any given time you have the concept of your followers but this is an imagined audience and you have no way of knowing how much of that imagined audience overlaps with the people who actually see it thus you have virtually no control over how you're presenting yourself or being perceived your identity becomes something that others built for you this is what context collapse means we have never had this

level of immediate global communication with each other ever thus we have no rules for navigating the levels of multifaceted self-performance the platform requires no way of understanding the cultural nuance of the random people we interact with no facial or body cues we can use to inflect tone we have people of all ages from children to the elderly from disparate backgrounds with different levels of life experience in education all toss them together and a few bespoke platforms that have no design unifying purpose other than vague terms like to share and communicate I mean and also to make money off of you fighting it's absurd it's amazing that we can get anyone to agree on anything with this this many cultural and social balls in the air further because we're out here making games or art or whatever that's associated with our real names we essentially have to turn our identities into a brand you and your work become inseparable because to make money we have to constantly be marketing ourselves in an industry where it is so easy to base your self-worth on your output the system only perpetuates this fallacy instead of having the luxury of

treating socials as a space for friendship you now have two perfectly perform your work in your life and your friendships 24/7 because it is literally part of the job this in itself is exhausting but this is why arguments about media on lines so easily devolve into ad hominem attacks because if we can't distinguish ourselves from our work strangers who only know us by our work definitely can further context collapse intersects with this idea of temporal collapse just like we have no context we have no true sense of the passage of time online despite timestamps everything that's happening on the Internet is happening right now no past no future media current used to take place over months or years through traditional printing avenues but now it's happening about millions of things at once for millions of people in the entire cycle of hot takes that used to happen over months now happens in a period of minutes and it also incentivizes just throwing a take out there as fast as possible leaving no time for real deep thought

and reflection since we have so little information with which to form our image of strangers online it becomes easier to look at their web presence divorce from the passage of time that's part of why we have people digging through tweets that are a decade old and trying to use them to smears we are only gonna see this issue get worse as the generation that grew up with their entire lives constantly being broadcasted get older people change part of being a person is changing and the Internet requires your existence to be static branded and reliable even though the image strangers form of you online is literally only the tiniest facet of your personality because it's impossible to fully convey ourselves online what we do instead is present a flattened version of ourselves a simulacrum that represents us instead of the real thing and unfortunately we now conflate the simulacrum with the actual person and that's where parasocial relationships come in you know when you have a crush on someone that you don't know too well you take a few things that you know about them are attractive they like dogs

whatever and we're pattern-seeking creatures so you favor lee you favorably extrapolate that data into a fantasy of what you think they're like the fantasy then becomes a separate entity from the actual person and now you're expending all of your emotional energy on that fantasy that you're conflating with the person a parasocial relationship is a one-sided experience where the audience or viewer or player forms a mental image of a public figure or fictional character that they projected emotions on to this is a super deep well of information and there's a youtube series that does the deep dive better than I could ever give justice to its required viewing and will also you know link at the end anyway you see this everywhere the YouTube industry relies on fostering parasocial relationships between the audience and a personality dating seems work because they entice you into a parasocial relationship with hot dad's and we've been doing this with all sorts of actors in public figures forever it's a normal human thing but the internet with its unprecedented access to the subjects of these parasocial

relationships has morphed this into a very real issue that hinges on treating real people like their dolls to play with again talking itself the thing is a parasocial relationship is often a positive projection but it can also work the other way let's say you're hanging out with a close friend and they say something stupid and offensive you've known them a long time you know they're a good person and that it doesn't reflect their values so you feel completely comfortable being like yo don't say that and then you can have a productive discussion about why it's bad turns out they didn't know you can explain the context and then you both learn from it let's say that instead of generic stock photo friends saying the offensive thing to you he tweets it you know like a dumbass your friend has 12 followers but then someone with 20,000 followers quote tweets your friend with a sick dunk and suddenly people are crawling out of the woodwork to call your friend an awful person and make all sorts of leaps about who they are and what they meant I'd like to posit that this is also a

parasocial relationship by the way stop quote tweeting idiots just to boost your ego because you're playing into their hands and giving them a platform they wouldn't have had otherwise seriously you are part of the problem anyway [Music] thanks nah oh thanks social media is a network of real actual relationships jumbled in with positive and negative parasocial relationships that are all treated as if they're the same combined was context collapse and temporal collapse we have no context no sense of time and no sense of self no [ __ ] wonder the Internet can be such a nightmare and all of these things are only exacerbated by the fact that the platform's we use to talk to each other capitalize on all this chaos due to the lack of a unifying thematic structure of a website like I don't know Twitter it's basically just the wild wild west because what's the one thing that unites every account on the platform no matter what they're here for likes retweets followers and engagement because in lieu of any sort

of traditional structure eventually a social hierarchy is going to form and what we've watched form is what we call an attention economy everyone is fighting for your attention all the time so those who can hold it the longest win this applies to both the platform's themselves and the people on it the major social media networks are all vying for your eyeballs so they design themselves to be as attention-grabbing and addictive as possible this releases the same feel-good addictive surge of dopamine as this and most importantly this and of course the attention economy is built on both intermittent variable rewards and the logic of late-stage capitalism so the exchange of social capital and essentially dopamine via tenshun views likes and follows is ruthlessly competitive because the internet doesn't have firm guiding values social capital trumps everything else so now it becomes about aggressively pursuing what gets you the most social capital and fast making something that's quality takes work being thoughtful and measured takes time

showing others kindness and patience doesn't make you popular socials are now a globalized version of a high school cafeteria where the meanest loudest most inflammatory people are rewarded with attention in 2010 in 2019 attention is power we have smudged our identities in the truth so far that these words don't even matter anymore look at the events of the past week look at our president this is the ultimate consequence of the attention economy it does not matter if you are good or if it's right or true it matters if you can keep people watching the fact that we're still downplaying the impact of the Internet is a cultural agent or considering it's something that we can just log off of is [ __ ] dangerous at what point do we start taking it seriously what's it going to take how much damage do we have to do to each other to the environment to our culture and to our moral character until we start talking about how we can make this better this is where it comes back to meta modernism and why it matters and it's certainly not a panacea I also know [ __ ] I also do

not have all the answers because I don't think anybody does but pure irony and cynicism are killing us and for a lot of us it's a defense mechanism to protect that core sincerity but for many more it's a way of life because if all you stand for is cynicism and distance and mockery then you stand for flatness you stand for nothing the core of what I'm saying isn't that it's all bad and that we're doomed it's that we need to use these tools in the power of our attention and social capital responsibly it's that we need to take the internet in the way it affects us seriously because doing the opposite has even more serious consequences for us in real life just like it's not helpful to tell you to log off it's also not helpful to just passively accept that the Internet is a bad place and will always be a bad place and I kind of can't believe it took me getting yelled out online for making a game about dads kissing to realize how the problem is so much bigger than just caring yourself in the face of sudden success how callout culture and entitled gamers and the decay of media create an inner

cult internet culture thriving on aggression are just a symptom of a problem that affects us all I know it sounds silly but we can't let being terminally online actually kill us we can't let this tool flatten our work our politics our activism our friendships and most importantly our identities into something two-dimensional clickable and purely cynical I challenge you and myself to use this week at GDC to embody the complexity of ourselves and our work and to share it with others in person we deserve complexity as humans we deserve the chance to be multifaceted and always growing and our work should reflect that but most of all we deserve the chance to treat each other and ourselves with honesty compassion and sincerity thank you [Applause]