CENSORSHIP AND BEING A MINORITY

I’ve been going back and forth on what I think about the Itchio staff. There’s even comments from me about the situation in the professional games media press where I’m sympathetic to the staff, but I’m also just annoyed by the incompetence and how chronically understaffed they’ve been.

At some point, intentions stop mattering. Gross neglect is harmful. As you’ve written, the delisting has caused a lot of damage that cannot be compensated at all. I’m still pissed that Uranium Gays went one from the most popular TYVNJ entry to the bottom; its re-indexing has made it bounce back up, but there’s a part of me that wonders if it could have reached more people.

Reading the zine, I think my opinion on the staff remains sympathetic but only slightly. I’m very, very irritated by the radio silence as well. They haven’t done shit for six months and counting. Volunteers are obviously burned out.

On a related point, they have done more than the bare minimum by geo-locking accounts for UK citizens: it’s one thing to hide the game entry but it’s another for the entire account to be hidden for these people. I don’t understand the rationale to this day when other websites have only hidden the game.

I don’t really know how to talk about Itch without getting emotional because I do care about the site. I know everyone is working hard, but there’s clearly a disproportionate amount of care given to people. It’s reminding me that in the end platforms are platforms: they serve the interests of capital, not us.

I'm sorry I just found this. Thank you so much for writing it. This is still so important right now and it feels like nobody's talking about it anymore if they're not directly affected, so it feels so isolating.

Thank you for writing this.

I wasn't planning on reading this because I knew it would be depressing. But I did and it was... I generally agree with the sentiment of this zine, aside from a couple parts of minority and fetish, but that's not the main point. It's still valuable insight into exactly how cowardly and complacent Itch.io staff is. Implicit bias affects people more than we know or want to admit so bringing attention to it helps in starting to overcome it. If only the people who run these sites, where others rely on them, would realize that. 

Thanks for making this. I read it through on a one-sit. Very captivating text and well put ideas. Also sheds light on things and gives people information.

I already read your zine “looking on writing black characters,” and I really appreciate the insights you gave there. This zine was no different. I like how nuanced you write. At the end of my read I was pretty angry with the way itch treats a selection of creators with plausible deniability – leaving them hanging and in precarious situations.

My games are still very much in the SFW category, and I learn about new games mostly through my feed and jam entries. That’s why it completely went past me, that the de-indexing was still an ongoing issue (I wasn’t even aware friends of mine were affected >.<).

I learn about new games through recommendations, but when I first started looking for trans rep games a year ago, what i found through itch’s search was very limited. I have to assume this has only become worse over time. This added barrier is especially dire considering how scarce media portraying people from minorities in a fair light is already.

To me the trans fem dev space I found here feels like a trading ring for zines: Very personal, at times transgressive, showing a wide variety of skills, and breaking with aesthetic norms. I’m glad I found this space. It becoming less and less discoverable is really dark.

Thank you for sharing your experience and shedding a light on the issue.

It's all so difficult and frustrating. Seeing you talk about it has helped me put words to some of my experiences as a trans woman in corporate workplaces, and it scares me the devaluation of art that is occurring through all of this. Art will always have value, and art always pushes boundaries, that's what it does.

I hope other creators feel the same but I know if certain platforms crashed and burned tomorrow, or just got worse for marginalized groups to the point we couldn't even post on them, I'd still find a way to make and share art with the people I could.

this is why we need to truly divest from any platform that even has corporate shareholders.  in a capitalist system it will always be profits over people.