{"id":3579,"date":"2021-12-02T01:52:44","date_gmt":"2021-12-02T06:52:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/briebeau.com\/thoughty\/?p=3579"},"modified":"2021-12-02T01:52:52","modified_gmt":"2021-12-02T06:52:52","slug":"capitalism-in-my-depression","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/briebeau.com\/thoughty\/2021\/12\/capitalism-in-my-depression\/","title":{"rendered":"Capitalism? In MY Depression?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is bleak, to a degree, and will discuss: the COVID-19 pandemic, mental & physical illness & disability, politics, nihilism, financial details and sales, and community-related trauma (perpetrators of harm, business ethics). However, I want to be transparent about my motivations for leaving the capitalistic, financially relevant industry of games and my step back from the community around it.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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by Beau J\u00e1gr Sheldon, 2021<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The State of It All<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The world, contrary to some song lyrics, is not a vampire. It is a wasteland we have made ourselves. The world is not sucking blood from us, we have instead reaped as much as we like and never sown anything not dripping with toxic waste or colonial intention. The “we” here is obviously largely white, largely capitalist, and disturbingly fascist even if we struggle to fight against it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The past US presidential term, this US presidential term, & the pandemic have shown me, a disabled, queer, trans, nonbinary, neurodivergent, mentally ill person, that most people do not care if I live or die. They do not care if I struggle or stress. They don’t care if I have healthcare, a safe home, a functioning set of lungs, or food to eat. Not just me, but anyone who is marginalized, and especially  Black people, people of color, and indigenous people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As someone who grew up conservative, I had grown to know that people who were different were treated badly and weren’t respected. What really shocked me in the past several years is that even protecting the whole of humanity doesn’t matter to so many people, even protecting themselves<\/em> doesn’t matter, so long as the status quo is maintained, money is made for those with the most of it, and white supremacy maintains its stranglehold. Conspiracies, lies, and harm that I had seen in many small ways was clearly on a much larger scale – alongside the rising anti-trans sentiment, constant violence against Black people by police & civilians, anti-Indigenous action including violence and neglect, the handling of immigration & refugees, anti-vaccination movements, pushes against fair labor practices within organizations, and rampant sexual harassment and assault are just the endless nightmare of the world we live in. Oh, also our oceans have literally been on fire, along with endless acres of land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve talked before about my personal state – mental health struggles, physical disability, having to basically give up my career plans after spending tens of thousands of dollars on school, being repeatedly affected by the actions of perpetrators of harm, & unfair pay. I have fucked up myself – between my health making it hard to fulfill project promises at times, my struggles to communicate & my loss of function during illness resulting in offense or misunderstanding, plus inability to cope with technological issues & cognitive struggles resulting in miscommunication or missed opportunities. No matter how much I want to be doing well, even with therapy, attempts to apologize or account for my errors, medication & treatment, I can’t exist in the world like I want to, because of who and how I am, and because of how the world really is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Beau,
by Beau J\u00e1gr Sheldon, 2021.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

You might ask, what the fuck does this have to do with games?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Let me be clear, it has fucking everything to do with games. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Game design is a creative space for me, and when I am feeling like shit, and constantly living in fear, exhaustion, pain, and shame, I can’t do creative stuff like I want to. It’s so hard to survive in this world, especially when I know that to be successful, not only do I have to navigate all of the predatory behavior & bad business ethics that are just painfully rampant in games, but I also have to put on a fa\u00e7ade that hides everything I’m struggling with, try to avoid offending or annoying any of the people with actual power and influence in the industry, AND figure out how to magic up energy to be constantly promoting, constantly looking for more work, while constantly trying to improve all of my skills (and develop new ones, which is super challenging for me now).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And like, yes, every fucking game designer or artist or freelancer lives this shit. The challenges for some of them are far greater than me, for others it’s not as much. It’s very exhausting and stressful and the financial & success disparity between the larger companies (many of which engage in practices or business decisions I disagree with & do harm to the industry and gamers in general) and small creators is a slap in the face, especially when I see a lot of smaller creators who end up either needing to or feeling like they need to just suck it up and suck up to try to get a single fucking scrap of that success. It’s not fair to them and it’s unnecessarily beneficial to those up top.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everyone in this industry also gets the constant threat of harassment, constant battles of social media & internet debate and discourse, and that ever so exciting commentary about how indie games are so overpriced while people drool over luxury sets of hardcover books filled with shoddy photomanips or prejudice laced narratives, sometimes both, maybe with some extra “this can’t be shipped until after the cardboard shortage” components.  When so many designers I know are literally just trying to afford a fucking meal, it is vile to watch, and I have lost the capacity to fight it actively and to watch my colleagues suffer deeply while I’m also struggling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have had some boons in the past year – my spouse has a slightly better job, I found a way to exchange some work to help afford massively helpful medical treatment, & I have avoided direct COVID impact (I lost my grandmother, and my dad got COVID, but we’ve been lucky). We’ve still had a lot of health & wellbeing issues (for all three in my polycule), repeated issues with our ancient house, and everything feels constantly delicate – like even the slightest thing that goes wrong will destroy everything, because there is no support, there is no infrastructure, and I can’t even keep up with design work or work a regular job to help contribute.\u00a0 It’s exhausting and terrifying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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by Beau J\u00e1gr Sheldon, 2021.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Plan<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Next year, my goal is to not work towards capitalism. While I will continue my work at the resin shop I help at, & I have some small admin type tasks I do, any creative work I do will not be targeted towards sales or income.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am extremely aware that this is a privileged choice, but I also am aware that even with all of my disabilities & mental illnesses, I can’t get on disability, and I also can’t fucking work reliably. I’d still like to try to build skills, continue my recovery (recoveries, really), and do creative work, even if I can’t contribute to society or my household in any meaningful way. I’d like to find even a scrap of joy in daily life, or in my activities.  Trying to market my work, which is necessary to make sales, or market myself, which is necessary to get hired, feels hopeless, exhausting, and hasn’t succeeded much so far.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The things I hope I get to work on?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I still want to do game design, I have some projects that I’ve been slowly working on but too exhausted to engage with deeply. Carheart Nosferatu, some Script Change stuff, I dunno. We’ll see, but it’s on the list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am doing some more hands-on work, like drawing, painting, and making miniature diorama type stuff, as well as working in the shop. I’m hoping to get better at them! I built a fairy house that I’m planning to gift to friends, but want to make more! Plus I miss sculpting a lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to work more actively on my photography, doing more boudoir shoots for the kind of people who don’t normally get that kind of opportunity but absolutely deserve it, plus more nature photography, and maybe trying some video work. I even have some ideas for some Leading with Class video work, which would be amazing to get back to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of this with hopefully less time being absorbed in stressful online conversations, less paranoia & anxiety about who to trust or whether I’m fully understanding complex conversations or whether I’m failing to communicate effectively (and my career depending on it), and hopefully a lot more time to spend with my partners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A Reflection on Financials<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I wanted to just have a bit here to give context to what I’ve actually been earning in games, because that is very relevant to the weighing of scales I’ve done leading to the decision to step back. I’m going to share some data in text, plus some in screenshots in slideshows that I hope will actually work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first thing is my sales on DriveThruRPG. I didn’t download this year’s data in part because it’s, uh, kind of painful to look at, but from our tax downloads last year, I calculated that all of my games resulted in me receiving a $40.09 payout for 2020 (around $300 in sales went to The Trevor Project directly for sales of Of the Woods, over 30 copies), with 3 sales of Turn\/Towns Like Ours and one of Let Me Take a Selfie. I will likely be putting up my upcoming Turn supplement on DTRPG (with work from Fabby Garza and Jan Martin, among all the results of the Kickstarter rewards like new towns & archetypes), intended to be a charitable project donating to an Indigenous charity, and DTRPG is so far the only place I know that can donate directly instead of me having to juggle it. That’s the biggest value for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For all of my sales at Indie Press Revolution to date, I have had a total of $1173 in sales (that’s gross, I think). That was around 60 copies of Turn, and one copy of Behind the Masc. I am very grateful to be able to distribute through them, and for all of the promotion IPR has done on my behalf, so I’ll still be keeping my print copies & bigger project PDFs there. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, my itch.io sales, which are… a mixed bag. Script Change does pretty well, but that’s most of it, and I’ll let the screenshots here do some of the work. I’ve included screenshots of my payouts, each game or product I’ve released with its dashboard showing the graphs for the longest period of time I could of views\/downloads\/etc., and all the bundles I participated in (all but the BBC Bundle, the Queer Games Bundle, the Epimas bundles, the One-Shot Megabundle, and the Disabled Designers bundles are charity bundles I did not receive funds from), plus sales, payments, etc. over the past year.. <\/p>\n\n\n\n