yeah, it probably feels like a whole different thing when it has actual frames

"I kill my sisters. I TAKE their men." what a goddess

yeah, you're not wrong, and i do think that contextualizes some of what it's doing mechanically better. and i guess i just did not find that particular wrinkle very interesting when i played it. that was, indeed, a decade ago now, so i might revise my opinions if i play it now, but eh.

yeah, fungi if fungi were just... free-floating bits of encoded information waiting to steal your 3D printer, which is a freaky image

yeah i think that surface level forcefulness of its moral thinking-- which pushes the issue explicitly metatextual, and i recall making me feel like the game thought i was a bad person for not knowing which menu buttons to press-- does seem to belie something deeper that i never really got into

as you say, viruses do not reproduce, cannot reproduce, or even move around, without hijacking living cells. even most parasites are more autonomous than that

one of the biggest debates in biology, at least when i was being educated, was whether or not viruses meet the basic criteria for life, with the answer leaning toward no, which I find profoundly disturbing and interesting

which is not *dissimilar* as an approach to what i'm talking about, but is a very specific version of that approach that never landed for me

my issues with undertale are largely that i think its approach to pacifism turns "not hurting others" into a sort of failable puzzle challenge that then becomes a moral issue-- the game is upset with you for not passing its arbitrary mechanical tests that you didn't really know about beforehand

i have very mixed feelings on undertale, personally, but one thing i have heard about from people who are into it is that the genocide route is, like, extremely compulsively satisfying and uses mechanical reinforcement to make it playable despite its horrors, which i do think fits my philosophy

to make an anti-war film you *also* have to make parts of a pro-war film inside of it, is my take on the matter. l think of it as the warhammer 40k approach

holy shit someone actually is making a game in the style of system shock 1. that's incredible

if you want to explore a concept or behavior that is bad, but that people have motivations to do in real circumstances, you gotta give the player motivation to do it, too, and that often means giving a sense of mechanical satisfaction

yeah i feel that, though to me it really feels like a communal coping mechanism-- a sort of gallows humor to make it easier to digest the sheer, unimaginable horror of the news. which of course doesn't mean you have to like it any more than you do

it is very much lesbian-ass silent hill in space

his only unambiguous win

yeah, i was on tumblr