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

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

  • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    17·
    6 months ago

    Weirdly I think it could work, if one flipped the entire premise on its head: “young witch” becomes “young witch only a few years out of magical grad school and already burnt out and falling apart” and “a small alpine town” becomes “the setting starts out as some sleepy idyllic town from an indeterminate time, but flows seamlessly between that and a decaying rustbelt town and a low-cyberpunk slum without any character acknowledging this” and “the missing cat” talks and eats cigarettes and becomes your inexplicably grounded foil for the rest of an incredibly banal plot that’s entirely out of sorts with the way the world is literally falling apart around you.

    • Nacarbac [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      10·
      6 months ago

      Yeah! Almost every magic-caster setting has an awful undercurrent of inequality where mages rule the “muggles” pretty much effortlessly, and any protagonist starting low is actually just elevated to hang with the cool masters of magic.

      Or it could go the Technomancer or Case of the Toxic Spell Dump direction, where magic and wonder are as subject to being ground up to oil the gears of capital as anything else and the most common career for a young mage is decades on the Industrial Enchanting factory line, churning out flying sportscarpets or assembling Wands of Kill Insurgent.