Ritual of the Moon
Updated Mac Version to 64 Bit
What Could Have Been
Originally I was going to write 28 #RitualoftheMoonReflections but the last one, Pre-Release Feelings: Emptiness, felt pretty final to me - although, I'm told, kind of eended them on a bad note. (If you don't like bad-note endings, maybe Ritual of the Moon is not for you!). I did that ritual on release day I wrote about and burned some things I wanted to let go of. Felt nice but didn't really work as much as it usually does. The major thing I wanted to let go of was all the things that could have been.
It's hard not to see flaws in your own work, what could be better or improved upon. There's one major thing I wish I did differently, but it's something I chose early in the process and didn't realize it was not a good choice until a few months ago. For that I am like, welp, live and learn. (I'm not going to say what it is because I don't want you to realize what it is!!!)
Something I wouldn't change at all is the visuals. I think they're so beautiful. There's nothing that looks like it. But doing these #RitualoftheMoonReflections made me realize how beautiful so much of our process was. Making art is always full of possibilities and constraints. I usually plan and then impulsively pick something more than I like to iterate or edit, whereas artists Julia Gingrich and Rekha Ramachandran do a lot of iterations to refine and experiment. That plus the 5 years it took since I first started planning it means there are many different things that could have been. Some are so beautiful I'm sad they're not in the final game. But Ritual of the Moon is one game with one look. It could never be the way it is without the ways it's not. It couldn't be any other way because this is the way it became.
Now that you all have a taste of what Ritual of the Moon looks like, I thought I'd share this video of our design process, and some stills from different prototypes.
4 days after release.
https://vimeo.com/163869155
Pre-Release Feelings: Emptiness
The past few months, or maybe a year, I've been feeling very nihilistic. Not much matters. No matter how much yoga and meditation I do, I'm still stressed, in a culture that promotes stress, overwork, and individualized responsibility. No matter how healthy I am, I can dislocate a rib and still months later have limited mobility. Why not smoke cigarettes again? Why not skip meditation? Why not drink alcohol again? Why not throw this plastic bottle in the garbage bin right here instead of waiting til I find a recycling bin, because that recycling bin probably ends up in a garbage dump anyway. I recently finished a milestone exam in my PhD recently that I had been preparing for and dreading for months (a year?) but instead of feeling happy and accomplished and celebratory, I just felt empty inside. What was the point of all that work? Of all that stress? To check a box on my file? Hooray. I felt immensely happier and more fulfilled having dinner with friends that night than when my committee told me I got honours, something I had been secretly wishing I would but in reality gave me zero feelings other than emptiness. When people congratulated me, I was like "oh, sure."
These feelings are carrying over to Ritual of the Moon. First though, there is worry. What if no one plays it? What if no one likes it? What if no one can play for 28 days, and the whole premise is flawed? What if there is a bug that we don't know about? But more prominent that that is my feeling of emptiness. What does it matter? No one will play it. It's already been to festivals and at galleries, maybe its time is over. It doesn't matter what I price it, something will be unhappy with the price. I've talked about R o t M so much but I'm making such a big deal over nothing. I put years of work and dedication, alongside other really talented people also putting in beautiful work and dedication, for nothing. Just to feel empty.
Emptiness is a strange feeling. All feelings are hard to describe and don't really make sense unless you've experienced them. It can be either the feeling of missing something or that things are meaningless. I'm obviously the latter right now. Emptiness is often associated with depression, especially low level depressed feelings that exist in the every day, the slog to keep going, not necessarily sad. I personally am more prone to perfectionism, where everything matters too much, and I hold myself up to impossibly high standards. I think what's going on this year is the slowly growing belief that regardless if I live up to my high standards or not, it doesn't matter. Succeed or fail, whatever, i'm still sometimes anxious sometimes happy, and the earth is still doomed. Before I thought I had control over my life and my feelings, and it's seeming to me now that I have barely any.
This really isn't necessarily a bad thing. Letting go of some perfectionism and control can be beneficial. Emptiness too isn't bad. For the past 2 years or so I've been wanting Ritual of the Moon to be over so I can open up space for new projects. That emptiness is space for the next idea, the next project, or simply space for the lack of pressure. In fact, tomorrow night the programmer Chris and I are going to do a ritual where we burn Ritual of the Moon stuff like prints of assets and scribbles of notes about my feelings on it, so I can completely empty myself of it. Show gratitude for the whole process and all I've learned from it, and then let it go. Soon Ritual of the Moon will be the world's, not mine, so I have no business holding on to it.
1 day until release.
Writing about R o t M
First, there is a new, very dramatic trailer out for Ritual of the Moon! Please get hype. Now, onto writing about writing.
Not last summer but the summer before I wrote the first draft of an essay about the process of Ritual of the Moon, psychosocial disability, and time. It became two paper, one short and informal one on First Person Scholar, and one longer and more academic one in a special issue on queerness in Game Studies edited by Amanda Phillips and Bonnie Ruberg. Both papers are amazingly open access!
I'm really proud of this paper. Even though I'm an artist, my academic writing tends to be really dry (good for getting As in school but bad for being an artist-scholar), so being able to weave together theory, art practice, and personal experience helped enable me to experiment more with it. It also is the beginning of how I'm thinking through my academic projects and dissertation, which is about the regulation of affect and debility for profit of neoliberal capitalism done through videogames, and then imagining a different, healing form of game design based for psychosocial disability. I'll be starting to write that in earnest in the fall.
In these papers I talk about the design process as it relates to the faux-division of craft and technology, and the labour of craft, but mostly I focus on time. Specifically, combining notions of queer time with crip time, the former being about the ways in which queerness can and has reformed chrononormativity, queer people's relationship to time and urgency, oscillating between no future (Edelman) and hopeful futures (Munoz). Crip time is a term used to describe theories of time and disability (almost always as they are formed by capitalist impositions) that make us recognize how expectations of long things take are based on very particular minds and bodies. This is felt in the affect of every day life, the mundanity of the labour to keep on living. As you might have read in previous #RitualoftheMoonReflections, I think this daily mundane is a site of debilitation but at that same time can be the most important site of resistance, healing, and recuperation. In the paper in Game Studies, I talk about quantum time, how quantum physics is currently understanding the non-linearity of time, but I won't try to sum that up here!
I also talk about my feelings re: the game taking so much longer than I thought! An excerpt:
"I’ve spent a lot of the past two years agonizing and complaining. Oh my god I want the game to come out so much. It’s a year over my estimation. It’s not done. I really want it to be done. I’m scared it will never be done. I’m scared it will loom over my head for the rest of my life. I’m scared I will put it out before it’s ready.
How do you know when it’s time to let go?
But I’ve had to shift my thinking about it. Instead of hating that it isn’t out yet, I’ve started to tell myself that it needed time to be fully digested, for me and the team to fully understand it and do the idea justice. It needed time to transform. I tell myself that labour takes time. That love takes time. I needed time to strip it to the barest bones of meditation on healing the future.
I’m so used to making things in a hypomanic state: work work work, exhaust myself then be done. But the pace has to be different for this game because it is about a different pace. It is about daily dedication in small bits over long periods of time. It is about being confused, stuck, suicidal. It is about meditating for 5 minutes a day because over time that creates a ritual that sustains us. And maybe the game is waiting for the right time to be released. Maybe it is waiting for when it makes the most sense. I’m realizing that it feels more prescient than ever. I know it is on so many of our minds, that push and pull between the desire to set the world on fire, giving up on it, and only caring for each present instant, and on the other hand, putting every ounce of ourselves into making the world better even if it feels fruitless, even when the majority seems against us. It feels befitting and relevant to consider the future of queerness, of racism, and of disability in North America and much of the world, at a time when living on the moon by yourself doesn’t seem like such a bad idea."
Now, it's almost out and I have new feelings about it! More on that tomorrow...
2 days until release.
The Soundtrack
☾ https://ritualofthemoon.bandcamp.com/ ☾
3 days until release.
On deciding when to blow up and when to heal
The base idea for Ritual of the Moon came as I was fighting with a close friend. Or, I was fighting. She had no idea. I was feeling really abandoned and betrayed. I couldn't decide if I should keep putting loving healing energy and effort into our relationship or I should blow up at her and say fuck it. I don't think there's always a right choice between these two.
I can stew over these kind of things for a long time. I can sometimes hate making decisions. Or, more accurately, sometimes it feels as if I cannot make a decision. I'll get stuck in loops of "what if", playing out scenarios over and over, flip flopping between options every hour, minute, or even second. It's really bad when I'm anxious. I'll get stuck in the no-decision loop. I'll think all day - or for days or for weeks - having the same repeating thoughts.. I'll try to urge myself to make a decision, but I can't. If I try to make one, tell myself "ok, this is what I'm doing!" it won't stick. I can stare at a screen all day, trying to decide if I should book this flight or that flight. Tell this person that thing or not. Choose this PhD program or that one. Go to the grocery store or not. Doesn't matter how "big" of a deal it is, I can get stuck in it. Sometimes I have to call my mom and ask her to make the decision for me.
So, I was stuck in that decision process about my relationship with my friend. How it turned out was, I passive aggressively let something slip, and then she pressed me on it and got me to tell her how I was feeling, and she then shared how she felt. And as a result we fully reconnected! One can look back now and say I should have just told her my feelings right away, but really sometimes it's so much effort to try to tell people how you're feeling, too much of that loving healing energy and effort, when you don't know if it will be accepted.
It might seem like an easy choice to always protect the earth, but sometimes the earth deserves to burn. I have no answers on how to know when to do what. It's always changing. All I know is that for me, it's best to actually make a decision and not be stuck in between.
4 days until release.
On Achievements
I was pretty adamant that there would be no achievements in Ritual of the Moon. I hate achievements in all videogames. I think they, at best, annoying and meaningless, and, at worst, a representation of the way most videogames create a loop of work and false reward in order to make the players feel productive, a mandatory feeling under neoliberalism. Ritual of the Moon is about self-reflection, and daily habits, not work and reward. There are no celebratory flashing lights or music cues that make you want to play again and again. It is modelled after ritual and meditation, where the only reward is being more emotionally in-tune (which sometimes is not an award!).
But last week I was like, well what if instead of thinking about them as "achievements" which does not make sense for this game, I think about them as markers of the narrative progress. There is nothing in the game that pops up and says "you made this choice! so this is what will happen!" so the Steam achievements do that work. Other than the first one which is an achievement for playing for 7 days, each achievement marks a change in narrative path you are on. I think the moment they pop up will be distracting, but I actually like the signalling of different paths and options.
Of course, only the Steam version will have achievements. If you are like me and dislike achievements but are interesting in the splitting of different story paths, I've attached the achievement doc here so if you play on mobile or itch, you can refer to it.
5 days until release.
Raw Scans
To make the visuals of Ritual of the Moon, artists Rekha and Julia handcrafted objects and sourced materials, scanned them, and digitally manipulated them. Here are some of the raw scans. There are the crystals and runes, clay molds, wire weaving, my hair, broken computer hardware, a crystal, and very creepy bottles i made.
6 days until release.
Pre-Ritual Sale
Techno Tarot is a robot who gives you a tarot reading. All the digital cards are true to the rider-waite deck, with some genders and skin colours changed, and the meanings of the cards are the same, but cyber-ized.
Cyclothymia is in a way a pre-curser to Ritual of the Moon. (In a way, they're all pre-cursers to Ritual of the Moon...). It's a narrative that begins with connecting starts and ends with a woman having feelings in her bedroom.
Cyber Sext Adventure is a game where you sext with a bot. Enough said.
Parts to Remember is an interactive found footage film about bodily memory.
I've written about the earth is a better person than me before in these #RitualoftheMoonReflections. It's my most recent game about a woman who finds she can talk to the earth around her - and have sex with it.
So take the week and enjoy these pieces!
This is the itch link: https://itch.io/s/17429/pre-ritual-sale
Or you can get the earth is a better person than me on steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/959710/the_earth_is_a_better_person_than_me/
7 days until release.
Text Material Trials
Before we settled on embroidery and wood burning for the text, we tried out some other things like wire, pencil crayon, glue, sparkle paint, and puffy paint. Puffy paint is amazing. Just in general. Puffy paint is great. Everything looks like foamy clouds.
My writing is so messy I really couldn't do hand written or puffy paint even if I wanted to. Embroidered text is more legible than my handwriting.
I also tried cursive, which was a mistake.
8 days until release.
