Why Not Manifest?

In addition to getting the coveted Warp Door feature for my first Plano project, I recently contributed to Manifesto Jam 2026! You can read my NO MORE CRAFT manifesto here. I was glad cecile decided to run it this year because they’re, imo, an expert at writing sharply opinionated texts, and it made a bit more of a splash this time (more on that later…)

I still feel a connection to Manifesto Jamming since it was a very interesting experience to run the first one, and I also had a nice time secretly contributing to the second one which was run by Max. Game jams can sometimes functionally be a way of soft-indoctrinating people into professional standards of scope, collaboration, what a game even is in the first place, so it’s nice to also have a jam that is based on indulging and expressing your individual values and opinions, and only really demands uploading a txt file as the minimum entry.

This most recent manifesto jam was huge; 333 entries in the end, and I have read or at least skimmed most of them. It’s evident people have a lot on their minds! I think it also became more visible and more of a discussion point than most people who were involved or had participated in previous ones expected.

A lot of people used the format of the manifesto to focus confidence in their own practice or vision, or try to work it out through a sort of writing exercise, and I think this is great! There were also a lot that used it to reject or critique common trends, norms or rules of thumb in the current games space; the curmudgeon in me also salutes those. I think this is all really important stuff to be thinking about and articulating in a gaming space which is floundering on both a cultural and financial level.

But, for a few days mid-jam it kind of felt like it had reached the level of like, something that enough people are talking about on social media so it’s transformed into a “General Topic” that bluesky elders and power users etc feel welcome, if not obligated to, pop off their thoughts about without even knowing what the reason people are discussing a particular topic is. And this creates a landslide of telephone-game style posts where the id-feelings particular phrases evoke just kind of run wild, lol.

A common pattern. And usually I try not to respond to people who are doing these things to a compliant, parasocial audience. But in this case, I feel like the way it was talked about, and largely misrepresented, is an interesting temperature check on where discussions around videogames and game making are right now, and how it’s changed in the eight years (!) since I first ran Manifesto Jam.

First, what were the objections and misrepresentations I saw? I think the most simple one was that writing a manifesto is kind of inherently pompous, that the people doing it have an excess of self-regard or whatever. But I dunno! Nowadays, what else is going to tell you that your work is good or interesting or worthwhile, that you’re doing it right? The social media algorithms? The fucking economy?? Literally show me a healthy external source of self-esteem.

In my own manifesto, before any of the reactions really took off, I said that you have to be pompous for the right reasons. It takes a measure of inner fortitude to have faith in your own vision and not just be kicked around like a subservient culture-producing foot ball, and clearly articulating this vision can be a way to make that happen for a lot of people. If you alternately think it does nothing you are free to continue posting.

There also seemed to be the belief that videogame-related manifestos are going to be inherently tedious rehashes of stereotypically “game design-y” thoughts and values. If you’re worried about it being another “Depth Jam” though, it’s really as easy as skimming the titles of things submitted to the jam, which are about pretty much every angle on making games.

The same is true of people who seemed convinced that writing a manifesto for your own work is “overthinking” or wasting time that could be spent (readers, withhold your laughter here, please) “shipping.” There also seemed to be people operating under the impression that a majority of those participating in the jam didn’t have a creative practice or produce writing and criticism about videogames at all. In this case I also invite you to actually click on the link, read some things, check out some of the linked itch.io profiles, etc, instead of making up a guy to be mad at.

The first and most obvious point is that posting is also not shipping if we’re going to be really pedantic and bad faith about it. Posting is just talk, but usually, because it’s on a centralized commercial social media platform, it’s not even on your own terms, and also the type of talk you get reactively pulled into. Some of those that post “ship” have lately only been shipping posts… meanwhile 200 games on domino.gallery.

But the “don’t think just ship” type responses also unnerved me. Because like, you have to think about your work to know it’s worth doing, right? The historical function of a manifesto in the arts was rarely descriptive of what the person or group has already been doing, but setting and announcing their intentions moving forward. You don’t have to write a manifesto about it, but surely you do have to scan the cultural field, measure your own work against what’s out there, renew your sense of your own desires, etc. to make sure you’re not digging yourself into a sunk cost fallacy hole, right?

Finally there were a bunch of TTRPG people who were really weird about it that I find mostly incomprehensible because I play computer games. To them I suggest not immediately indulging in housecat-style “Ummmmm… Pissing without me????” behavior every time they see or think they see the word “videogame,” especially if you are going to post your work on the hobbyist videogame website where people can upload their videogames for free. Because there’s going to be a lot of videogames there; you might have to get used to it.

You got me. I'm kind of mad, I guess. The thing that really got to me about these sort of tedious, unimaginative, smug, closed-off objections was that I couldn’t have imagined them running a jam with the same name, the same premise, and so on, when I did eight years ago. Vibe shift! But why?

There’s a few reasons why I think there was more noticeable negative response this time than what I remember during either of the two previous Manifesto Jams. Some more understandable or innocent than others.

Like, it was just bigger. More people noticed it, so you’re going to get more haters alongside more people who are interested or happy to participate. This is a simple explanation, but not fully satisfying. I think irritation with its (comparative) bigness was also exacerbated by the fact that it took place outside of centralized commercial social media, where things can feel quite hierarchical between big name accounts that dispense “takes” and “content” and what they perceive as an alternately fawning or unruly audience.

I feel like a social media environment where we’re incentivized to be locked into continuous feeds has made people very reflexively annoyed when something unexpected, against the decided topics of the day or that they don’t immediately understand, seems to come up again and again. Usually a deliberately abrasive experimental free webgame made with videotome or decker or whatever only really circulates in its intended sympathetic community, but a bunch of people who make their own weird work deliberately coming together to write about why in a condensed time period can make this discussion pervasive enough that it reaches people who would usually be blissfully unaware of anything in this vein. Manifesto jam “breaking in” and becoming a topic of discussion on ie Bluesky will mean many people on Bluesky simply have the feeling that people are suddenly talking about or paying attention to the “wrong” thing, especially because understanding it requires clicking off-platform and reading stuff.

And this relates to what I think is the biggest change between now and then. With Twitter being a flaming nazi spam dump, Facebook being ugly and janky as fuck, Instagram being basically Facebook but more incomprehensible etc– despite the presence of enjoyable small-scale alternatives, Bluesky has kind of won out as the place online where people publicly enact their professional-sona. And everywhere, but especially within videogames, “being a professional” is an increasingly precarious, exclusive, and unrewarding endeavor. Basically all you’re left with that’s any better than an unglamorous spreadsheet job (hi) is the ability to position yourself as a Professional.

Even though it was post-GamerGate, I felt like I was running the first Manifesto Jam in 2018 at a time of comparable optimism about experimental, noncommercial, hobbyist etc games. We all had a consolidated enemy that was superficially uniting for a time; it also felt like something with a goofy concept or fun vertical slice could get a splash from the money hose of platforms like the Apple Store trying to fill out their games content. There was communication for both game makers and critics across the lines of professionalism or experience because all this new stuff being accessible and seeming to take off (twine! bitsy!) seemed like it could transform or enrich the industry. Make your quirky free dating sim and some big company will come knocking to have you add the romance system of your dreams to some established IP.

Some people got jobs or worked their way up with portfolio pieces, but in the end this didn’t really change the brutal boom-bust cycle of the industry, or give it more stability and broader audiences through cultural prestige or seriousness. So maybe free games, accessible tools, paying some attention to what the rabble are up to, etc, hadn’t actually done anything? Of course the industry had enclosed and hoovered up what was amenable to it, but expecting practices, communities and values based on voluntary association and non-commercial exchange to transform your commercial industry into something more sustainable is kind of like expecting some eggs you got from a goose to keep laying eggs.

Still, that expectation existed, and I think it’s why people who have, over the past decade, professionalized, are now quick to roll their eyes at people who are uninterested in creating within the constraints and demands of “professionalism,” even when they had been that person once. “The economy is bad, I’m a realist, I did the work…” confrontation with an alternative that questions whether that was worthwhile or even the only way can be irritating or painful.

But why do I care? This is an important question actually. For all the weird and hostile posting about it, Manifesto Jam was a success in that a lot of people participated and it got a huge variety of submissions, from ones I’d rate actively annoying or a bit undercooked to awesome and inspiring. That’s kind of what you want. The posting can’t stop you. And that’s an important lesson.

But I do think it kind of makes the general atmosphere feel a bit more exclusive, punishing, and grim, stuck in its own stodgy perception of the way things are or the way things have to be done. It highlights how the reactivity partly fostered by social media platforms can make people, who, imo, would have once been excited to read some opinionated pieces on what videogames should be like, who would have once sought out, embraced, or even released their own non-commercial free work, become resentful of and reject people doing the same thing a few years later. It also shows how the sympathies of subsections of the online loosely-videogames-y community have shifted, creating new tensions where some things that were once in, or on the border of being in, are now firmly out. And the pervasive economic downturn is, I think, the headline component in these phenomena.

This is getting into potential “loony” or “loser” territory, I guess I feel a little hesitant to openly express it, but in a way I wanted to talk about this because the response to Manifesto Jam, and how it changed since I first ran it in 2018, really felt like a potted lesson in Dialectical Materialism to me. The vibe feels different not due to a single event or idea that changed how people think, but because people have subtly altered their politics and beliefs over time in response to changing economic conditions, both within the games industry and across the board.

It’s not like, there’s one single point, an itch game or warpdoor post or whatever, which makes someone actively decide I’ve had enough of these weird, unprofessional people making experimental free or pwyw games, they’re harming the industry, or they didn’t end up making the industry more prestigious or broader or stable, they don’t have anything to say, they’re getting attention my project should get, they’re annoying, writing about them doesn’t get me enough clicks… etc… though thanks to the advances in access to others’ unfiltered consciousness that poster’s madness offers, all of these sentiments come up explicitly on social media from time to time.

It’s more like, due to increasing precarity and professional insecurity, the drive to be more bought in to survive, there’s eventually a stimulus (like a bunch of experimental, amateur, queer, free games people posting their vision for creating work at once) that makes more people respond in a more negative way than they would have before, and the collective point is passed: from the top down we’ve decided this is cringe or stupid now, even if it is the same thing and working towards the same ends (ends which, I don’t think anyone would argue have been resolved!) as it was a few years ago.

Before you know it, blaming some form of constructed outsider (who may have previously been seen as a peer!) becomes a more amenable prospect because the economy sux. I think the extent to which people can seem to arbitrarily slip into these sort of attitudes based on forces that are not directly related to ie what games are being released or discussed now is what someone is observing when they describe a kind of overall negative “vibe shift.”

And when these people are so on the side of, or at least bought into, conventional visions of, if not “success,” then “how you should be doing it to deserve maybe getting success,” how do you push against their dismissal without seeming bitter, lazy, broke, stupid, wilfully doing it wrong, especially when “success” in the form of conformity to the algorithm and doing/saying things that make the number go up are the only real values of the social media platforms we’ve all been herded together into? At best you can get someone to say “oh I wasn’t talking about you in particular” in this instance, but the sense remains that it’s only a matter of time before what they mean will expand to include you too.

Plus it just sucks to see something that was merely encouraging people to think about their experiences, their desires, what they like or want to make, etc, and write about it, get shot down in these ways, which generally are just defined by wilful ignorance or disengagement with the actual premise of and submissions to the jam. It feels like a disproportionate response to a writing exercise about stuff that hardly anyone pays attention to anyways at the best of times; even the “independent” games coverage sites have dropped the pretense of ever covering anything unusual or experimental, and hardly any of the big institutions even bother with the “eat your veggies” type free games that make u think columns anymore anyways. So we can’t even do our own thing now with a bunch of people barely clinging to a “professional career” saying WE’RE too highfalutin????

Like, you can click on the link, believe it or not, and see what’s going on before you post that take. You can also just keep scrolling if you’re not interested or too busy posting that you’re the only one who ships all day and/or playing Forza. The type of posting about it I saw was frustratingly clueless and also a deliberate choice. Maybe consider why you feel the need to respond in this way to what is basically a free online group writing activity, like lol????

Anyways, this is all kind of beef-in-hindsight. If you didn’t see posts like the ones I was talking about, don’t worry about it, you don’t have to seek it out to be informed or whatever. I just felt like I had a lot of thoughts about a proportionally minor blip in the “discourse cycle,” and wanted to be on-record as expressing some unease with this behavior and how, to me, it marks how much things have changed. Because 2018 was kind of yesterday, but also kind of ages ago. It may feel like we rehash all the same dumb stuff every week, but it can, and does change.