Thorns

A while ago I bought the hidden object game Alchemy Legends: Prague Legends on sale on Steam. The description is:

Follow orphan Eva on a trip to mystical Prague in Alchemy Mysteries: Prague Legends. After a relative's mysterious death, Eva inherits an ancient house in Prague. Knowing nothing about her past, she goes looking for answers. There she uncovers secrets about the house, her family and an insidious plan of the black alchemist. A wonderful and dangerous adventure is about to begin. Are you ready?

Sounds pretty run of the mill, right? And then today I got around to playing it.
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So, a question that's come up in a game I'm working on, and is likely to come up again in future: how do you combine allowing the player character (PC) of a dating sim having a spectrum of gender identities available with having love interests who aren't all bi/pan?
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A sequence of thoughts I had just now:

• Hey, a new indie visual novel! Looks pretty!
  
• Hmm. "Asian mythological themes", huh?
  
• A disabled protagonist!
  
• ...who is magically cured at the start of the story(*)...
  
• This is a demo and they are asking for feedback, oh god should I try playing it and offer suggestions?
  
• Wait FROM THE WRITER OF CYANIDE TEA AHHHHH
  

*prepares self to try and ignore this game's existence for perpetuity despite the indie VN community hailing it as a Thoughtful Exploration Of Disability*

On the plus side this gives me extra motivation to work on my interactive Northanger Abbey where Henry Tilney is in a wheelchair and nobody mentions it.

(*)she's not only magically cured, she was happy and friendly pre disability but became withdrawn and cynical once she got sick, and it is only in the Magical ~Asian Themed~ Land Where She Can Walk that she learns to overcome her bitterness. Probably gets punished/mocked a bunch for her terrible flaws first, though, this is a Cyanide Tea game.

The bi guy's path can be just as romantically satisfying as the others, I was just playing it wrong /o\ I mean there are still other issues, but that was my main problem with the game and it was all the result of misunderstanding a walkthrough. OOPS.

Thanks to the anonymous commenter who let me know! I have the best anonymous commenters.

If my (flawed and shallow) understanding of the history of novels (specifically scifi and YA), comics, and films is any guide, in 20 years:

Video games will be taken more seriously as an art.
There will be room in the marketplace for lots of healthy subgenres appealing to people from all walks of life.
There will still be heaps of cheesy AAA shooters because people like that sort of thing, but there'll also be cross pollination between genres to the betterment of all.
There will specifically be a thriving Indie Game subculture, Indie Game Makers who are taken seriously in mainstream culture and can make a comfortable living etc.
People will remember Gamergate, if they do at all, as a bunch of regressive moustache twirling Luddites who were too hidebound to accept progress and True Art etc.

And the heroes of this new movement, and of the history as people remember it, will be white dudes. They'll make a movie starring John Scalzi as the Brave Male Feminist and Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkesian as the thankful oppressed victims. Brianna Wu will have a cameo played by Dakota Fanning.
There'll be Best MOGAI Games Of 2034 Humble Bundle or whatever, but the Indie Game Artform will for the most part still be a bunch of stories about grizzled white dudes, just...artistically written ones. Maybe some tragic lesbians every now and then, and the Great Classics as taught will include a careful tokenistic sprinkling of games about and by POC, disabled people etc.

Genres outside the Indie Game Artform will be looked down on as Not Real Art, and this condescension will as it happens fall most severely on any genres which just happen to be more popular with women (AAA action games will alosbe dismissed, and middle aged gamergaters will mutter about how they warned everyone this was going to happen and how AAA action games these days lack the masculine energy of the old days. Female fans of AAA action games will mutter someting quite different). Dating sims, for example, will continue to be as looked down on as romance novels.
Independent games which care more about representing neglected POVs and being entertaining than hitting the current Art buttons will be vaguely respected but not paid much attention.

And we'll all keep making and playing the games we like regardless.

(I do actually consider this to be a mostly much better situation than what we have now. But I had a Vision Of The Future and felt like sharing it. Also, yeah, massive generalisations etc, I hope my basic point comes across)

Jon Stewart and the Burden of History A flawed but still interesting critique of John Stewart. This came up on my dash shortly after a discussion of how not-that-feminist Jane Austen was, and I think in both cases there's that ambiguity between satire for it's own sake and political statement. Critiquing hypocrisy and ridiculousness does not always extend to critiquing the system that allows such hypocrisy and ridiculousness to flourish, or those who are sensible and honest but harmful.

Mass Effect: Conviction Comic about the new crew member James Vega. And oh look, after the recent DLC where you had no choice but to destroy a planet of unfriendly aliens(*) we have yet another scene of a privileged guy berating thuggish aliens for being so belligerent about his complicity in the mass murder of their people. YAY.

A nice collection of links about this #yesgayya thing.

Also, I have no link to hand, but Australia now allows for a third gender on passports, and has removed the surgery requirement for trans people, huzzah!

(*)Making this the fourth time the player has to decide if (or in what way) they want to be complicit in genocide/mass murder. I would like a new moral dilemma please.

So, last week I played Mass Effect and loved it, modulo a few niggles (see these posts). I've been playing Mass Effect 2, and while in a lot of ways it's a better game it's gone for Darker and Edgier and has taken some of the problematic aspects of the old game and crossed the line into creepy badness. I'm still definitely going to finish it, but there's that element of "Why can't I quit you/how long until you upset me again" fear that is, for example, familiar to many fans of Supernatural.

Warning: contains sexual assault triggers (though very vague ones) and also spoilers (though the first section isn't spoilery, and the spoilery section is marked)

EDIT: I played it some more and the next few hours of gameplay were pretty much solid awesome. Stupid Bioware.
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I was going to try and do an indepth thinky post about Dragon Age:Origins(*) but then I'd feel obliged to research it and I think I'd rather not learn so much about the setting that I can see all the cracks. So here's just lots of misc non-spoilery thoughts (I can't think about anything as solidly as I have this game and not poke it wrt bias etc).

On the whole I think it's pretty awesome as a game, but some aspects are problematic to a greater and lesser extent.
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We went to the video store yesterday and I got out:

Wii Music: This is LOTS of fun. Not a game so much as a music making program (though it does have minigames like what is basically "Handbell Hero"). Very silly and I'm kind of bored it already but worth a rent and probably fun at parties. I would have LOVED this as a kid, and I get the feeling it's more fun in co-op mode (Cam isn't interested :/) This ad shows the sort of thing you can do, there are some actual rock songs and stuff in there too :)

Bones disk 1: Not gobsmakcingly brilliant, but the first crime show I've seen in a long time that doesn't have a thick, nasty undercurrent of Bad People Must Be Punished (where bad people includes single mothers, transexuals, uppity foreigners...) The main characters are more interested in intellectual one-upmanship and flirting than tut-tutting. Also, as kadeton and greteldragon said, the lead is a sciencey lady, kind of like a less offensive McKay (she thinks she's smarter than everyone and logic >> emotions, but isn't actively cruel)

I just finished Guitar Hero (the original, from the video store) on medium setting. In like 3 days!

To put this in perspective: I don't think I have ever finished any computer game that involved manual dexterity/hand eye coordination on a non-easy setting before. And even the ones that have an easy setting tend to challenge me a fair bit. Heck, about the only genre of game that I can get through without cheats/walkthroughs/excessive leveling etc is word games.

I still haven't finished "Portal". I'm fine right up until they introduce things that shoot at you, and then the puzzle solving part of my brain curls into the foetal position wailing "Can't think! Robots will shoot me!"

Anyway, if it turns out this version of the game is actually really easy? Don't tell me. I am happier in my blissful ignorance, at least for the moment :)