Kastel

it's gay month, so i figured i should recommend a few free english lgbtq+ games i've played this year.

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i've been watching Nick Knacks, a retrospective detailing the rise of children's television (not just nickelodeon), by poparena and it's made me think about my own excursion into children's literature when i took up a class for writing for children.

writing for children is very tough not just because you have to get what the kids are into but also the fact you're tempted to be condescending. it's easy to talk down to kids in this genre of media. you subconsciously want children to be something they may not want to be: you think of them as mini-adults, infants, property, malleable objects that can be twisted and turned into what you want to be. in general, i think researching how kids react and express themselves has made me thought deeply about what stories for children should be. ( Read more... )

i recently watched this fantastic documentary on text adventure games by jason scott and they mentioned the problem of “how do we get more people to play these games”. you see these veterans and amateurs burn out trying to make these games profitable while a select few is still hustling out there and saying, “There’s an audience that is clamoring for this. We just need more visibility.”

as the enlightened redditor i am (i don’t use reddit), the answer is clearly somewhere in the middle: there’s definitely people out there who would love these text adventure games and more broadly, niche titles in general. i’m defining “niche title” broadly here: the stuff that’s not on storefront pages like Steam or consoles. there’s people who would love to immerse themselves in these text only worlds if they knew (i count myself as a recent convert) or people who would go “holy shit, this indie game is kinda cool”. and there’s definitely this David and the Goliath appeal: the underdog communities can beat goliath with more support from the outside.

i get that, but i wonder how many people will actually play these titles even when good visibility is there.

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damn, this game played me like a fiddle and i fucking loved it.

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every time i play a game these days, i've often come to the realization that this smells like a tabletop game. the SaGa games are very obvious, but you'll also see this in titles like Disco Elysium and Citizen Sleeper that use the non-combat trpg systems out there to tell their stories. it gives it a more open-ended feeling for players to express themselves.

so i'm just gonna blog about it because i find it interesting and i like to solidify these thoughts before i post it on my real deal newsletter about player expression. this is just another dreamwidth wordvomit and should be read not as something systematic but as the aphoristic ramblings jotted down in some notebook.

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when i started romancing saga 2, i did not expect to find myself immersed in a game so much that i scrambled for my friedrich nietzsche books and start leafing his works for epic quotations on mortality and death.

it is a video game that resonates with me because it speaks about history, philosophy, mythology, and most importantly (for my anti-humanist/literature brain) nihilism. i cannot stress how much this game is my shit and i want everyone to fucking play this game now.

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when i decided to undertake the saga journey, i thought the series was just the "galaxy brain video games engineered by the madman who gave us final fantasy 2". but after going through 30-40 hours of this nightmarish buggy game with kino moments, i realized i was playing a work brimming with sheer genius.

it's jank, but it is doing something more radical than i or many western game critics gave it credit for. i thought RS1 was doing things that jrpgs and crpgs can ever dream of.

it was giving me my own journey. my own story to tell.

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white people talking shit about white people don't usually hit as hard as pocs and indigenous people talking shit about about white people. sometimes, they do but that's because they heavily rely on these literatures. this affects white leftist thinking too.

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instead of doing visual novels like some aniblogger, i've come across an opportunity to write about indie video games on a pretty legit magazine read by dank leftists i admire. the commissioning editor's suggestions took me by surprise, but it was so compelling that it required me to reorient my research.

since i'm approaching the subject matter back at square one, i figure i should outline my research philosophy as i've been asked by folks about how i do things. i'm going to use what i'm researching -- settler colonialism -- as my case study.
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