a (difficult but necessary) disclosure

Hi. If you don't care about RPG Maker as a platform/culture/community/history (and I'm certainly not saying you should even though I do) there is really no reason for you to read this (it's pretty long and not what you'd call a fun read), that and because the visibility of this makes me extremely anxious I will replace this with an actual proper Retro Shock devlog as soon as I can.

My name is Devon. I am a 30-something disabled white dude. In the past I have used the name StormCrow/CrowStorm. Before that I went by the name Max McGee. Before that I went by the name Legion. I've had many other 'noms de développeur' but those are the noteworthy ones. It is important to note that I was never active as more than one username as a time, I did not converse with myself. I did not, do not, and will not sockpuppet. These identities/handles were used sequentially, not in concert. One never overlapped with another. 

This post is long but it's not as absurdly, ridiculously long as this gigantic font and the tight margins conspire to make it look.

This post exists to alleviate, not create, drama. I am terribly fearful of it having the opposite of the intended effect but I am also feeling very, very hurt and worthless over my presumably-lifetime ban from RPG Maker dot net. It is killing me inside and I felt like I had to say something to at least TRY to work through these feelings, even if it meant risking more drama and even worse feelings... : /

I have, to put it mildly, a checkered past with the RPG Maker community--the fact that the 726thgame ever added to the site and the 10,759th game added to the site are both my work gives you an idea of just how long my history with RPG Maker goes back.  I had a lot of early success at a very young age. I made Iron Gaia (TVTropes page here)  in high school and I made Backstage in a month in my freshman year of college. By my junior year of college I'd released Iron Gaia: Virus.  I've made literally dozens of other games, virtually none of which were completed and only a few of which were noteworthy:

• Iron Gaia 2 wasn't supposed to be vaporware, but it wound up that way after a very painful incident in the summer of 2006.
• Backstage 2 REALLY REALLY wasn't supposed to be vaporware, and a lot of talented people helped me work on it, and I feel terrible that it was never released and almost certainly never will be released.
• Eldritch, Mage Duel (including Mage Duel Redux), and Everything Turns Grey all saw significant progress in development and garnered an encouraging amount of attention and enthusiasm. None of them were finished. All of them are now cancelled.
• Two games I worked on as CrowStorm/StormCrow, When You Were Young and Chapelwaite, were completed and released (well, completed after a fashion in the case of When You Were Young) and are worth checking out/playing. A weird kinda sorta sequel to WYWY has been worked on quite a bit and might conceivably be finished. Live Free Or Die is now Spirit of '76 (itch page pending, RMN page presumably never?).  

I can't actually view most of the links above that I included above because I am banned on the website RPGMaker.net where my work is hosted. This is something that really, really, really hurts me. It makes me sad, and angry, and frightened, and it eats away at my motivation, not just to work at my craft of game design and development but honestly, to live. I am estranged from everyone I was friends with in real life due to mistakes I made in real life. The fact that the world online is also divided into two kinds of people, people who don't know who I am, and people who hate me, is extremely painful. The feeling of being known--the feeling that someone knows me, that I have an identity, a history--is something I can't experience without the accompanying queasy fear of being banned or shunned or exiled because I have been recognized. This is...it is really difficult to live with. No matter how many times or how firmly I tell myself, SCREAM at myself that it is absurd or childish or immature to be upset about what people on the internet think, it doesn't help.

By 2006 I was on a committee on IRC judging the Misao awards. I also won one, I believe, for story/writing in Eldritch, but it might just have been a nomination, it's so long ago I cannot remember. This was an enormous amount of success for my absurdly young age. I was 20 years old in 2006, and I realize now with the benefit of hindsight I was in some of the important ways pretty immature. Studying various people in videogame development and TTRPG development I've noticed a trend where someone very young, very new, very unseasoned, succeeds MUCH more than I did and becomes HUGELY famous and feted/lauded and beloved again at a very young age...and then FUCKS UP much worse than I did, publicly self destructs and/or melts down and winds up disgraced, ostracized, and/or exiled: John Romero, Phil Fish, Adam Koebel (who I should clarify is a weird rapey creep I don't identify with at all) and several others I can't name off the top of my head. I think that what happened to me was definitely a species of this phenomenon, where people who aren't emotionally or mentally ready to be famous and/or relevant are launched into the public spotlight by their success and handle it terribly. 

I returned to the RPG maker scene in 2008 as "Max McGee" after graduating from college and failing to launch my career as a writer or get a job--you might recall, if you're old enough, that there was a huge economic collapse in '08.  At the time I thought I was probably regressing--at that time I already thought RPG Maker was something I was "too old for" which in hindsight now that I'm in my mid-30s is fucking hilarious--but that didn't slow me down any. I returned as Max McGee was embarrassed of the drama surrounding my old handle of Legion--scared of being considered a joke--and having Richard Bachman in mind, to test if my early success had been a fluke. I concluded that it hadn't been when my game Mage Duel became featured game before anyone knew who I was/my pedigree as such. Shortly after, however, certainly by 2009, everyone had found out that Max McGee was Legion.

>>>Fast forward through over half a decade of seemingly endless forum drama surrounding Max McGee (much of which I got extremely, perhaps even absurdly, upset over in real life).>>>

After I was dumped by my fiance and girlfriend of 11 years in 2017, I returned to RPG Maker yet again to try and fill at least some of the aching void where my life had been. This time, I returned as StormCrow (CrowStorm on here and on the official rpgmaker web forums). I returned as StormCrow because I didn't want to deal with any of the baggage that Max McGee was settled with from years of emotional overreactions and immature behavior, I was deeply embarassed of it and I wanted a fresh start. (Interestingly enough, the first game I released as StormCrow ALSO became featured game 9 years after the same thing happened with "Max McGee" and Mage Duel.)  More specifically, I wanted to distance myself from the POLITICS that Max McGee had been espousing when I left the community around 2014/2015. To my great chagrin, I was at that point pro GamerGate. Since then--primarily between then and 2017--my politics have changed a great deal with a major shift to the left. StormCrow is more representative of who I am as a person now than anything "Max McGee"--a name I am sadly coming to detest--can ever be. *shrug* people change.

This time I was MUCH more successful at concealing my identity, and I wasn't found out until 2020. I was subsequently banned from RMN for reasons I still have not heard any of the site's staff clearly articulate so I honestly don't know--the Max McGee account was not banned at the time of this ban, at least I'm 90% sure it wasn't, so it wasn't for ban evasion, exactly, and I still do not know exactly what rules, as such, that I broke. 

After being forced to return home to New York due to being broke, I again rejoined the RPG Maker community, this time as The Gentleman Loser. Hoy there!

In summation, I am a deeply polarizing and divisive person to put it charitably. I'm also a miserable prick and an asshole. I'm overly sensitive, overly emotional, prone to hyperbole, bad at de-escalating, great at holding a grudge, prone to oversharing, insecure but egotistical, extremely defensive...I could go on! I have a huge amount of trouble getting along with people. And I am old enough now to know that it is definitely me, not other people, where the problem lies, even if some of my spates were with people that were real pieces of work themselves and/or had their own issues native to them. I have positive traits that attract people, orbiters, fandoms, attention, and praise, and then I have other, worse traits inextricably tied to those positive traits that repel the same people I have drawn close to me. Everything I like about myself is tied up with the things I HATE about myself.

It's important to me that people that I don't choose to be this way. Divisive and polarizing and disruptive and argumentative is something I am trying and failing not to be, not something I am choosing to be. I have been diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder Type II, with clinical General Anxiety and Social Anxiety disorders, and with Major Depression. My brain is, to put it colloquially, all fucked up. I am on medication. I am, when I can afford it and when it is practical for me (which is sadly not right now) in therapy. I am trying, and have been trying for a long time, to work on myself. I am not finding much success but I am still trying.

I am tired of hiding my identity. So while I fear I am endangering my career by posting this disclosure, and I fear the negative attention and/or censure it might bring, I can't keep hiding who I am and who I was, no matter how ashamed I might be of my past conduct and how much I don't want my present self to be judged by it.

Thank you for reading all of that, if you did.