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the_dunk_tank @hexbear.net
WhyEssEff [she/her] @hexbear.net

obsessed with these tweets, there's layers to peel back here

  1. obviously there's the fact that her critiques of DE are so unabashedly surface-level that you cannot tell if she's actually played the game or read a plot summary/review of it.
  2. but there's also the fact that she's proposing a supposed improvement on what DE is with her own prompt, which in-and-of-itself is the lowest form of critique in my eyes–'what if you had an entirely different idea?'
  3. and then the prompt itself is a doozy:
    1. she somehow found a way to both critique DE for being unimaginative with its scenario/having a white man protag and propose, in alternative, the absolute whitest possible scenario imaginable
    2. in the implicit shift from a grimy Eastern Europe to a comfy Western Europe, she's managed to gentrify her scenario proposed in a critique about diversity
    3. she wants to keep disco elysium's, unexamined by her, 'wonderful writing', while stripping it of all the rawness and deliberate confrontation that is at the heart of it that would conflict with the idyllic nature of her scenario and her stated opposition to griminess
    4. her idea of a more diverse story, if we're taking it as she's presenting it, is swapping a white guy with a white gal, which, I mean, diversity win, I guess.
    5. the fact that this is the most generic, safest-possible indie game idea imaginable. I could go on itch.io and find 50 of pretty much that game. this is the idea that like 50% of developers have when they're thinking of a quick point-and-click game for a game jam.

i could go on, but the most scathing possible point I could make to this tweet is that this person is a BAFTA Judge

95 comments

  • Every other western indie game is a "cozy ghibli-inspired solarpunk farming sim with social elements where you can pet the doggo". Look, I get it, life sucks, and it's nice to have a reprieve. Yet, to borrow from the author: "do we really need another game" where you're a smol bean in a world of childish whimsy? I feel like that's a pretty well treaded path (if on the off chance you feel like you don't have enough, learn french; french indies are to childish whimsy what japanese indies are to sexual perversion).

    Cheap, petty dunking out of the way, I would like to address some points:

    I.
    a) You can't take the narrative mechanism of DE and plop into a different game; Harry has a broken psyche, he's in the middle of restructuring his image of self (or if you ask my friend with DID, he's just fine, he just has DID and the character we play is a newborn in the plural system). You can grow and develop his personality over the span of a few days because the man just had a meltdown. Regular people don't talk to a skinhead and become a fascist 8 hours later, nor do they see a bust of fantasy-Marx and turn their entire personality into "you know what, ultraliberalism IS bullshit"

    b) In a sense, the game is not about Harry. You have to insist in order to even find out what he looks like or what his name is, and you can just make something up completely in the latter case. If the game would be about "being a white guy" then it's self-defeating because Harry himself no longer wishes to be Harry, going back hurts him. Somewhere, at a fundamental level he knows "being Harry" has failed him and he's ready to grasp onto literally anything else there is.

    II.
    a) Reducing the diversity of the game to "main character is white" reaches bad faith territory for me. The entirety of Revachol is filled with weird and wonderful people, and we're able to glimpse into each and every one of their struggles precisely because we're not one of them, we're strangers, and we're only there in passing. If harry was instead a white woman protagonist but then all these working class and poor people were removed from the game then that would be a net negative for inclusion.

    b) The core team that made DE is from the Baltics, Eastern Europe. You know, that part of Europe that endured sustained economic, political, and military aggression until it became a tattered shell, an open chasm, where the best and brightest left their homeland for the west in order to become nannies, and toilet scrubbers, and waiters, migrants treated like shit, so they could have a better life than living in the fucking wreck necessitated by the west's destruction of socialism. A story that to this day can only be told by allegory lest you be shouted down by idiots reassuring you, a native, that you don't really know how bad communism was and how Stalin nationalised his uncle's egg monopoly and that's why they had to move to Florida.

    III.
    a) The story is also, not a detective story in and of itself. The game's canon reveal of the murder mystery is indistinguishable from a joke ending; some commie dead-ender you never interacted with before killed your guy while under the influence of the fumes of an illusive psychic stick-bug. Columbo, this is not. The story just uses the framing of a murder mystery. By the end of it, you feel bad for the people of Revachol. At every point the game makes it hard for you to "focus" on the case because that's not the point of the game.

    • I don't know if I've ever seen someone mention it on here, but Sunset is a narrative-driven adventure game where you play as an afrolatina maid employed by a wealthy businessman in a fictional south american country undergoing political turmoil.

    • You also bring up why it's so good if you make Harry become a communist. It's good because it makes no sense for him, so he has to actually grapple with the concept. He has no reason whatsoever to be a communist and the only person who believes he's being genuine is Kim (maybe the two students too). A lot of the communist vision quest involves the detective tricking himself with various rhetorical devices.

      He's a white amnesiac alcoholic cop who suddenly decides he's a revolutionary. He's never read a single word of theory and his initial understanding is that he's the only true communist in the world. Other characters largely disregard the communist stuff he says because they see it as irrelevant. He's a cop. They already know who he is. The detective is so far out of his depth that he might even try tricking himself into believing he's the reincarnation of his universe's Marx.

  • DE's 'insanely well crafted narrative system' and wonderful writing are to serve a point, to create impactful text/subtext through the mechanics that the developers were passionate about. This sort of backseat creativity irks the hell out of me because I promise you if the exact team that made DE set out to make some quirky witch cat game or something, it wouldn't have been nearly as good. Because the team were passionate about DE's subject matter and not passionate about quirky witch cat games.

    The people passionate about cat witch games are making them and if they're not as good maybe that says something about the idea. You can't just take 'good concept' and combine it with 'idea i personally like' and get good art out of it.

    • Like, yeah, okay, let’s change the story of the divorced amnesiac suicidal drunkard in a decaying town trying to solve an apparent lynching into Harriet Potter and the Live Laugh Lost Kitty, but please oh please maintain the vacuous idea of “good writing and mechanics”, as if the writing which is grimy and confrontational and political and raw and the mechanics which are meant to represent how Harry thinks specifically is something you can just rip cleanly from the world they wanted to build and put into the idyllic Switzerland cat pastel game

    • ...I promise you if the exact team that made DE set out to make some quirky witch cat game or something, it wouldn’t have been nearly as good.

      Alternatively, it would be good but also not resemble what miss BAFTA judge had in mind, leading her to complain about that game too.

      • Rosa Carbó-Mascarell when the quirky witch cat game by Robert Kurvitz that she requested has the protagonist kill themself to win an argument

  • Ugh there's too many gritty detective settings these days! Has anyone considered making a comfy pastelcore game? I bet nobody has ever made a game like that before

  • switch out the drug-fueled washed out deadbeat middle-aged white man for a yuppie young neo-pagan swiss white woman who has an outdoor cat problem, but keep everything about disco elysium the same

    i'll be honest, I kinda want to see the shit-flinging the baltic commies can come up with for the western euro-nerds

  • I'm playing as a generic middle aged white man again, urgh.

    To be honest I had only played as a naked green zombie prune with a club before this game.

  • Yes. How many times its about a white guy?! We need a game about Hillary clinton and her brave stand against that cheeto. It should be Hillary combating russian agents. The game should have a morale system which increases only by voting blue. The game should be called "Its Her Turn".

  • I mean heck, I'd enjoy a cosy game with DE-style mechanics. It wouldn't be hard-hitting or whatever, but it'd be fun.

    However, I don't think "generic" is a fair descriptor when the protag starts as a post-disco lover who spent three days partying so hard he blew up his possessions, his room, and his goddang mind

  • All amazing points, and also

    Not only does the art style show she's probably thinking of like a white girl, it also reveals that the imagined game does not star someone who is stumbling through a fugue state wrestling with the disjointed parts of their brain

  • I recoiled at the "idea"

    Like I really don't want to make anyone who likes the aesthetic feel bad but THAT IS FOR FUCKING BABIES, BE AN ADULT FOR GODS SAKE

    I'm not even necessarily against the setting or concept, but this idea is intended for AN ADULT BABY YOU FUCKING BABY. Even if it was done with really tight and evocative art direction or something, putting it alongside DE makes it seem ten times more baby coded, you BABY ADULT go enjoy stuff for babies

    EDIT: came back to double dip on my seething; why is it that in a medium typically dominated by media for adult men who are babies, the response is apparently that there aren't enough games for adult women who are babies

  • i seem to remember an ancient interview (probably on rps) where they discussed their main character choice and said that if they would've done a lady protagonist she would probably have been pregnant or have some other "condition"

  • Yeah “let’s do DE but less grimy and more female-centric” isn’t the worst prompt in the world, a tad superficial but whatever. But my god that setting/protagonist they’re suggesting is like every cozy indie game on the Switch from 2021-2023.

  • Tbf tho I'd totally play the witch game, it obviously wouldn't hit as hard but there's absolutely space for comfy feelgood games.

95 comments