 Hi, I'm Portbentine. I'm probably best known for making a bunch of games like Howling Dogs and Crystal Warrior Gesha, plus organizing and curating around the accessible game design software known as Twine. I'm now going to say a series of words that will end in about 20 minutes. I get asked questions like, what was your inspiration? When did you decide to do this? I don't believe in the intentional versus unintentional dichotomy. I feel like it diminishes the writing of feminine people. I believe that my subconscious is a skill and no less important than anything I can identify is a conscious decision. Gender in my games. Character in my games is feminine. She or they. A lot of media spreads the belief that femmes can't survive on their own, can't have friendships and romances and alliances of their own, but I'm not really interested in anything else. I approach hypertexts like cinema or music a lot of the time. Oh wait, I just had a slide, sorry. I like to imagine trans practices as unique as each universe and then many genital implants, magical anti-androgening glyphs, a vampire schoolgirl sucking on histrogenated blood. I approach hypertexts like cinema or music. To me, hypertext is more like a camera or a lyric than a page of text. I like the intimacy that comes with individual sentences and words. People don't want to read, they want to die. I love random generation. I'm interested in creating narrative impressions for randomized parts, kind of like a poem that changes each time. Each game of Love is Zero is, it generates like, you have these normal branching choices but it generates this lyric in parallel with your choices. So it's kind of like this engine for processing the normal choices that happened in a choose your own adventure game. I also made a game called Her Car is the Edge of the World. It's about being a woman who drives around in her car and murders people. You do this by looking at people on the road and deciding whether to give them a ride or not. The game presents, you have the randomly selected set of characteristics. Like their hair or clothes or whatever. These characteristics are tied to any mechanics or bonuses. There isn't much of an in-game persona to share responsibility with. This places responsibility directly on the player. I'm interested in presenting unusual choices to the player that interrogate them as a person about the interruption of fictional incentives. In Her Car is the Edge of the World, the protagonist is never caught. Like the monstrous Femmes from my other games, she never dies. Most media that explores monstrous femininity usually kills them at the end. People want to be entertained but they don't want to consider what the day-to-day life of a monster is like. They might have to feel guilt. Now I'm going to talk about walls and space in my games. Armada is an action arc where you play a slime girl who sprays slime. You go through the game hemmed in by walls and other barriers, like in many graphical games. One of the endings, however, turns you into an agent of corruption. Now you spray a glitched slime which eats away at whatever it touches like acid, changing colors, destroying barriers. Instead of representing the chaos ending through dialogue or cutscenes, I made it so every time you use the most common command of the game it makes everything go to shed. Pink Zone, on the other hand, has no walls, not the normal kind, anyways. Things will slow you down but never stop you from moving completely. There is only friction and you kind of figure out what things are in this Roshakian kind of way by interacting with them. I like to use space in my twine games too. In Cyber Creamy, which is about being haunted by evil AI, it starts out with a more traditional spatial map where you can walk around a spaceship and pick up weapons, that kind of thing. Over time it dissolves into abstract space. You're no longer clicking on places, you're clicking on emotions. Every time the game makes you think you have control of it, like when you escape from Cyber Queen, it does this by reasserting the map. When you're caught, it dissolves again. The effect is of being toyed with by a superior intelligence. Twine is really good at summoning up these changing states because of how amorphous the hyperlink is. Physicality in my games, everything you swallow will one day come up like a stone as a game about suicide. People are afraid to let a living woman talk about suicide. At the moment of death, the mental distress, untrustworthy, stigmatized, is translated to physical evidence, trustworthy, vindicated, manipulable. If you're dead, you get a million reblogs but a living woman talking about her experiences because it's 165. It seems counterintuitive to wait until people are dead before listening to them, but I think I understand. They don't want to think about the sheer number of trans people who need housing and food into healthcare because you think about that and you have to think about the system that creates those artificial scarcities in the first place and how fucked everything is. It's way easier to solve a corpse's problems than the messy problems of someone who is still alive. It's way easier to co-opt a corpse for your agenda than listen to the uncomfortable truths of someone who is still alive. I hosted the game for 24 hours and deleted it. Many important subjects are reduced to frictionless, re-bloggable fodder for neoliberal emotional consumerism, so I wanted to make a game that required outside intervention for survival, just like suicide. With those we love alive is a game where you draw symbols on yourself to react to parts of the story. I was really surprised by how many people did this. I got like hundreds of drawings and it's kind of a big deal to me with my job to get this kind of circulation of energy back to me after I make something. So it was a really different experience from when I normally threw something out to the shadow audience void. And it was just very touching for me. I call some of my games therapeutic because they're in dialogue with the body. And with those we love alive you meditate, draw on yourself and talk about trauma. There is kind of this active, curious voice in a lot of my games, curious about the person on the other end. A lot of the upgrades people have made to the internet are really boring. I'm interested in the mysteries, the in-between places, the people still love it, 3 a.m. I like to think about who might find something I made and how intimate that connection is. So I write intimately. Here are some random games I'm working on right now. This is about a post-apocalyptic salon society trying so hard to click it with my non-dominant hand. I'll cross media for you. And as a trans woman, I really love cars and blood, so I wanted to kind of make a game about resultants, you know, femme racer. I don't really have anything besides intro. Maybe it'll just be that, I don't know. This is inspired by the Catamites Marker games where you draw graphics on an index card with marker and scan them in and make a game. It's really kind of easy to do and nice and compact and cozy. Websites to sell art with. A lot of what I make wouldn't work with gatekeeping or big campaigns. So I use sites that allow me to focus on, quick turnaround and smaller creations. Teespring will print and ship shirts if you're designed on them as long as enough people pledge to your campaign. Shirts can be a little expensive unless you reduce your take. This was offset by not having to make or ship the shirts. If your main objective is getting people to wear your designs, it's a good option. The female oriented shirts run a bit tight, so I suggest selling a variety of types since there's no such thing as a female or male body. Gumroad is good for selling smaller things. One thing I've learned to selling my degenerate film is that a lot of online marketplaces don't like it when you sell explicit sexual content. So I had to remove certain images from this. They can be more lenient if stuff looks like it fits under some weird cultural standard of art or if it's more text based. So just a heads up. Gumroad takes a cut of 5%. Oh wait, oh no, oh no, wrong thing. It's so horrible. One thing I like to do is disable the option to ask people for a name when they buy something. Things that ask people for names can be daunting in a world where we often have to use or conceal deadlines. Patreon is my main source of income. It's kind of a way to subscribe to a person instead of a product. The figure you see isn't exactly what people receive though because Patreon takes about a 9% cut and some people's cards bounce as well. You can set it to receive pledges monthly or per thing you make. People are probably more psychologically inclined to pledge per month, but it really depends on what you're doing. Harassment dynamics that trans fems face. This is the really fun part of the talk. People don't really talk about the unique harassment dynamics trans feminine people deal with. If someone calls a woman a bitch, there's a general understanding that that is misogyny. But they call trans feminine people things that are harder to respond to. Rapist, sexual predator, abuser, pedophile, et cetera. They often call us the thing they did to us. They call us things so bad that even denying them is destructive. Who wants to stand up in public and say they aren't those things? Who is the privilege to not get called those things in the first place? And of course, as a white person, I benefit by narratives that black people don't have access to. These flattened narratives designed to get wider acceptance aren't helping feminism. They're putting people in danger. Some other things I've dealt with. I've been sexually harassed. I've been misgendered. I've been intimidated away from conferences. I've been forced out of jobs. I've had other game designers harass me out of housing. I've been pressured when I worked as a curator not to cover the games of trans women who are seen as competition to other game designers. Working in game design gave me a PTSD, a condition where I relive what happened to me every day. It's been years since certain incidents and I still wake up and it's the first thing I think about. A feminist culture that was unwilling to intervene at any point during those years does not make me feel included. You shouldn't need to be some kind of cockroach just to make a game. Like in feminism, there's this pressure to be strong and brave and absorb a lot of pain. I don't want to be strong. I want to be happy. One thing I would suggest is moving away from community and scene and movement models with their false promise of solidarity toward what you can directly affect. The nature of idealizing a movement is that it becomes more important than people. This is why most of the harassment I described came from feminist and queer spaces. This is why a lot of spaces are right with assault and abuse. In the zine, the broken teapot, an anonymous author wrote the following. There are no activist communities only the desire for communities or the convenient fiction of communities. A community is a material web that binds people together for better and for worse in interdependence. If it's members moving away every couple years because the next place seems cooler, it is not a community. If it is easier to kick someone up and to go through a difficult series of conversations with them, it is not a community. Among the societies that have real communities, exile was the most extreme sanction possible, tax amounts to killing them. On many levels, losing the community and all the relationships that involved was the same as dying. Let's not kid ourselves, we don't have communities. For a lot of transfems with their fragile health and socioeconomic status, exile is death. Here's what no one wants to say. We don't have diversity because transfems are regularly scapegoated and they always have been. Because we have fewer connections, many of us without family, friends, work, et cetera, it is easier to make us disappear. This violence is accomplished with character assassination, misgendering, gaslighting, mobbing and ostracization. It's easier to victim blame than to take criticism. If you want to find the scene with the biggest problems, look for the one that says it has no problems. We need disarmament, not diversity. Diversity is pointless as long as the ability is retained to make marginalized people disappear and to thin air. An ability founded on capitalist colonialist constructs like masculinity, the Western gender binary and whiteness. It's like waving a gun around telling people, it's okay, I'm not going to shoot you. Naturally, my next topic is making things with PTSD, trauma, you know. I feel like trauma for me has been more conducive to short form than long form. I hate thinking about my future. I've been trained my whole life to hate, thinking about it. It's hard to put things into the world if you feel you won't be around for it. I made a lot of stuff in hyper concentrated bursts like this talk because doing anything that didn't nominate me was terrible. A lot of the coverage and marketing apparatus is based around larger work, which, like novels, are difficult to produce without the proper material conditions. But this isn't purely about physical resources. It's important to understand the emotional barriers to creating what they took away from us inside. All of this technical by the numbers aspects of diversity don't mean anything. If you don't repair a lifetime of being told our ideas don't matter. So we need emotional support. Diversity is not a substitute for friendship and war. A lot of trans fans who manage to get a job find themselves in a lonely, anxious, icy environment. Making games for years without access to social spaces and peers made me feel like I was crazy. I still don't have access to many of those spaces. I still get hostility from many game designers. So if you perceive similar treatment, don't blame yourself. The world has a million reasons for trans exclusion. You don't deserve any of it. Let's be pragmatic. Anyone who is going to treat trans fans like human beings would already have done it. If feminism wanted trans fans, it had hundreds of years to do so. If the old scenes wanted trans fans, we would already be there. All this bargaining and begging for acceptance is the model of an abusive relationship. We are in an abusive relationship with the world. I write for the people who will never be accepted into these spaces, the ones who are unable to assimilate and a survivor waiting to be articulated. I guess I have five minutes, so if anyone wants to, I guess, ask questions or throw things at me, that's fine. No throwing things at me. No throwing, stop doing that. Yes? Sort of generic, but where can we find out more about him? Oh, I guess I have a website. It's pretty shameful. God, I mean, I guess if you google Porpentine, I'm the first result. So I've beaten the hedgehog, or no, I've beaten the porcupine, whatever that animal was. Thank you. Thanks. Yeah. Oh yeah, they need a stick. How do you feel about more ways to get more trans feminine people? But in two more sustainable income situations, like actually we're both making approximately the same me on GetTip, you on Patreon, but I've got a dozen friends and they all aren't going to get 1K in love. Oh yeah, I know. That's all bullshit. Like it's all bullshit and luck. Like yeah, I was just, yeah. Okay, yeah, sorry. If anyone here asks me, yeah, right? Like I don't, anyway. Your opinions. Besides that it was bullshit, unless you don't have more opinions. I mean like, Patreon and all that shit is bullshit. Like, to clarify, I mean, I mean, getting, I mean, I think the things I described can be potentially helpful to people in certain situations, but yeah, like, it's a completely, you know, corrupt system and that not a lot of people have access to. Yeah, it's really hard to figure out, I mean, I'm kind of figuring that out myself. Like, for the last years I've lived with other trans people in like pretty small rooms and kind of pulled our resources. It's kind of a very diverse set of tactics required to survive and like, yeah, the whole art thing requires, it's just so sleazy and it's not like some fit all solution for people. It's just been one that I've been lucky to find. This one's a statement. Like, I do basically the same thing. Like, I take that same amount of resources and I was just getting to myself and I'm like, I want all of my trans people to have this and I'm like, well, I can't get more. I'm just going to share it and spread myself thinner so I can support like three or four people on what I was already getting. Right, because there isn't like, there isn't like an endless well of like bill gates to fund trans people to just give them like, yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, trans people actually having physical resources is something that I feel is really ignored in favor of like tokenism and success stories and like, there's so many people who like, okay, for me it took many, many years to just get to the point where I could feel okay like creating when there's like all this trauma for people to work through. Like people basically need like, it's like a huge wound that's just staggering to look at. People who grew up without families, people who need, yeah, it's a massive wound and I think it's beyond me articulating it. I guess in building from that is it possible that if enough people got together that we could create an alternative payment system that deals with these issues like in the spirit of like solving the problem that's there? So, wait, sorry, were you done finished with your thought? Thank you, pretty much.