Zoyander Street

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 17:46:11 +0100

I’m selling some things that might interest #immersive media folks and anyone experimenting with #alternatecontrollers.

👋 The first Leap Motion device, which facilitates gesture-based input: ebay.io/m/IOumzt

🫀 This USB heart rate monitor: ebay.io/m/Le7yr2

#altctrl

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 20:41:13 +0100

Spending too much time on this… WIP making custom vinyl covers for my laptop keyboard that show the default #cavesofqud key bindings and the JAFL #Shavian layout. Lots of helpful assets from game-icons.net, which are so nicely made they don’t even need to be modified for vinyl cutting.

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 11:07:23 +0100

30 mins left on this auction of my limited edition Dreamcast, which is currently set to go for a criminally low price. Get this bargain and help me to buy a mobility scooter: ebay.io/m/zSDIRF

#retrogaming #dreamcast

Three alternatives to a social media ban for under-16s

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 10:40:20 +0100

The UK Government’s proposed social media ban for under-16s punishes children for the crimes of corporations.

Tech companies such as Meta have for well over a decade been documented participating in the manipulation of our electoral systems, our media ecosystems, and our minds. Instead of legislating to protect the public as a whole from these harmful practices, the ban simply uses this as a pretext for a new level of mass surveillance, and a new revenue stream for the private corporations that process our personal documents for age checks.

Consent for this has been manufactured through, among other things, a public consultation that included obviously manipulative survey design, with questions such as “do you agree that adults should do more age checks, if it means children are safer online?” You could do this very obvious rhetorical move with anything. “Adults should speak Latin with one another, if it prevents children from hearing things that may harm them”, “Adults should sacrifice the blood of a goat at every solstice and equinox, if it keeps children safe from evil spirits”, perhaps even “Adults should overthrow capitalism, if it means children are safer”.

Rather than keeping children safe, the ban threatens to send any particularly determined young person into underground, less regulated online spaces, which will further fuel a rise in extremism and empower predators. More than 60% of children in Australia are still able to access social media despite the ban; they’re just doing so in a more secretive and less supervised way.

It doesn’t have to be this way. I imagine that in the mirror universe, where good intentions prevail and worst-case scenarios are hypotheses rather than predictions, a better government is developing a programme of activities to foster a better internet for everyone. Here are three examples of things that I imagine our benevolent doppelgangers might be creating.

Local, community-run, adult-supervised online services

We denizens of the bad place seem to have taken for granted that online services that connect people to one another must be owned by, and run in the interests of, massive tech corporations. We give them far too much credit; too few people tell the history of the internet as autonomous grassroots movements to create useful resources for specific communities, such as the rise of BBS boards and IRC channels in the 1990s. In discussions last year about the Online Safety Act, questions about community-owned federated services such as Mastodon servers were met with bewildered waffling - it seemed that Ofcom knew that these existed, and also knew that the law had not been written with this in mind, but at the same time needed to retain the right to prosecute a webmaster running a service that causes a large amount of harm despite its small scale. This has put people who run small services in a precarious and somewhat frightening position, despite these exact people potentially holding the key to making internet use safer for everyone.

When I think about how a reasonable adult keeps their child safe in any space, IRL or virtual, a key question is who is supervising the kids, and whether you trust them. It has been clear for a long time that nobody should be allowing Meta or Roblox to act as babysitter, given their history of fostering mental illnesses and child labour exploitation. Online spaces that host young people should either be run by a trusted adult, or by paid, professional digital youth workers. They could be managed by schools, libraries, charities, or informal local groups.

Handing some responsibilities to young people after they turn 18 could be a significant boon to media literacy and digital skills; moderating online communities quickly teaches you about how to have clean arguments, how manipulative speech functions in day-to-day life, and how to maximise agency over the tech tools that you use. Services can be created using a wide variety of tools and platforms, some of which are open-source and highly customisable to the needs and interests of a small community. Co-design and participatory design approaches become almost second-nature at this scale, creating a highly democratic digital space that allows young people and adults alike to develop valuable citizenship skills.

Community-run digital youth spaces are not a lofty aspiration. I’m on a private Minecraft server that has strict rules allowing children to play only if one of their trusted adults is also present either virtually or in person. It means operating at a much smaller scale, even than other community-run services. Anyone using ActivityPub for a youth group should only federate with a select group of other trusted servers, and continuously monitor the safety of the other servers in their network. It also means that someone in the community or the government has to cover the costs of these services, as with any physical community space; in this scenario, advertisers get very little opportunity to profit from the attention of young impressionable minds. Youth workers should also receive proper training and compensation. Many people are not used to paying for these things in the digital world, or having to apply for government funding to support them, but is it really more costly than offering up your children as assets that big tech can sell to advertisers?

Regulating addictive and manipulative design patterns

The consultation survey demonstrated that the government is well informed on some of the leading issues with addiction-by-design in social media apps. They used the more neutral term “persuasive design”, and I understand that there are significant problems with the use of the term “addiction” since tech products don’t directly interface with our neuro-receptors (yet - who knows what Musk’s minions may eventually create). However, I think the term “persuasive” suggests that a system has been designed with a particular rhetorical intent in mind, which gives these corporations far too much credit. Yes, they act intentionally, but they are too amoral and nihilistic to envisage any specific rhetorical purpose to the things they create. The only message is (to channel Bo Burnham) “consume more of everything, consume all the time; consume anything at all, we don’t care what it is, as long as you do it here.”

Design patterns specifically called out in the consultation included infinite scrolling, autoplaying videos, and content recommendation algorithms. A recent ruling in California also included push notifications and likes as examples of “compulsive” design patterns that have harmed young people’s mental health. Since these have already been identified, why aren’t they being regulated as a matter of urgency? Legislation should at the very least require that all users are given the ability to turn these features off, or better yet, ban them entirely. Safety-by-design should be mandatory in all products that are designed to be used by the public, including social media apps.

This approach would be fundamentally different to the foolhardy attempts to control substance abuse disorders by criminalising users. Humans have a fundamental need to connect with one another and seek out information. If you ban individuals from accessing these things, they will find other ways to fulfill that need. In contrast, although addictive design patterns probably simulate some kind of real neurological imperative, I doubt that a ban on content recommendation algorithms would force significant numbers of people to seek out illicit sources to score the perfect cadence of cute animals, ragebait, and ads. Its not the quality of the algorithm that keeps us locked in, but the network effect of everyone and their dog having signed up with a corporate service provider long before it showed its true face.

Funding a mental health renaissance

Nevertheless, as with drug policy, harm reduction should be paramount. We’re being told that young people have soaring rates of anxiety and that nobody knows why, but it must be those damn phones. I agree that corporate app design is having a deleterious effect on the mental health of all users - and, with the forced introduction of LLMs, now their cognitive abilities are under assault as well. But to attempt to solve the mental health crisis by cutting people off from one another is beyond absurd - it’s potentially disastrous. If the UK government bans social media use for a group already facing isolation at unprecedented levels, it will need to mobilise an army of mental health practitioners to ease young people through the transition to whatever the next phase of youth socialisation will look like (what will it look like by the way? Presumably we’re not aiming to go back to the 1990s and early 2000s, when there was a moral panic about youth street gangs and teen pregnancy rates.)

Unfortunately, we already know that an obvious and predictable need for increased mental health services is unlikely to provoke any UK government into meaningful action to meet that need. We have known for many years that in addition to the stress of lockdown, COVID causes neurological damage and mid- to long-term loss of functioning, which naturally leads to mental health problems - why hasn’t the 2020s seen a wave of new programmes covering the cost of training and hiring large numbers of counsellors and therapists? Even though it only represents a small portion of claims, we’re being told that a rise of anxiety is fuelling a massive increase in benefits spending - however, any chronically ill person can tell you that “anxiety” is the first diagnosis you get when you’re still trying to persuade your doctor to properly investigate your symptoms, which likely have a neurological or other systemic cause. So, where is the funding to increase the number of GPs and give them more time with patients so that they can properly diagnose people who have been labelled with anxiety? And when the primary issue really is mental illness, young people wait so long to be seen that they often age out of these services before they reach the top of the waiting list, landing on an adults' list that is also impossibly backlogged. This is all the worse if by this time their mental illness has developed into something considered too complex for the “Talking Therapies” service, a cognitive-behavioural hammer that treats every patient like an identical nail. With all this concern about young people’s anxiety levels, why is the government not increasing funding for severely underresourced children’s mental health services?

Whether we ban social media or not, a massive expansion of mental health care is desperately needed, with a wider variety of approaches and a close integration with physical health. I imagine that in the mirror universe, trained and supervised digital youth workers are able to spot signs of mental distress early and signpost young people to local services, who will see them promptly and work with them to identify a therapeutic approach that best suits their needs. Young people who are being victimised by cyberbullying receive mental health first aid immediately, and since mental health services are adequately supported, the bullies are also able to receive appropriate care to resolve their issues with aggression and boundaries, without this taking any resources away from victims. But when cyberbullying happens in our world, we focus our ire on the medium, paying little attention to what the message might tell us.

Implementing any of these recommendations would of course cost the government money, and lose them political capital with infuential tech corporations. This runs counter to present-day orthodoxy, which sees our government spending £billions in order to curry favour with AI boosters. If we can do that, then are we really so poor that we can’t afford to pay youth workers to manage gaming servers? To echo their own biased consultation, wouldn’t any cost be worth it, if it means that children are safer online?

AI and the Paradox of Agency exhibition

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 13:17:31 +0100

Last year I had the pleasure of contributing writing, research, and narrative design for Caroline Sinders and Romayne GadelRab’s new interactive installation that explores AI and decision making through the lens of disability benefits.

We drew inspiration from bureaucracy simulators such as “Papers, Please”, which have the player make decisions on other people’s lives. Instead of an allegorical dystopia, we decided to portray a near-future society beginning to attempt to reform the system to be more humane to disabled people. This attempt is furtive and incomplete, not least because its institutions still reduce people to numbers and datapoints.

The piece is now on display at Umea University’s Bildmuseet as part of the exhibition “AI and the Paradox of Agency”, which runs from 2026-03-13 to 2027-01-17.

www.bildmuseet.umu.se/en/exhibi…

Leaving Critical Distance

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:03:38 +0100

After more than a decade, I’ve decided to step away from the board of Critical Distance. I love this organisation so much, and I’m proud of what we do to contribute to a culture of online writing about games. I haven’t been able to play an active role in this since my MS diagnosis, and it’s time for me to move on and make room for someone else who can put new energy into it.

Critical Distance’s work becomes more important with each passing year, as threats to online writing intensify. The issue forefront of mind of late is AI, but this is just an extension of the patterns of enshittification that have been hostile to grassroots online culture for a long time. Writing became content, content became data, and with each step writers were ever more devalued. We need online spaces that intentionally cultivate an interest in each other’s contributions, provide support and encouragement to creative people who have something to say, and archive it for longevity and searchability.

There’s a lot of room here for volunteer work to strengthen the project. I’ve been particularly interested in finding help with our archiving tools, which would be a great project for a student or someone building their open-source web development skills. Expanding Critical Distance’s reach across platforms and formats could also be valuable work, perhaps by creating a new podcast series or reviewing the weekly roundups in a Twitch stream.

Our community recently rallied to boost support for our Patreon, meeting our new funding target within a day. With more funding, Critical Distance could expand its archiving efforts and carry out upgrades to the website, including overcoming bot traffic issues that have rendered our RSS feeds unusable. Please consider becoming a Critical Distance supporter on Patreon, so that they can get bigger and stronger while I get some rest.

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 21:13:01 +0100

Sharpening my Inkscape skills by tracing some playing card designs. This one taught me how to use a few of the path effects, cloning, and mesh gradients

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 21:07:42 +0100

I’m really enjoying the “World of Playing Cards” website at the moment, which has a large collaborative archive of cards with articles about different types, regions, time periods, etc. www.wopc.co.uk

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 20:24:09 +0100

What generally happens to trans artists who try to offer a grassroots alternative to mainstream wizard school IP? My project was relatively well-supported through grants, and even I’m seriously unwell due to burnout and broke after trying to make something cool happen for us. I can’t be the only one

Website making for trans health

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 15:07:47 +0100

Next week I’m headed to London again, this time to give a workshop at Studio Voltaire sharing skills and inviting people to contribute to the Desperate Livin trans health archive. We’re going to explore some DIY digital archives, and I’m going to try to share some of the joy I feel about the handmade independent web.

To me, making a webpage yourself using simple html is intrinsically a beautiful thing to do, because it gets you closer to the materiality of the thing you’re working with. This is all the more important during the AI bubble, as so many drag-and-drop tools have now incorporated generative AI (as Chris Lawrence pointed out in the announcement of the Critical Distance Fansite Jam).

There are still a couple of places left, so if you’re a trans person in reach of London who wants to contribute to digital resilience for the community, please register.

“Zoyander Street hosts a workshop on coding and content, with support from artist Jennifer Booth. This hands-on session focuses on practical digital skills for community use, including adding, updating and amending website materials, as well as incorporating accessible formats.

“In this workshop, participants will learn how to share and build digital skills; centre Trans health, autonomy and community-led knowledge; increase accessibility of the Desperate Livin’ website; and keep the archive socially active and sustainable.

“Desperate Livin’ is an interactive digital archive of materials created by and for members of the Trans community, supporting autonomy, health and resilience. The site is open-source and was compiled by Raju Rage and designed by Zoyander Street in 2022.

“Please note that this workshop is specifically designed for and by Trans people. Please complete the expression of interest form below. Your attendance will be confirmed on Friday 16 January 2026.

“A laptop is needed to participate in this workshop. If you don’t have one, please let us know and we can provide one.

“This workshop forms part of Tender Living, supported by Arts Council England and Paul Hamlyn Foundation.”

Event page at Studio Voltaire

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 17:20:33 +0100

You should come and see this in-person performance of my interactive queer sci-fi play Assigned Earth at Birth, at Bread and Roses Theatre in London on 11th or 12th December: app.lineupnow.com/event/tal…

On scripted interactions

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 18:38:42 +0100

A compliment I often receive is “you’re totally yourself, you don’t care what other people think”. Unfortunately, it’s not true. I worry a lot about how other people perceive me. It’s a bad habit, and an embarrassing one to have carried this far into adulthood. I’ve been told not to worry about this since I was a teenager who was verbally bullied a lot, and I’ve always found the advice illogical. I can’t separate who I am from the way I am perceived by others or from the way I move through the world. This doesn’t mean I feel empty. I feel like a dense mix of reactions that is permeable with the outside world. I try to make art that is responsive and permeable in that way.

Intrapology is my project in live interactive online theatre that centres disabled, neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+ people. Our shows run on our own free open source software Intrinsink, which we’ve developed in community with other artists working in games and theatre. Intrinsink allows the audience to influence what characters say and do through multiple-choice voting and free-entry text. A script shown to actors changes during the performance to reflect these audience interactions.

Intrinsink integrates narrative design approaches from videogames with the liveliness and authenticity of theatre, so we get to tell stories about sociotechnical systems, with sociotechnical systems. The movement between rigidity and fluidity is meaningful, as is the gap between what’s perceived as “human” and what’s perceived as “unnatural” in performance. This is all the more relevant in the AI bubble, when a machine’s capacity for social mimicry is being mistaken for an indication that it is developing sentience. Since social masking can be mechanised, we should look into the gaps in our own everyday performance to find our humanity.

I began working in this format in 2021 as a collaboration with D. Squinkifer, who first developed this approach to software-mediated interactive queer performance for their MFA project Coffee: A Misunderstanding. I suggested that we modify their existing approach to focus on collective voting, and hoped that this might allow us to reflect the way that our social context shapes who we are, what we think, and what we do. We created a test piece about our experiences of autistic masking, and the collective construction of social scripts.

Today we make a series of online interactive science-fiction performances set in a universe of many worlds, where each world is created (consciously or unconsciously) by the society that inhabits it. When people have conflicting worldviews, their world splits, and they find themselves living in two separate fragment worlds. We develop the worlds of this universe through collaborative worldbuilding workshops, using tabletop storygames. This means that our work reflects multiple modalities of interactive storytelling, and decentres the single author while still retaining a clear authorial voice.

I worry that people from interactive theatre prefer the fluidity and openness of improvised performances over the rigidity of scripted work like Intrapology. I am sympathetic to that position, and in fact I’m not even sure I can name anyone who has articulated it, so it may just be my own opinion that I’m projecting onto others. Nevertheless, I want to lean further into this aesthetic rather than seeing it as a flaw to be erased.

Part of it is that as a neurodivergent person, I want to defend the value of stilted speech and scripted interactions. This reflects thinking by neuroqueer theorists such as M. Remi Yergeau, who has argued for the rhetorical agency in autistic ways of communicating that are seen as disordered under neuronormativity. Yergeau highlights non-verbal communication such as hand flapping; Bernadette Bowen has argued in defense of stilted speech and the communication needs of hyperlexic autists. Autistic and transgender social psychologist Devon Price advocates for a process of “unmasking” that includes processing our fears about how we are perceived, and accepting the value of divergent ways of being in the world. The interaction features in Intrinsink reflect both polarities: the need to follow scripts to fit in, and accepting that our authentic ways of communicating might be seen as less “natural”.

We should get curious about the expressive aesthetic of awkwardness. This is a running theme in D. Squinkifer’s work - to take just a couple of examples, Interruption Junction highlights how expectations around conversational turn-taking can make a person feel or seem invisible, and Hold In Your Farts Or Die suggests that both masking and unmasking carry costs. Coffee: A Misunderstanding taught me that awkwardness is not necessarily something to be avoided - a tense silence and a lack of eye contact can mean many things, and we should grant ourselves a degree of agency over that meaning, rather than just seeing it as an intrusion that detracts from desirable, fluid interactions.

Part of my aspiration for Intrapology is to create a space where we might rewrite social scripts for ourselves, and invent idealised contexts in which we can imagine ourselves thriving. And yet, as soon as we invented a utopian community in the Intrapology universe, we started talking about the ways it would fall short, the ways “good communication” can be performative and even violent, and using interruptions to deepen the fissures in smooth interactions.

A healthy and authentic relationship with the world doesn’t fit the cultural ideal of smooth communication that is so easily mimicked by Large Language Models. Things should glitch and pause, our breath should catch, our eyes should meet only briefly. We are permeable beings, and the connections between us are sites of vulnerability. It’s not normal for interaction to feel normal.

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 15:35:31 +0100

A hybrid performance of Assigned Earth at Birth is coming to London in December, as part of the TALOS V science fiction theatre festival! post.intrapology.com/news/talo…

Interview with Geeks for Social Change

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 17:39:09 +0100

Dr Kim Foale very kindly invited me to do an interview for the Geeks for Social Change blog about digital archiving. It felt so validating to take a moment to reflect on one specific thread of my career, particularly one that connects to the museums side that goes all the way back to my undergrad year abroad experience. This interview was prompted by my two upcoming workshops with Raju Rage’s Desperate Livin project, on 22nd November online and 2nd December at Studio Voltaire in London.

How would you encourage our readers to get into archiving?

For some people archiving is a practice of collecting physical things like zines and artwork. You keep your collection somewhere safe: probably in your own home, rather than in a stranger’s garage, for example. Ideally, we’d approach digital archiving the same way. So, if you’re doing something digital, take a bit of time to think about your relationship with corporate power, and consider learning from the IndieWeb. Your safety strategy here depends on how nerdy you want to be - maybe you’re just periodically exporting a backup to an external hard drive, or maybe you’re self-hosting tools on your own server. I’m somewhere in the middle personally!

I wish more people who share their own experiences and perspectives with a community online were thinking about how they archive their contributions. We need searchable permalinks for the things people are posting on Tiktok, Instagram, and Youtube. It’s remarkably easy to set up an automatic archive on PeerTube that takes in videos from Youtube and Tiktok.

Trans-Digital-Archiving: Workshop 1 with Raju Rage, XYZ Projects and Studio Voltaire

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 18:22:50 +0100

Free, booking essential Saturday 22 November 2025, 4–6 pm UK time

I’ll soon be running an online workshop on digital archiving, building on the Desperate Livin project that collects grassroots resources for trans people and our supporters in a handmade indie website (see desperatelivin.com)

Participants will learn how to build and share their digital skills; centre Trans health, autonomy and community-led knowledge; improve accessibility across the Desperate Livin’ website; and keep the archive socially active and sustainable.

This workshop will be a space for dialogue around digital archives, Trans archiving, the IndieWeb, autonomous content, social web and community knowledge-sharing. Digital Archives (Sharing and Discussion) is the first of two workshops held as part of Desperate Livin’s Trans-digital-archiving series.

Please note that this workshop is intended for and by Trans people.

More info at the Studio Voltaire website

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 04:54:30 +0100

Some (groups of) parks, mapped with Marcelo Prates’s Prettymaps github.com/marcelopr… All using my custom preset that focuses on green spaces and leisure / culture. Do you recognise any of them? I love how each has its own characteristic shape.

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 18:46:24 +0100

I’m running some queer storygame sessions in Rotherham during October half term, about witches, skeletons, and dirt: post.intrapology.com/news/plug…

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 13:27:52 +0100

I’m still looking for 3-5 artists who I can support with grant applications this Autumn-Winter. If you face barriers to formal grant writing processes then this is free to you, as many major funders will pay for support workers. zoyander.cc/services/

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 17:20:36 +0100

For artists doing projects in England - Arts Council Project Grants is now open for grants up to £100k. If you face access barriers that impact your ability to apply, I’d love to help: zoyander.cc/services/

Dodgy Derek's poisoned pond (a story about creative fields)

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 14:07:30 +0100

Here’s something that connects a lot of the moral injury and just awkward conversations that I have as a digital artist in the 2020s:

A concept, tool, or field of enquiry was once a broad possibility space, explored by folks with lots of different perspectives and interests. A big pond that you can swim around in around fairly freely, without feeling a strong pull in one direction or another. Some currents lead you closer to capital, some lead you further away. Participants imagine the space they’re exploring in lots of different ways. Some schools look askance at others, temporary alliances and exchanges form and dissipate, activity ebbs and flows.

Then some arsehole with a lot of capital notices that this field could be useful to him - typically, he can use it to justify the value of some technology in which he has invested heavily, despite it being highly inefficient and having no demonstrable purpose. This investment probably now looks like several massive datacentres full of GPUs. I think of this arsehole as Dodgy Derek, because I picture him as a kind of Only Fools and Horses wheeler-dealer who owns a garage full of useless crap that’s poisoning the environment and needs to find a way to make money out of it.

So, Dodgy Derek comes along into this wide open possibility space, persuades his friends to invest some of their cash into his venture, and puts a load of resources into system. Immediately, the possibility space starts to collapse. Whirlpools form, and things that used to be distinct are now pulled into each other. Dodgy Derek’s garage of crap poisons the pond, it smells really bad, and it starts to attract attention.

It’s at this point that people start asking you about the new massively-hyped thing. And you have nothing positive to say about it at this point. Perhaps you vaguely remember when this was a much broader, vaguer, and more interesting space, but you don’t really want to say that because it sounds snooty. People will hear “I was into this before it was cool” but that’s not what this is - you were into it when it wasn’t a horrifying churning morass of toxic crap. You share a couple of points about why people should probably stay away from the nasty pond, and maybe the other person hears you or maybe they get defensive, or maybe they label you technophobic. “But think of the possibilities” they say, as if you haven’t been thinking about the possibilities for a very long time, as if you haven’t seen Dodgy Derek’s antics actively destroy most of those possibilities.

In the process of all of this, it becomes apparent just how differently your fellow swimmers were imagining the pond. Some people were there to explore the various interesting things living in the pond, and some were there to become the biggest fish in it. After you’ve left the pond, it’s mostly those bigger fish who stay behind. They think they’re going to keep eating the smaller fish and getting bigger and bigger. They think the naysayers are just resentful because they didn’t become a bigger fish. But the pond is toxic. Why do they want to be the biggest fish in a toxic pond? Why would you keep going in a space that has no life in it?

On the question "Does Sheffield have an indie games scene?"

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0100

This article in Now Then Magazine is at its heart a lovely profile of three local game developers: one small work for hire boutique, and two artgame devs making the sort of thing that’s very close to my heart. Indeed, it’s the kind of thing I constantly have to explain even to people who consider themselves gamers: Maisha Wester’s Coded Black, co-written by Desiree Reynolds, is a walking simulator about anti-Blackness in the US and UK; and Benjamilian Swithen’s Trans Theft Horso is an adventure game about gender gladness. It’s the kind of work I’d expect to see at Now Play This or Indiecade, and that was visible in the vibrant indie games scene of the San Francisco Bay Area when I spent time there in the mid 2010s.

I must admit though, I flinched at that headine: “Does Sheffield have an indie games scene?” But at least they didn’t call it “gaming”! It’s true that Sheffield seems to lack an indie dev scene, despite being home to people making cool indie games. I assume the German language has a word for the longing for a community of practice, which is as fundamental an emotion for me as romantic loneliness or professional insecurity - I’ll just call it “the angst”. It wasn’t sated even during my time in the Bay Area, and I’ll probably never have it that good again.

Counterintuitively, I probably wouldn’t even be a full-time artist making games today if I lived in a place known for its games scene.

Ever since I moved back to South Yorkshire, I’ve been frustrated by the lack of an indie games scene here. In fact, one of the moments that came closest to reproducing that scene in Sheffield was Gaming the Gothic, an event co-organised by my Intrapology colleague Emily Marlow. Apart from that, Sheffield just doesn’t seem to do alternative games events (the AMAZE outpost last year provided a much-needed intervention). There are no playtest events where you can regularly see quirky works-in-progress, and I have no cosy group of weird games people with whom to regularly cowork in a cafe.

One reliable salve for the angst is a gratitude practice. I didn’t have access to these things in the Bay Area simply because of the character of the place – it was in large part thanks to Randy O’Connor, who immediately befriended me and made an intentional effort to include me in things. All of it was set up on a grassroots level by various organisers in the scene, with little to no institutional support other than occasional in-kind contributions from tech companies – as is the American way. Organisers also received very little recognition for this work, though presumably they benefitted professionally from the relationships they built in the process.

As is common for games coverage outside of the games press and blogosphere, the article spends a lot of space at the top defensively trying to explain games’s existence and importance as a whole, particularly with reference to the sphere of arts and culture. “It’s difficult to make the case for video games as a medium. Almost everyone has, through intention or misadventure, been exposed to a good film…” The rehashing of the “are games culture?” faux controversy then ends up framing the issue of game developers’ invisibility in Sheffield, with the implication that games have been excluded from Sheffield’s arts and culture scene.

This risks giving an unrealistic picture of things, at least in contrast to my own experience. The one thing that’s saved me since moving here has been the embrace of games by South Yorkshire’s art institutions. To give just three examples: Rotherham ROAR has let me use their space for games installations a couple of times since 2017. In 2019, Site Gallery selected me for the Platform residency, allowing me to create games for gallery spaces, including their own. I’ve been a supported artist of Sheffield Theatres since 2023, when I was selected for the Bank Cohort programme; they’ve given similar support to other game-making artists such as Erin Marsh.

None of these things provided significant sums of money in themselves, but they have been helpful in securing other funding for my work. All of these institutions have put resources into supporting the development of local artists and profiling their work – by which I mean, there is at least one person who is paid to do the work of building and managing relationships and co-designing programmes of support with the artists themselves. It’s not cultural recognition that facilitates this stuff – it’s the everyday work of people who make space with one another.

I think it’s probably important to recognise the difference between a city’s games scene and the visibility of successful games with a clear identity from that city. In contrast, consider Thank Goodness You’re Here, a game developed and set in neighboring Barnsley that received significant recognition nationally and locally. Although Barnsley’s creative scene is doing well (I say enviously from Rotherham) I’m not aware of a thriving indie games “scene” there. Am I wrong? Is this another instance of Sheffield missing out on opportunities by failing to properly engage with its smaller neighbors?

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 18:07:59 +0100

I’d like to support between 3 and 5 artists to write grant applications between now and December. Disabled and neurodivergent artists may be eligible for FREE support. You can request my help with Arts Council England Project Grants, which reopens this month: zoyander.cc/services/

Flags

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 18:25:49 +0100

I read an article on CNN that was like “it’s normal to see our national flag here in the US, but in the UK it’s controversial”. This was sort of true in the 2010s, for a certain value of “normal”.

In my time in California in the mid-2010s I always knew I’d wandered too far from the Bart station when I started seeing flags. When you get too far from a dense population centre, the settlement quickly starts to lose its coherence and has to loudly assert its own existence. It’s as though the imagined community of the nation is fragile and contested in the context of all the wildfires and raccoons.

I had the same feeling when I was briefly an artist-in-residence in Belfast in 2019. Back then there were very few flags in England, so all the flags on houses there looked weird and ominous, especially with the police there being more visible and heavily armed. The hyper-visibility of flags doesn’t communicate that the identity of the place is stable, but the contrary: they’re artefacts of a decades-long conflict that isn’t fully resolved.

England now is like California was then. Flags are normal, in places burdened with the maintenance of this fragile sense of normality. City centres are eager to communicate many different things to you visually, but wander too far from a major rail interchange and you will find yourself in flagland, where the only thing any house seems to want to say is “England!” It’s the visual equivalent of Pokémon just saying their own name over and over again, but without the natural biodiversity. If the house values are high enough you do get some nice hanging baskets as well, but mostly it’s just cars and flags in front of boxy brick houses.

Defenders of the flag frenzy say things like “we should be able to be proud of our country”, but flags don’t solve that problem. The threats to that sense of pride in the imagined community come from failures to make the community real: why feel pride in an imagined community, when your daily life witnesses so much evidence of that community’s failure to care for people who need it? A flag doesn’t rebuild a community, it only makes its fractures more noticeable.

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 12:48:00 +0100

Map of regions supported by the UK government’s Department for Culture Media and Sports (DCMS) Create Growth programme. A frustrating time to be running a creative business in South Yorkshire.

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 14:13:12 +0100

Absolutely love being able to create a custom interface for every performance. This is one of those joys of creativity online that every artist should get to experience. I hope if we get to keep making the show we’ll be able to keep raising the bar on our digital set design. Intrapology.com