I propose a new genre of ultra-violent books, movies, video games, comic books, and so forth. (From Twitter)

[Originally posted on twitter.  Ish.  The introduction is new and everything will have, at least, an editing pass.]

So, before I get to what this is, I wanted to note where it comes from.  Feel free to skip this introduction, main text after the break.

At some point, I was looking at something (been a while, don't remember) and every time I loaded the page to check for new stuff it landed on one of two tweets about the synopsis of a completely real upcoming book.  I say that because, based on the synopsis, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was instead a fake thing that existed only as a farcical over the top parody.

The synopsis makes it difficult to tell if the book will be something too painful to read, or something that one could have fun tearing apart.

Whatever the case, it's a power/vengeance fantasy in which the perpetually offended hegemons who cast themselves as the persecuted victims of the unwashed masses can live out their fantasy of seeing their supposed oppressors laid low and forced to come to them for protection (recognizing their superiority, of course) OR DIE!

When you're not actually oppressed but your identity is built around believing you're oppressed, you end up looking for signs of your oppression in strange places.  Thus the book, which is called Trigger Warning, is lashing out at the injustice of . . . even at a remove, I can't take this concept seriously.

It's the kind of book where the synopsis puts the terms "triggered", "microaggressions", "male privilege" "cisgendered bathrooms" and "safe space" in scare quotes.

The synopsis went thus:

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WON’T SAVE YOU

Former Army Ranger Jake Rivers is not your typical Kelton College student. He is not spoiled, coddled, or ultra-lib like his classmates who sneer at the “soldier boy.”

Rivers is not “triggered” by “microaggressions.” He is not outraged by “male privilege” and “cisgender bathrooms.” He does not need a “safe space.” Or coloring books. Jake needs an education. And when terror strikes, the school needs Jake . . .

Without warning, the sounds of gunfire plunge the campus into a battle zone. A violent gang of marauders invade the main hall, taking students as hostages for big ransom money. As a veteran and patriot, Jake won’t give in to their demands. But to fight back, he needs to enlist his fellow classmates to school these special snowflakes in the not-so-liberal art of war. This time, the aggression isn’t “micro.” It’s life or death. And only the strong survive . . .

Before I get to my original response, I want to call out a few things in that cutesy synopsis.

As the only person like him in, apparently, the whole fucking school (the school needs him specifically, not the 1% of the student population like him) Jake Rivers is very clearly the specialist special snowflake of them all.  I would also argue that, since he doesn't have to deal with anyone like him, he's pretty damned spoiled and coddled as well.

The "ultra-lib" classmates he has, remember, have to face something he doesn't: Jake Rivers.  A lot of people would love to attend a school where they would never face a Jake Rivers.  His classmates don't get that.  Jake does.

The scare quotes paragraph pretty clearly demonstrates that while Jake Rivers doesn't need coloring books, he seems to want his own twisted version of a safe space.  (Twisted but traditional: the comfortable are comforted at the cost of afflicting the afflicted.)  Also that he is one of the sneerers.

Basically, Jake here is almost everything he detests.  The only broad strokes thing he's not is liberal.  Sure, the specific details might differ, but Jake is exactly what he thinks other people are.  He might not need a safe space or even understand what one is, but it seems like he wants a space in which he personally is safe from everything that might possibly offend his delicate sensibilities.

Also, grammar fail:

[...] he needs to enlist his fellow classmates to school these special snowflakes in the not-so-liberal art of war.

After Jake gets himself an education, perhaps he can teach the author about semi-colons, because that is what they're made for.  Put a semicolon after classmates, and it's fine.

As it is, however, it says that Jake needs to enlist his classmates in order to school some other group of special snowflakes (the the violent gang of marauders, perhaps) in the not-so-liberal art of war.

The use of the phrase "the art of war" makes me imagine that this schooling is taking place under the auspices of Kelton's prestigious Chinese Military Literature program.

(Stuff from Twitter, edited and possibly refined, follows.)

- ~ ∗ ~ -         - ~ ⁂ ~ -         - ~ ∗ ~ -

Ok, so whenever a certain page reloaded it came to one of two tweets about this garbage [link to synopsis], I have thoughts.

No.  I have THOUGHTS.

I shall now make these thoughts known to the world.

- ~ ∗ ~ -

For all the talk about Hollywood liberals, and mainstream liberals, and this liberals, and that liberals, and those feminists, and these aggrieved masses of entitled . . . whatever, I've never really bought it.

Consider:  We've had Red Dawn twice.

Everything from Home Alone to [[every Steven Seagal movie in the history of actors named Steven and surnames that are almost, but not quite, "Seagull"]] is picking up on the right-wing fantasy of "They violated my home so Imma kill and/or torture EVERYONE!"

One goes to Home Alone for the torture and not-quite-Seagull for the killin'.  (If you're going to watch one of the gull movies, I recommend Under Siege, though be warned that never will a movie make you more in favor of a major American city being nuked than when Steven is trying to stop it.)

Now one could reasonably come to the conclusion that, maybe, we should have less of this.  Perhaps having this one story told in infinite variations is causing us to miss out on other stories and having an effect upon our ways of thinking, and our culture, and . . . stuff.

Or, one could completely ignore the reasonable and think the way that I think.

- ~ ∗ ~ -

All of this has been a roundabout way to say, I propose a new genre of ultra violent books, movies, video games, comic books, and so forth.  Well, I'm sure that the genre already exists, so I'm more proposing that it become mainstream and be brought to mediums in which it has not yet found traction.

Rather than describe the genre, I'm going to give a specific example and let you extrapolate the genre from there.

Instead of former army ranger Jake Rivers saving the Keyton students from a random violent gang of marauders in a battle where only the strong will survive, we'll have this:

Riley "I got disowned and don't have a last name, but no worries; I'm in a better place now" will join forces with others.

Ne will do this not as a leader shaping lesser classmates into what nir ideology requires but instead as an equal partner in a communal cooperative of, "We're getting through this together, and we'll do whatever we can to make sure everyone survives regardless of whether they're strong."

Riley is no more or less special than any of the other snowflakes and doesn't think the fact ne is a genderfluid + genderqueer [∗] ace person of color from a minority religion entitles nir to special rights.  Just equal rights.

(Riley is not a latte fan, but nothing against those who are.)

[∗] Riley's gender shifts between multiple non-binary genders.

- ~ ∗ ~ -

It's no easy task securing safety for everyone when the fascists in your government have decided to make an example of your university (and also use it as a feasibility trial for cracking down on everything not cis-straight-male-rightwing-christian-'Merica-fuck-yeah)

The fact that "We're saving everyone.  Yes, even those assholes" means needing to manage an asshole population doesn't help.  In the lawlessness of the law trying to kill you, bigotry is hard to contain, safe spaces hard to come by, and micro aggressions deplete san points.

Even so, the entire point of the action genre (whatever the medium happens to be) is to let characters solve problems by punching them in the face.  (Something that doesn't work in the real world, but is a wonderful escapist fantasy of simplicity) and so Riley and co dig in.

- ~ ∗ ~ -

If it's a video game instead of a book then there will be a crafting system and bonus points to those who realize that "marble + shoelace" = sling.  Especially since David versus Goliath is the symbolism you like when the government has decided to end you.

The government decided to end them in the name of traditional values, keeping daughters safe, making sure America remains a Christian nation, *something*something* states rights, defending white heritage, and so forth, of course.

Said-government also makes a point of mocking trigger warnings, misgendering people, and such.

I'm leaning toward video game here because you can have stealth, shooter, parkour, settlement management, social, and so much more.

You can have the character need to take time in the safe room to recover from the bullshit ne needs to face elsewhere (implement a crayon+mandala system if you like.)  Basically: the importance of self-care implemented as a game mechanic.

You know the fantasy that if society collapsed and [fantasizer] rebuilt it everything would be better?  Indulge in it.  In addition to things listed above and more (how did I leave out tower defense?) you get to shape the society of the resistance to make bigotry not fucking cool.

Instead of being wiped out, as is realistic, the university becomes the center of a new multicultural egalitarian society in which people, while still people, have at least taken steps to make sure they don't fuck up in the exact same way they have been for 700 years.

DLC includes:

• Daring raids on medical facilities, and factories, and such to make sure no one is forced to go off their meds
• Treaty building with with other marginalized or outright targeted groups.
• Setting up a school system that's neuro-divergent friendly.
• Blowing shit up in epic ways.

There's a rhetoric skill you can invest in if you want to convince the non-evil portions of the army and police to come over to your side.

There's a side mission where you have to deal with not-Jake-Rivers and his social-Darwinist macho murder cult.

But mostly there's blowing off steam in a way that doesn't hurt anyone but feels good, especially when you've been forced to listen to bigots and other assholes rant about how certain people, possibly including you, don't count as people (or that some people's lives don't matter.)

And there's queer, non-white, non-Christian representation.

And safe spaces are respectfully shown.  And trigger warnings are shown as things that improve people's quality of life.  And it's possible to actually put an end to microaggressions.  (Remember: the action genre is a fantasy in which the problems faced are actually able to be solved, often in simple, sometimes explosive, straightforward ways.)

And for once it's the people who are actually treating the lives of others as disposable in the face of their ideology in real life who are shown disposing of others in the name of their ideology in fiction.  And non-kyriarchal utopia is shown as a thing worth aspiring to instead of a joke.

- ~ ∗ ~ -

And I forgot to mention, traditionally action protagonist = [really qualified + special], so Riley is the best in the chess club, founded the top Splatoon team on campus, is active in the community (was in the movement that stopped Women's Studies from being cut), and a is glass blower by trade.

- ~ ∗ ~ -         - ~ ⁂ ~ -         - ~ ∗ ~ -

That basically covers it.  I could have named the post "I begin a bunch of paragraphs with the word 'And'."  Cutting and pasting the line in question was close to accurate (though it's not as descriptive as it could be.)

Thought I'd try to get something out there, this was already mostly written.  It still has taken me positively ages, but today is a day of rest.  (My sister is checking out the property she hopes to move into today.  On other days I'll be helping her race to move out of what we're losing, as I have been for a while.)

Six potential games involving a trans affirming eldritch sex cults

(Massive) Meta note:

This doesn't mean that I'm back.  It doesn't mean that I'm not, either.

Two days after giving up on trying to write stuff, I was reading Ana Mardoll's twitter and I came up with what follows.  The only changes have been to fix the mangling of having to fit all this into tweet form.

I think that removing the pressure of trying to write is at least partially responsible for my creativity coming out to play, but that puts me in a kind of strange position because if I say, "Ok, I can keep doing this," then the pressure would be back on.  (Right?)

It's also not entirely clear that removing the pressure is enough.

One spurt of creativity is infinitely better than no spurt, but one spurt in six days (which is what it's been now) is most definitely not enough to base conclusions on.  It's one data point.  With one data-point it's impossible to even guess an interval on spurts.  It's obviously not two days (the distance between giving up and having the spurt) since if that were the case I'd have had two more spurts by now.

Maybe it's one spurt per month.  Maybe it's better.  Who knows.  If this doesn't mean I'm back, though, at least I'm giving Stealing Commas a swan song with this.  (Random, true, note.  Swans don't have swan songs.  Think of the idea of "swan songs" as the pre-medieval bestiary version of the "beasts in medieval bestiaries are entirely divorced actual beasts" bullshit.

⁂

Ok, onto stuff.

Background is not necessary, but it could be useful, so I shall stick it in a footnote.*  The short version is that there is a game in which the horrible wrongness of the eldritch sex cult --the part that's supposed to make them horrifing enough to justify the game being in the horror genre in the first place-- is that . . . it's trans affirming.

This led to Ana saying:

Mind you, given 2018 right now "eldritch sex cult that affirms transgender people" sounds pretty awesome.

Like. Is there an application I need to fill out, or....?

My mind was still on "video game", which therefore led to this:

⁂

It also seems like it could be used as the premise for various awesome games in a variety of genres.

Just going to make a random list of things that pop into my head.

⁂
Game idea one

(tweet one, two, answer)

You're the leader of a small trans affirming eldritch sex cult and your congregation has grown too large to comfortably meet in your living room.

Navigate various hazards in pursuit of your ultimate goal:

A brick and mortar church.

Hazards include:
-- Local Zoning Ordinances
-- Bigots on the city council
-- Unfair Landlords
-- Trolls on the Internet
-- The difficulty of organizing a successful bake sale
-- Jerks who protest at your bake sale
-- And More(TM)

[Question I was asked:]

I like your game.  Can it have zero guns please?

Only game idea three would have guns.  I wouldn't even consider guns in this one.

[Suggestion from Ana:]

Also, when you do get the bake sale organized, the members keep sneaking off to smootch and paint each other's nails.

⁂
Game idea two

(Tweet 1, 2, 3, 4)

(This idea sticks with the horror genre from the game that started the discussion.)

The protagonist is a member of a seemingly ordinary and mainstream church.  Then ne stumbles upon the terrible truth.  Now it's not just nir life, and possibly soul, on the line.

Can ne save the innocent members of the trans affirming eldritch sex cult that nir church has secretly been torturing and brainwashing?  Can ne prevent completion of the ritual to summon an unstoppable army that will "cleanse" the earth with their fiery swords?

Will ne finally accept that the gender binary doesn't fit nem and realize that ne would really find it quite fulfilling to become a member the trans affirming eldritch sex cult (provided ne can save the cult, and the world, of course)?

~ ~ ~

Run, hide, unravel twisted conspiracies that are unspeakably evil, sneak, hide some more, prevent angels from killing off much of the world's population, save the trans affirming eldritch sex cult from the religious culture warriors, and more in [game name], if you can survive.

⁂
Game idea three

(tweet)

The [evil empire] has launched a massive attack on all worlds where [trans affirming eldritch sex cult] isn't outlawed.  It's up to one (trans lesbian) grizzled ex-space marine and her (genderqueer) Cleric of Tentacles sidekick to save the galaxy with guns and magic.

⁂
Game idea four

(tweet 1, 2)

Dating sim.

"Trans affirming eldritch sex cult" positively screams, "Dating Sim!"

Naturally it will be queer as all fuck. A major subplot being the the player character getting over hang ups and prejudices via regular conversation's with the cult's wise elder.

The cult's wise elder is entirely asexual aromantic herself, but you don't have to actually be sexual to agree with the tenets of the trans affirming eldritch sex cult.  (She, naturally, has had a lot of alloromantic and/or allosexual people she's cared about in her life.)

⁂
Game idea five

(tweet 1, 2, 3, 4)

Having successfully summoned the dread gods, your trans affirming eldritch sex cult has been saddled with the difficult task of running the new theocracy.  This naturally requires a great deal of work.

Honestly, it would have been easier if world governments hadn't surrendered.  While others have easy tasks, like writing loophole free laws to ensure protections for minority religions, you got the hard job: writing the new standard high school sex ed textbook.

In pursuit of this task you will need to travel all over the world, meet interesting people, learn about various cultures, and hopefully not be an appropritive jackass.

Also: the text must be grammatically correct and error free.

Good luck.

~ ~ ~

It would be a combination of a visual novel and some kind of advanced text parsing thing, and likely way too ambitious to not fuck up in the implementation.  (Both technically and culturally.)

And, remember: Eldritch.  Textbooks that don't acknowledge (divine) mollusks as full people could make the gods irate.

⁂
Game idea six

(tweet 1, 2)

You are the chief architect of the trans affirming eldritch sex cult, and therefore tasked with designing accessible churches, community centers, and so forth accounting for a wide variety of patron needs, and making full use of the strange geometries involved.

~ ~ ~

"Yes, Möbius strips are fun, architect person, but the kids in the daycare will have enough trouble learning the difference between their left and their right without them switching every time they run down the main hall."

~ ~ ~

I never could get this idea into a tweet well, but it's important to remember how sound carries.  (Which would vary depending on the geometry involved.  For a very simple example: sound would dissipate more quickly, with respect to distance, in hyperbolic space.)

There are broadly applicable reasons for this (if you've got a sermon going on for adults at the same time kids elsewhere are doing less sermony stuff, you don't want noise from either to infringe upon the other) but also possibly (though not necessarily) ones specifically related to it being a sex cult.

If sex is considered sacred, and church is a place for sacred things, then it is not unreasonable (though neither is it necessary) to believe that there might be boinking (or just loud smooching during the previously mentioned nail painting sessions) going on in churches being designed.

A lot of people are awkward regarding such things, so you probably want to design things with discretion in mind.  This would include things like investing in soundproofing for any chapel or [whatever] in which potentially noisy rites might be performed.

It would probably also include floorplan concerns.  Specifically: if seeing someone walking down a given hallway means "Hey, they're on the way to [physical affection]," then congratulations: you've just excluded all of your awkward members from participation.  Don't be that architect.

⁂
⁂ ⁂

And that's all there was.  (Actually, more than all there was due to the last section before the break.)

I did also think about a management game where you're overseeing a larger organization.

There's all sorts of decisions involved in running a multi-church denomination and while I know precisely zip about what that stuff is, I can imagine or just make up things.

An obvious example would be how is the budget divided up in general (e.g. how much of the budget goes to maintenance?) and how are the resulting divisions then allocated (e.g. is it more important to do upkeep on the air conditioning in building X, or the plumbing in building Y; or if you do both, how much goes to each?)

Maintenance is the example I chose, but the budget also includes the soup kitchen, any outings, community outreach, helping members who are having financial woes, paying workers decent wages, maybe paying for guest speakers to come, getting Tentaclemass presents for all of the kids (that way you know none are going without), all of the regular bills (rent, power, water, heat, so forth), and so much more.

Then there's scheduling.  You don't want a given location to simultaneously attempt to host a wedding, a funeral, and bingo.  Someone needs figure out what can be done when and, since I'm assuming the game will be single player, that someone is you.

And lets say you've got an awesome speaker.  (Making up an example on the spot, might not be all that good.)  An lobster boat captain who wrote a kickass book about what it was like to come out as female to her crew, her family, the other captains she knew, and those she did business with.  Given the time she can spend, she can only speak at one or two of your locations, though.  How do you decide which ones?

Do you just pick the ones that have had to wait the longest since the last awesome speaker?  Do you ask the various locations to say what they think about how well the speaker fits their congregations?  Do you arrange for carpooling so that people who really want to listen to her but aren't in the right place can get a ride over?  (In this case you'd want her two locations to be chosen to minimize how far people not at the location would have to drive to get to at one.)  Do you set up a video camera where she is speaking and TVs + speakers where she isn't so that everyone can see at the same time?

Moving away from scheduling, what about when you're ready to open a new location?

Do you build a place from the ground up thus having all of your needs built in, do you buy a place that's a good price for the location and modify, or do you buy Gothic cathedral with really cool ambiance (but requires even more costly renovation because it's not accessible and it's made of fucking stone)?

And staffing, and delegation, and . . . blah.

And maybe getting tax exempt status.

⁂
⁂ ⁂

* [↑] Ok, so, background.  Which, as I said at the open, doesn't actually matter.

Ana came across a game called Lust for Darkness and here's xer account of that discovery:

Me, browsing Steam: "is...is this an interesting horror game premise or just transphobic garbage?"

-

Sigh. Ok, I checked. It's the latter.

-

[TW: transphobia]

Game: "an eldritch sex cult!"

Me: "Yes!"

Game: "who modified their bodies in horrifying ways for pleasure!"

Me: "er...uh, like lobster claws?"

Game: "here's pictures of women with dicks and men with vaginas!"

Me: "IN 2018 HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW ABOUT TRANS F

-

Me: "Did they seriously not KNOW, because--"

Review: "The game repurposes and twists the trans symbol into a demonic symbol."

Me: "WELP."

Someone responded with:

Not only is it transphobic, but it’s also just really weak horror. I mean...that’s the best you’ve got? I’ve seen more upsetting body horror in old Looney Tunes shorts.

Which led to Ana saying this:

Yes!

I was like. "Is...Is this supposed to scare me because like?"

The horror isn't just transphobic in premise (it is), it seems to actually require the player to be transphobic in order for it to work!

-

Mind you, given 2018 right now "eldritch sex cult that affirms transgender people" sounds pretty awesome.

Like. Is there an application I need to fill out, or....?

Which has brought us back around to where this post started.

So that's the background.

Largely aside, the writing style of the mentioned review is sometimes quite fun:

Taking clear inspirations from Amnesia: The Dark Descent and amateur pornography, the pre-release demo for Lust For Darkness is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a video game.

It reminds me of a time years ago when I encountered an ad for one of the Michael Bay Transformers movies, which informed me that the that movie included "acting" and "directing" (after saying something to the effect of "It's got great effects!")

It was true.  There was indeed acting and directing going on the movie.  Barely, but it was there.

When Celessa held the Slate, Introduction (Breath of the Wild)

[While the most obvious solution to make the Gerudo Town section of Breath of the Wild not be terrible would be to just show the gate guard the Sheikah Slate, the possibility of sending someone else into Gerudo Town suggests story possibilities.  Who would Link trust?  Why?  So forth.]

The chronicler has asked me to tell the tale of the time I held the Sheikah Slate.

First, I suppose, I should make an introduction my name is Celessa and I was on a pilgrimage when the towers rose and the shrines lit up. I met Link on the road.  I call him “Link” rather than “The Champion” or “The Hero of Legend” because that is how he introduced himself to me.

He didn't tell me of his mission, or expect me to recognize his greatness, or anything of the sort.  He simply told me his name was Link and agreed that the sacred springs sounded interesting.  That was how we first began to journey together.  On the road I learned of how he'd lost his memories and therefore didn't know his way around Hyrule.

We became side tracked many times on our travels, both before and after I learned of Link's identity.  The things we did weren't what I'd have expected from a great hero, and perhaps that is why I never had much interest in the Hero of Legend: I expected something else, something that didn't impress me.

Dropping everything to help a woman find the Horse God and resurrect her lost companion made sense, of course that's what one would do. Things like escorting a monster extract fan to the skull shaped lake where the creator was staying or helping a young woman get three dragonflies for her younger sister's birthday, however, were not the sort of things I would have expected from a great hero with a great destiny.

I think, now, that perhaps it was these things that kept Link going in spite of having lost everything, even his understanding of who he was.  He never put himself above others and thus treated everyone he met as an equal or better.  It kept him in touch with the fact that saving Hyrule wasn't about a kingdom or some label on a map, it was about the people who live here.

Or, perhaps, it's just part of his character, something that couldn't be erased with his memories.  After all, I did the same and I'm not in any prophecy.

We never talked about why we did what we did, the reasons seemed self evident.  I wonder what Link will think of this philosophizing when I show my first draft of this chronicle to him.  He's never been one for using many words.  At first I thought that was because with no memories he didn't think he had anything to contribute.  Now I know that it's just who he is.

What one must understand is that by the time Link asked me for help we had been through so very much together.  I wasn't chosen at random, though he said that if I had refused he would seek out an adventurer and pay her for helping.

If I refused.

He was uneasy about asking: he didn't want to impose.  He wanted it to be clear that everything he had done for me was done without the expectation of anything in return, and I could say, “No.”

He was half right.

I suppose he was so worried about “imposing” because I'd been his first real friend or ally since he woke up.  The old king's ghost doesn't count.  Link had assumed he was some kind of spirit of Hyrule or forest spirit or something, when it turned out that the old man was really the ghost of someone he'd known before losing his memories Link soured on him somewhat.  The memory he'd awoken as we ran for our lives through Hyrule Castle had changed that to outright animus.  So, at the start, I was all he had, though it was just by chance that that had happened.

He was afraid he'd drive me away if I thought we only became companions because he expected to be repaid for what he'd done.  Let it be known to all who read this: everyone, even legendary heroes, can have insecurities.

We'd traveled all over Hyrule at that point.  We'd given apples to the ancestral shrines to get seeds for a giant leaf being's maracas.  We'd lived my dream of walking in Princess Zelda's footsteps on a level I never dared to hope possible.  I'd watched him run back toward monsters we'd only narrowly escaped because he'd forgotten to get images for the compendium.  I'd told him a thousand times, “You don't need a raft to stand on water when you have Cryonis.”  So many times we'd survived only because we each trusted the other with our lives without hesitation.  So many times each of us had saved the other.

We'd stood half dead surrounded by monsters we'd slain only for red sparks to rise from the ground, the sky to turn, and the horrible realization to sink in that we'd forgotten to check the color of the moon.  Again.  We'd run; we'd run so often and so much.

I had taken his horse to a stable to wait for him so many times –when he needed to go somewhere a horse couldn't and left via paraglider or Sheika Slate– that I don't even remember when it became my horse.  My beautiful mare, believed to be descended from Princess Zelda's royal stallion and definitely outfitted with the saddle, bridle, and reins that Zelda herself used for that stallion.

All these things –nights spent at the same campfire, helping Purah recover her physical an mental maturity after an experimental mishap robbed her of them, holding a great fairy at arrow point and explaining the meaning of “informed consent to her– meant that I knew our friendship had been genuine, he needn't have worried about that, but I also knew that I couldn't say, “No,” regardless of how much he was willing to accept that answer.

After everything we'd been through, who would I be if I refused?  It was such a simple thing.  I could go to Gerudo Town and he could not.  Of course I went.

I want to be able to recommend Starlight Vega, but . . .

So a while ago I was really, really in the mood to play a game with a lesbian protagonist and apparently:

Badass [space marine]/[normal marine]/[secret agent]/[person in over their head but rising to the challenge]/[whatever] shoots/slices/whatevers monsters/bad-guys [while still making time to go out with her girlfriend]/[so she can go home to her girlfriend]/[alongside her girlfriend]/[to save her girlfriend]/[while her girlfriend talks her through things from mission control].

is something no one's ever tried because . . . bwha?

I note that by a cunning use of "/" I have suggested, not including the "[whatever]"s, 80 basic formulas which could each be used to make hundreds of distinct mainstream games that go out on precisely zero limbs.

The closest we have is the first game, and first game only, of the Tomb Raider reboot.  It's ambiguous, but it's so very close to being definite.  Too close, apparently, for the publishers, since they made a tie-in comic with the explicit purpose of sinking that ship and then are emphatic in their lack of acknowledging Lara's love interest in the sequel.  As in, the one and only mention is along the lines of

"What about Sam?"
"We're not going there!"

And so, being in this mood to play a game but finding little, I looked at stuff not in my genres.  I looked for anything.  Which pointed me to visual novels, and thus I encountered Starlight Vega.

If you have Steam, it's at 40% off because of the Fourth of July Sale.  And like I said, I want to recommend it.  It has great art, there are parts that are cute, heartwarming, so forth, it's emphatically not just having f/f relations to show boobs, nor is it something that throws in just a token female romance option, while there are things that are superficially similar the story is different from pretty much anything else I've seen, and . . . I want to be able to recommend it,

BUT

A list won't do, let's take things in order.

The names that matter are all music based, but I don't think there's anything to read into that; I only mention because I'm about to introduce Aria and Melody.

At the start of the game you, Aria, show up at your dead grandfather's house and move in with your mom, while your best friend Melody helps with the moving and spends the night.

Apparently you're skittish while Melody is into ghosts and the occult and magic and so forth but so far has yet to encounter any such things so she's been limited to mundane books on the matter and fiction.

We first see the lack of editing in how the story starts or doesn't start, depending on your choices.

You hear a feminine laugh three times which wouldn't be a problem with only women in the house except for the fact that it's definitely not coming from either Melody or your mom.

You decide once is imagination, twice is paranoia, three times is enemy action.  And jump into--wait, where the Hell did that giant tome Melody is hugging in her sleep come from?

So the two of you investigate and, in a room that wasn't there before, there's a stone on a podium.  Don't touch the stone and the story ends, the mysterious stuff disappears, Melody is mind whammied into not remembering any of it, done.

Which seems ok if that's all you've done but playing the game more will reveal:

• The only one with cause to laugh wasn't female and certainly wasn't sultry.
• The sultry female was emphatically not laughing.
• The one who has power to do stuff would prefer that you don't touch the stone and that Melody does keep the book, so not touching the stone should have no fucking chance of short circuiting the story
• No part of this makes sense in context.

Do touch the stone and you get to meet Lyria.  She's been smacked by retrograde amnesia that, honestly, probably does does make sense in context.  In all likelihood the bad guy used some magic or other to suppress her pertinent memories, but it's never really explained.

This will set up the two primary paths.

Melody is your best friend who is secretly in love with you: romance option 1.
Lyria is a --

* * *

Ok, back to the lack of editing.  Lyria says that she's not a demon and only ignorant humans refer to her home planet of Vega as "The Demon Realm".  You'll eventually meet the "Queen of the Demon Realm" who is neither human nor ignorant.  And as the story progresses it'll be "demon this" and "demon that" we'll find out that the inhabitants of Vega self-identify as "demon" because by the time the writer got to that point in the story the fact that they're not demons, just demonized, had apparently been tossed out entirely and the writer couldn't be bothered to go back and make the early parts fit.

So when you meet her Lyria is not a demon, just an alien with horns and a tail who's species was mislabeled as demons in order to stir up hate against them and eventually drive them from earth and cut off communications between the two planets.

By the end she's a demon.  Demon, demon, demon.

* * *

Melody is your best friend who is secretly in love with you.  Romance option 1.
Lyria is a demon you freed from a 50 year imprisonment in a stone, but in so doing magically bonded to you.  Romance option 2.

Each of them will instantly be mistrustful and painfully jealous of the other.

The most benign manifestation is that Melody would be interested in studying a magical tome regardless, but she'll push herself to the point that she's not doing the much in the way of sleeping or eating in hopes of finding a way to break the magical bond and thus eliminating any reason for Lyria to be near you.

Melody is too shy to tell you that she's in love with you.  Lyria is making it impossible to miss that she's romantically attracted.  Melody wears modest clothes.  Lyria does not.

You have your options.  How do you decide?

Well, kindness coins.

As in, you can pursue Melody, spending time with her over Lyria when given the chance, and end up irrevocably with Lyria just on the strength of not being an asshole.  (Melody, to her credit, will take it well.)  Insert enough kindness coins, sexual relationship pops out.

This is all manner of fucked up, but still, such is life: fiction falls back on the old established ways no matter how toxic and unrealistic they may be.  Especially in relationship sims.

There's also the idea that poly relationships can't exist, that love means being horrifically jealous of anyone the object of your affection spends time with, the idea that one could possibly like two people simultaneously provokes a response of "Wow! What a sl-" and . . . wait, let's stick with that last one.

You can only even say you like two people if you've unlocked the "Harem route" which is a joke ending that pushes harder on the no-poly front before ending on a triumphant: "If there are ever more than two people in a relationship, it's because there's a competition going on to see who will finally win and advance to the 'two person relationship' stage while leaving the others behind."

* * *

And . . . fucking editing.

So many examples, but here's one:

The story attempts a "not what it looks like" and you hear these lines:

unknown: "...Do what you came here for..."
Lyria: "...What do you expect? We're never..."
unknown: "...Then you'd rather..."
Lyria: "Hmph! I couldn't care less about her... she doesn't..."
unknown: "We have to do it now!"
Lyria: "The humans... I don't care about them anymore. Aria..."
unknown: "Just glamour her into submission."

Later on, if you pick the right path, you'll get to hear the whole conversation, and it very definitely is the exact same conversation, except somehow you've slid into a parallel universe where almost none of what you heard was said at all, nor was anything close to it.

Instead of filling in the blanks to place the nine fragments you heard into their real context, it throws out everything but the last line and so you're left with no fucking clue what to do with the rest of it.

Well, that's not quite right.  The second and third lines are indecipherable.  There's just not enough there.  The rest can be worked with.  And you can figure out enough to learn that not only do the words themselves not appear in what's supposed to be the full conversation, neither do any of the concepts they're referring to.

The first line, for example, "Do what you came here for . . ." is pretty easy to work out.

Mind you it brings us to another moment of "Couldn't you fucking edit this?"

Anyway, at this point in the game Lyria's memory has been returning but she has yet to remember how she got to earth.  Her sister has contacted her via an intermediary and told her a story.  The story is wrong, but Lyria believes it.

Trouble is, even though there was only ever one story from one source with one version, the game never decided what the fuck that story was.  Maybe it would have been better if sixty different people had contacted her and each told her their own personal theory because then it would explain how what Lyria was told ended up being so all over the place and inconsistent.

Anyway, in certain scenes it is indicated or stated outright that Lyria was told she came to earth on a mission to get the magical tome and a human to read/translate/transliterate it.  (Magical beings can't read the tome, nor can they touch it without harm.)

In other scenes she was told nothing of the sort, and the game seems to prefer those other versions, but that's pretty much the only thing that that the first line could be referring to.

Nothing even remotely related to that comes up in the full conversation.

Ditto for the other stuff you can work out.

Honestly, they'd have been better off if they'd dropped the whole "not what it looks like" + "here have context" model and had the two things be completely unrelated.  Instead they kept the last overheard line and what happened after so that there could be no doubt that these two bits of text are meant to refer to the same exact conversation.

* * *

Scherza, Lyria's sister, was a stretch goal for the project that funded the whole thing and it . . . well it's probably not a coincidence that it's the thing that finally manages to collapse the flaming wreckage making up what would usually be world-building into complete incomprehensibility.

And yet . . . I want to be able to recommend this game.

I think it gave me an even bigger dose of "What the fuck?" when I looked into the code and saw:

(Paraphrasing) We need an if-statement here, because otherwise --more often than not-- this won't make sense

Which was completely true.  The trouble was that that comment had not been acted upon in any way, not only was there no if-statement, what followed was not revised in such a way it would make sense.  The result was that, for that part of the script, if it made sense it was more a result of you having randomly selected the only path (which was also the most unlikely path) where it could possibly make sense than a result of any kind of craft on the part of the game designers.

Usually, though, things didn't make sense regardless of what led up to them because everything was at odds with everything else.

And yet, I want to be able to recommend this game.

It has so much potential, but it's all fucked over.

But the modders can fix it, right?

Well, no.  There's no mod community or mod support.  The engine packages all assets into a single file meaning the simplest way to fix things would involve replacing that file, which would have you distributing everything that makes the game the game, which is indistinguishable from piracy.

There are more complex solutions imaginable, and alluring considering that the engine is actually very straightforward and fixing fucking everything would be a breeze.

A breeze that required some artistic licence, though.

It's easy enough to tweak here and there to remove or work around problematic elements when the underlying structure is there, and there there's definitely enough there to see the structure that should exist most of the time, but Scherza's route is truly mangled.

It's broken into 15 sections, two are missing entirely, and in the rest there are several references to content that was either cut out or never written in the first place.

Throughout there's a mechanic that keeps a tally so if, at the end, the tally is under or equal to a certain number you get one ending and if it is over you get another.  Trouble is, the stripped/[never inserted in the first place] content was where the deciding additions to the tally would be.  It's impossible to go over.

There was very clearly a last minute change from making a degree of sense to making no sense at all, but the the indication of the original sense making is the internal code equivalent of a dead link.

So on, so forth.

So choices would have to be made beyond just easy ones like, "Do I want to be virulently anti-poly or not?" but it's totally salvageable if you just rewrite a bunch of it, notably the shit parts.

And yet . . .

Always derivative, but asymptotically approaching infinity

I'm the kind of person who has big, detailed, ambitious ideas . . . for other people's work.

For my own work I'm lucky to get a premise and a paragraph.

When people talked about being let down by the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who I came up with an idea for a rebooted franchise with a hundred year plan that wove together various divergent narratives, made the 50th an event rather than an episode (which the four previous decade-events crescendoed up to), had built in mechanisms to deal the possibility of unplanned actor departures (be they due to getting a better deal, creative differences, or less healthy reasons) took every plot-hole as a jumping off point to do something interesting, and . . .

Could not possibly have the serial numbers filed off.*  I did that without even really trying.  It just happened.

When I try to come up with an idea of my own I usually stall out before I write a single word.

If I can create a plot then I can't create any actual scenes.  All outline and no substance.  If I can create some actual substance, a scene or two that might be written, there's no story for it to fit into.  If I have characters I probably can't conceive of a setting.  If I have setting, I probably can't conceive of characters.  If I try to mash two ideas together so I have both . . . they don't fit, don't mesh.

Yet if I'm trying to tell the story of Bella Swan, Tsukasa, and JC Denton facing the zombie apocalypse (while I hide behind Bella, in a sort of cowering way) . . . well that has a timeline, it's got a general overview, it has a couple scenes, it's got . . . ok, honestly not that much.  But way more than The Princess Story, and way less than Edith and Ben, which is kind of the point.

The more original something is, the less I can actually pull it off.

I'm writing this when I've been on an extended dry spell with respect to everything, so it might not seem to have much punch given that I'm not writing anything be it derivative or original, but this too shall pass and when it eventually does I think it's a fair bet that I'll be having a much easier time writing something set in a world Ana Mardoll or Fred Clark is deconstructing than something entirely of my own.

But, the thing is, even though my works are derivative, it's not like they're copies.  Writing copies of Left Behind or Twilight would hardly be rewarding, more like mind-flaying.  Tons of original thought and world building and characterization goes into that stuff.  World building and characterization that wasn't present in the original.  So if I'm doing all of this stuff, why can't I do it without some execrable work as my jumping off point?

I think part of it is seeing things from a Watsonian perspective and asking, "Ok, why the Hell did that happen?" instead of taking the external Doyalist perspective which lends itself to, "What the fuck were you thinking author?  There's no way in fuck that should have happened!"

Bad writing, or even merely inconsistent writing, leads to a complex world because you need to be able to reconcile things that are nigh impossible to reconcile.  If you take it as a given that X, Y, and Z happened and ask, in-universe, why and how, you start developing strange and interesting theories that may take you to places you never expected to go.  (Or epileptic trees.)  That doesn't happen if you take a more reasonable approach and recognize that the author(s) simply fucked up and/or didn't care.

But, at the same time, you become tied to the original by the very problems that create such fertile grounds.  If your setting depends on X, Y, and Z because your world building was literally started by, and laid upon the foundation of, the question, "How can X, Y, and Z all happen in the same universe?" then these things become too important to throw away.  Take them away and your foundation is gone, the building crumbles, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, mass and moment are released, other poetry as well.

So maybe it's absolutely fundamental that you have a sparklepire who saves a depressed girl from an out of control van spinning counterclockwise across an ambiguously full parking lot on a day when school really should have been cancelled because WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK FICTIONAL FORKS, WASHINGTON!?  (Not to be confused with actual Forks, Washington which I'm sure is a nice place that cares about the lives of their teenagers.)

And at that point you're really not going to get away with, "No, really, it's not Twilight, it just happens to have a gaggle of --two adult and five teenage-- sparklepires who have been living in Forks since the depressed main character stopped coming to there to visit her police chief dad during the summers."

Or maybe it really matters that your protagonists are a star reporter, an airline pilot, an college student who is daughter of the pilot, and a pastor to the previous two, who all have the unwanted attention of the Antichrist because he's already got the flight attendant linking three out of four of them and (with the un-linked pastor for the free space) if he can catch them all he'll have bingo.  (Nicolae Lanakila, he's got to be the very best, like no one ever was.)

Or perhaps there's a really strong reason why it matters that these people came through a picture, onto a ship, were briefly enslaved, discovered a burnt out island, had one turn into a dragon, another meet a fallen star who did body-horror to his slaves, and . . . the estate of C.S. Lewis would like a word with you.

Those are over the top examples, and I don't really know where I'm going with this.

Other people's works are like puzzles to be solved.

We ignore, for a moment, that the author was a horrible racist and the character traits are an expression of that racism, and instead ask, "What could reasonably lead to someone in this situation having these traits, thinking these thoughts, and doing these things?"  If we do it right, then we'll end up with a much more interesting character, one who isn't from stock racist caricatures (I can never fucking spell that word right; thank you spell checker) and subverts the racist tropes the original enforced.

We ignore, for the moment, that the author had the plot go A, B, C because they had an outside agenda they were going to follow whether it made sense or not, and ask how could B follow from A when at first, second, and third glance that seems not just implausible but impossible.  Then we ask how this could lead to the right conditions for C when B would seem to negate any such conditions.

When the puzzle is worked out we've done more world building and more characterization and more solid fiction than the author ever did.

But, for whatever reason, I can't seem to do it on my own.  I've worked out how to re-work The Last of Us into a story with three main campaigns** in which Riley never dies but everything canonically shown happens, the world is significantly more fleshed out, and so forth.

Seriously, look at the size of that fucking footnote.  That's just a general overview.

For my own zombie stuff . . . I got nothing.

Ok, not nothing.  One scene where a trans character is accepted.  Pretty close to nothing when you compare it to what goes on in my head re:The Last of Us.

I can fill a world with stories and details and so forth, provided it's not my world.

I don't know why I felt like writing about that, but at least there's a post here.

* * *

* I could maybe get away with the idea for a series that follows what the Tardis does with itself after the Doctor is finally well and truly dead.  Just don't call it a "Tardis", don't have it look like a blue box on the outside, find another name for the low frequency torsion inducers (things that use sound to induce a twisting motion and can thus be used to embed or extract the helical threaded fasteners --usually metal-- so common in the universe) cut all ties to the rest of the franchise, change the background mythology, and . . .

Oh, and it's also the part of the concept where I have the least idea of what would happen.

Pattern continues.  The more original something is, the less I'm able to follow it down the winding paths that eventually lead to, you know, actual produced fiction.

-

** The first campaign is Joel, it's like the main game but the Ellie parts are cut out.  When Joel is unconscious the story skips over that.

The second campaign is Ellie it starts with the flashback Left Behind content, follows from there to the next . . . three weeks, was it?  Her getting back into quarantine, her ducking the military, her meeting Marlene, fast forwards through the parts where Joel is doing all the work, shows follows her perspective on getting the handgun and saving Joel, continues to skip to the parts where she's separated and independent, all the way through to saving Joel at the university, at which point we get the non-flashback Left Behind content, the Ellie parts of winter, and then what little of the ending she's there for.

It ends on her talking about Riley and asking about the fireflies (no flashbacks to what Joel knows, this is Ellie perspective.)

The third campaign is Riley.  It starts with her slipping out of a firefly safehouse and crossing occupied Boston to reach Ellie.  The Left Behind content is mostly done in excerpted cut-scenes, ones that take into account decisions the player made in the Ellie campaign, but don't spend too much time making you rehash the same stuff.

Then there's the two of them getting infected.  While Left Behind strongly implies that they were bitten by different zombies, her hand (the one that got bitten) came dangerously close to the mouth of the zombie that bit Ellie so it's not too hard to say they were infected by the same zombie, at the same time, in the same place.  Add in saliva mixing if you want.

After the cut-scenes of excerpts from the date with Ellie in Left Behind Riley wakes up.  Turns out she didn't turn.  Like the last survivor of the helicopter crash, entirely non-zombie illness caused her to become dangerously violent.  She attacked Ellie, Ellie thought Riley turned, Ellie thought she killed Riley.

An injured Riley makes her way through occupied Boston looking for Ellie.  She's hiding from fireflies and government alike because she's AWOL from one and a terrorist to the other.

The Boston section is made of short bursts and large gaps.  She's healing from a near-fatal wound, she can't trust any doctors.  As a result she's always several steps behind until the very end of the Boston section.  She finds out where Ellie is going to be taken just before the Boston events of the Joel campaign.

She makes it to the original meet point before Ellie, Joel, and Tess.  The fireflies are still alive and, when they learn Riley is immune too, decide one immune girl is as good as another.  They capture Riley*** and split up.  Half of them take Riley to the university, half of them stay to wait for Ellie.  (Obviously the second half die, but that's not what this story is about.)

Riley wakes up at the university when it's still a firefly base.  She learns that they're looking for a vaccine, not a cure, she learns that extracting what they want will kill her, she realizes that the same thing will be done to Ellie if they get the chance.  Riley fights her way out (the damage she does is part of why the fireflies abandon the university.)

Riley sticks around, out of sight, as the fireflies abandon the university.  She was waiting for Ellie, but instead of Ellie showing up, she learns where the fireflies are relocating to.  She knows that that's where Ellie will be taken if Ellie is still alive.  She's on foot, so her trip to Utah takes a different route and a different amount of time than Joel and Ellie's.

She finally catches up with Joel and Ellie at St. Mary's.  In an extended version of the cutscene where Joel gets his weapons back we learn that Joel wasn't guarded by one easy to distract and disarm solider (because that would be profoundly stupid, make no sense, and be a plot hole one could pilot a fully loaded 747 through.)  Riley kills the second soldier --the one Joel didn't know about-- who would have killed Joel before his rescue attempt even started.

After a quick introduction, she and he split up to thin out the guards and make it more likely one will reach Ellie in time.  (The idea is that worst case they split the guards in half, best case most of the guards are after one intruder and the other has minimal resistance.  Gameplay-wise it'll turn out to be worst case with neither one having it easier.)

Riley fights her way to Ellie via a different route and arrives just after Joel saves her.  She stays behind so that Joel can escape with Ellie in spite of carrying her making him significantly slower than the various armed fireflies out to stop them.

Before they separate, though, they make a plan to meet up again. Riley nixes the standard 'just outside of town' idea, and tells Joel to keep going until he reaches a safe place, Joel tells Riley about the dam.  Riley says not to tell Ellie about her being there, either she'll tell Ellie herself, or (if she doesn't live to do that) it's better that Ellie not have to deal with Riley dying twice.

That's done fairly quickly, so perhaps not the best thought out plan, and probably not communicated in full sentences.

The final combat section of Riley's campaign sees her between Joel/Ellie and the heavily armed fireflies all converging on them.  She doesn't have to beat the fireflies, just slow them down enough that they never reach Joel/Ellie.

Once that's done she comes to the garage, walks over Marlene's corpse, slits the tires (or pops hoods and yanks wires) on all but one vehicle, and drives that one away.

In her ending she arrives just in time to hear:

Ellie: . . . that everything you said about the fireflies is true.
Joel: I swear.
Ellie: Okay.

Which is when she announces her presence:

Something like:

Riley: I don't know what he said, but the fireflies are gone.  They gave up on a cure, their last base got shot up, and Marlene is dead.  All that's left are angry people with guns.

No, that's too long winded.  Just something about the fireflies being past tense.  Riley knows that they stopped looking for a cure even before they abandoned the university because they were going to vivisect her for a mere vaccine (same as Ellie.)

Anyway, fade out on an long overdue Ellie-Riley kiss.  Joel can be in the background visibly not-disapproving.  Maybe even a smile.

Put all three together and you get canon The Last of Us (including Left Behind) but with final-level plot-holes . . . not quite filled in, but at least smaller, our interracial same sex couple not doomed to being half zombified the moment they decide to be a couple, a happier ending, and so forth.

Joel is learning to be fully human again, Ellie is searching for meaning after she seems to have lost everything (and finds it in her companion, not her quest individual people, not the abstract idea of saving humanity), Riley is fighting for love.

For Joel the climax is saving Ellie, for Ellie the climax is saving Joel in "Winter" (which would include escaping the horrible Reaver settlement) and maybe a bit of bonding with him over giraffes, with the actual journey's end being denouement, for Riley the climax waits until the very end when she and Ellie are together with no one trying to eat or vivisect them.

-

*** Riley would have gone willingly but the fireflies in question believe that they shouldn't put all their eggs, all two of them, in one basket.  They refuse to let her wait for Ellie because they figure that if the two girls are sent in different expeditions there's a better chance that at least one will make it through.

Thus they take her against her will.

Characters from a game idea, (transplanted comment)

[I wanted to do a proper write up of the concept, by my ability to produce stuff is touch and go, and I lost touch with it (it went) between the comment and trying to expand on it for a post.  So this is just the comment from Ana Mardoll's Ramblings with perhaps a bit of clarification added in.]

So, εν νω εχω an action-adventure game where the player can choose the main character's gender but not assigned at birth sex. Main character was AFAB, period.

The game would follow main character seeking out and rescuing pansexual (cis) girlfriend's little brother. Little brother is ace, but I might want to underplay that because he's been snatched up by a Lovecrafitian cult for their virgin sacrifice and the message "Being asexual will get you kidnapped by evil people who live in strange geometries" is hardly a good message to send.

There isn't a village crazy lady (sorry Tala, not every place has someone to fill that role) but there is an older woman who can perhaps dispense some wisdom at the underground Esheresque village the player character meets nir first allies at. She's outlived her lovers, but was once part of a poly relationship where the love triangle was closed.*  (She's bisexual and her first lover was a likewise bisexual female, the one who was added to make it poly was male of some gynephilic persuasion.)

The village was originally entirely composed of people whose thinking was so different from our own that language (including things like ASL, writing, and so forth) is impossible for them (and understanding them in fullness is impossible for those who have language) --they still vocalize, it's just that they only ever use nonsense "words" and those words don't have any pattern to them (a given word may seem to mean X this "sentence" but it'll probably never mean that again)-- but they're nice people who will accept anyone who needs a place to stay and doesn't cause trouble, so by the time the character comes upon it the village has a mix of speakers and non-speakers, including some village-born children who are speakers and have been raised alongside the non-speaker children.

The older woman from two paragraphs up was the first speaker to come across the village, and moved to it full time after her lovers passed on.  She therefore has the most experience interpreting the sounds, gestures, and so forth the non-speakers make, though that doesn't necessarily mean she's the best at it, and she's quick to point out that even after all this time she still doesn't actually understand them.

I figure while main character is there ne will see children of both sorts listening to "Jabberwocky", probably read by older woman, enraptured. Also, when ne gets a sword I see this exchange:

The sword is delivered by two young apprentices, one speaker and one non-speaker:
Player character: *in jest* Is it vorpal?
Speaker: The vorpalist!
Non-speaker: Vorp, vorp. *each "vorp" accompanied by a thursting/stabbing motion*

-

Anyway, I'd likely play the game through with the main character as a cis girl/young woman, thus not fulfilling my desire for a trans* character in game, but when I was thinking about it, it occurred to me that there's no reason that choosing character gender needs to be linked to character biology, and in the cases where you don't have full control over the details of the character maybe it shouldn't be all the time. Maybe sometimes we should have, "Ok, you picked X but character was assigned at birth Y, certain bodily features may show this**, and your character will be shown taking hormones every so often." (Not that all transitions involve hormones.)

Of course, part of what needs to happen is for there to be so many representations that no one representation is ever placed under the crushing weight of, "This is what trans* people (as a whole) are like." Which wouldn't take much time if the games industry didn't, as a whole, suck. So one figures it will take a really long time.

-

* All three legs link lovers, unlike the standard set up in fiction where there's love between A and B, and love between B and C, but not so much between A and C.  The points A, B, and C are in a triangle, but only the legs AB and BC are actually filled in.

** I don't pay much attention to Adam's apples, in spite of the name screaming: GENDER! Apparently there are a lot of people who would like the kind of character creation where you have control over minute detail, which the above described game wouldn't feature, to include the option to have women with larger ones and men with smaller ones.  (Absent some disease or mutation I don't know about, or surgery I suppose, all human beings have one.  It's the visibility that varies.)

chris the cynic's Guide to Game Design -- Controls

On a meta note, it's been a day shy of a day more than nine months since the first draft with the name "chris the cynics Guide to Game Design" is listed, so it's something I've been thinking about for a while, even though this is the first post to make it to public consumption

So: controls.

Key Points

This is the short version.  The "Too long; not going to read" version.

Let players customize the controls as they see fit.  You know neither their bodies nor their minds and that means you cannot possibly make an ideal control scheme that works well for everyone.  You can, and should, try.  This, however, should result in merely the default setting(s).

The players should be able to create custom control schemes as they see fit.

An important and oft overlooked part of this is when the controls for multiple things are coupled together under a single input.  While this happens more often in controller games, given their limited button space, it's actually quite common in general.

You need to be able to let players de-couple things.  What this looks like is when you have a button that does X or Y (generally depending on context) you need to let the end user, should they so desire, have separate buttons for X and Y.

You also need to let the gamer couple things so the separate buttons you have for A and B can be combined into an "A or B" button like you had for X and Y in the previous example.  Yes, this could result in incredibly stupid things.  That's not your problem.

Finally, in addition to allowing players to bind commands to keys/buttons, you should let them bind them to combinations thereof.  (I.e. normally the X key does this, but if I'm holding L1 it does that.)

General Overview

Let the players customize every damned control.

But-- no.  Every.  Single.  Thing.

This is so very basic and yet triple-A publishers still get it wrong to this day.  So here's the deal: you don't know.

I'm not just talking about the basics of you not knowing whether or not your player has two hands with eight fingers and two thumbs between them, as most game designers stupidly assume.  (May Furiosa kick their asses.)  I'm talking about everything.

You don't know how your player's parts, whichever parts they may have, operate.  Assuming your player has exactly the digits you expect, you don't know how big they are, how much space they can cover, what hurts, what's comfortable, what they're used to.

There are good reasons and bad reasons for failure.  Most, though not all, games are built on the assumption that the good reasons should be part of the play experience.  It looks like this: You don't succeed, you restart at the last save/checkpoint/whatever, you try again.

This hinges on the idea that you, the player, are failing for a good reason.  Fun curls up in a ball on the ground and dies of despondency if the player is failing for a bad reason.  Bad reasons include but are by no means limited to:

• My thumb doesn't bend that way
• I've been playing games with a different control scheme and I keep on attacking when I'm trying to jump which leaves me plummeting to my death
• I can't actually mash that key because the relevant digit had a run in with frostbite
• My hand is small, I can't quite reach that button while holding down this button
• I keep on thinking this button does X because it makes sense to me even though for some ungodly reason that button does X even though only a sadist would make that button do X
• The fucking designers made the O button do twelve different things with no common thread between them and whenever I tell my character to hide she instead jumps on the nearest table and dances an Irish jig

And so forth.

All of those are things that could easily be avoided by letting the players customize their control scheme.

With a computer customization has a lot more options because there's an entire keyboard to work with, generally a mouse, and possibly other peripherals.  With a console the standard controllers tend to have about as many buttons as a really cheap four-function calculator, so options are more limited but they're still there.

Coupling and Decoupling

It is common for some actions in games to be context specific.  Hitting the cover button doesn't cause you take cover when there's no cover to take.  You can't throw something if you have nothing to throw.  It is, at best, extremely difficult to do a stealth takedown of an enemy when your character is the only being, friend or foe, within five thousand miles of the action.

Even simple straightforward buttons we take for granted, like "fire", are in fact context based.  If I tell the character to fire when the character has a storm trooper rifle equipped it does not, in fact, cause the character to quick draw their Bryar pistol (technically a Bryar rifle that's been so modified and sized down it's now pistol sized) and fire that.

It makes intuitive sense to group together all of the "use weapon's primary fire" commands into a single "use the primary fire of the weapon you've got equipped right now" command that can then be bound to a single key.  Thus Dark Forces has one primary fire key instead of ten.  (Though whether punching someone counts as "firing" your fist is debatable.)

That's a very simple example of coupling commands into a single button and having context determine what they do.

It's also a thing that makes intuitive sense.

That said, many modern games have found it more useful to separate the Dark Forces "primary fire" command into three or more parts.  Where in Dark Forces melee takes the form of choosing weapon 1 (fists) and then hitting the fire button, in a modern series like the rebooted Tomb Raider or Uncharted there's a dedicated melee key that does that and then returns you to your previous weapon when you stop hitting that key.  Grenades (Dark Forces weapon 4) also tend to be given a dedicated key.

Dark Forces had "Use one of the weapons one through ten, which one determined by context," if it were like the modern examples it would have been decoupled into "Use weapon one", "Use weapon four" and "Use weapon two, three, or five through ten, which one depending on context."

Even something as simple as "use the selected weapon" has proven to be more complicated than people originally thought.  But this is all still pretty simple and easy.

Where this becomes more difficult and complicated is when you've got something like the Uncharted series and you're trying to fit aim, fire (only for guns), throw grenade, punch, counter, jump, drop, hang, roll, take cover, leave cover, switch cover, use, open journal, find ally, equip weapon one, equip weapon two, find vehicle, break neck, pull off cliff, kick off cliff, shake flashlight, and so forth onto a handful of buttons.

Let's talk about cover as it's a decent example.

The way the game works, you can only take cover while standing on the ground.  The way things in general work you can only drop from something when you're on something to drop from.

So it makes pragmatic sense to put these two actions together, which is what the devs do.  A single button controls both and what the button does is determined by context.  It doesn't get messed up because it's impossible to do one whenever it's possible to do the other.

This is a case of coupling controls at its best.  A drop button is completely useless when on the ground, a cover button (in these particular games) is completely useless when not on the ground, put the two together and you've saved button space and reduced the time during which what buttons there are happen to be useless.

The cover control is also coupled with the the switch cover control which, again, works because you can't drop or take cover in situations where you can switch between two areas of cover (since you're on the ground and already in cover.)

It's then coupled with the hang off of something you were standing on top of which intuitively makes sense as a down action being grouped with drop, another down action, but runs into difficulty because there are times when it's possible to either take cover or hang off of what you're standing on and the game isn't psychic enough to know which you want, so mistakes will be made.

Then it's coupled with leave cover, which means that maybe when you were trying to safe-ishly get from one safe area to another while under fire (switch cover) you simply stand up (leave cover) and get killed by machine gun fire.

Then it's coupled with roll, which means that sometimes when you're trying to switch cover, or hang off of something, or stop being glued to the wall but still stay in one place, you dive into a forward roll and end up standing in a place you never meant to be.

So forth.

This isn't an example of coupling at its worst.  Not even close.  If I had to pick the worst I'd probably go for the: "We made a non-lethal stealth action share a control with 'Jump up, lunge forward, murder someone in plain view of everyone in the entire county, and then just stand there while people gawk'" that can be found in certain Assassin's Creed games.

The Uncharted example is coupling at its middle.  Fairly usual, about as inoffensive as these things get, and still laden with problems.  "Leave cover" is the same button as "Stay in cover" (which is what the switch cover control is for) and that's more or less what you can expect from a lot of games.

This is . . . sub-optimal.

Of course, part of the reason for this sub-optimal situation is because we're talking about a console game and a controller doesn't have that many buttons.

Still, depending on one's play style some of the commands coupled into a single button might not be needed, reducing the chance for the game to fuck up, or there may be entire default buttons that never get used onto which some of the commands from an overloaded key can be placed.  Or changing up which controls are coupled with which under single buttons could solve everything.

How to let players customize

In PC games it's common to allow each command-set (control over decoupling and coupling is seldom given to the players) to have two keys bound to it.  This is a good thing as it allows for a player to deal with things like: I can't touch [Key One] while I'm holding [Key Two] but when I don't have to touch both at once those are totally the best keys to bind those command-sets to.

Or it can allow multiple people to use a game with their own preferred control scheme, but in that case only two.

I've already talked about the importance of allowing players to couple and decouple commands, so it should be clear that, while a command set might be default, players who want or need to should be able to customize at the level of individual commands.

Two or Three keys per command-set is good, but there's no reason it can't just be N.  Control scheme profiles should exist so that you can switch from "This works best when I'm helping a seven year old play the game" to "This works best when I'm playing on my own," and even "This works best when my friend [person] is playing the game on my system."

Some game designers, to their credit, are already allowing players to create as many control schemes as they want (with the option for two inputs per command in a given scheme, no less.)

But PC games are hardly the only games.  (Though what I'm about to say can go for PC games too.)

All of that does apply to console games, but console games tend to be played with controllers and controllers have limited buttons.  And this is where the wonderful field of combinatorics comes in.

You see, in the art of keyboard creation there was this incredible invention called a "shift key" that, by reserving one key for altering what the others did, allowed keyboard makers to turn [X] keys into [2*X - 2] keys.  Suddenly the alphabet required a mere 27 keys (26+1) instead of 52 (26*2).

Things get even more interesting when one considers that there can be multiple ways to modify what a button does instead of just one dedicated key.

In fact, people who work with controllers have long had the idea that any combination could potentially be used for a unique command.  A, B, X, and Y (my keybord doesn't have squares and triangles, sorry Playstation) go from being four things to being ten by making each combination of two buttons do a unique thing that happens to be different from what any of the individual buttons do on their own..

It's not like controllers just have four buttons.

Conclusion: there's really not a shortage of buttons on a controller IF a player is willing to use combinations.  Is a player willing to use combinations?  Depends on the player.

Let them bind the controls to whatever buttons they want AND to whatever combination of buttons they want.

Imported Comment: Weapon Durrability mechanics, and inability to pick up weaponizable things, in Zombie games

[Originally posted as a comment at Ana Mardolls.]

Random pet peeve:

It makes a certain amount of sense that fighting zombies with a stick would eventually break the stick. The number of hits you get out of a cast iron pipe, on the other hand, is positively absurd. Unless the zombies are made of stronger stuff and you're hitting with more force than a human being can muster.

The absurdity is raised to ludicrousness when a metal ax breaks in like five hits. We're talking about something that is designed to be smashed into solid wood enough times to cut down many trees, often for years on end, before a wood handle would break, and this one has a stronger handle than that. Yet five hits to something significantly softer than wood and it's kaput.

[Added] I meant to mention the machette too. I stab people with it, meaning it's under minimal stress as it's encountering only soft tissue that it easily moves through. Four stabs and it breaks for no apparent reason. [/added]

I understand that weapon degradation is gameplay mechanic, just like slapping an alcohol disinfected bandage wouldn't really cure you from being repeatedly shot, but the thing is that instant-absurd-heal medkits are there to make the game possible. Otherwise you'd be dead before you reached the plot. We let it fly because they help us, as players, actually play the game.

The sturdy looking ax that's apparently made out of aluminum foil is not a necessary break from realism. The game would be just as possible if the only weapons that broke are ones that realistically would, and, in fact, we know that the game takes place in a world where weapons can be more durable than reality given the magical jam-proof guns that would, realistically, break down way faster than a cast iron pipe.

But I haven't even reached the height of pet-peeve yet. If I'm playing a game where I have to replace my melee weapons every two seconds because they're composed of paper mache, don't fucking send me to a place with pool cues that I can't pick up. Those things aren't very durable at all*, but they'd do better work than my cast iron pipe that was somehow imported from a Wile E Coyote cartoon where it had been manufactured by Acme and even if they didn't, they'd at least be multiple "breathe on it and it disintegrates" weapons that I could use on the clickers.

And this isn't even getting into the fact that while I can throw bottles and bricks, two things whose shape demonstrates they were never intended to be thrown, but I can't pick up the pool balls which are shaped exactly how we design things that are meant to be thrown.

First zombie game I make, the main character's primary ranged weapon is going to be a sling that's sized for pool balls.

When the conquistadors came the natives had them matched in firepower partially because the guns at the time sucked, but equally because their sling stones (actually made of clay) were manufactured to all be the same weight and shape allowing for much more control than using found objects. That's why the deciding factor was swords. (Wooden swords with obsidian blades are absolutely devastating to a person they're used on, but they can't survive a hit from a metal sword.)

Long range, the character will have to use a gun, but mid range the pool ball sling should be highly effective, no have a limited ammo problem because of ball retrieval, and have refills to replace lost balls pretty much anywhere in America that someone didn't have the same idea.

But this is beside the point, which is this:

If I'm fighting with found sticks, don't show me piles of found sticks that I can't pick up for fighting purposes.

-

[Added:]

* The typical pool cue is made of hardrock maple.  Way stronger than the sticks the game does let you fight with, but not nearly so strong as a cast iron pipe.

Communal cues are usually one piece affairs making them slightly longer than a Japanese  jō, I'm told the Chinese weapon that's mostly equivalent is called a bang, but I can only find one source so I'm not entirely convinced.  I have difficulty believing that there isn't a western weapon made out of about that length of wood, but I can't find one.

Two part cues would be even more durable.  Simply put, the longer something is, the easier it is to break.  Separating the cue would also lend itself to an interesting fighting style.  The butt end of a cue would essentially become a club, while the striking end would be able to be used as a lighter faster weapon.

Health Regeneration

[This comes from the idea of making in-universe sense of things in video games, think of it like Tutorial but on a different topic.  Also in a different setting.]

You're not human, that's what's going to get you through this, assuming you actually do survive.  Wounds that would take a human being months or years to recover from are things you can heal your way out of in under a minute.

All you need to do is get your body into a state of rest, that includes no longer being shot, stabbed, punched, burned, fried, functioning as an electrical resistor, crushed, impaled--

Just what the fuck do you think is going to happen to me?

You want to do great justice or some other naive bullshit like that, I expect you to be subjected to everything short of a meat grinder.

Somehow I doubt I'll be run through a meat grinder.

I said everything short of that.  Anyway, get your body in a state of rest and count to thirty at a pace somewhere between languorous and ordinary.  That should get you back to normal.  But have like a backpack of extra clothes or something because they won't magically heal.

Thank you fashion consulting.  I'm not planning on being shot stabbed and sliced so very much that the bullet holes, punctures, and incisions in my clothing make me indecent.

You're so damned naive.

So I just wait a bit?  I'm supposed to trust my survival to my ability to be a stopwatch.

One of the few areas where you're in luck.  You're not human but you are human enough that your eyes aren't like mine.

And this helps how?

The closer you come to death, the more the spirit world will become visible to you.  When you're at death's door it'll be so overpowering you'll see only it.  As you heal it will recede and you'll see the mundane world unhindered again.

I repeat: and this helps how?  I thought the spirit world had the same architecture.  Unless there's a convenient ghost right in front of me--

Only your rods are capable of perceiving the spirit world, half-breed.  For some reason they have an easier time with it and your eyes are too human for your cones to see the spirit world.

So the spirit world is black and white, like I'd see in low light.

No, it's full of vibrant colors some of which you're incapable of even imagining.  You can only see it in black and white.  Just remember that when the colors fade you're not well, when they go away you're near death, and when they're back to normal you're fully healed.

What if I get shot in my eyes?

Wear goggles or something if you're so concerned.

What are the limits on this healing?  If I lose an arm--

Then pick it up, wait for a calm moment, and sew it back on.

If I get shot in the head?

Try not to.

But if I do?

If you do, and you remain conscious long enough to escape and heal, then you're in luck.  Your soul is tied to your body much more tightly than a human's.  It'll be able to tell your brain how to heal properly.  A human with brain damage usually doesn't get access to how they were before until after they're dead and their brain no longer mediates between their soul and their consciousness.

Hellfire and Angelfire?

Pack a medkit.  If you patch yourself up, the healing will take over as if the wounds were mundane.  If you don't patch the holes, you risk bleeding out the same as a human with an ordinary wound.

My odds of success?

It would take a miracle, and half breeds like you aren't in the good graces of any of the powers capable of granting one of those.

So why the advice?

Some people, ones with incredible willpower and the stupidity to put themselves in situations where there's no hope of winning can make their own luck and change the odds.

You don't think highly enough of me for that to be a factor in your thinking.

There is a chance, however slim, that you will survive.  That chance wouldn't exist if I didn't give you a basic primer on your biology.  So, when you end up dead having failed to accomplish anything, I can keep my conscience clear by reminding myself that I gave you that chance.

If, on the other hand, I didn't give you that chance, then I would always have a nagging doubt that maybe you would have survived if I'd given you the chance to do so.

That does sound more like you.

-

And that shifted characterization between beginning and end.  When I first had this thought it started with "You're not human, that's what's going to get you through this" and the faith of that (you will get through this) was a key part, as was a genuine desire on bold's part to help Italic survive.

Took a sharp turn at "My odds of success?"  Not sure why it did.

And I could just cut that section off and have it be an in-universe explanation for the health regeneration that signifies damage by desaturating the world and healing by letting the colors return.

Not sure which version of the characters I like more, Bold with faith that given the right information Italic can survive, or Bold pretty much sure that Italic is going to die, and only doing it so Bold can have a clear conscience when Italic is inevitably a corpse.

The original idea probably ends right before "Hellfire and Angelfire?" but I was thinking of a semi-divine explanation for why Italic isn't human and thus can regenerate health so the question did flow from the premise in my head.