Stanwixbuster

@stanwixbuster

Stanley W. Baxton // he/him 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ Award-winning narrative game dev NWCDTP-funded PhD on non-commercial game communities + sustainability, BAFTA Breakthrough 2025, ex-Supermassive Games

270 Following2,537 Followers870 Posts

Bluesky

amateur gay trans

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Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· 7d

bandcamp listening parties are good

Din of Celestial Birds
Actually on stage Chris and Tom swap, otherwise too much light shines off Andie and Tom's heads

wasted_shadows
BALD

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· 25d

on the train back. thanks everyone who came to my talk and liked it and everyone i yapped and caught up with

Photo of the whitest arm imaginable.
Caption: lowkey getting a tan

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· 26d

who the fuck's this guy

Photo of BAFTA's Develop booth, with a TV screen showing Stanley Baxton.

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· 28d

yay wheee

16:00 - 16:45 How to make whatever you want and still get attention
Stanley W. Baxton, Stanwixbuster

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· 28d

hello im in brighton now for #developbrighton. i'm doing a talk at 4pm today in room 3 about how i make games the industry hates and why. come watch it or don't

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· Jul 9

my train appears to have cloned itself

Two departures for Manchester Airport at 19:20. The first is cancelled. The second is not.

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· Jun 14

hot tip for everyone: if you're being subtweeted about holding racist views and refusing to engage with anti-racist texts, do not reply to said subtweet demanding the public evidence that you hold racist views and refuse to engage with anti-racist texts

Max Remskyi [in reply to Stanwixbuster, a link to Racism without Racists]
Well, as I see that, it's rather western(mostly America)-specific thing. Would probably be a good read if I wanted to do anything with americas writing wise, because so far it looks as if you were explaining blind man (me) what colour is.

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· Jun 14

sure lad

Max Remskyi
Why hate Campbell though? He was not creating any "quick tools-boilerplates for authors", but had been looking for the repeating patterns.
The only downside is that many consider his studies as the modus operandi, not "curious find".

Stanwixbuster
take a minute to consider why applying a european mode of storytelling filtered through jung to everything ever written is not that good

Max Remskyi
Well, he could not do it in any other way. His european experience lense was the only one he had, and if he could re-lieve his life in another culture I do think he would, simply out of his love of the game

Max Remskyi
I do not think he's made any "point" so far. He had some obervation, followed them through and wrote them down
Consider it as a longass blog post on "look I've researched many stuff and see such and such patterns, do with it what you want".

Stanwixbuster
his point was that all stories are a one-to-one map of the "hero's journey", what he literally called the monomyth (one original myth), and that all other modes of storytelling can just be approximated into a euro-centric framework
perennialism is a fundamentally eurocentric and white surpremist talking point and any attempts to further those goals will only dig ourselves further into those mindsets. there has never been a perannialist philosophy claiming that any non-european frameworks are the capital-t Truth, because they'll get laughed at for not being white

Stanwixbuster [Reply to Consider it a longass blog post...]
and he has been thoroughly debunked by almost every mainstream branch of anthropology and social science
people cling onto him because they like the idea of the One True Story mapping neatly onto hollywood

Max Remskyi [reply to perennialism is a fundamentally eurocentric...]
Could you elaborate? I am not thoroughly engaged with the cultural aspect of this stuff

Stanwixbuster
to start with do you know what perennialism is

[censored]
yeah the monomyth is very one note. some of my favourite stories are conflict-less which immediately falls out of its scope, so it aint all that

Max Remskyi
Nope

Max Remskyi [reply to yeah the monomyth is very one note...]
The times Campbell lived in are very different to ours, though, and different generations like very different things

Stanwixbuster
in short its this idea that there are common themes across schools of thought (usually religion), which means that all schools share one metaphysical truth
Max Remskyi
Judging anything out of the historical/time context isn't fruitful in my opinion
Max Remskyi [reply to in short its this idea...]
Ah, I did not know the exact term, but the definition is something I meet many times

[censored] [in reply to Judying anything out of the historical...]
if it's commonly applied in the present time (out of its historical context) then its worth critiquing i think

Stanwixbuster
in practice this means that the dominant modes of thought can point to other schools and say "well see, this is just what we're doing" and smother them out and can liberally appropriate their work without the original schools seeing any credit and in extreme cases being killed off entirely
the most long lasting (and shockingly unknown) form of this is theosophy, which then went on to be the foundation of nazi ideology and hindutva

$Max Remskyi I agree on critiquing, I do not agree on the vector of the said critique, e.g. when explaining "why monomyth sucks" it is much more rational and understandable for others when it is explained objectively through the prism of "bad, lazy storytelling", not through "because he was racist" Stanwixbuster [in reply to The times Campbell lived in...] how much of a different world do you think 1950 is Max Remskyi Very much. They had no pocket "world library" in their pocket, machines could not generate so much slop and information (though there were attempts), the healthcare, and many many more stuff I mean, the world is in constant acceleration, and each following year brings much more than the previous one Stanwixbuster [in reply to I agree on critiquing, I do not agree...] so you admit the grievance is not that the monomyth is racist, but that people are pointing out that it is racist im dropping this now because you need to have a long sitdown and reconsider your relationship to this man that academia has spent the last 70 years debunking and why you feel the need to come to his defence this hard Max Remskyi My grievance here is that it is pointless. He's dead long ago and does not care if people in future call him racist. Nor it will help to debunk the monomyth faecal foundation.\$

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· Jun 11

check out this spam email i just got

Mft Gongo (no subject) - Hello Stanwixbuster,

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· Jun 8

have you ever seen one of those awesome double column poems that give you different readings depending where you look and thought "damn i wish i could make an overly convoluted game that's just like this." well guess what. i've just made the engine for you stanwixbuster.itch.io/stereotome

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· May 26

creasing because if this was in the uk this would literally be recording a crime

Rule 149 of the UK Highway code. "Never use a hand-held microphone when driving." is highlighted.

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· May 26

TOMMY???????

Youtube thumbnail of a man driving a car with a microphone to his mouth
Title: Absent Thereafter - Vocal Playthrough (While Driving)
by Between the Buried and M

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· May 26

LOOK AT MY CHILD

A tomato stalk with a small green tomato

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· May 25

by @brkeogh.bsky.social @mahliann.bsky.social @marcuscarter.com the book i wish i had when i was starting undegrad, and what i will be subsequently recommending to every undergrad

Game Studies: A Critical Introduction to the Field
by Brendan Keogh, Mahli-Ann Butt, Marcus Carter

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· May 25

by Andreas Malm while reading this i was at a conference where the keynote was a fukuyama-like "it looks like continuing with the current economy and fossil fuels will kill us. oh well!" and this was about as close to a pure antidote as you can get

The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World
by Andreas Malm

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· May 18

as a curiosity, here's the split for the a maze. awards last weekend presented without comment

Pie chart titled A MAZE. 2026
58.3% gamemakers
33.3% media and presenters (games)
8.3% execs (games)

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· May 10

Bluesky post by Stanwixbuster
my take on whatever games discourse is happening right now is that you'd get a lot more done if you logged off and actually made those games you say you love so much

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· May 8

got to the part of children of hell development where i have to start drawing

Three men sit on a couch. Their penises are on fire.

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· May 6

yeah by definition many of those presenting are gamers and nothing else (in relation to games). this bit isn't even an exaggeration, particularly in the early years where presenters introduce themself as a gamer speaking to other gamers, not /makers/, because there's zero cultural knowledge of it

to articulate that beyond jokes at the expense of the medium. Imagine someone presenting a film BAFTA by opening with “I love watching films. I watch them all the time. Movies? Wow. I love movies. How do you make them? Who knows! It’s magic! I don’t know anything about this. Now let’s celebrate people who make movies.”

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· Apr 27

>start phd writing >do other shit for a minute >come back

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· Apr 24

found out which building in trafford's on fire

Google popular times graph. Live, less busy than usual. The bar for 2pm is bottomed out and red.

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· Apr 23

gamer wandering around manchester for the first time turning up his nose at the yellow tram you have to press a yellow button to enter

Photo of a tram interior. All the fixtures are yellow.

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· Apr 23

i can never turn off the steam friend notification thing because a few times a week i'll get a popup like this

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· Apr 16

jesse what the hell are you talking about

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· Apr 16

trying to place a house on top of my towncentre in a 90s rts with a very literal english translation

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· Apr 11

hey gang, i'm doing another talk at @narrascope.org this year. if you like listening to me being annoyed at things that are mostly inconsequential this is a discord stream for you

Discord stream
The Shaman, the Outsider, and the Diet of Worms: Worldbuilding Through Negative Space
Stanley Baxton
Stanley has a problem with worldbuilding. He has such a problem, he made a whole game about it, and went on to win Best Experimental Game at last year’s NarraScope showcase. In this talk, Stanley will deconstruct the approach he took to worldbuilding in his project Diet of Worms, offer alternatives to putting everything into a public-access wiki, and show how “subtextual” worldbuilding can be used as a narrative tool in itself.
DES WRI FAN ACA [worldbuilding, narrative design, lore]

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· Apr 11

burger king boys love

Section of a spreadsheet, with a narrow column BK and wide column BL.

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· Apr 10

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· Apr 3

by Robin Wall Kimmerer i've seen this described by indigenous people as "nothing groundbreaking if you're native", but that doesn't stop the prose being absolutely gorgeous. i am also some white dude

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Stanwixbuster@stanwixbuster· Mar 31

anyway that's the shot. here's the chaser