freckles_and_doubt | Entries tagged with mad gaming

Last night, having after several weeks of play flogged my way through the entirety of Dragon Age: The Veilguard (the new Bioware game), I arrived at the climactic battle in my characteristic gameplay state: having duly and grimly maxed out all my companions' levels, completed all their individual angst-ridden storylines, refined my and their equipment to the highest quality, secured my romance of choice, massaged my allies to the greatest possible functionality, scoured every local map for quest markers, and knocked off every quest listing in my journal. Then I clicked on the fateful doorway to enter the final confrontation, and the game crashed to desktop. At which point I thought "Thank fuck!" and went to bed in a state of relief that the cosmic wossnames were, for once, looking out for me and, probably, my blood pressure.

What I am saying is, having finished the damned thing this morning in a state of fulminating irritation, I am now going to launch into a full-fledged rant on how much this game annoyed me from the vantage point of someone who both dropped a bucketload of money to upgrade my computer to run it, and has damned well played it to the hilt, if only more or less out of sheer bloody-mindedness.

I am a Bioware fangirl. I have played all the Dragon Age and Mass Effect games multiple times, some of them over and over and over again (probably nearly twenty run-throughs of Inquisition). I love their worldbuilding, their ethos of character interaction, their ability to present difficult choices and actual consequences, their humour and pathos and even their gosh-darned political sweep, this last being something I usually hate in my fluffy down-time pursuits. The last few weeks have consequently been marked by rising anger, betrayal and grief as I realised, incrementally, just how far the makers of Veilguard have departed from the previous games in the series: not just in the sense of ignoring or contradicting huge swathes of backstory and event and history and build-up, but in their clearly shifted goalposts, their determination to make, at base, simply a different kind of game.

How different? let me count the ways in which it has repeatedly made me swear, rage, cry or succumb to ennui.

I get that setting it in Tevinter is necessarily a shift to an area we haven't seen before other than by implication, but Veilguard simply abandons or ignores too much history from the previous games. The mage rebellion has dropped off the map entirely, which, fair, Tevinter didn't experience it, but given the carry-through of the Inquisitor and Varric and Harding, too many previous decisions and characters are simply not referenced. Hawke and the possible stuck-in-the-Fade outcome? The Hero of Ferelden's search for a blight cure? various romances - Solas/Inquisitor (particularly!), Dorian/Bull? I know that that's a lot of possible ramifications given different player choices in different games, but they managed the world-state specifications and brief acknowledgements in DAI, why can't they here? What about Tevinter and slavery and Fenris's whole crusade? we don't even see slaves. And blight contact used to be a death sentence, see: whole basis for the DAO warden thing, and now it's not an issue? Despite relying on player investment in previous games as a marketing tool, they have surgically detatched Veilguard from a lot of what's gone before, and it feels like a severed limb.
Veilguard gameplay presents a huge loss of what I can only call interactive texture, a sort of cut-price flattening of environments and radical slimming of NPC interactions. Compared to Skyhold, the Lighthouse feels bland and rather cold; there is a lack of connection to supporting allies who are dispersed to different allied bases rather than existing in a community. It feels like a related problem that quests are often tickboxes, in which motivations are often insubstantial and outcomes perfunctory. High-stakes choices feel unearned, decisions made for companions are unscaffolded and based on insufficient information. Too often it feels as though the game is paying lip service to agency. Losing or blighting a companion based on an arbitrary choice is maddening, I strenuously object to being blindsided by losses I have no way of predicting or avoiding. I play games to feel instrumental, not helpless.
The overall feel of the game tends to a deliberate darkness and nastiness, environments and events have a relentless emphasis on grimness and destruction - not just metaphorically, actually, too often the visuals are too damned dark to see properly. The blight in particular is disgusting and depressing. If I wanted to wade through squelching tentacles and pulsating boils I'd play a horror game.
The escalation of stakes was ridiculous - not just another Blight, but gods? TWO gods? Multiple blighted dragons? multiple Archdemons? they trashed the world. It was all so over-the-top I couldn't really get invested in the actually interesting reveals in lore and history and what have you.
I realise these have never been open-world games, but previous iterations did not lead one around by the nose quite as egregiously. Inquisition managed a wonderfully open-world feel, the rollback on that is heartbreaking. Too much of Veilguard felt like blindly following the little diamonds towards the next quest objective, through often confusing landscapes that were painted backdrops rather than a real world.
if I wanted to play timed or dexterity challenges (which I do not at all in any way) I would play a fucking console game. If I wanted to repeatedly solve stupid blight-node puzzles I would play stupid puzzle games. The puzzles are not intelligent and are often not properly scaffolded. I have never resorted to walkthroughs so often in my life, mostly because I simply didn't care enough to work it out for myself.
If I wanted to micromanage tactical combos I would fucking look for that kind of game. Skill improvement felt arbitrary and opaque, trees were too complicated and new bonuses felt meaningless, combos were too fiddly to bother with, I ended up leaving companions to do their own thing. Playing on the lowest difficulty meant that button-mashing was actually fine as a strategy, but I do not like feeling that significant development time went into combat refinements I don't care about, at the cost of character and narrative interactions I do actually care about.
I do actually want to micromanage equipment bonuses, I do not want to acquire random arbitrary gear with constellated bonuses I cannot optimise for myself. Nor to I wish to accumulate huge quantities of gear I cannot sell, or remove from my inventory, or give to my companions. Or even look through easily, they could have given us a damned sort function so I wasn't wading through irrelevant armour types every time I picked up something new and tried to work out if it was worth swapping.
I actually loved the companion personalities and stories, but too often your own choice of response wasn't actually meaningful - in fact, a lot of the time I felt that choices on the conversation wheel were making no damned difference to anything. I can only speak personally to the Lucanis romance, which was deeply unsatisfying because it basically dropped off the map as soon as you'd made the conversation choice which was explicitly supposed to trigger it. It felt tick-box and unsubstantial, with too huge a gap between "you're in a romance!" and any actual narrative payoff. There was no supporting background detail, banter, romance interactions; hell, Fallout 4 did a better job of making a romance feel organic and scaffolded, and that's an FPS.
Overall the writing actually wasn't brilliant, interactions often felt immature. Egregious example: Taash's nonbinary story was great, except it wholesalely dumped the idiom and structure of contemporary gender identity - in fact, of an extremely recent, narrow and specific idea of gender identity - on top of a fantasy setting, and made absolutely no attempt whatsoever to integrate it into any of the Thedas cultures, either linguistically or conceptually. I loved that they included it so respectfully, but the implementation in a weird way felt particularly young - it needed a more objective perspective and more nuanced consideration of the cultural implications in the Thedas setting.

This game gave me the same feeling that recent Marvel superhero films have done: that I have just bought into a marketing exercise whose point is to maximise sales to the broadest possible demographic, one which is defined, in sharp contradistinction to previous efforts in the genre, as being significantly composed of people who do not share my tastes or interests. This has resulted, primarily, in a glossy, high-production-value product focused on action and combat, onto which gestures at narrative, world-building, fidelity to previous products, and any other loci of consumer investment, have been pasted as superficially as possible. If we're talking gods, this is not the thing itself, this is a meat-puppet avatar waved on the end of a tentacle, an extrusion prettily shaped, but glassy-eyed and vacant. When I play Dragon Age, I want to play Dragon Age, goddammit, not this ersatz, lobotomised thing.

As my personal cosmic wossnames will obviously dictate, I am whiling away large chunks of this disability-ridden long-COVIDed existence by playing video games, which I can, by dint of careful rearrangement and at least one PC upgrade, do from my comfy armchair with my feet up. Which is useful, because I can only sit at my desk for about 20 minutes before the fatigue kicks me hard, so my usual PC-gamer proclivities were a bit hamstrung until I worked out how to connect the PC to the TV with an HDMI cord and found a controller that actually worked.

I am brain-fogged, and absolutely cannot play anything new, so it's old favourites up in here, with the difficulty dialed right down to the lowest level, a declension about which I decline to be embarrassed, I am simply not up to anything more demanding. I have played Skyrim through, again, twice (orc warrior with big sword and shield, no bows allowed! never done that before! she was great! and a separate mage playthrough just to prove I can, it's tactically far more demanding as Skyrim magic is underpowered, and I'm surprised I managed to make it work even on easy in my current state.) Then New Kitten happened, who can't take loud noises, so I went back to Stardew Valley, which is cute and gentle and doesn't alarm her unduly.

I love Stardew Valley, it's nicely written and cutely retro-pixellated and the gameplay is satisfying, and it hits repeatedly and precisely my personal buttons about Making Things Work and Tidying Things Up and Restoring Order. And its certifiably insane designer (honestly, it's one guy, he wrote and coded and scored and soundtracked and drew the entire bloody thing, Renaissance men also ran) randomly puts out free updates with mad new content every few years, and the last one came out a month ago and is delightful, and I've been happily discovering its whimsical new added bits with small, joyous yodels.

But it has this weird side effect, which is that it makes me miss my dad. It's a farming sim; you inherit an old, derelict farm and basically build it up to functionality from scratch, and you end up, after diligent pottering around through seasons and years, with these lovely rows of crops and woods and fruit trees and barns full of chickens and cows and goats. And my dad was an animal scientist and grew up on farms and worked on research stations, and I keep wishing he was still alive so I could show him the game; I think it would have amused him. Like most video games, its representation of reality is necessarily emblematic rather than realistic, it strips down the actions and goals to a symbolic minimum, exacerbated by the fact that it's low graphics and relative simplicity because of the indie format. So I am occasionally niggled by the fact that you don't grow cranberries in bogs, for example. Or you can cheerfully fill up your silos with hay you've harvested while it's raining, and it doesn't subsequently spontaneously combust. It should combust. Compressed damp hay goes eeeeeevil.

And every time I accidentally milk a cow from the front rather than the back end, which you can cheerfully do because you can access the milk gesture from any direction as the game doesn't distinguish, I imagine how my dad would mock the slightly insane result. But I also think he might have enjoyed playing it anyway, given its idealised, back-to-the-soil, escape-the-rat-race ethos, and the way it allows you to create a small world of farm functionality in an unrealistic but deeply soothing way.

Or maybe I'm projecting. Anyway. I love Stardew Valley, even if it makes me miss my dad. It's not an unhappy reminder of who he was, and it feels, across time and death, like a tiny connection. I'll take it.

... in re Pandy, loss of: do not try to play Stray for a bit, it doesn't go well.

So Stray is a wonderful little game, in which your avatar is a cat, and you guide it through a post-apocalyptic, vaguely cyberpunky cityscape that's utterly devoid of people, although full of their empty homes and businesses and artifacts, and instead houses a fairly sparse population of robots all going peaceably about their business. It's mostly exploration and route-finding, at least to date, with a bit of puzzle-solving and questing as you gradually construct the backstory narrative of the city and its weird, giant-cylindrical, abandoned environs (it's some kind of artificial habitat, I haven't got far enough to work out what, but the city's ceiling is circular and dotted with lights). You start out in a much more sylvan and beautiful environment, all overgrown vegetation and water and your happy cat colony, which seems to be inside the wall of the city. You then accidentally fall into the city and have to try and find your way back to your family, hence all the puzzle-solving and route-finding. You're not quite a standard cat, there is some kind of assumption of augmented intelligence in the puzzles you have to solve, but the little animations when you interact with bits of the city, drinking from puddles and scratching random bits of furniture and sleeping on cushions, are very feline and very adorable.

The game has the most amazing atmosphere - not just because you're playing a kitty, but in the gentle, wistful, slightly surreal flavour of the environment itself. The robots are enormously endearing, both your own little floating sidekick, and the angular, ungainly, slightly sad and vulnerable personas of the larger npc robots you encounter. My favourite so far is one little mini-quest where you can find bits of sheet music scattered throughout the world and bring them back to the guitar-playing robot, and he'll play them for you - lovely, gentle, jazzy, bluesy tunes (mostly), and you can either sit and listen, or curl up on the cushion next to him and sleep while he plays.

But. The minimal sense of threat in the game (at least so far, I'm fairly early on) comes from the zurks, which are horrible little red-eyed robot crab things that occur in swarms and will chase and eat anything living - which, so far, is only your kitty self. (My current theory is that the zurks ate all the people, leaving only robots, and cats.) If you don't evade them (which is tricky, memo to anyone else inspired to try this, don't try to play on PC with a keyboard, it's optimised for controller and the keyboard interface is horrible and will make you fail to outrun zurks inevitably and repeatedly) you are swarmed, and your poor little kitty is eaten. It's not graphic, you are simply piled by zurks, but I cannot, it transpires, handle even the minor glimpses of the little recumbent dead kitty-form amid the swarm at this stage of my personal cat journey, it's deeply traumatic even though you immediately reload at the last save point absolutely fine.

So, yes. I love this game, but it's on temporary hold, despite my jonesing for a kitty-fix, until I am not likely to be traumatised by losing my feline avatar. Which is a pity, because I'm dying to see how it turns out, and to deepen my acquaintance with the world. Ace game design, ten out of ten, would recommend. Just not when grieving a cat.

It transpires that there is actually a limit to the number of times one (or in this case, I) can play Stardew Valley over and over again without a break. It's a high, but real number. When I have, once again, tamed the farm, delved to the bottom of the dungeons, befriended the village and married my romance du jour, I can only immediately start a new game, oh, six goes out of seven. (I may, in fact, have a slightly unhealthy addiction to Stardew Valley, it prods with pinpoint accuracy at my personal button labelled "make systems work"). The seventh time, I start casting around for something new, slight and frivolous to play upon the Ipad of an evening when lounging in bed, cat-bestrewn and shutting down my brain for sleep. This has brought me Fallout Shelter (fun for two goes, now boring), occasional outbreaks of Solitaire or Plants vs Zombies, a number of unsuccessful forays into things that Simply Failed To Grip, and, most recently, Merge Dragons.

I am vaguely ashamed of Merge Dragons. It is the epitome of a casual game in the sense denigrated by "Real Gamers": cutesy, superficial, and in mechanical terms apparently simplistic (merge three or five of the same thing to get a fancier version of same! Rinse, repeat!). There is a strategic element to it, but only just. It is rife with Adorable, TM, Cartoon Dragons who float busily over the landscape, harvesting and building and being merged to make higher beings.

It is also fiendishly, machiavellianly, shamelessly, mercenarily manipulative.

Merge Dragons proliferates the possible types of dragons, the objects they can harvest (life orbs, coins, seeds, sprouts, etc), the objects they can harvest from (trees, flowers, mushrooms, hills, lakes, buildings, grasses, etc etc etc), and the flavour, configurations and environments in which said objects are located, to a quite ludicrous extent; it is always throwing off special events, new packages, fancier dragons. In terms of areas offering variations on gameplay, I can pursue merging random objects in my home camp; my dragon houses; puzzle levels; a dragon quest zone; Arcadia; the tower (sheer chance with randomised goblins, I hate it, I am whatever the exact opposite of a gambler is); or the annoying arena of the special event, with its new spanky dragon types and specialised tokens of some sort. Were I not a reclusive misanthrope, I could share (presumably) dragons with other real-world players in dragon dens. In the month or so I've been playing it has offered me Egyptian dragons, Viking dragons, dessert dragons (really, that's not a typo), aquatic dragons, gem settings, beach settings, zodiac settings, Unspecified-Oriental settings, and whatever the hell that mad clockwork thing is. In terms of iconage and nomenclature, I cannot acquit the game of unpleasant cultural appropriation and stereotyping at a number of points, but other than that it's generally not without its own slightly plastic charm.

However. Said slightly plastic charm is clearly and evidently also the product of a crack team of marketing primates, deterministic behaviourists, Dark Side statisticians (i.e. statisticians), and designers who have had key creative organs surgically removed and replaced with actual dollar signs. Because this is a free game app. You can download it freely, and can for a while freely and happily pursue the above dragon-wrangling, harvesting, coin-accumulating existence, merrily merging things for fun and profit, until you run to the carefully-judged edge of the easy bit, and into the game's entrapment zone. You are forced to face the fact that to proceed further you have to either grind mercilessly at a snail's pace, or speed things up by spending real world cash to acquire dragon gems, which will open treasure chests, buy fancier dragons or allow you to acquire key items to merge at strategic points so you can unlock further merge opportunities.

I can confidently attribute the fact that I have not spent thousands on this stupid game to the fortuitous (or possibly prescient) circumstance that I have set my Ipad to require me to re-enter my password every time I buy something from the app store, and I can never remember my password. Since I am generally playing in bed at night and am warm and comfortable enough that I won't drag myself out of bed to go and look it up, mostly I don't buy dragon gems. By such fragile bulwarks do we save ourselves.

Because, here's the thing, I can absolutely see exactly what they're doing. I am wholly aware of the careful build-up they've created, where you have just enough easy wins at first, and have earned some rewards, and can see potentially very nice perks and loot waiting just ahead, except that either you first have to spend several hours mind-numbingly making dragons harvest life orbs so you can get past the &^)(#%*(% dead plant zone into the area where you can merge again... or you can dump actual money into dragon gems and take a short cut. Or use them to buy the cute, fancy dragon eggs you can't buy with coins or find in any of the areas. Or make the dragon gem payout which will save your accumulated loot in the tower if a goblin gets you. And I know what they're doing, I can see exactly how I'm being manipulated, and it's still compelling enough that at times, when I have randomly remembered my password and really want that loot, I have to rugby-tackle my own fingers to prevent myself from pressing the button to buy. Sometimes I miss. I was never big on sport, anyway. I have paid less for this game overall to date than I would have for a premium large-scale RPG, but honestly I'm not sure if that's much of a recommendation given the pricing structures of AAA games.

So I think I find myself, primarily, bemused at all this: by all the precedents, this stupid game should not be keeping my attention, and I suspect it's only doing so because I'm tired and COVID-bludgeoned and post-lurgified and don't have the brain for much more. Further thesis: I play a lot during load shedding, when there isn't much else to do. So in fact I might actually be able to at least partially blame Eskom for the whole debacle. Eskom and the Merge Dragons marketing primates. Yup. All their fault.

But I also think that the siren call of Stardew Valley will reassert itself eventually, possibly when my irritation at the commodification of my gameplay has finally filled its gauge and I delete the whole bloody thing in a fit of pique. Because really, it's dangerously addictive candyfloss with a carcinogenic core.

Whew, one of those half-year blogging hiatuses again, funny how they creep up on me. I think remote working, and the concomitant ability to not leave the house or speak to actual humans for days at a time, is actively reducing my general communication skills. Or, in other words, the pointer on the Isolate-O-Tron has dipped from "Hedgehoggy Hermit" to "Homicidally Misanthropic", a considerable drop from its pre-COVID standard levels of "Awkward at Parties/Disinclined To Leave the House". I always did have to arm-wrestle myself, best of two falls out of three, to force my own attendance at any given social gathering. Now I've apparently kiboshed the wrestle at the outset by stealing my own elbows. Metaphorically speaking. Physically they are still more or less attached. I mean, I can still type, so have no real excuse.

All of the above, incidentally, not to cast any aspersions on the generally much-appreciated virtual presence of anyone who still does drive by this venue occasionally to see if I'm burbling. Virtually you are all lovely and much less likely to make the Isolate-O-Tron's needle quiver, and I really have no excuse for abandoning you.

I am driven to resume blogging, characteristically enough, by the burning need to record for posterity a particular dream I just had. My sleep patterns are a mess again, mostly because I've just had a month-long run-in with a particularly epic case of 'flu, and went off both the antibiotics and the decongestants only a couple of days ago. Since the combination of meds was making me sleep 9-hour nights like a particularly coshed dormouse, going off them has led to those happy evenings lying in bed for hours at a time with eyes wide open like the millstone eyes of the tinder-box dogs in the fairy tale, feeling the sleepless seconds drip by with equal parts horror and despair. Insomnia is a bitch. And when I do actually sleep, it's lightly, and with interruptions, and I wake up earlier. Hating the universe in general and everything in it in particular, see "Homicidal Misanthropy", above. But I do, in all that disruption, remember far more of my dreams.

Said dreams characterised themselves, a few days ago, by degenerating into actual nightmare, with far more gore than I am wont to experience, dream-wise. I blame the Queen, for dying. Because the generally sad and laudatory nature of the media and social media responses are giving me ingrowing postcolonial irritation and the tendency to mutter darkly about hypocrisy and jingoism and denialism about the current parlous state of the British economy, culture, political landscape and royal family (racism, sex scandals, legislative meddling and black-market cash deals, oh lord). Which is all filtering into my dreams, causing me to dream the following:

a darkly threatening forest setting at night, occupied by:
several small/innocent children, and;
a team of servants, tasked with nobbling the above for the consumption of:
the Queen, characterised for these purposes as:
a Fallout robobrain robot, which looks like:
this:

except with the Queen's head attached in place of the glass dome, and the additional, horrifying detail of:
an unnaturally large mouth, opening unnaturally wide to reveal:
rows of enormous, long, jagged, horrifying teeth, with which:
she proceeded to bite off some poor child's arm, lots of blood and screaming, and I woke up.

I do not like this monarchy. It is skraaaaatched. As are my sleep cycles. I should add, also for posterity, however, that playing injudicious amounts of Fallout 4 is (a) satisfyingly apposite to the current state of global geo-political meltdown, (b) satisfying to the general state of homicidal misanthropy, as I wander around with a maxed out plasma rifle and sniping skill taking down deathclaws with single headshots, and (c) apparently colonising the dream landscape.

(my subject line, by usual processes of free association, is David Bowie, "Time").

By way of rewarding self for the horrors of this year's remote reg and orientation experiences, I ordered myself Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and have been playing it in the evenings as far as possible given the various outcomes of the daily war between myself and Pandora for occupancy of my gaming chair. Apparently I can only occasionally seduce her away by deploying the heated blanket on the sofa. We have arrived at a semi-compromise, below:

I am enjoying ACNH, although not deliriously or obsessively, and have, shall we say, Notes.

Pottering happily about a landscape harvesting, planting, building or collecting things and meeting small, domestic goals is very much my jam when I'm tired and stressed, see obsessive re-play of Stardew Valley, incursions into things like Littlewood and My Time At Portia, and my fondness for the buildy bits of Skyrim, Fallout IV or Yonder. ACNH is more of same, although through the console lens rather than the PC, and is thus Different - less textured, less character-driven, and its cutesy aesthetic is occasionally grating. (Yonder and even Portia did it much better, IMNSHO, in the sense of being more Zelda-like, less childish).

I am enjoying, in a qualified sort of fashion, the pottering about, although its grindiness becomes repetitive a little too quickly. The writing, while in the facile sort of class appropriate to the genre, is occasionally amusing and wry. I do become a bit weirded out by the visuals, the fixed perspective is frequently frustrating and the horizon effects are frankly trippy, in the sense that ACNH denizens apparently live on a cylindrical world with a radius approximately the width of a football field. The way things move over the horizon is odd. But overall it's rather pretty and occasionally, when the art team have been let loose on a night sky or sunrise, beautiful. (Also: desperately enamoured of the museum.)

I also think I am losing potential texture and depth because I don't do co-operative play with Real People, that's not what I game for, so huge tracts of the game which are designed for island visits and social interaction with other players, are simply closed to me. (And the inbuilt assumptions around interaction infuse the gameplay rather unacceptably. Cannot, because of lack of above, complete fruit and flower collections! Maddened!) And the characterisation of the NPCs is superficial enough that it doesn't in any way substitute for the Real People interactions, and really makes me miss Stardew Valley.

Which all sounds unduly negative, but I have been playing several hours a day for the last couple of weeks, and am deriving quiet enjoyment from it, so there is clearly a lot here to enjoy despite the minor deficiencies. (I am also developing a marked habit of playing for an hour in bed in the mornings when I wake up, with tea and cats, because Switch, and it's definitely not a bad way to start the day).

What I am not enjoying at all, because I don't think they're satirising them strongly enough, is the unabashed capitalist underpinning of it all. I live in a late-capitalist hellscape, I do not need such to be faithfully and only semi-critically replicated in my gaming, thank you. ACNH is very much about Things, it's a densely populated landscape full of highly specific bits of furniture and clothing and decorations and appliances and useless modern tchotchkes, which you collect in large amounts. Even worse, its achievement and quest mechanisms are expressed in a miles/rewards/tokens system which forcibly reminds me of the one I rejected, with extreme prejudice, from my medical aid - little mini-quests all carefully calibrated to force you to grind, and sell, and buy, and grease the wheels of the whole system.

And Animal Crossing works on a system which makes you borrow money to build things; hell, you arrive on your idyllic island and the managing company immediately turns around and stiffs you with a large bill you spend the first part of the game paying off. It turns out that owing money, which gives me hives in the real world, also gives me virtual hives in gaming. I hate owing money, and you can't do anything - build, move things around - without paying large sums for it. (I am simultaneously replaying Littlewood because ACNH has given me an overwhelming desire for a fully, freely landscapable map at whim, as often as I like, without penalty).

Although it's inevitable for the glossy large-scale popular product of a massive and powerful corporation whose design techniques are clearly aimed more at marketing than at narrative fulfilment, I really, really hate that this game quite unabashedly normalises capitalist assumptions and structures and, ultimately, entrapments. The cute island getaway setting is not an escape from capitalism, it's merely another set of images in which to replicate capitalist pressures and trappings, buy and sell and borrow and consume. (And don't get me started on turnips. I think the empty notional money manipulation of the real-world stock market is vicious and immoral and disgusting, and it's not suddenly cute and acceptable because your abstract coup markers are now knobbly vegetables).

Part of the whole setup is clearly semi-satirical, in that the company characters who run the islands are caricatures - raccoons with their little grasping hands, and Isabelle as a sort of overly and superficially smiley corporate doll. But it's a nod and wink sort of jokiness which renders these corporate figures both innocuous and intrinsic - that's just, the game says, how things are. They're a bit dodge, but you can't resist them or overturn them or choose not to interact with them. They underpin everything. Capitalism, the game says, is the only game in town. And it's cute! don't worry about it! just play it! we all do! it's all there is!

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is both training wheels and pabulum for the capitalist serf, and while it's a reasonably entertaining sort of gameplay amble, about the best thing I can say about it, re-reading the above, is that it's apparently energised me into rampantly politicised Marxism in two weeks, which is not bad going, given my levels of exhaustion and usual state of jaded political lassitude. Huh.

(My subject line is Preachers, "Motorcycle Emptiness", because apparently the only possible response to corporate capitalist cute is Welsh anti-capitalist semi-punk).

This is my Christmas present to myself. Because it's been a hellyear from the nether pits of hell, and I have held impossible faculty processes together with my bare hands in the teeth of the odds, and have also managed to save slightly ridiculous amounts of money on account of not being able to leave the house ever, and I really, really want to play Zelda again. And it was delivered (once I could actually order it, after two frustrating months of unavailability of any Switch except the Fortnite branded one, spit) within 24 hours of ordering even under COVID and two days before Christmas, as apparently the SA Nintendo are wildly efficient, or at least really, really want to hook me into their console. Which is lovely, as I shall now spend Christmas in Hyrule, being cutely animated and pretending none of this is happening.

I have played Breath of the Wild already, I borrowed stv's console for a happy few weeks a couple of years back while he was embroiled in Playstation (because, unlike my pc-fondling self, he's a Real Console Gamer), but this is part of the appeal, which is also a feature of the 2020 hellscape: I cannot play or watch new media. (Or read new books, really: I am reading voraciously, but things I've already read, either fanfic or murder mysteries, currently all the AJ Ordes and half the Lilian Jackson Braun Cat Who series in the last week). I keep trying new films or games or TV, and bogging down in the weirdest sort of anxiety half an hour in because I'm all tense and panicky about what might happen next. It's particularly odd because anxiety is not my mental illness of choice, under normal circumstances I'm much more about depression. To these depths does COVID sink us. Also, I was very alert to the Borrowed Console thing while playing the first time, and didn't feel able to deprive stv of his rightful Switch for any longer than necessary, so didn't feel able to indulge to the fullest my usual playing style, which is glacially slow and completist and involves, in an open world setting, wandering happily around pursuing absolutely every possible side quest ever, however trivial, with small cries of satisfied glee.

I am on leave between Christmas and New Year, which is the maximum time I can take off given how much I still have to do. I have no plans for Christmas bar lunch with my sister and niece on Boxing Day, and propose to spend the time (a) not leaving the house (we have a spanky new COVID variant which is more virulent than the original and our numbers are spiking horribly, I predict more lockdowns), (b)de-beetling my house (AGAIN! they're back), and (c) playing Zelda. This suits me absolutely down to the ground.

It's definitely the apocalypse, I was in the supermarket yesterday and they hit me amidships with the first Christmas carol of the year, "Silent Night" sung in what appeared, for some reason, to be Dutch. This was cruel and unusual in itself, since normally the Geneva convention requires that it be November before Christmas carols are permitted to enter the arena of war. It was rendered additionally and unnecessarily hideous by the fact that the supermarket was playing syrupy "Silent Night" in Dutch at one end, and an entirely different Supermarket Radio Experience was inexplicably churning out the Proclaimers at the other. Standing exactly in the middle, circa the ice-cream aisle, with one in each ear was completely indescribable. I emerged, shaken, and tottered across to the mall to acquire (1) soothing new towels in an attempt to recover, and (2) books for Da Niece, whose esteemed birthday it was yesterday.

Time is weird this year. Da Niece retains her excellent literary taste - Song of Achilles by request, and receiving with joy Naomi Novik (not the dark school one) and the second Spider-Gwen - but also vouchsafed the information that she turned 15 yesterday. I have genuinely spent the last two years thinking she's 13, by my mathematically-challenged calculations she should have been turning 14 at the absolute most. Apparently it's been 2018 since 2018. Or I'm in a serious kind of denial. I had been vaguely assuming, with auntly pride, that she's a particularly mature 13-year-old. She's a delightful and particularly mature 15-year-old, anyway.

Also on the Dark front: I have just re-read, with much enjoyment, Tamsyn Muir's Harrow the Ninth, which retains, beyond its unabashedly Gothy vibe, its status as an excellent LARP/escape room puzzler, now with added bones, blood and despair. I cannot, alas, get into the sequel at all, it appears to be submerging itself in excessive literary device, including fragmented time-flow and inexplicable descents into the second person. The worldbuilding remains amazing and fascinating, and there are satisfying revelations, but even with the first-book twist as a starting point, it's losing me. Phooey.

Possibly by way of slightly more satisfying excursions into blood and death, I am currently re-playing Fallout 4 on survival mode, which means dying approximatly four times a combat, and needing to eat, hydrate and sleep to a somewhat realistic schedule. In this, if nothing else, will we exert some control over the apocalpyse.

Today's weird fact! abandoning the lockdown day count in my subject lines appears to have somewhat neutralised my posting avoidance, I think I was being actively repelled by the amount of counting I needed to do on my slightly mathematically-challenged fingers in order to work out what day we were in. Alternatively, it's just depressing to contemplate how many days there have been since this whole nasty mess started. (Bonus weird fact: I enjoyed maths at school, despite crashing spectacularly out of the A-level version, but the other day I realised I can no longer remember how to do the particularly elegant abstract origami of either calculus or simultaneous equations. This is sad. I should find a YouTube video or something).

Today's additional and completely unrelated weird fact: having a healthy videogaming habit can create some incredibly bizarre cross-universe identifications given the fact that Western video games appear to draw from a comparatively small pool of voice actors. I am very voice- and accent-conscious when playing, it's a huge component in my choices for videogame romances (mmmm Fenris), and I'm getting weirdly good at picking up familiar tones, even behind slightly different accents and in completely different contexts. (The fact that I obsessively replay favourite games is probably also implicated, to be honest). This tends to leave me with rather odd predispositions to like or dislike particular NPCs based on the roles played by their voice actors in completely different games.

I am still hacking happily through Kingdoms of Amalur, which is still pretty and fey and consoling, while allowing me to work out my frustrations by hitting Bad Things very hard with lightning attacks and a Big Sword. While it's not a companion-oriented RPG in the mode of Bioware, it has a huge NPC cast and seems to particularly use familiar voices. Viz.:

OMG almost the entire cast of Critical Role is in here! Good grief! I don't even know their voices particularly well, given that I've never actually watched an episode of Critical Role and have imbibed what I know of it via clips on Tumblr, but it explained a lot about the niggling familiarities when I pulled up the cast list. (Also, Laura Bailey is Serena in Skyrim, I'd just played that DLC before Amaluring, who knew!)
Some of the minor characters are played by that one dude who plays minor Dark Elf characters in Skyrim, the guy with the slightly nasal baritone. Given the tendency of IMDB to list voice actors with one or two main roles and then "additional voices", I don't know who it is, but every time I hear him I look wildly around for dragons. Oh, wait, I know who it is, it's Erandur, which makes it Keith Szarabajka, which I think is impressive on my part because it means I identified him playing characters like "Citizen" and "Soldier" in Amalur, and they don't have huge amounts of dialogue.
There are also multiple turns from the guy who does the vaguely Scandinavian accent for lots of the Nords in Skyrim, notably Vilkas, which IMDB says makes him Michael Gough. It was seriously dislocating to have the Vilkas personality - slow, serious, meathead - coming from high-ranking Fae lords in Amalur.
Great tracts of Dragon Age. Seriously. Commander Cullen's voice actor (Greg Ellis) has played three different NPCs in the two days of Amalur gameplay, and I find the dissonance between Cullen's voice and the NPCs rather bewildering. Also, now I'm jonesing to replay Inquisition. I really liked Cullen. Can you tell I really liked Cullen?
Simon Templeman, most notably Logain in Origins, but also a bunch of Mass Effect characters (Admiral Han'Gerrel, and Gavin Archer).
That slightly dodgy Traveler who insists on calling me Dove all the time is the voice of Vicar Max from Outer Worlds, which explains why I never liked him, really. No offence to David B. Mitchell. He does a good sleaze.

I find it sad, in retrospect, but ultimately unsurprising that most of the voices I identify easily are male. The women tend to sound more similar to me, and I suspect that I am also being slightly ejected from identifying strongly with female characters because they tend to be written by male writers, and thus to conform more slavishly to stereotypes, particularly sexualised stereotypes. Ayln Shir has a lovely, throaty contralto, but the character wears such a ridiculous skimpy chain-mail bikini that I listen to her in a state of perpetual irritation.

But looking at the cast list of Amalur, there's something else going on here too: while there is quite a large female voice cast, there are comparatively few important female NPCs, most of the big roles with lots of dialogue are male. And, doing a random check on the female voice actors, they tend to skew a lot younger than the male. I don't recognise them because most of them don't have such a huge body of voice work: they not only have less access to plum roles, they have been at it for a lot shorter time.

This was supposed to be an amused survey of voice actor crossovers, it didn't set out to be a feminist rant, but apparently it ain't easy being a Gurrl in Kultcha, particularly Kultcha of the videogame persuasion. Systematic sexism is hell on female voices, in every sense of the word.

I have just spent ten minutes giggling helplessly, because of this, which takes to its logical conclusion the mash-up of the dungeon crawl and dating sim video game genres, to create one where you... date your weapons. Get your sword to fall in love with you in order to improve its abilities. Said swords being represented by suitably over-the-top swoony avatars with magical-girl special effects featuring roses, apparently. I had to do a quick calendar check just in case it was April 1st. I can't work out if I'm actually going to acquire it when it finally releases, just to see if it's as exquisitely ridiculous as it sounds, or if I'll be giggling too hard to click "purchase". I probably will acquire it, if only because it may stave off for a bit longer the inevitable moment when I cave and procure a Switch, and hence Zelda.

The horrors of lockdown and COVID are currently being complicated by the usual Eskom shenanigans, which means we've had load shedding for the last week or so. This means, among other things, that I need to fill up all my gas bottles, supposing the local hardware store actually has any gas, which means I will need to venture out of the house for the first time in a week and thereby resolve the indeterminate Schrodinger state of the car battery - flat or not? will the car start or won't it? My otherwise much-loved Beast lurks in the driveway with surprising threat when I haven't left the house for a while, I'm almost too afraid to climb in and turn the key, because it all becomes so complicated if it won't start. But I suppose I should buckle to and try. Under current circumstances, this is really a very First World Problem, people are dying out there. *flings self to Total Perspective Vortex in penance*.

Gawsh, that was an unconscionably large posting gap. In the featureless slide of lockdown days it's fatal to get out of the habit of posting, weeks have drifted past before you know it. Something about the comparative blandness of days at home makes time go weirdly fast, even with the enormous and horrible events happening out there - they are still strangely distant.

I cannot tell a lie, however, my absence from Teh Intarwebs for the last couple of weeks has more than a little to do with the fact that I finished playing Witcher 3 and went straight back to replay 1 and 2 in quick succession, more or less in a spirit of enquiry. Did I hate 2 as much as I did first time round? oh hell yes, the Roche path is even worse than the Iorveth one. But I enjoyed 1 again, as much for its nostalgia value as anything else. While replaying I was struck by how similar in feel it is to DA Origins, just in level of graphics and underlying assumptions about gameplay, my guess would be that they came out in approximately the same year. (A quick google reveals I am almost correct: 2007 and 2009, respectively). Am now embarked happily on 3 again, which was the whole point of the replay (I will be completist or nothing, dammit). I am revelling in its beautiful design.

South Africa has yet, I think, to hit its true COVID peak, I suspect our worst times are ahead of us, so I am in no way complacent about this, but I am still reeling at how badly the whole thing is being handled in the UK and, particularly, the US. There is no excuse, absolutely none, for a major global power and highly developed nation to screw up disaster management this badly. I keep reading reports of Trump or Johnson doing their typical destructive flailing, and thinking, gods, they are actually trying to kill people, this is Scrooge's “they had better [die], and decrease the surplus population".

But a slightly different Shower Thought struck me the other night. If America were a fantasy novel, this whole thing would be a giant cautionary tale about the hideous energies unleashed when a Manifest Destiny goes wrong. Can you imagine how much, even with the cumbersome corruptions of the American political system to circumvent, Hillary would be kicking butt responding to this whole crisis? There would be none of this nonsense about science denialism, or not wearing masks, or opening businesses again. Her particular brand of energetic, hard-headed efficiency was clearly designed by merciful Cosmic Wossnames to lead the US out of this horrible thing with minimal loss. Trump stealing that election drove destiny off course, causing backlashes of cosmic energy which ensured that (a) he was the exact inverse of the Destined One, absolutely the worst possible person to respond to this particular challenge, and (b) everything would go spectacularly to hell in the most extreme way possible. Thus plagues and rains of fire and riots and murder hornets. Barring a plucky band of chosen heroes to overthrow the Big Bad, we're doomed.

OMG my HOUSE is CLEAN! because Codsworth arrived yesterday, and was absurdly simple to set up, and spent three hours last night bumbling around the house picking up three of his dustbin's worth of cat hair, kitty litter, dust, random cat food bits and dead beetles, which are apparently the result of my clearly rather incompetent and perfunctory cleaning routine. Some interesting pointers have emerged.

Apparently my COVID fogged-spectacles grocery-store special of accidentally buying the object two to the right of the one I actually want, extends for no adequately defined reason to online shopping. I blame the multiple open tabs of exhaustive research. Having negotiated cost analyses, comparisons, endless reviews and the weird availability sine waves of robotic vacuum cleaners under the effects of South Africa's frantic middle classes forced, for the first time ever, to clean their own houses for extended periods, I placed the order for what turned out to be a Milex Intellivac rather than the Xiaomi Mi I had selected and fondly imagined I'd clicked on. They are both white, approximately the same price and have similar levels of good review, which is clearly why I confused open tabs, so we'll have to see how it turns out.
The main irritation of the above is that all the online hacking instructions for replacing the robot voice are for Roombas or the Mi, and the annoying lady who says "Cleaning initiated!" and for some reason I persist in identifying as Japanese-American, is really a bad match with the Codsworth persona. But the name has stuck. (Codsworth, as I mentioned in the comments on my last post, is the robotic butler companion from Fallout 4, and is rather excessively British).
I am completely charmed by the extent to which the self-propelled nature of the robot confers agency and personality on it. Codsworth bumbles happily around my house, bumping gently into things and doing a sort of spin reversal with what I cannot help but read as a certain amount of muttering under his breath. He inches carefully along walls with little spinny motions to get into corners, and when presented with an open space, marches carefully across it in rows, with little officious semi-military turns. He's very good at getting under things like cupboards and the piano stool, and extricating himself by judicious spinning: he spent twenty minutes footling happily around under my bed, removing possibly an entire cat's worth of cat hair. When faced with the living room rug, which has a tendency to runkle, he goes at it manfully and usually manages to climb the bumps. He is usually either tired or drunk by the time he's finished, and takes several goes, entailing backing up about a metre, to align himself with his docking station. He is a Personality, and I am happy to have him added to the household.
Robot-proofing the household is a bit like child-proofing, at floor level. The place is ridiculously tidy because I've had to put away anything he could choke on or knock over. In related news, apparently I own seventeen cat toys.
The cats' responses to him are endlessly funny. Jyn is freaked: she clearly reads the little darts he does as attacks, and watches him cautiously from a safe distance, poised to flee, her eyes like saucers. Pandora, on the other hand, is not only unphased, she identifies him as a fellow creature who needs to be firmly placed into the pecking order, which means her current favourite party trick is to sit her substantial bulk down in front of him with some deliberation, and refuse to move while glaring at him, so he has to bump her and go round. She doesn't seem to mind this, and doesn't actually hiss or spit at him, which means the "fellow creature" routine is only partially initiated, and he's clearly not a fellow cat. I am taking mental bets with myself on how long it'll take her to work out he doesn't give a fuck for her status.
Fallout's Codsworth is a round, floating robot with multiple arms; in game you can stick a bowler hat on him. I am lamenting the absence in my life of a miniature bowler hat I can affix to him. However, it occurs to me that I do have a spare Colmant champagne cap, which is in the shape of a miniature top hat. BRB, need to find the double-sided tape...

Day 1 of shutdown. This has had a weird effect on my backbrain, I have had on three separate occasions this morning had to forcibly restrain myself from wildly buying a Nintendo Switch online. Apparently having Witcher 2 and 3 lined up to play over the shutdown is insufficient. Also, all the Animal Crossing content on Tumblr and the Breath of the Wild 2 announcement are clearly triggering me, it's all their fault, I can't be blamed. Currently I am slightly awash in tea as the best possible response is distraction, I get up and make myself another cup whenever the desire to click "place order" is overwhelming. Fortunately there are three large boxes of Earl Grey in the cupboard, the result of adding potential shutdowns to my normal tea-hoarding proclivities.

I mean, I don't even know if the stores are still delivering non-essentials right now. Although I could probably work up an impassioned defense of videogaming as essential to my mental health under the circs. But I also think this is another offshoot of the curious unreality of this apocalypse, the way the world - and thus the actual, concrete implications of madly spending R8000 I can't really justify - doesn't seem to be quite real right now.

The university is in a state of flux, we are having enormous difficulties finding a way through the academic year when something like a third of our students don't have home internet access or laptops and can't be expected to study remotely. Central management is, I fear, being more than usually tone-deaf about this. I do not enjoy the way that this kind of crisis inexorably tends to reveal that we're actually being managed by an evil corporation rather than an academic institution.

My sister texted me from a restaurant last night, where her server noticed the surname on her credit card and asked if she were related to me. Apparently I have massively assisted him in every year of his studies and he is very grateful. I am not sure if this actually compensates for the hell aspects of this helljob, but it's very nice to hear. History does not relate if he brought her free shots on the strength of the association, possibly I actually need to be in the restaurant for that to happen again.
The Religious Studies department brought me fancy chocolates this morning. They are trying to drum up numbers in their courses, and I enlivened advisor training this year with, according to onlookers, a heartfelt, impassioned and articulate rationale for advisors to push REL courses on students looking for electives. (This didn't actually do violence to my atheist soul as it's a comparative religion rather than theology department, and made a good case for both the core social science training they offer, and the absolutely vital need to understand religious belief and pressures in today's global political and cultural landscape, which, word. Also, their first-year course back in my undergrad days is materially implicated in the gentle death of the somewhat lukewarm evangelical Christian beliefs with which I arrived at university, so I owe them). They have nearly doubled their first year courses and are seeing marked increases in senior course sign-up, which means I've had a measurable effect even given the hideous 120% of capacity at which this year's first year is labouring. Heh.
My small cat, Jyn of legend, song and inoperative jump module, is going through a hyper-affectionate phase, where she will reliably run to the door to meet me when I get back home from work (Pandora merely lurks on top of the piano and waits for me to come to her), and will insist, several times an evening, on climbing onto the desk and headbutting me affectionately in the armpit until I stop petting Stardew Valley ducks and pet her instead. Someone on Teh Internets mentioned the other day that they have never known a cat with the tuck-head-under-human-chin-lovingly impulse who wasn't taken away too early from the mothercat as a kitten, and I have to say, insufficient maternal training would also probably explain the deficient jump module. She still can't climb out of an open window if she has to balance on the windowsill to get up there. I am mentally adding it to the list of reasons to ritually curse her original owners, the bastards who imported her for their visiting grand-daughter and then got rid of her when the child left.
In tenuously related news, I finally beat the *()%^@#& Stardew Valley fishing minigame on the Ipad, where I can't mod the hell out of its ridiculously fiddly and demanding butt. I feel that the universe is validating my imminent Ipad upgrade, which has become a necessity because my current iteration's most recent possible operating system upgrade option is too old to run either Firefox or the 1.4 Stardew Valley content update, which is lovely and adds materially to game enjoyment. Bugger Apple's careful operating shenanigans for the obvious marketing ploys they clearly are, anyway. But a tablet of some sort is vital to my reading-fanfic-in-bed routine, as well as to my game-playing needs when I have to elevate my feet because my ankles have swollen again. And I don't want to go Android because I'll have to buy all the apps again for Android. Sigh. Fortunately, I can fund the upgrade almost entirely from the money left over in my account at the end of February, which happens because I'm too bloody busy with reg over Jan and Feb to actually spend any money. On a cosmic level, I have totally earned this.
When I mentioned to the Deputy Dean that I'll be on leave for just over a week from tomorrow, he looked momentarily stricken and then muttered, not quite under his breath, "well, that seems overdue". A sentiment with which I can only heartily concur.

The Outer Worlds is a first-person sci fi rpg, kinda what you'd get if you did a mash-up of Mass Effect (particularly Andromeda) with Firefly and had the results infused with something of the bleak post-captitalist sensibilities of Blade Runner and Fallout. With particular emphasis on the Fallout, because (a) black humour is very black, and (b) those nihilistic sods at Obsidian made it, and they did New Vegas.

Outer Worlds is another beautifully made thing, stunning worlds and visuals, good gameplay design, interesting political threads running through the whole thing, and character and companion options almost Bioware-level. The Firefly-style ship that's your home base is particularly nicely done, with a sarky AI who clearly shares code with Portal's GLaDOS. The setting is similarly frontierish, although a far more developed frontier than Firefly posits: mostly, it's an outer-space version of the Fallout dark-capitalism-gone-wild ethos, where giant corporations have settled this corner of space with the intent of Making Money out of it, and out of its hapless inhabitants. This has, of course, Gone Wrong, so it's failed/decaying capitalism still trying desperately to wring money out of things.

The planets themselves are often beautiful, full of weird and dangerous creatures, and spectacular vistas and skyscapes.

The worldbuilding is interesting: the way that people try to live in the post-capitalist hellscape, and the various resistances and escapes they devise, are well imagined. The capitalist hellscape part is often blackly funny, when it's not appropriately maddening or horrifying. And the very early intro to the black humour, apart from the poor cannon-fodder dweeb tiredly reciting corporate slogans, is a beautiful re-enactment of the glee I felt during this moment, it made me laugh in a way that forces me to realise I am occasionally not actually a good person.

But. There's a but here, could you feel it coming? I haven't finished the game: I stopped after failing the final boss battle a couple of times, because I was so bloody annoyed that it was the final boss-battle that I didn't feel sufficient impetus to power on through. Thing is, the worldbuilding is so rich, and the potential so vast, the main experience of the bulk of the gameplay is almost expectant: you want to see where all this goes. And the answer is, apparently, nowhere. You are perpetually starting up plotlines and implications which desperately want to be followed, and aren't. And I don't think it's just because I missed bits: I had recourse to walkthroughs in sheer frustration, and nope, that's all she wrote. I said to jo&stv at the time that it felt like a very specific brand of bad sex, where the partner is flashily into really good foreplay that builds and builds until suddenly they roll over and ask if it was good for you while you're still hanging there, unsatisfied. There really isn't anything the game could do with that bloody boss battle and its outcomes which would address that sense of anticlimax.

I don't, in short, enjoy the feeling that a game is a setup for sequels. It's what maddened me with the second Dragon Age the first couple of times I played it, and however much DA2's value was proven only by Inquisition, it's still a more satisfying play for me than Outer Worlds was. Which sad, because it's a rich and entertaining thing they almost finished building.

Doing the belated year in review reminded me of the two videogames I had been expecting rather excitedly and eventually played in 2019, both of which turned out to be disappointing in various ways. And as this got ranty, I think this may be several posts.

Greedfall was in many ways beautiful to play: an extremely well-produced fantasy RPG with Bioware-style party and romance options, minimal glitches or bugs, an aesthetic that's beyond amazing, setting and worldbuilding which are detailed and mostly original, excellent voice acting, and all-around absorbing gameplay. It's set in a sort of fantasy 17th century, which allows amazing things with costume and hats and muskets and tall ships and cities and what have you. You get to wear a cloak. Do you know how frustrating it is that the majority of fantasy RPGs don't have a cloak option? Cowards. Just because they're fiddly to programme. Greedfall manages to largely avoid the wooden plank cloak effect and unfortunate weapons clipping glitches, it can be done.

And you play a diplomat figure representing one of three developed nations in what is effectively the colonisation of a highly magical and extremely beautiful island filled with relatively technologically unadvanced native peoples and the most incredible, twisted, magical, guardian creatures.

And as you explore, and meet people, and are betrayed by your fellow colonial "allies", and encounter the creatures and peoples native to the island, it becomes more and more obvious that you are a coloniser, and your nation's leaders and policy-setters don't give a fuck about the fate of the native people and creatures, and more and more often the options you have boil down to killing them horribly and looting their corpses. You can't roleplay not wanting to be a coloniser. However hard you try to save and protect and co-operate, you keep running into encounters where all you can do is destroy, and the things you are destroying are amazing and beautiful and don't deserve to be destroyed in the name of "progress" or "profit".

And if you're me, you stop playing before you finish the game, because even if they allow some kind of last-minute reversal and boot you all the hell off the island, no possible narrative payoff could possibly make up for the bitter taste of all this inescapable colonial complicity. Of which I have quite enough, thank you very much, in my daily South African life. I don't play videogames because I want to have my nose rubbed in my lack of political agency. For fuck's sake.

Ultimately, I'd love to believe that this was a deliberate ideological choice on the part of the designers: that they are inviting you to replicate 17th-century colonialism in order to make you feel its evils and your complicity with them. But I can't, because the textual evidence of the gameplay and the worldbuilding simply don't support it. This is a game about cool visuals and nifty alt-17th-century gear, it's not a sophisticated critique. Which is an enormous pity, because its potential is vast.

Struggling a bit with what I think is a sinus problem, still doing that irritating thing where I randomly wake up in the morning with a pounding headache and nausea, and pretty much lose the day. New exciting symptom: my ears are ringing. More or less perpetually. It sounds like a distant, frenetic cricket, speeded up, and possibly mechanical. I am very tired and glandular and headachy.
On the upside, I have also randomly discovered that I am one of the small minority of people who can deliberately flex a weird muscle in their inner ear to make a sort of low rumbling sound. It's very odd. I do it by slightly tensing the hinge of my jaw and, strangely enough, the edges of my tongue. Bodies are odd. Mine particularly.
I have found a replacement for Stardew Valley, which I have played repeatedly until all meaning ls lost. My Time At Portia seems to have been constructed by systematically mining Zelda, Stardew, the Fallout 4 building mechanism, Minecraft, Yonder, and probably others I do not ken, for their cute and enjoyable features, and then cobbling them together into a sort of small-town cartoon post-apocalypse. I am not enamoured of the character design, which is unwontedly stereotypical and a bit grotesque, and I don't think the writing is quite as strong as Stardew, but it's a thoroughly enjoyable and immersive playing experience, and hits all my "systematically building things" buttons with fair enough accuracy that I am finding it difficult to stop playing in order to go to bed, despite my frankly ridiculous levels of exhaustion.
Winter has hit! it bucketed with rain all Sunday night and into the morning, causing Cape Town traffic to instantly seize up, as is its rainy-weather wont, and the cats to gravitate either to me or the new fluffy blanket on the bed, of which they seem to approve. You can tell that the weather is getting colder because they have buried their status-jockeying differences to almost, but not quite, cuddle.

Jyn has done that kitty-growing thing where I blinked and suddenly she was larger, burlier and very clearly adult when a moment ago she was slim and teenaged. The status-jockeying is clearly because Pandora's grasp on the Top Cat position is shaky and doomed. You can tell from Jyn's expression, which is faintly smug.

I appear to be nesting. I had another outbreak of internet art acquisition, and upon arrival of the spoils carted them off to the nice framer man (he's a closet sf geek and gets terribly excited about some of my artwork choices) and had them properly framed. (And may I add, ye gods and little fishes, international customs duty has skyrocketed this year. The two Dappermouth prints cost more to import than they did to buy and ship). My home is now Decorated, or at any rate more decorated than it used to be (it was always pretty decorated, I am incapable of resisting good internet art when I stumble over it, and also have an almost inexhaustible supply of fangirly enthusiasm for highly representable media. Apparently one of the upshots of loving things very hard when you love them, is art.)

Art Outbreak 1: replacing the big green owl pic which hangs over my bed. I had this up for several years, and then the little hooky thing on the picture rail had an attack of ennui and allowed itself to slip gracefully onto the fainting couch, causing an enormous splintering 2am crash a foot from my head, and incidentally completely trashing the print with broken glass splinters. Cussedly, I ordered an identical replacement. I have retired the fainting hook and found one of stronger mettle. Or metal. My wol is back, and I hope he stays there.

He is a beautiful, calm, dream-thing in the same dark green as my bedroom decor, and I love him. He's by an amazing California-based artist called Waelad Akedan, who I found on Society6; she does phenomenally rich and dreamy animals with, I think, Indian visual influences. I'm weirdly happy to have paid for this twice.

Art Outbreak 2: further to the dream animals, the moody, atmospheric art of Dappermouth, the Tumblr handle of artist Jenna Barton. I darkly suspect my recent Teen Wolf fixation may have had something to do with the wolf one, but mostly I love these for the way they feel both haunting and haunted.

Omens and Mirage. I meant these for my study, but have ended up putting them in the living room where I see them more often. I love the way the wolf floats, and the cats disintegrate.

Art Outbreak 3: it wouldn't be me if there weren't videogames. These are now in the dining room, they're from something called Pixelnoise Studios, and they aren't joined by the Skyrim and Zelda ones only because I managed to prod my self-control out from under its rock and cuddle it until it co-operated. (These are the images from the shop, my frames are plain glossy black, and frankly look better).

I should add for posterity that I am currently re-playing Andromeda. Unpopular opinion: it's a good game. Slightly more millenial than the darker-edged original trilogy, and prone to the same problem which we run into running LARPs for the current generation, viz. they tend to lack the conviction for proper villainy, but beautifully made and thoroughly enjoyable even trending to the pastel.

Blissfully rainy and cold for the last couple of days, my garden is all happy and full of rain-washed leaves. It makes the Skyrim replay less urgent, I don't have quite the same desperate need to deny the globally warmed African temperatures by frolicking through snowy landscapes, but I'm right at the end of two major quest lines I haven't played before, so have had additional reasons to plunge straight back into gaming when I get home.

This is the replay where, in fairly uncharacteristic denial of my usual Lawful Good hard-wiring, I am playing through the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood quest lines. Thieves Guild is, obviously, about wholesale nicking stuff, and also restoring a crumbling guild to its former glory days; the Dark Brotherhood is an assassin's guild, with a particularly nasty Daedric godling at the heart of it. (The Daedric lords in Elder Scrolls games are potentially very nasty indeed, and I tend to avoid all but a handful of the nicer ones like the murder-ridden pits of extra-dimensional perversion they are). And part of my vague yen to get all anti-establishment up in here is, I think, because the world in general and my academic corner of it in particular are making me despair of systems in general, and wish to bestow on them a hearty Up Yours, at least in an abstract and virtual sense.

But the other reason I've managed to go beyond my usual point of initial "nope" in these quest lines is, weirdly enough, role-playing, because this time round I'm playing a Khajit. These are the cat-people race of the Elder Scrolls world, humanoid, furry, rather lovely tigerish faces. My current iteration has caracal ears, which are my favourite feline ears of all time. Khajit have good bonuses for thievery and sneaking, but mostly Khajit identity is enabling my non-lawful activity by dint of the fact that Skyrim is beautifully constructed as a parochial, insular little snowfield full of patriotic Nordic types who distrust and exclude outsiders, and random NPC samplings of whom have some choicely racist things to say on the subject of cat-people. You start the game narrowly escaping random execution for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I emerged from the starting sequence in a fine frame of seething indignation towards Nords, the Empire and random discrimination which made it comparatively easy to decide, right, you bastards, you owe me everything you have. Also, you tried to kill me, so I'll kill you right back.

It's surprisingly freeing. I don't think I'll drift in any wholesale way towards this kind of anti-establishment gameplay as a general rule, it's really quite alien to me, but at this particular moment, and given the more dysfunctional kinks of my personality, it's probably weirdly healthy. I am, at base, incredibly bad at anger. I find it very difficult to direct it against the world; I will turn it, nine times out of ten, against myself, into generalised self-loathing. As I burgle yet another snooty Nordic home with vindictive satisfaction, somewhere, without knowing why, my ex-therapist is spontaneously punching the air.

Cape Town is having a January heatwave, which I resent somewhat given that it's October. This week has been temperatures in the high 30s, which the weather site assures me is ten degrees higher than the average for this time of year, so thanks, global warming and climate change. I have been sleeping in a mosquito net in sheer self defence. (That is, in a mosquito net and nothing else. The cats appear to be enjoying the additional skin contact, which is hardly helping the problem). The unseasonable temperatures are also stressing my garden-watering schedule something 'orrible, the pots dry out in a day rather than the usual two or three, and as a lone lorne single person I am simply not generating enough grey water to compensate. At this point longer showers may be a moral necessity. (Moral if you're a druid, at any rate. For the purposes of this exercise please assume I'm a druid. The indecent burgeoning of the inhabitants of my container garden over the last few weeks under the aforementioned sunlight suggests that it's not too much of a stretch).

The installation of actual curtain rails in my front windows has been a small but measurable point of mitigation of all this nasty cheap imitation sunshine stuff. (As opposed to real weather, which has clouds and rain in it). Actual curtains rather than those ridiculous blinds noticeably drop the temperatures when you close them to exclude the afternoon sun, which otherwise streams in uninterrupted and with worrying ferocity. My slightly cheap and stop-gap curtains are a pleasing sea-green in colour, rendering my study agreeably underwatery to an extent which is itself cooling to the soul.

I am, needless to say, also retreating into my usual heat-wave remedy, which is to obsessively re-play Skyrim, because snowy landscapes. It is a possibly worrying index of my current state of work-hatred and general misanthropy that I am, in this playthrough, playing dead against my usual type, and following both the Thieves' Guild and Dark Brotherhood quest lines. I could react against current global moral meltdown by being particularly noble and upright, or I could, apparently, decide that there's no point and in any case I am out of fucks to give. Murder, mayhem and plunder, yay. Why the hell not, everyone else is.

I do, however, shudder to think what actual January is going to give us in the way of temperatures if this is October. Move over, Death Valley. 50s here we come.

Profile

December 2024

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Base style: Modular by branchandroot
Theme: Purple Haze by timeasmymeasure

Freckles & Doubt

With my mastery of narrative structure I should be ruling the cosmos by now.

Entries tagged with mad gaming

veiled in flesh the godhead see

the valley of the shadow

memo to self ...

emergent behaviour

the sniper in the brain

from feudal serf to spender

so apparently I'm now a console gamer

Dark? what ideal conditions for night!

'tis the voice of the lobster

Day 117: tickled

Day 102: shower thoughts

Day 58: welcoming our new robotic overlords

Day 1: impulses

small validations, random, various

narrative frustrations, various, Part 2: The Outer Worlds

narrative frustrations, various, Part 1: Greedfall

an indeterminate number of things

a thousand words

rage against the machine

too damned hot

Profile

December 2024

Syndicate

Page Summary

Tags

Style Credit