she/they/it // disabled personal trainer, luddite game dev, walking oxymoron
In the age of early access viral hits, optimization is just something no publisher wants to put resources into before they know the game’s a success or not.
True story, a game I worked on at my last job shipped on Xbox One and PS4, the PS4 version was not even built until a month before shipping.
I understand there’s no solution here that doesn’t result in discomfort for someone, it will always be a balance, but I’m pretty opposed to declaring spaces off limits for trans people for cis people’s comfort. That does nothing but push the discomfort off into the future and deny us access to public spaces simply due to the fact that people don’t feel like seeing our bodies. Would it be appropriate to enforce acceptable BMI ranges, or require patrons to have all their limbs, or require them to have a particular skin color? All these things make some uncomfortable too, for bullshit reasons, and we wouldn’t allow for discrimination on those grounds - why are trans bodies the exception?
Not going after you in particular, this is a pretty common hangup. But it just irks me given that going to a spa every now and then is extremely important to my health due to chronic pain. If this was the norm for spas within reasonable distance of me, I’d have nowhere to go to meet that need. Denying services in this manner is not trivial or harmless.
I guess I’m of the mind that if you’re showing up to be nude in a spa around other nude people, does it actually tangibly matter which genitals are present, so long as all other norms of the space are respected? Bodies are just bodies. The rules of engagement (read: “don’t”) are still the same. Trans women are not coming into women’s spaces to harass cis women, in fact we’re a lot more likely to be harassed ourselves if we’re required to use mens-only facilities instead.
This is a spa in with locations in Tacoma/Lynnwood WA, relatively near there is a nude beach that seems to handle this just fine.
I mean, are trans people who haven’t had bottom surgery not supposed to use gender-separated locker rooms? Which one should we use? I go to a spa where I can change in the women’s locker room and it’s just very normal. I’m not concerning anyone with my dick and nobody’s concerning themselves with mine. Granted, it seems patrons of this spa remain nude while using the facilities, but it’s still a comparable example. If harassment / unwanted sexual advances are one’s concern, then unfortunately that is just possible anyway and needs to be mitigated regardless of genital configuration. They could at least let her wear a swim skirt or something y’know?
I crunched like hell in my mid 20s on a live service game that I enjoyed playing, was well loved and consistently played by a few fans, and had a few unique ideas in its niche. I gave up a lot of life for that game to see the light of day, under extremely tight timelines and wavering support from a flakey publisher.
It lasted less than a year in release because of a few mistakes in early access and it inhabited a saturated market that seems near impossible to penetrate now. The console ports that caused the worst months of the crunch never even saw a release.
Me and the rest of the devs would love to just play the game again, but the game’s kinda just rotting somewhere in storage of a publisher that long ago tried to pivot toward NFT/metaverse bullshit, to predictable results. Outside of a few early playtest builds a few people have (and definitely aren’t supposed to) we have basically no way of playing it ourselves, much less letting others play it. We couldn’t even get much approved to show in a portfolio once the studio closed and the assets went to the publisher. It makes me really sad and I’m no longer in game dev / tech at large professionally for that reason. This story is not unique, this is pretty much just how the industry works and devs near-universally feel screwed over by it.