Times do change.
My first interviews were before Thoughty – on my previous and now defunct site that I ported here with Systir Productions & 616, and on Gaming as Women with attendees of a Gamerati game day and then Judy Bauer of all people. I kicked off Thoughty and Five or So Questions in 2014 as a continuation of the original blog, but only the interviews really stuck around.
I have done over three hundred interviews on Thoughty, about 250 of those being Five or So Question interviews. I have only had a few interviews fully fail to be completed due to scheduling, and one pulled by the creator. I’ve interviewed people about not just tabletop but also card, board, and video games, plus lonely solo games, huge collections of tabletop and live action games, their artwork, their design process, their Kickstarters, and more. I have had an exceptional opportunity to pick the brains of the most brilliant designers in tabletop games, from legacy designers like Ron Edwards to genius women designers like Dr. Jessica Hammer and Meguey Baker to groundbreaking modern designers like Jay Dragon and Rae Nedjadi. Many of these people I have grown to consider friends and colleagues, and I’m so grateful for the amazing things I’ve learned from them and shared with you.
I have been supported by my Patreon supporters primarily for these interviews, enough funds to pay for my website and a bill every so often, some busy months enough to help me pay medical expenses. I am incredibly grateful for my supporters, for everyone who has shared an interview, recommended a creator to reach out to, or praised my interviews, regardless of whether they supported me financially!
You may ask, if this is so great, why does the title say you’re ending interviews? What does this mean for Thoughty? Why has the site been so slow recently, anyway? Well, that’s what I’m gonna try to answer here. This is… a bit long. I’m still me, you know.
Why am I ending interviews?
I should clarify – I am not ending interviews entirely. I hope to still occasionally court a creator to tell me all the fun thoughts in their brain meat. However, doing interviews has been more challenging than rewarding for longer than I’d like to admit.
Some of this is because of the world at large and my own life – my mental and physical health are two lava-filled garbage dumpsters a lot of the time, and I am not at the capacity I once was to manage tons of coinciding bits of information and get them aligned. It is far more disappointing to me than you, I assure you, and the political and global stressors are just… so much, y’all.
Some is because it’s financially a crunch. Even with a Patreon, because I can’t pump out a busy schedule, I don’t make enough to justify some of the stress and related trauma. Trauma gets us all in the end.
Boost the Marginalized! But *I’m* Marginalized…?
One of my biggest pushes with Thoughty has always been to promote marginalized and minority creators – queer people, trans people, people of color, Black people, disabled people, low income people, religious minorities, and so on. I settled on doing an email format years ago because my disabilities don’t make video or audio interviews easy – it’s hard to even promote my own work! – and have gotten ten times more difficult over the years.
It was also so it was accessible on all time zones, so people could get translations if they wanted for other languages, so people could take their time, so people could control their words since I never edit people’s words except for significant typos and they can contact me any time to edit a post, so I could reduce any biases I had based on appearances or presentation (we all have biases we don’t recognize), so people who were afraid of being seen or heard could still have a voice.
I kept interviews mostly short, included images only when people started asking, posted in varying time zones over the years, and I’ve done varying sizes of interviews to include marginalized creators when white, cis, straight project runners tend to steal the spotlight. My format, the way I searched out interviewees, how I went to cons to get to know people and encourage them to promote themselves and also encouraged people online regularly – it was focused towards the marginalized and minorities.
And still, the people who reach out to me, the people who finish interviews, the people who have enthusiasm in their responses, the people who help me by providing the things I request, they’re still mostly white cis straight guys. You know why? They have all the free time and all the privilege. I am not happy about this.
I have tried varying my format, I’ve tried doing interviews months in advance, I’ve sent all of the questions at once or questions in conversational patterns, and still, the marginalized and minorities among us are underrepresented. I don’t blame these people! I do take the blame for this, mostly, because I know the fact that I’m white is unapproachable enough for many people to not seek an interview. Plus, time-wise and communication wise, it can be easier to do a 30-60 minute podcast or Twitch stream, and I also know that self-selecting for interviews is challenging. But, it’s not like the universe is doing me favors.
Content Warning: Existential Dread, oppression
The reality is that marginalized and minority creators are working at least third shift to be doing interviews and promotions for their games. Thoughty doesn’t have a big enough audience for people to get a huge impact from a post, plus it takes replying to emails (which is less favored these days) and one more thing to juggle with their day jobs, health, mental health, families, and the fact that the governments of our Earth and the Earth itself are in the process of destroying anyone who isn’t highly privileged and surrounded by a secure support system. Game designers and artists are unfortunately common in that category, and so combined with all things, it takes a lot more work on the interviewer’s side, which isn’t actually unfair.
If I were not already disabled, if I didn’t already struggle with multiple mental illnesses, if I were not already a survivor of trauma, if I were not already struggling with dysphoria and trans- and queerphobia on a daily basis, if I were not already worrying about the tons of political and social and financial panics I might encounter tomorrow, maybe I could be a better interviewer to this incredibly well-deserved population. If wishes were horses, I’d ride into the sunset. There are already better interviewers. I can’t keep pretending that I can keep up with this anymore.
End Content Warning: Existential Dread, oppression
Where It Hurts
Speaking of which, the constant discourse in the community is exhausting when promoting creators. It has made it harder to accept interviews, to seek them out, and to monitor the news, especially considering my past trauma. I have pretty serious feelings about ethics, and my moral center screams when I have to investigate a designer that emails me to see if they’re secretly a white supremacist or sex pest.
Content Warning: harassment, sexual assault, manipulation, trauma
I have had some of those harass me for what I post about or who I post about, which is gross. However, the recent events with Ben Chong left me feeling abandoned and traumatized, and that’s what bled into Thoughty. Ben and I were close but long distance, intimately, for about a year. They told me about just the mildest and most explainable of their offenses when shit hit fan, drowned me with apologies and tears. As someone who champions rehabilitation, in a total panic, I posted to support the survivors and say I’d be a contact while I hoped that Ben rehabilitated, because I thought I was in love with him and I thought he could change. (I left out that last part.)
Immediately, people unfollowed me, and someone pulled an interview I was really excited about that was already posted. And yeah, I did fuck up. But, I read the triggering reports, I immediately apologized because my initial post was wrong, cut ties entirely with Ben, and came to terms with what they’d done. No one has an obligation to follow me or connect with me. I just felt like no one realized that Ben had manipulated me, lied to me, and tried to turn me into a shield against others. Ouch.
My tendency to love freely, to try to push for change and betterment even after bad actions, had backlashed against Thoughty. It was worse when people were tweeting that someone should’ve played the support role for Ben anyway, like I hadn’t just pulled out my heartstrings and lit them with butane fire. It was a stick in my eye.
It felt like a repeat of the Cartel incident, to a degree, but more like my long experiences with Zak Smith and the fact that no one ever seemed to recognize that ZS’s movement targeted me (& a partner), it seemed because I asked people to stop harassing him and Mandy as revenge. I feel like my interviews are sort of tainted now, that this abusive experience and feeling of abandonment has connected to my work.
Nonetheless.
This shit is no one else’s fault but mine. The problem is, it still hurts, and people can judge me for that if they want. They can judge me for messing up, for being a bad ally, for not being a good enough interviewer. I’m trying my best…
That’s just not always the best.
End Content Warning: harassment, sexual assault, manipulation, trauma
Where do we go from here?
I plan to update the Patreon to remove the focus on interviews, but wanted to give people time to digest before messing with their money. I expect the Patreon may wither and die, but void knows I need those dollars for various Legit Responsible and Extreme Irresponsible reasons, like functioning teeth and anxiety-binged gummy candies. Nothing…suspicious… (For real, tho, I don’t have like, the ability to work a job.)
I hope that some of you will remain with me, and that someone who has more energy, more strength, and more ideas about how best to serve and promote the marginalized and minority community in games will come along to do text interviews, because axes of accessibility are important! I just don’t want Thoughty to become a bastion of promoting the most privileged or just a core selection of my friends who happen to answer my plea for interviews.
Thoughty remains! So does Script Change. I still hope to do some interviews, as mentioned, very periodically. I want to talk more about design, and about leadership in games. I want to talk about the things I personally enjoy in games, break them down, see if I can make them make sense. I hope when the worldsuck eases I’ll release more games, though I doubt anything I do solo will be as big and fancy as Turn. I’ll be separately supporting my partners with their projects. Oh yeah, and I’ll still be accepting guest blogs here when I can build up a larger fund for paying creators!
Keep an eye out for my guest interview with Cam Banks over at BeyondTheWeird blog – talking about some Masters of the Universe RPG! I also hope to just play more games, and have more to talk about here because of that.
I also don’t want to feel an ache in my chest every time I start a new interview, knowing I feel apart from the community and also like I am providing low quality service. I know there is a chance things didn’t go like they seemed to go in my troubled experiences above, but social media and the game community together are a maelstrom of confusion, and what I remember most is pain. When I’m hurting too much – mind, body, and soul – to serve the community I want to serve, it’s time.
Everything you do in life will someday find a way to slip a splinter beneath your skin. The question is not whether it hurts, my friends, but whether you pull it out and heal. This is when I close my eyes, grit my teeth, and yank.
