The Difficulty of Free

If you take a look over in my resorces section, you'll see a lot of sources I use for free photos and photo manipulations. I encorage you to look into these options if you're creating your own games and art. Especially if you're planning on releasing your material for free. (But if you want to be paid for your hard work, that's your choice, a choice I make quite regularly!)

There's a few.. problems with using free material. But before I get into all of that let me just say this: if you have the money to buy better resorces and therefore pay other creators and programers, you should do that first! But, if you would be unable to create art without free resorces, by dog, use those free resorces! I am always in favor of more art especially if that art is as ethical as it can be.

The Biggest Issue

If you are using free resorces sites like Pixabay and Flickr and all those other juicy places to find photos have about a hundred million more free pictures of thin, media-attractive white people. People of color in a diveristy of ages are difficult to find. People with disabilities are hard to find. People who are average looking are hard to find. Non-hetero normative relationships are hard to find. Fat people looking awesome are hard to find. Women is active non sexualized poses are oh my dog hard to find.

The issue with that is one of access and convience. Because the media so often defaults to white, to women-as-sexy to thin as normal, to straight as normal and so on, if you aren't activly thinking about challenging these false defaults you may miss oppertunities. If you just need a quick picture of a nurse for a short scene, for example, or just to fill in some space in a game book or whatever your art is, when you quick search for nurse you're going to largely get thin, white, women. It's just one peice of a large whole, though, right? It's pretty natural to grab what's right in front of you and get on with your arting! Is it the free photo website's fault that there isn't a ton of alt and challenging images of the normal and real range of human experience that runs counter to the media's white-straight-cis-thin fantasy land? Of course not. Photographers who are photgraphing a range outside of white-land don't owe it to us to give us free material for our own productions. No one should demand more latina models work for free to 'balance' things, for example. No one should demand gay couples dump their wedding pictures on free sites. That's absurd. Artsts who desire to be paid should be. (I include models as artists here, fight me.) And so the conundrum exists. Poor artists using free material MUST consider normalizing the world outside of white-land. But. We cannot and should not ever demand that any marginalized group give us free stuff.

The solutions could come in a few ways. Challenge your own search terms. Don't search for nurse, search for male nurse. Black nurse. Whenever you search for anything involving women you're going to get any number of highly and often gratuitiously sexual images. If you need a sexy lady, that's cool. If not, search cautiously and try not to default to sexy when you don't mean sexy. It may mean more time searching, it may be frustrating as anything, but the effort matters. As artist, we can accept responisibilty to show the world the way it is, not white-land. Take the time.

Another solution? Move away from the free sites and contact other artists directly. "Hey, I saw on tumblr you did a really amazing set with a woman in a wheelchair. I don't have a lot of money to spend on this, but could we work something out, barter or other thing to pay you for your skill?" You'll get shot down a lot, but the effort will be worth it when you can find a way to give another artist something they can value in exchange as well as normalizing the real world.

And sometimes, if you're able, you're going to want to pay that godawful 35$ to download that stock photo you saw of the executive gay couple that is just perfect. It may stink, but if it's worth it, it's worth it. Just try to balance your time, quality, and so on to find the peice you really need.

I hope that helps, I hope you'll consider it. There are plenty of ways to create games and game material for cheap or nearly free, but don't let low budget mean producing a product that exists only in fantasy white-land. Ganbatte!

#free #gamemaking #youcandoit