When I read the interview you gave to Kotaku magazine in 2017 about Ichigo, I felt that you were finally saying what I've wanted to say about the topic of appropriation as follows:
The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don't you? I'm terrified of that world, and I don't want to live in that world, and as a mixed-race person, I literally don't exist in it. My dad, who I barely knew, was Jewish. My mom was an American-born Korean. I was raised by Korean immigrant grandparents in Koreatown, Los Angeles. And as any mixed-race person will tell you—to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing. And, by the way, I don't own or have a particularly rich under understanding of references of Jewishness or Koreanness because I happen to be those things. But if Ichigo had been fucking Korean, it wouldn't be a problem for you, I guess (p. 78)?
Why I've not been able to say what you've said has something to do with the pressures of political correctness. A correctness that posits that if I don't belong to a group, I have no right to reference or depict that group in my art. Or my writing.
Shortly after I underlined this passage, I read it to my adult son who is half Korean and half Mexican. After listening intently, he said, "Mom, I'm so glad that that paragraph exists."
As I teach middle schoolers and high schoolers at a public charter school, I find myself encouraging them to be curious and observant about the world around them. To not be oblivious. To not be overly self-absorbed. To notice things. When I ask them to tell me what they have observed and noticed, not all things that they come up with is purely about them. Thank goodness. I want them to express what they notice not just about themselves but about others.
Contrarians could point to examples of plagiarism and explicit replication to push back on the thesis of your argument, which is that to make true art, we need freedom. Freedom to be inspired by what we observe and experience, not just what we purely belong to. I don't hate contrarians. I hate that there is never enough time.
I was grateful that you revisited the topic of appropriation toward the end of the book within the context of how technology simultaneously frees and constricts us:
Well, if we'd been born a little bit earlier, we wouldn't have been able to make our games so easily. Access to computers would have been harder ... We wouldn't have made Ichigo Japanese, because we would have worried about the fact that we weren't Japanese. And I think, because of the internet, we would have been overwhelmed by how many people were trying to do the exact same things we were. We had so much freedom—creatively, technically. No one was watching us, and we weren't even watching ourselves. What we had was our impossibly high standards, and your completely theoretical conviction that we could make a great game (p. 394).
Earlier in the book, this paradox about technology is brilliantly addressed by Marx's mom, Mrs. Watanabe, in response to Sadie's expressed interest of learning about her rich experience with textiles:
Mrs. Watanabe loved hand painting, quilting, and the discipline of woven textiles, but she worried these techniques were a dying art. 'Computers make everything too easy,' she said with a sigh. 'People design very quickly on a monitor, and they print on some enormous industrial printer in a warehouse in a distant country, and the designer hasn't touched a piece of fabric at any point in the process or gotten her hands dirty with ink. Computers are great for experimentation, but they're bad for deep thinking' (p. 229-230).
She goes on to explain that a great textile like the William Morris Strawberry Thief becomes great not just because of technology's role, but because of the dirt in the garden that he tends to in order to grow the strawberries depicted in his designs. And because he experiments with fabrics to understand which fabrics can bear which dyes. And because this process is riddled with sweaty and agony-ridden failures. And because failures teach as the artist tries again. She points out that the resulting fabric is "the story of failure and of perseverance, of the discipline of a craftsman, of the life of an artist (p. 230)."
If it is true that "in games, the thing that matters most is the order of things (p. 171)," I think it also matters most in life. There is only one order in which you and Sadie gave the unique shape you did to this book. There is only one order in which I've taken my steps of yesterday that brings me here to the present, ready to take my steps of tomorrow.
Thank you for creating games I ache to play. Thank you and Sadie for expanding and reshaping the concept of love.
Jenny
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