This is most likely the longest post I will post for a very long time. It will likely be a post like that of many on the internet, read by few, and mostly for the continued structuring process of the writer. It’s an outline of what PB is, what it never was, and more importantly what it will be is going to be presented. Bear with me – PB is going to be more awesome than ever and if you’ve ever wanted to see how it came to this, read on.
Without any further ado: I’ve hit a milestone. It is definite, and something that can’t be backed out of. Hence, a milestone. We are almost at PB 2.0 – if not the technological singularity, then at least the focused effort of trying to put some more oomph, aha and §£[£≈©≈±] to the world. First, the story so far: a cautionary tale about a business of passion and how it took years for it to begin gelling into place. It’s brutally uncensored and honest, and the most definite source of the history of PB 1.0 that will ever be put in pixels. Still, it won’t be all-encompassing and will skip some details that don’t add to the general story. Skip to the bottom if you only want the future. You can do that now, thanks to the internet. The future always is the past.
This is for friends and enemies, those who know me and those who don’t, those around today and those who will read this much later. This is also for people I know professionally and those I know as acquaintances, for those who know me as a student and those who call me an artist. This is for better or for worse, and for setting things straight before going onwards.
But mostly this is for those that started this, so I dedicate this to Thom Kiraly and Kristoffer Åberg.
Summer 2009
During the two years that Propaganda Bureau has been around as a formal business, many changes have occurred over time, shaping and reforming what the ultimate goals of PB are. It’s gone from a very broad, exclusively commercial endeavor with three very different guys, to a single-man and mostly artistic practice. This has, of course, much to do with crass realities (personal goals, family life) but more interestingly this has history in our collective, and since a year back, directly been affected by my personal development more than ever. Looking back just two years, some of the ideas we had at the time were probably far, far off the chart of any reasonable possibility to complete. The first two years have been a road: I can’t say I regret anything (although some stuff was never very fun at the time) because it has led us to where it all is now.
I’m married to a woman much unlike me. I find her company comforting. Our location in Karlskrona has had the unfortunate effect that she has been mostly unemployed during our years there (2005-2011, with a small break 2008-2009). This means I’ve been the sole provider at most times. How this is relevant will be made more clear along the way. That is my family situation.
On a July night in 2009, in a very infrequent case of public intoxication (I believe I was hanging out with my mentor and former colleague and teacher/professor before this), Kristoffer drove me to Thom’s place on the outskirts of Karlskrona. We’ve all known each other for years. There we signed the documents to start the company, and some legal documents between us as partners. This was the culmination of at least 18 months of planning and discussion. That was the easy part. In the papers, our business plan was simply “media production”. We aimed broad and were kind of familiar with what we’d like to do. I had high hopes to realize some amount of the game designs I’d been thinking about. No definitive plan was set in stone, however.
Fall and Winter 2009
In the autumn of ’09, before receiving the official OKs and blessings of the state, me and Kristoffer did the first paid gig for PB – a restaurant he had contact with wanted a new web site. We’ve never worked so much for so little, is my final and only remark on that. It was drudging, boring, very much uncreative modern man-labor at its worst.
Over the two years that have passed, the most bullshit crass question that has been circling the existence of PB has been how to make this a full-time job for three people. Now that’s just me, but the point is the same. Thom was studying, Kristoffer had a full-time employment as a salesman and I was teaching half-time, so we had something to go by, although my situation was much more dire than theirs as explained earlier. As any upstart or economically-conscious person will know, the process of starting a new business (and don’t be kidding yourself, even an artistic practice is business as much as stock trading is) takes time and involves a great deal of hard lessons to be learnt and a steep incline to get to the first contract pennies or sales. I believe that the incline is proportional to the diffuseness of one’s business not merely as an actual firm, but in one’s dealings with clients and the general interested public. While we weren’t off the mark entirely in 2009, we had this condensed set of problems:
* Naturally diffuse nature between commerce and “art” + a bit too vague mission statement
* Negative factor in experience versus revolution-ability
* No background/history/back catalogue, no clients, based in small town: only way out is clawing upwards
* Highly diverse nature between the founding members; skills, skill levels, time, interests etc.
We tried, poked and were in contact with a range of people and possible jobs, but much of this was more in the tech crafts and man-labor area (design, writing, coding) that in short was fairly unexciting. I’ve personally never seen those tasks as first priority things to do, or even grasp for when in need of cold hard cash. Original work is what I’ve aimed for all along.
What was good, because all was not bad, was our dedicated efforts to think about different approaches, side projects, interventions and were thus constantly rethinking the nature and subject matter of PB. Many good ideas came out of this which unfortunately had some problems taking root in how we worked back then.
Aside from everybody’s small quirks and mannerisms, ultimately I think the dividing line between us three members was how art was conceptualized and thought of in the context of creative practice and sustainable living (income-wise). At the time pretty severe breaks occurred in discussions of the game design ideas I had. We weren’t agreeing on directions, intentions and even on the digital aspect of contemporary games. Suffice to say that even my own, today much more elaborated and expanded-upon, framework of (as Tale of Tales would call it) ‘not-games’ was still in its infancy and unable to cope with the practical issues we had then. Because there was still no hard evidence of the wide competencies required to make a game, we probably had a collective feeling that we’re in for the long haul (time, learning, pain) if we decided to go down that road, unsure and disagreeing where to start grinding.
January-May 2010
Then came our go-ahead from Karlskrona municipality and the local arts grant we had applied for before Christmas. So we made a ‘game’. We had proposed Föränderliga Rum/Everchanging Spaces and received half of what we had proposed in our budget, which still was the best money I’ve ever received. Their placing faith in the fulfillment of the game/web installation/public art project along with the more substantial cash involved (if compared to the meager web design pennies) most definitely set a spark to the latent flames we tried to keep alive. I had been somewhat unsure that our rhetoric and goals were not being communicated well enough, and the difference in how people in the cultural sector took us was miles from the world of the “paid gig commercial barbarians”. For me, although it may have been a bit brash based on a single occurrence, I took this as the go signal to begin turning more exclusively to that kind of clients. We began the project while sending emails to lots of groups who might have been interested in games dealing with issues related to them (groups included KRIS and Tindra, among many, many others). No replies came. With the first money we were hunting for an office and finally landed a pretty exclusive space in a kind of business hub with some other information-media firms. I can’t say we were all agreeing on the wisdom of this at first, but it did serve as a good working space during our time there.
For Föränderliga Rum/Everchanging Spaces we had many ideas that we wanted to realize. Because that piece was heavily textual we wanted to have local authors and writers contribute to it. Goal one was to textually reproduce the speech Horace Engdahl delivered at the Karlskrona City Library’s 50 year jubilee. We got the OK: done, and check. Next up was Katarina Mazetti, who interestingly thought we were some bratty media kids trying to rip off a professional writer’s new, original work for free. As soon as we told her our much humbler nature and that we worked practically for free the ice melted. Check, and done. The rest of the ideas died because our budget got tighter and tighter because we had to cover rent and expenses. I think we all feel a bit sad about it.
After lots of deliberation we decided to try making a game (NonViolence) in 30 days for release on the Worker’s Day, May 1st. The short story is that it mostly went fine, but that the time that could be allotted by Thom and Kristoffer made things hard to keep to schedule. I was doing almost all of the heavy lifting while trying to outsource increasing amounts of skill-based tasks to them. This obviously takes much time and is really only worth it in the (very) long run. Harder still was Thom’s hardline position that he wanted none whatsoever of the technical implementation work, although he finally had to help with levels and such. Overall it was a very good experience when it worked. Problem is it was dysfunctional from the start and I’m glad something good came of it at all. NonViolence never made it out in any proper, good version but I’ve been putting time in it now and then to finally release it for iPad sometime this year.
Somewhere here we got the contract to make a slideshow for the Karlskrona Visitor’s Centre in the “German Church” that was being restored. In short, our idea was much more interesting than a simple slideshow but not interesting enough to write much more about here. It was a fairly decent job that focused on the information space firstly (the narrative and sequence) and left the implementation up to us as well – I think this is a pretty good setup for a contract job because it places faith in the skills I see myself doing more than merely pointing a camera at a building. The budget was again on a much more acceptable level than before which felt heart-warming, so there was some evidence we could actually earn some money doing this.
Summer 2010
As summer 2010 drew near, I sat in a meeting with Kristoffer and a new client. The task was to create a new web site for them in around a month’s time. The pay was hilariously low, if you are curious. This contract was in Kristoffer’s hands and I only checked in on progress at times. When deadline loomed the client was not pleased with the results. In hindsight the experience of dealing with a dissatisfied client was strengthening but not at all pleasant. Diplomatically I solved it as best could at the time. After a serious conversation Kristoffer was no longer a partner of PB, but not only due to this unfortunate event. He seemed to be lacking the energy in general, and it seemed a waste dragging on from here. The moral of the story is not that bad work makes paying clients angry, however, but that the interweaving of personal time, day job commitments and business ventures on top of that is not suited for everyone. Possibly the worst decision here was NOT to quit the day job long ago. I sincerely think it takes that kind of commitment to break through and not die trying when struggling upstream like we did. If it would have been the correct choice for us/him at that time is something entirely different. Anyway, we parted ways because that was the only sane thing to do. We never became enemies, but instead became closer than we’ve been for many years, almost like when we were kids.
While that was a backlash, it was not something I much grieved for. I remember clearly how I said that my primary concern was protecting the company name, regardless of who’s personal name gets shat down in the process. I still believe that in a very intimate business the alter ego of the company becomes the stronger and more important character. That’s also the notion I’ve wanted to play with in PB – the personal feel that clashes with the corporate/state facelessness.
The single biggest hit was when Thom wanted to inform me of his departure at the time of the Öppna Sinnet (Föränderliga Rum/Everchanging Spaces) press event in July or so. While his departure would not come at once, he made it clear that FR/ES would be the last thing he worked on. I will keep it brief and say that we talked about it like adults although I felt that the motivation for his decision was at the time rather vague. Later that year I would learn that both my compatriots were to expect children. Maybe the decisions for the future family life did affect something of this. Suffice to say, I was at times feeling that the death of the combined forces approach left me personally in a whole shitpile of trouble. I had to find out what my own path was, do it to 110% of my ability and, if only temporarily, fend off some of the more complex multi-facetted projects to make rapid, visible progress. My job situation was changing because the program I was teaching at was in a state of redevelopment and I was no longer entirely certain that I was going to be needed much longer. I had to provide food and rent and somehow manage to be much more wildly creative, unforgiving and directed in my efforts than before. No one was there for support any longer. And I still had an office to pay rent for along with equipment bought for PB that wasn’t fully paid for yet.
August-January 2011
Föränderliga Rum/Everchanging Spaces was released on August 2nd. A live demo was held in a local mall (bad idea, but interesting stories and some unexpected users) and we had a small press conference. Unfortunately all of this had a weird vibe as Thom was, in practice, no longer a part of it. We stuck through it because there was no other choice.
During the late summer I had come to the decision that games, of some sort, would be my primary focus. Everything else would be secondary until I had something to show for my dedication. Game design and theory has been what I love most since 2005 when I found a proper channel for it. The problem with something like game design is that while it is a pretty abstract thing itself, all the disciplines that make incorporated, actual games work need to be seen, felt, heard. Thankfully I’ve spent practically all my “free” time since 2008 learning, among other things, programming and 3D modeling. I was still scared shitless about doing a game all by myself despite a range of demos, my final project for my BA was made in Unity, and then the more recent NonViolence. So I came up with the first ideas to the game that would become Don’t Get Raped. “That should be easy enough”, I thought to myself.
Along with a few smaller income sources/jobs via PB and the final payments for the year’s earlier big projects I managed to get Kristoffer and Thom’s company loans paid and the final rent situation arranged and out of the way. I was well on my way to get economically straightened out.
Working on DGR, I spent considerable time researching victimology, crime statistics and rape cases to cover ground for the game mechanics. I fell hardest for the paranoia aspect and fear of rape instead of the explicit act, and on how victims project real fears to external entities. Technically I learnt something new all the time working on DGR. It gave an enormous boost of confidence seeing it grow. When it was deemed ready for 1.0 (on which I will write later) I released it in late October, with five updated versions in a week’s time or so to cover unexpected problems and bugs, on the Unity (the game engine I use) forums and IndieDB. Some interesting debate took place. I was covered in Blekinge UpplevelseIndustri and talked about how digital games can cover issues not usually seen in gaming. The reporter was almost as excited as I was, saying he had never heard anyone talk this way about games before. Still, the reporter was in no way the generic reporter jerk. It made me happy. I felt as if this might actually work for me on a whole different level than what I thought previously.
After an unexpectedly interesting business development weekend, where I spent -lots- of time thinking and rethinking Propaganda Bureau, I finally got to the final act: present to, and “impress”, a panel of creative industry judges with your business/craft/talent/whatever-it-is-you-do. I took with me notes on paper when coming in. I threw these after two seconds and did what I think I do best: spontaneous, engaged presentations. They seemed very, very “impressed”, almost awestruck in fact, and asked me why the hell I’m here in Karlskrona and not in a bigger place where my work can gain an audience. I had no good answer other than my work being here, for the time being. Probably not much longer, though, I reckoned.
I left that weekend understanding that something has to happen. PB has to be even more streamlined. It needs to know its place, if not just for other people understanding if they have any use of my services and what they can expect of my own work. After a short intermission, I continued creating games, trying to establish my optimal flow in the work process. Without really thinking about it, the transition from a much broader, title-less job description I was seeing for myself had almost entirely gone up into the more understandable calling of “artist”. Because, frankly, that’s what all my original work has been. It was not something that went in fast for me, mind you, and I had a very hard time accepting the “artist” title initially but the turn came around November when all of this happened. People weren’t shooting me down when I called myself that. Instead they took a very different angle on what they saw me do, and responded in ways much more suiting to it. Perhaps an “artist” becomes so through some degree of concensus, like many would argue that art is a consensual agreement. I was happy to see I had past the first hurdles on the road that would completely redefine PB.
The college I was working at was making little effort to inform me of my future there. My mentor and soon-to-be former colleague was frank when he told me I need to look into a graduate education so I can have a place to develop and stop worrying about the impending cash issues. I had previously done some half-hearted research into possible grad schools without finding anything that interested me at the time. Also, the prospect of PB growing into a mature, three-man business was looming only six months earlier. Making a new attempt I found a program that immediately clicked with me: a master in fine arts that had a digital focus, at Valand School of Fine Arts (Gothenburg University). I worked like crazy to complete the courses I was studying (to get student loans so I could pay rent, half-time teaching didn’t cover all expenses for us) and to create some more substantial body of work that would somehow show some of what I do and want to do more elaborately with the game medium. Together with my wife we made arrangements to leave Karlskrona for good, the place where we’ve spent our adult years, a beautiful place with no jobs, and the place where we got married. We left, still with no answers from my former workplace.
February-June 2011
For all the dreams and aspirations at the time, I was feeling down. The only thing me and my wife Jessica could resort to was to move back to her parents house in a tiny town on the other side of the country. My only goal would be to complete my portfolio and just stay sane. While I am grateful of their support it is one of those low points in life that will never truly wash away.
The application date was in February and I sent my portfolio, statement and letter to them. At the time I didn’t think so much about it, but considering that I’ve spent much time now in June to polish those projects, the work I sent to grad school still wasn’t really good enough in retrospective. It was much more of a prototype quality – there was something lacking. Context. A “critical game” for someone like Amnesty has context and message merely by being. My games didn’t have that. I will return to this matter a bit later.
In the end of March, I was supposed to show my work, in a pseudo-commercial rather than purely artistic context, at a rather large creative industries event in Karlskrona. In the pre-event planning I had talked about maybe doing some participatory installation-style games for the event, but these got sidetracked as I was gradually burning out. At the event would be a number of other creative enterprises – some of these were traditional-style artists. The many people who came to see what we (the collective of enterprises) do “for a living” could immediately understand what these artists did and discuss it with them. Few got around to discussing my work, which was botched because a multitouch company that had partnered with me got cold feet and the other technical arrangements were sub-par. All the participating companies, mine included, had posters with the company name and what the company does printed on it as shorthand, informational signposts. At some point during the very, very long day I pasted on top of the part that says what PB does, “Boring, adult games”. This dissuaded the kids who thought my iPad game was about something other than oppressive dictatorship, for example, so it worked. I took the entire experience to be a combination of me being burnt-out, my work and business still being slightly too hard to take in fast and (especially) the context and setting to be completely wrong that day. So wrong in fact that I promised myself something must happen so I’ll never have to relive that again.
After this event I made a trip to Stockholm for an interesting meeting. As soon as I got “home” I was depressed for weeks, trying to work but never getting much done even if I tried my hardest. I was trying to pull the threads of projects that could need revamping, fixing bugs or doing something entirely new. To cut straight to the chase, this depression let go gradually until the first week of May, when it was all gone. During this month Jessica had managed to get employment in Gothenburg, I got into grad school (decision delayed by about 5 weeks) and with enormous luck we got to sublet a comfy apartment. I’ve had contract work that pays well, so now all equipment and the personal money I’ve stuck into PB is repaid. 2011 also marks the year where I’ve been able to take my first, albeit relatively small, salary (this is mostly because of very big expenses and investments, there’s always been some money going in). Not every month or so, but it’s definitely been helping. Frankly, because of how things have been going this development seems almost unrealistic. So, since June I’ve been working pretty solidly from our new crib in Gothenburg. We love it here. PB is also getting much-needed energy and vitality.
Now: Moral(s) of the story, and what you can expect from now on.
I won’t waste much more of your time.
Some of the lessons learnt are:
* That I should have accepted my artistic, free side more a few years ago – not suppress it so much with the commercial side. There is money, work and opportunities in the kinds of art and information I am interested in without the need to make up complex plans that are incompatible with myself (and others). I blame this on coming from a small place that practically had no artistic community as such. Artistry was a concept that was always second-hand via media and such.
* If you are an upstart, think wide but try to find a common voice for as much of it as possible. Test it, rethink it, make it better. I would never have thought talking about PB with hair dressers and children would make PB better. It did.
* A modern business, of any kind, should be formed on passion. Sometimes people have wanted to tell me one should be crass and detached from the work one is doing. I call bullshit on that. Never start anything own if you don’t love it like you hated it. Knowing that real people are behind a piece of art, food, or even a rigid object-product means the world.
* And lastly: You’re not a pensioner at 25. You learn all the time. I’ve been running too fast to think about the road, being too age-conscious. I don’t have cancer. I will survive some more time. Sometimes I think I was way too brash a few years ago based on how I would have gone about today. If you don’t get better with time, however, is when you start having real problems.
What’s going to happen from now on is that I will continue to rephrase Propaganda Bureau’s mission statement and how the website communicates to the public. Much of it has been done gradually over the year and won’t be extremely noticeable for anyone who’s used the site this year. It’s all about filtering and getting closer to the core. So what is the core?
The core of PB is information, ergo, messages, ergo, ideas and thoughts. Art can be information and the way in which something, often complex, gets communicated. What is under constructive rearrangement is therefore not so much the types of work I do – this is pretty much set now, mostly consisting of multimedia “artsy” critical work, and some occasional contract work for the cultural sector. That got fixed along the very long road to here. Check.
What I am doing is rethinking the contexts, as I was implying earlier. Something like DGR 1.0 was never what it should have been despite a series of updates. Strangely many of the ideas I’ve been sketching for years have been far from a screen-presented digital game, still that’s what I was just doing earlier this year. What happens now is that I’m working actively to work in series: questions that spawn a number of works that work collectively. This also means, very much thanks to the fact that I’m soon starting graduate art school, that installations and more exclusive works will now be the new norm rather than the theoretical exception. Artworks will be able to grow and my practice will gain from it. I am more harmonious about the rest of reality and am going to some very interesting meetings this week. It seems very likely that some of my dream projects will start getting helped, funded and initiated in the near future. I am very content with things now, and it seems clear that the two years worth of history, contracts, art work has gotten me through the worst of times. In 2009 my mom, once a small-business owner, told me that any business/venture will need two years to get to a stable point. She was right.
If you read all of this, I hope it was worth your time. Regardless if you skipped here or read it all, PB will retain the dynamism and unforgiving critique of whatever gets in the way, but things will be way more awesome from now on. All thanks to rough times, burnout and stress. Who would have thought?
