It isn't hard to see that I absolutely love the Dreamcast. Just one of those reasons is because I love how a lot of the games on it came about because they were multifaceted developers with backgrounds in other things, besides games. It something that little window of time allowed, and is something you don't get anymore, because the endless hamster cage of capitalism simply doesn't allow us the time to do that anymore.
Take Ulala, the pink-haired reporter in Space Channel 5, who's in the middle of an alien invasion and she’s dressed to the fucking nines, I mean I'd do the same really. Anyway, what you do is listen to a sequence of directions and repeat it in time, trying to keep up while she dance, and if you get it right, more people join in on the performance! so your progress becomes visible as a growing company of dancers. I love how completely the game commits to making this a good time, and stylish as hell to boot.
Ulala’s designer, Yumiko Miyabe, played guitar in punk bands as a teenager. She followed Tokyo’s subcultures from rural Nagano through magazines and whatever news reached her, and wanted to move there badly enough to pitch art school to her parents. I love that so damn much. She wanted to get out of town and be around things she thought were cool, and years later I get to meet a character she helped imagine. It makes the world between someone else’s life and my own feel so much smaller.
Of course, just knowing this doesn’t show me exactly how Ulala happened but it is useful in showing some of the interests people brought to making it. Miyabe had a life before she had a place in gaming, and what that work led to gives me a reason to be curious about it, right?
Rez takes another fascination and lets you participate in it. Its producer, Tetsuya Mizuguchi, said that an important influence to the game was a street parade in Zurich that he came across during a research trip for racing game he was working on at the time. In Rez, shooting makes sounds that are fitted to the music’s beat. You aim and fire, and then get to hear your actions become part of the track. The screen fills with coloured shapes while the music you just made, plays.
This is part of why I love this thing, its games can make you want to engage with genres and playstyles that you almost never get to try at a AAA level. I don’t need to get what Ulala is doing or what it even is to enjoy the game; the enjoyment can come first.
Our lives
outside𖦹
I want my interests to continue to help me change and better understand the world. I want my love for poetry, or my passion for dance to help influence the things I create. Spending time with other mediums in your life makes you notice things others wouldn't.
Being a well-rounded person, to me, includes being willing to spend time with things you aren't really good at. I think it’s good for me to have my usual expertise become basically useless now and then, so I can think on my feet and adapt. You might know a lot about games but not know a single thing about how the musical process. Paying attention to the excitement your loved ones show lets you learn something about them, too. I want to be the kind of person who can do that without the insecure instinct I sometimes have with needing to prove I know something.
The Dreamcast encourages that side of me. It helps me see the connections between my interests, and gives me a reason to follow those without knowing where the hell I’ll end up. Experimentation has a personal risk as well as an artistic one. You can spend an afternoon on something that you now realize was a waste, or discover that your first attempt at drawing looks absolutely dreadful. It's worth it anyway, but we are rarely, if ever, afforded this.
Rent is due whether you think you’re an interesting person or not. You can have hours outside paid work and still spend most of them recovering, or doing the things required to be ready for tomorrow. Trying to read the same paragraph while falling asleep is hardly evidence of a defective imagination.
Miyabe also says she couldn’t have moved to Tokyo without her parents' financial help. I’m glad she had it. Capitalism organises so much of that availability around the need to earn a living. Your employer gets a claim on your time because you need the wage, and exhaustion follows you home without paying for the privilege. Then a new hobby can become another possible time sink, another thing you might be failing to develop. You can enjoy making something and still find yourself calculating whether you could sell it, because the extra money would actually help, and it fucking sucks. I hate that sometimes I have to think about selling something I love because I need to make ends meet.
There’s a cruelty in praising curiosity while treating the conditions for it as an individual responsibility. People need time they can use without worrying about the cost of using it. They need access to things, and some energy left on top of that when they get there. Saying that other media enriched these games makes me want those conditions for the people playing them, too, including anyone whose energy is limited by illness or disability.
You should be able to play shitty music for the rest of your life if it makes you happy. I don’t want my love of art to become a more sophisticated excuse for demanding that everyone be useful.
The Confines
of creativity𖦹
My favourite term lately, capitalist realism, does give an insight as to why it's so fucking impossible to even imagine doing the stuff you like. Capitalism is so accepted as the limit of what’s possible that any other thing is dismissed before it can even be considered.
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Once profitability becomes the only thing we can think about to get out of this hellhole, asking who gets to make something, or whether making it allows them a decent life, can start to sound beside the point. I think we concede too much when we accept that. An arrangement sustained by people’s decisions can be contested, however little power any one person has to change it alone.
You can genuinely see how much the gaming industry has flourished for the top dogs, but also failed the people who make them by going back to that very small time period where the Dreamcast existed. The Dreamcast also failed financially because it allowed for that grace, because capitalism and artistry are incompatible. You cannot create within the AAA system, because it is a leech that takes everything and then more. Sega wanted to sell games, and Miyabe described the creative freedom given to Space Channel 5 as part of an effort to reach a broader audience. I can appreciate what that decision allowed without turning a corporation into a friend. Commercial ambition helped fund work I love. It also left the opportunity to make such work dependent on whether people with money believed they could make more of it.
Miyabe recalled spending about 6 months developing Ulala, a schedule she described as a luxury she no longer had when interviewed in 2023.
But even with that allowance, there was a cost, cause there always is. Mizuguchi remembered sleeping at his desk during the period when Rez and Space Channel 5 were in development. He spoke fondly of the work, too, but that was definitely crunch. A person can love what they’re making and be giving more of their life to it than anyone should have to. Enthusiasm makes it possible to endure a lot, which is one reason employers can get so much out of people who care.
It's shitty that we have an industry benefiting from people’s experiences outside work while making those experiences harder to have. A musician’s years of listening come with them when they’re hired. An artist brings their eye shaped by places they've been to. Once they've been useful, the pressure is to keep producing with them. The time for becoming interested in something unfamiliar looks expendable to these people, because it's new or different and they aren't able to prove that it can make money. You can see this shit happening in real time with the Yakuza series.
They can't get rid of Kiryu for some godforsaken reason (we know why), so they will screw over any other plotline or character development to keep him in. Ichiban has proven himself to be an amazing protagonist in only one game, but he is basically second fiddle to the fourth chairman in infinite wealth; a change that I think nostalgia and money has a hand in, but you see what I mean? We cannot move forward because the past continues to siphon the minds of these people, thinking more of the same is more profitable.
Experimentation requires uncertainty. You might have an idea you want to try, and that attempt can change what you thought about what you were making. The same applies to our lives. You can’t know which interest will matter to you in advance, or insist that everything confirm the person you already think you are. I love the Dreamcast partly because its games have given me reasons to see myself value that.
Shorter working hours with secure pay would obviously change who has energy left. Public libraries and affordable places to meet would give people somewhere to follow an interest without every visit requiring a purchase.
Enjoying an experimental game won’t bring those changes about, I know. There’s organising to do, and power to contest, which is hard. But I don’t think pleasure is irrelevant to knowing what’s worth fighting for. We deserve to have the means to keep creating. My love for this console would feel incomplete if it stopped at wanting more products from the people behind it.
Got the moves?
Just click Let's Dance, to play! ^_^
Only if you wanna. :3
Reaching for
the Skies𖦹
People bring their lives into the games they make, and it's beautiful, all of it. And we get to make connections the people who built it never intended. We can take it seriously without treating the creator’s explanation as the end of what there is to understand.
At the end of her interview, Miyabe credits the whole team, then speaks about fans smiling and sometimes crying when they remember the games she helped make. People were grateful for something she helped make, and she’s grateful for what they brought to loving it.
That’s the fucking heart I’m talking about when I say I love the Dreamcast. It includes the work of people I’ll never meet, and the feeling I bring to it now. I can talk about Ulala’s dancing until I’ve driven you insane, but part of what I’m trying to communicate is how happy I am that people got together and made this amazing thing. There were decisions about her boots. Someone had to spend part of their day getting the movement right. I adore the artistry it took to create it, and I adore the end result.
I feel a lot of love towards the young me who loved this console before they could explain any of this. I want to take their enjoyment seriously, including the things that are too small to build an argument around. They were allowed to think a little chao on a VMU card was cute. They could like the music without knowing who made it, and finding the words decades later feels like I'm able to spend a little longer with something they wanted to show me.
Writing about it means trying to extend my affection to others. You might never have played a Dreamcast, but perhaps there’s a book somebody lent you that changed you, or a song you still associate with the person who first put it on. I’m interested in what becomes possible after that first encounter. We carry on finding our own reasons to love something, and it becomes harder to imagine ourselves without an interest that once depended on somebody passing it along.
I want that to leave me open to what people are making now. Someone could take an idea from Rez and make a game I find difficult to enjoy, because their other interests lead somewhere unfamiliar to me. I’d like to give it the time I hope someone would give my favourites.
It's Thinking...
