Telling Stories: Sexuality without the skeevies
I’ve said before that sexuality is part of roleplaying, because it is. It’s part of the human condition, it’s a valid thing to explore in roleplaying, and it’s going to happen anyway. But there’s a line between involving sexuality in your roleplaying and making it the sort of involvement that makes everyone around you look at you with narrowed eyes and intense discomfort.
This has come up a fair bit in the Final Fantasy XIV community of late, for kind of disturbing reasons that serve as an excellent highlight of the issue. Because there’s a race of adults that are clearly meant to look like human toddlers… who are also very definitely sexually mature. Which raises a lot of uncomfortable questions about the characters being played in the real world by adult humans.
Fantasy is, of course, fantasy. But it’s useful to understand how fantasy lines up with and can be influenced by reality, and to understand why one might make the other far more uncomfortable. It’s important to have sexuality as a component in roleplaying, but it’s also important to do so in such a way that no one gets disturbed by it.
April foolishness
Which one contains the real news story?
I’m writing this before my favorite holiday on the Internet has happened, but you’ll be reading it afterwards. Yes, Halloween is my favorite holiday of the year by far, but my favorite time to be online is April Fools’ Day. I absolutely adore seeing people be creative with elaborate, amusing, and entirely absurd jokes centered around games, online culture, and our general tendency to take everything far more seriously than is entirely healthy.
I especially like all of the various gags put forth by MMO companies, but you probably would guess that.
Oddly, I also see a lot of people posting about how much they hate the day, which strikes me as counterproductive. Literally all of the skills you acquire on April 1st are applicable to the online environment year-round. Part of the fun of the day, I find, is the fact that almost everything you’ll see online is explicitly a joke… but it’s never a joke you can just outright ignore, because it has elements of truth. It forces you to do a critical reading of everything you see, which is something you should be doing anyhow.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy V, part 4
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
So the protagonists of the game are currently not doing well at their stated goals. Two crystals encountered, two crystals destroyed. In their defense, the job wasn’t theirs until the wind crystal was already in bad shape and the water crystal sort of happened without their consent. Nevertheless, based on series history I’m sure that the other two crystals will wind up being just fine.
Well, they might.
All right, so it’s a foregone conclusion what’s going to happen from here. The important thing is to keep moving on despite that fact, after stopping to have a brief chat with the King to indulge in a round of the “We Told You So” dance. To his credit, he’s already realized that he probably should have listened to the group in the first place, not that it helps him a whole lot now. But Walse wasn’t the only kingdom amplifying its crystal with machinery, and the kingdom of Karnak seems poised to be the next victim of… whatever is going on now.
Hard Project: Otherland
Wastelands, teenage or otherwise.
There are a lot of things that I really like about Otherland, one of them being the simple fact that it followed the age-old trick of making the future seem real by only looking forward a little bit and making reasonable assumptions. The story doesn’t take place in the year 1999 on a space liner, is my point. Sure, VR technology didn’t become the focal point of computing for a lot of reasons, but the world put forth in the book feels plausible.
At a glance, it’d make a pretty cool game.
The Otherland MMO has shuffled developers and publishers more than once, but it always seemed like a really bizarre concept to me based off of reading the story’s setting far too literally. Not that it’s the fault of the programmers, who doubtlessly just wanted to adapt a vivid and interesting world to play in. At a glance, this seems like a no-brainer for a project; it’s only on closer examination that you realize the whole thing is damn-near impossible to pull off, and not terribly rewarding if you do.
Demo Driver 8: Just Get Through
Assume everything on every map will kill you.
In the oldest days of video games, this is what it was all about. We didn’t get an introduction to what we were doing. There were no explanations. If you were very lucky, there was an ending screen or two that tied everything that you had done into some sort of overarching narrative. More often than not, though, what you had was games clearly from the same food group as Just Get Through, challenges without context.
This is made somewhat more forgivable when you consider that the game is a one-person effort, and even more so when you admit, however grudgingly, that the game does a more than halfway decent job of living up to the spirit of what made older games fun without being tied into nostalgia or the trappings of the games. You start out by spawning in the middle of a cavern network with no real indications of what you should be doing, and no answers are forthcoming. All you can do is try to find the next portal. Or die along the road.
Eventually, you will die along the road.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 