We were lucky to catch up with Ap Thomson recently and have shared our conversation below.

AP, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you tell us about a time that your work has been misunderstood? Why do you think it happened and did any interesting insights emerge from the experience?

Last year I wrote a song about pacific salmon going home to spawn and then die. I was pretty proud of this song but when I sent it to my best friend she low-key hated it bc she interpreted it as being about someone who was sad because they weren’t getting laid. No no, I said, the salmon are sad because they ARE getting laid (and are thus at the end of their lifespan). The main insight I got from this is if you’re gonna write a song about pacific salmon reproductive habits you always gotta give a mini-lecture on pacific salmon reproductive habits prior to performing this song. Turns out it goes down great with an audience when I do that.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Hey I’m AP Thomson, game designer and future indie-folk sensation.

I’ve been releasing games independently for over 15 years, some of them solo projects, the rest developed with very small teams (2-5 people). Games I’ve worked on include Beglitched, Swap Sword, Multibowl, and Fortune-499. My current projects include an unannounced solo project, an unannounced album, and the upcoming Consume Me (developed with Jenny Jiao Hsia + Jie En Lee + others) which was recently nominated for five (!!) IGF awards. Look forward to all of this stuff releasing later this year!

I’ve been working on games basically since high school. In college I studied CS and worked on games both independently and as part of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT game lab (RIP). After graduating, I moved to New York to study game design at the NYU Game Center. After graduating (again), I split my time between teaching at the Game Center and working on my own projects.

As a consequence of working on such small teams, I’ve frequently composed the music for my games. Recently thats expanded into making music outside of game projects and performing live.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

Gonna be honest, not a fan!

Like anything built on crypto, if they aren’t a direct pyramid scheme then they’re frequently scam adjacent, with early adopters cashing out and everyone else left holding the bag. They’re also, on average, very environmentally destructive! Not good!

Even outside of all of those issues, the fundamental pitch of NFTs is that, by creating artificial scarcity, they allow digital art to once again become a speculative asset…and I’m not a fan of either artificial scarcity OR speculative assets! Of course, I’m well aware that art has been used as a speculative asset all throughout history, but that’s not what I personally find interesting or valuable about it, so there you go.

Also, speaking as a game designer here, a lot of the claims about how NFTs can be used within games (ie that you’ll be able to carry in-game items or characters into other games by other studios) are largely nonsensical. Even if you solved the actual hard problems associated with such an idea (ie coordinating between different companies, licenses, engines, designs, implementations, etc), there are MUCH simpler implementation methods that don’t require the blockchain.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

To create great art, artists need food, water, clothing, shelter, medicine, essentially the same things anyone needs to live a dignified life. They also need TIME, which in my country (the US) effectively equates to money, with the price getting higher every year.

It’s no secret that many thriving creative ecosystems in recent memory have emerged primarily in neighborhoods with cheap rent…only to then disintegrate as those neighborhoods gentrify and the artists get pushed out by higher prices.

If society wants to foster thriving creative communities, then it has to actually be possible for artists to live on a part time wage in places where they can interact in close proximity to one another (i.e. cities).

There are many levers society can pull to achieve this result. Rent controls, labor protections, an honest-to-god social safety net, not to mention proper funding in the form of grants. None of these solutions are new and many of them have been implemented in the US in the past, but recent decades have seen a lot of these policies weakened or eliminated entirely when we need them more than ever! Otherwise we run the risk of art being only accessible to the private sector or to artists with access to generational wealth.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://apthomson.com
• Instagram: bad_tetris
• Other: Bluesky: @apthomson.bsky.social
  Bandcamp: https://apthomson.bandcamp.com/