Confessions of a Quirky Christian Artist

[ This piece contains some spoilers ] Here’s a game made by my favorite designer, Fumito Ueda, 11 years in the making.  He made (It’s stupid to say any ONE person “made” a game since there’s usually a giant team and most of them are indispensable in making it happen, but that’s the parlance.) some of my favorite and very seminal, influential games: ICO and Shadow of the Colossus.  These games were groundbreaking for several reasons.  One reason was something called “design by subtraction”, nicely articulated here. In the early 2000’s console games were getting more and more complex, demanding and using all the buttons on the controller, competing with each other to be the game with the most features and mechanics.  Ueda, an art student with no game design history came onto the scene and wanted to do something different.  Instead of breadth, he went for depth.  He decided on a core mechanic that was both unique, and quietly subversive.  I’d go so far as to c

Warning: Political/Cultural/Philosophical blog ahead. Turn back now if this sort of thing upsets you. Disclaimer #1: In order to talk about cultural movements and ideas I'm forced to group people into imperfect conceptual boxes, such as "liberal" and "conservative".  For the record, I see liberals as people who tend to favor new experiences, are open to relatively fast cultural changes, and value individual expression more than group stability and tradition.  I see conservatives as those who value tradition, stability, and appeal to the moral foundations of Authority Sacredness and Loyalty much more as the basis for wanting to keep our culture as it is, or often, back to a time when things were more traditional.  Every person has a mix of these impulses, so don't think that I'm ever talking about YOU as a person, or even ANY individual person when I use these words.  For more on the Moral Foundations I’m using, see my post here:   http://joshuafor

Ok. So this is a big ask, but if you want to follow my thoughts here you’ll need to actually read at least this first article.  Then the conversation I had with a few people on Facebook about that article. … ONLY THEN will my thinking below will make sense.  In other words.  Turn back now if you don’t have a solid hour to work through this stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_appropriation https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/lionel-shrivers-full-speech-i-hope-the-concept-of-cultural-appropriation-is-a-passing-fad ? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/10/as-lionel-shriver-made-light-of-identity-i-had-no-choice-but-to-walk-out-on-her Josh Foreman Shrivers was a very interesting talk. I'm of two minds on this. First, I feel like I agree with almost everything she says about over-sensitivity and the slippery slope of having to write only memoirs if one takes the cultural appropriation movement to its logical conclusion. However,