Patrick Star voice i hate this channel
when ur playing a video game & someone says "gg" that means good girl
rly agree with most of this, the spirit of this, the sublimity of videogame-as-exploration that i've always found myself so naturally impelled to experience the medium through, and just cannot relate enough to so much of the core thesis herein to the point where i feel like this is something i could've written in another life
but it's painfully obvious a white woman wrote it. maybe other-me is too
but it's painfully obvious a white woman wrote it. maybe other-me is too
acho meio q maravilhosa a reação visceral q esse joguinho causa em muita gente nesse website e fora dele. talvez a autora faça alguns comentários q uma galerinha precise ouvir pra deixar de ser tão trouxa, por mais bobos q alguns deles possam ser.
talvez eu já esteja meio offline demais pra ir muito com a cara do humor desse manifestozinho, e eu n engaje muito com todo o conceito de "feminilidade" da autora. já tinha escrito sobre isso por aqui antes e tals. mas esse joguinho ainda traz questionamentos ainda estranhamente pouco populares pra maioria das pessoas q engajam com videogames de uma maneira ou de outra.
talvez a indústria seja um tanto q machista sim. talvez videogames possam ser mais ousados e n terem apenas violência como sua principal forma de interação com o mundo. talvez muita gente trate videogames como nada além de simples produtos comerciais pra serem consumidos e descartados logo em seguida.
n me entenda mal, talvez alguns jogos sejam apenas isso mesmo. mas honestamente, me deixa até um tanto q triste o tanto de gente q trata todo videogame como a porra do Microsoft Office ou do IntelliJ IDEA. um simples software desenvolvido com o único objetivo de ativar os receptores de dopamina do seu cérebro. e vejo muita gente tratando esse joguinho de twine aqui da mesma forma, algo q é claramente um projeto bem pessoal de alguém q só tem opiniões bem fortes sobre a mídia. opiniões inofensivas apresentadas de um jeito meio bobo e desengonçado, mas ainda meio q um tanto q radicais? pelo menos radicais pra uma galerinha por aí.
enfim, acho meio paia qualquer pessoa q reaja a Video Game Feminization Hypnosis só com raiva e desdém. acho meio tosco. meio cringe, até.
até pq n é lá muito difícil entender de onde essa raiva realmente vem tbm.
talvez eu já esteja meio offline demais pra ir muito com a cara do humor desse manifestozinho, e eu n engaje muito com todo o conceito de "feminilidade" da autora. já tinha escrito sobre isso por aqui antes e tals. mas esse joguinho ainda traz questionamentos ainda estranhamente pouco populares pra maioria das pessoas q engajam com videogames de uma maneira ou de outra.
talvez a indústria seja um tanto q machista sim. talvez videogames possam ser mais ousados e n terem apenas violência como sua principal forma de interação com o mundo. talvez muita gente trate videogames como nada além de simples produtos comerciais pra serem consumidos e descartados logo em seguida.
n me entenda mal, talvez alguns jogos sejam apenas isso mesmo. mas honestamente, me deixa até um tanto q triste o tanto de gente q trata todo videogame como a porra do Microsoft Office ou do IntelliJ IDEA. um simples software desenvolvido com o único objetivo de ativar os receptores de dopamina do seu cérebro. e vejo muita gente tratando esse joguinho de twine aqui da mesma forma, algo q é claramente um projeto bem pessoal de alguém q só tem opiniões bem fortes sobre a mídia. opiniões inofensivas apresentadas de um jeito meio bobo e desengonçado, mas ainda meio q um tanto q radicais? pelo menos radicais pra uma galerinha por aí.
enfim, acho meio paia qualquer pessoa q reaja a Video Game Feminization Hypnosis só com raiva e desdém. acho meio tosco. meio cringe, até.
até pq n é lá muito difícil entender de onde essa raiva realmente vem tbm.
I wrote a review about this some months ago, but after some other people I saw review it change their minds (plus being reminded of it by having people tell me I'm wrong) I decided to give it another shot. I think the first time I came into this I saw the one line about 'girldick' at the beginning and I kind of turned my brain off after that because of how much I hated that one line. I'm not going to delve into this too much on backloggd dot com, but as a transgender woman myself I have a lot of issues with 'girldick' and the adjacent culture around it. It's gross and fetishizing and it genuinely makes me uncomfortable. But, after reading this again, I realized there's way more to this that I flagrantly ignored my first go around. (Also, as someone pointed out on my first review saying something among the lines of "there's only like one line talking about weird online stuff" and I will concede that they're right. My bad!)
As my boyfriend states in his review, while this is art it's not really something that's made to be talked about the same way as "proper games" (whatever that means to you) are. Which is why I'm not giving this a score this time as it's rather pointless to, in my mind.
There are a lot of thought provoking ideas in this work. I don't agree with all of them (I think the bit about writers being "obsessed with conflict" especially is very silly), but it made me think about games in a way I've not really thought about them before. Take the topic of violence; while I disagree about video game violence being nothing but filler or a power fantasy, I completely get where the author is coming from. When you take a look at video games as a medium, in most cases there is some sort of expectation for a combat system. Again, this is something that I never really gave much thought to this before as it's always been the norm for essentially as long as video games have existed, but having it pointed out puts into perspective how odd it is. In other artistic mediums, such as novels, paintings, movies and the like, while many of them feature combat of some form, it's not something that's expected because of the medium it was created in. In other words, I doubt anyone has watched Finding Nemo and went out thinking "Y'know, that was a good movie, but I think it's weird how there weren't any big fight scenes!".
I think this outlook of expecting games to have combat, or hell any pre-determined mechanic, as the author states, is limiting to the genre as a whole, and only serves to make games less unique. I think there are many other interesting ways to have the player interact with the world and the creatures inhabiting it that is more than just beating the ever loving crap out of them. To quote the author, "if u want to reinvent a medium u have to eviscerate it first. destroy video games from the inside out like an alien parasite." I agree. Games should be deconstructed to their barest parts, those parts should be turned over and examined, and subsequently thrown out and replaced with something entirely new in its stead. Still a video game, but something that disregards any and all preconceived notions as to what a video game is supposed to/should be.
When I first read this, I took this as "all video games are bad and I am so much smarter than you for realizing this" when that couldn't be further from the point. The author clearly has a deep love and passion for video games, as is made obvious throughout the whole work. It's this love, this passion that makes her want to change them. So they can grow. Video games can be, and SHOULD be so much more. This game is a love letter to video games and their potential. It's a message about why we should break down the barriers that only serve to limit the creativity put into games and the love that games make.
To close, I want to talk about a different game. A game that I had an extremely similar experience with, and that explores strikingly similar topics to this one. That game is moon. When I played moon, I was so incredibly bored. It felt like a complete and utter slog. I didn't feel like I was accomplishing anything at all. I hardly knew why I even kept on playing. It's only when I beat the game and put thought into what I had just experienced that I had realized the point of moon: to be a "boring" video game. moon, like Video Game Feminization Hypnosis, was made by people who have a deep love for video games and want to push boundaries. The purpose of both of these games is to make people think. They want you to feel challenged. It's by design. They're both extremely earnest experiences that pay respect to the boundless possibilities of the medium. And I think they both succeed splendidly.
As my boyfriend states in his review, while this is art it's not really something that's made to be talked about the same way as "proper games" (whatever that means to you) are. Which is why I'm not giving this a score this time as it's rather pointless to, in my mind.
There are a lot of thought provoking ideas in this work. I don't agree with all of them (I think the bit about writers being "obsessed with conflict" especially is very silly), but it made me think about games in a way I've not really thought about them before. Take the topic of violence; while I disagree about video game violence being nothing but filler or a power fantasy, I completely get where the author is coming from. When you take a look at video games as a medium, in most cases there is some sort of expectation for a combat system. Again, this is something that I never really gave much thought to this before as it's always been the norm for essentially as long as video games have existed, but having it pointed out puts into perspective how odd it is. In other artistic mediums, such as novels, paintings, movies and the like, while many of them feature combat of some form, it's not something that's expected because of the medium it was created in. In other words, I doubt anyone has watched Finding Nemo and went out thinking "Y'know, that was a good movie, but I think it's weird how there weren't any big fight scenes!".
I think this outlook of expecting games to have combat, or hell any pre-determined mechanic, as the author states, is limiting to the genre as a whole, and only serves to make games less unique. I think there are many other interesting ways to have the player interact with the world and the creatures inhabiting it that is more than just beating the ever loving crap out of them. To quote the author, "if u want to reinvent a medium u have to eviscerate it first. destroy video games from the inside out like an alien parasite." I agree. Games should be deconstructed to their barest parts, those parts should be turned over and examined, and subsequently thrown out and replaced with something entirely new in its stead. Still a video game, but something that disregards any and all preconceived notions as to what a video game is supposed to/should be.
When I first read this, I took this as "all video games are bad and I am so much smarter than you for realizing this" when that couldn't be further from the point. The author clearly has a deep love and passion for video games, as is made obvious throughout the whole work. It's this love, this passion that makes her want to change them. So they can grow. Video games can be, and SHOULD be so much more. This game is a love letter to video games and their potential. It's a message about why we should break down the barriers that only serve to limit the creativity put into games and the love that games make.
To close, I want to talk about a different game. A game that I had an extremely similar experience with, and that explores strikingly similar topics to this one. That game is moon. When I played moon, I was so incredibly bored. It felt like a complete and utter slog. I didn't feel like I was accomplishing anything at all. I hardly knew why I even kept on playing. It's only when I beat the game and put thought into what I had just experienced that I had realized the point of moon: to be a "boring" video game. moon, like Video Game Feminization Hypnosis, was made by people who have a deep love for video games and want to push boundaries. The purpose of both of these games is to make people think. They want you to feel challenged. It's by design. They're both extremely earnest experiences that pay respect to the boundless possibilities of the medium. And I think they both succeed splendidly.
Ran through this for context after stumbling upon the reviews. I don't want to weigh in that much but I will say it's really funny that this person likes Kingdom Hearts.
my last review was fucking terrible because i made it in the middle of some kind of breakdown and im sorry for contributing to the bizarre dogpile / micro-culture war this game seems to have cultivated on here. if you liked that review while it was up for a day or two, you owe me five dollars.
anyway, real re-review:
maybe it's just that part 1 blinded me with misplaced rage the first time, but i still don't really find any of the ideas in it "challenging", just dismissive, to the point where they almost dilute how amazing and revelatory parts 2 and 3 are. it feels directed so precisely at someone like me, a "mechanics" believer, a gdc talk watcher, but i struggle to see the point of it. why hypnotize me? i'm already as feminized as can be. all of my games (released or otherwise) are for girls and they always have been!
absolutely no disrespect to princess; i liked a lot of the ideas presented in this (genuinely made me reflect on how i make games in a lot of ways) and i'd like to play more of her games.
anyway, real re-review:
maybe it's just that part 1 blinded me with misplaced rage the first time, but i still don't really find any of the ideas in it "challenging", just dismissive, to the point where they almost dilute how amazing and revelatory parts 2 and 3 are. it feels directed so precisely at someone like me, a "mechanics" believer, a gdc talk watcher, but i struggle to see the point of it. why hypnotize me? i'm already as feminized as can be. all of my games (released or otherwise) are for girls and they always have been!
absolutely no disrespect to princess; i liked a lot of the ideas presented in this (genuinely made me reflect on how i make games in a lot of ways) and i'd like to play more of her games.
Fuck all these limp-dick 4chan green text users and chicken-shit girlcock chasers. Fuck this 24/7 Internet spew of blahaj and r/196 bullshit.
not everyone can be a girl but some of u should try a little harder.. <3
Edit:
THIS REVIEW IS AWFUL. I have made an updated review that expresses my opinion about this much better. If you liked this review, I implore you to please read my new one instead.
Also, I doubt she's even read this, but I want to apologize to the author of this game regardless. This review is extremely mean-spirited and accusatory, and I had no right to talk this way about someone I've never even met. This person doesn't deserve to have her ideas obsessed over like this and to be psycho-analyzed by random people online just for giving her opinion on video games of all things.
ostensibly political but rly more of an aesthetic manifesto/individualist thing. doesnt bother to elaborate on "love" as the innermost principle of making good art as if everything including language were a sign for it. video games made by indies and industry devs alike r made for gamers (latently fascist white/asian dudes) and not real people with any remote amt of individuation. the contrast btwn part 1 and 2 (what games r v. what games can be) reads like stuff i myself and my friends have thought which is assuring. really the only thing undermining this is that this user thinks kingdom hearts is an example of a good video game when i cant think of much that screams culture industry distraction-generator louder than a disney + anime rpg. cool to know there r people on the earth
re other reviews on this page, ill say again what was sort of implicit in teh above: i am not so sure the femininity is the point as much as the strict adherence to self-determined/discovered values, which is basically wht "love" stands for. titling and style is provocative in a way thats super interesting to me
re other reviews on this page, ill say again what was sort of implicit in teh above: i am not so sure the femininity is the point as much as the strict adherence to self-determined/discovered values, which is basically wht "love" stands for. titling and style is provocative in a way thats super interesting to me
A trans-femme manifesto on how much games fall short in communicating experiences outside of dominant lenses. It's a pretty straightforward and easy to use Twine format and encourages moving around throughout the text at your own pace to engage with what you're most excited by. Definitely worth the time it takes to engage with it.
And y'know...it IS weird that Mario kills babies.
And y'know...it IS weird that Mario kills babies.
kinda fell short in the middle. but otherwise good
To be super reductive, this is the Notes from the Underground of writing on games. It makes some really good points, has some good jokes, but also comes off as a little iconoclastic.
I am a sick girl.... I am a spiteful girl in a male-dominated industry. My art is unattractive to our strait-laced time-as-a-currency society. I believe my fingers are diseased with carpal tunnel.
I am a sick girl.... I am a spiteful girl in a male-dominated industry. My art is unattractive to our strait-laced time-as-a-currency society. I believe my fingers are diseased with carpal tunnel.
CW: Discussions of Transmisogyny
The common response to vulnerable niche play experiences like Video Game Feminization Hypnosis (2019), Cave Story Sex RPG 2007 (2021), and He Fucked The Girl Out of Me (2022), is mockery both for the boldness of name and of content. Video Game Feminization Hypnosis is a psychic-design-manifesto with lines like "i dont care about the "puzzles" i just wanna explore weird islands & mess with the machines" and "ive half-joked about my games being laced with estrogen but i wonder how powerful they could be. what if we could use video games to forcefem ppl all over the world" nested as hyperlinks throughout her vent towards a better girly gameworld. Written in lowercase text and using internet acronyms like 'ppl', she speaks with a casual concern for unfettered femme exploration games as a way to potentially rewrite the social code.
It has not been product tested for review, nor has either of the other 2 games mentioned. The problem here is that the culture of 'gaming' itself is unable to step beyond the bounds of product review. Franz inquires into this problem around Cave Story Sex RPG 2007
"Why do we seek to quantify something clearly very personal based on how much it resonates with us?
I think my problem is that I think people are looking at this game as they would a product. Like it needs to have some value to me, otherwise it's not "worth playing".
Nadia, Fewprime, Blood Machine, npckc, communistsister, bagenzo, and [pourpetine] (https://xrafstar.monster/games/). These are in my mind the most notable transfemme gamedevs and their relevant store pages for their work¹. It's obviously not a comprehensive list, but this is my notation for who is the most publicly notable and prolific within the scene. Notice that all of the games on these pages are free as are the 3 games I opened with at the start. That's because transfemme gamedevs more often have to make their corpus free just to get eyes. So what are gaming spaces assessing the 'worth' of a completely no strings attached free simulated experiences? I think its the fact we dare to make people uncomfortable and borrowing a modicum of their time (across all the devs I've mentioned I cant think of 1 that takes more than 3 hours to finish, usually only being around 20 minutes in length at most). My sisters have to cheapen themselves to 0 just to get your ear and its still just met with mockery, harassment, and belittlement².
Even when a transfemme game dev gets the chance of any success at all she is thrown down again. In pourpetine's Hot Allostatic Load (2015) she notes among a litany of pained observations that
"One of my abusers was sent a list of the nominees for the upcoming games festival Indiecade. Unfortunately, I was on the list. I ended up winning an award, ostensibly to recognize my feminine labor in the areas of marginalized game design—years of creating access for other people, publicizing their games, giving technical support, not to mention the games I had designed myself. Instead of solidarity from other marginalized people in my field, I was attacked."
Video Game Feminization Hypnosis beats to a much more Utopian drum. A belief that we can mesmerize people into a more pure goo out of this vindictive rut, create a games made out of love, show people feminine Exits.
I believe in all that. I also believe that my words and those of my sisters are constantly being cast a sidelong jeer of disposability. That I and my sisters are then to blame for when a mobbing happens and not the world's own biases and outrage. This world has made this all quite non-negotiable, no more playing along with the democratic cesspits and hateful comedy routines. Here's to reflecting on the play experience others treat as compost as if its the most meaningful urtexts in the world because to quote pourpetine again "Build the shittiest thing possible. Build out of trash because all i have is trash. Trash materials, trash bodies, trash brain syndrome. Build in the gaps between storms of chronic pain." trash art is my queendom.
I hope it suffocates society before it can flee to their patriarch Arks. As princess put it here 'flood the world and dilute the sludge'.
-------------------------------------------------------
1. 2 notable exceptions I know of with pay to play games by transfemme is princess/Girl Software's other games, and the cowriting of Aevee Bee on Worst Girl Games. Also key in on the fact here I'm making no judgements on individual pricing of games as a moral decision.
2. Does not remotely just happen On Backloggd³ if you think this is just a grievance I have with this site you're gravely misreading me and I urge you to slow down your social media outrage use for a bit qt~
3. Although I should not lie, social media sites are remarkably more unreliable habitats for trans people than they initially appear, this place has been a great learning experience of that in my case
The common response to vulnerable niche play experiences like Video Game Feminization Hypnosis (2019), Cave Story Sex RPG 2007 (2021), and He Fucked The Girl Out of Me (2022), is mockery both for the boldness of name and of content. Video Game Feminization Hypnosis is a psychic-design-manifesto with lines like "i dont care about the "puzzles" i just wanna explore weird islands & mess with the machines" and "ive half-joked about my games being laced with estrogen but i wonder how powerful they could be. what if we could use video games to forcefem ppl all over the world" nested as hyperlinks throughout her vent towards a better girly gameworld. Written in lowercase text and using internet acronyms like 'ppl', she speaks with a casual concern for unfettered femme exploration games as a way to potentially rewrite the social code.
It has not been product tested for review, nor has either of the other 2 games mentioned. The problem here is that the culture of 'gaming' itself is unable to step beyond the bounds of product review. Franz inquires into this problem around Cave Story Sex RPG 2007
"Why do we seek to quantify something clearly very personal based on how much it resonates with us?
I think my problem is that I think people are looking at this game as they would a product. Like it needs to have some value to me, otherwise it's not "worth playing".
Nadia, Fewprime, Blood Machine, npckc, communistsister, bagenzo, and [pourpetine] (https://xrafstar.monster/games/). These are in my mind the most notable transfemme gamedevs and their relevant store pages for their work¹. It's obviously not a comprehensive list, but this is my notation for who is the most publicly notable and prolific within the scene. Notice that all of the games on these pages are free as are the 3 games I opened with at the start. That's because transfemme gamedevs more often have to make their corpus free just to get eyes. So what are gaming spaces assessing the 'worth' of a completely no strings attached free simulated experiences? I think its the fact we dare to make people uncomfortable and borrowing a modicum of their time (across all the devs I've mentioned I cant think of 1 that takes more than 3 hours to finish, usually only being around 20 minutes in length at most). My sisters have to cheapen themselves to 0 just to get your ear and its still just met with mockery, harassment, and belittlement².
Even when a transfemme game dev gets the chance of any success at all she is thrown down again. In pourpetine's Hot Allostatic Load (2015) she notes among a litany of pained observations that
"One of my abusers was sent a list of the nominees for the upcoming games festival Indiecade. Unfortunately, I was on the list. I ended up winning an award, ostensibly to recognize my feminine labor in the areas of marginalized game design—years of creating access for other people, publicizing their games, giving technical support, not to mention the games I had designed myself. Instead of solidarity from other marginalized people in my field, I was attacked."
Video Game Feminization Hypnosis beats to a much more Utopian drum. A belief that we can mesmerize people into a more pure goo out of this vindictive rut, create a games made out of love, show people feminine Exits.
I believe in all that. I also believe that my words and those of my sisters are constantly being cast a sidelong jeer of disposability. That I and my sisters are then to blame for when a mobbing happens and not the world's own biases and outrage. This world has made this all quite non-negotiable, no more playing along with the democratic cesspits and hateful comedy routines. Here's to reflecting on the play experience others treat as compost as if its the most meaningful urtexts in the world because to quote pourpetine again "Build the shittiest thing possible. Build out of trash because all i have is trash. Trash materials, trash bodies, trash brain syndrome. Build in the gaps between storms of chronic pain." trash art is my queendom.
I hope it suffocates society before it can flee to their patriarch Arks. As princess put it here 'flood the world and dilute the sludge'.
-------------------------------------------------------
1. 2 notable exceptions I know of with pay to play games by transfemme is princess/Girl Software's other games, and the cowriting of Aevee Bee on Worst Girl Games. Also key in on the fact here I'm making no judgements on individual pricing of games as a moral decision.
2. Does not remotely just happen On Backloggd³ if you think this is just a grievance I have with this site you're gravely misreading me and I urge you to slow down your social media outrage use for a bit qt~
3. Although I should not lie, social media sites are remarkably more unreliable habitats for trans people than they initially appear, this place has been a great learning experience of that in my case
This game like talking to the beautiful trasngender woman from twitter you fumbled two years ago
white woman media
n esperava nem um pouco o que eu li lol
uns anos atrás eu aspirava ser um game dev, mas com o passar do tempo foi descobrindo que minha paixao realmente n era >fazer< jogos e sim >jogar'< eles.
acho que existe mt jogo q eu queria q fosse bom mas é... ruim? sla, nao sei de onde tinha vindo essa vontade, mas depois de jogar mais e mais jogos essa vontade só foi embora, agr eu quero ter experiências ao invés de fazer elas.
se tem algo que eu noto é que a cada dia que passa eu odeio mais jogos com muito investimento ao ponto de que o dinheiro supera o amor ao jogo e isso fica notável enquanto você joga. raras são as excessões em que eu nao me import com isso...
enfim, amo jogar jogos e provavelmente vou amar jogar eles até eu o fim (contanto que eles também sejam feitos com amor ig)
:)
uns anos atrás eu aspirava ser um game dev, mas com o passar do tempo foi descobrindo que minha paixao realmente n era >fazer< jogos e sim >jogar'< eles.
acho que existe mt jogo q eu queria q fosse bom mas é... ruim? sla, nao sei de onde tinha vindo essa vontade, mas depois de jogar mais e mais jogos essa vontade só foi embora, agr eu quero ter experiências ao invés de fazer elas.
se tem algo que eu noto é que a cada dia que passa eu odeio mais jogos com muito investimento ao ponto de que o dinheiro supera o amor ao jogo e isso fica notável enquanto você joga. raras são as excessões em que eu nao me import com isso...
enfim, amo jogar jogos e provavelmente vou amar jogar eles até eu o fim (contanto que eles também sejam feitos com amor ig)
:)
i checked this out because it kept appearing in my activity tab and people are really opinionated about it and honestly the most i took from this is at least she's self aware this is barely even a "game", let alone one that meets the criteria of what she wants as much as it is a manifesto fueled by a random whim. at least i get why people are so opinionated (its literally an opinion piece) but its kind of as shallow as her perspective on games she talks about
In late February, I left a review on this game. I didn't really get it. I wouldn't say I fully get it now either, but I have been thinking a lot about this game ever since then. That review kind of sucked, but I guess it's a snapshot of that moment in time, the immediate guttural reaction to a challenge like this game is. I acknowledged in that review that as a cis guy, this was a perspective that I was likely not going to fully understand. I do feel as though this game is somehow unreviewable. Maybe this review can be seen as more of a review of my now-deleted review. In that I described this work as "ineffectual". That feels strange to say. I think it being on a site like Backloggd where it's presented as the same sort of product that any other video game is, inclines one to view it as a product. It's art, but is it really fair for it to be judged in the same way that Baldur's Gate 3 is? That just feels off-base to me. For me to suggest that it is "ineffectual" is almost like saying that somebody is venting in an "ineffectual" way. You could say that I guess, but read the room man! Maybe that's fair game because it's released as a Twine game on itch.io, but that still doesn't quite sit well with me. I didn't even really know what Twine games were when I first played this! It looks like this is its own category of game, which is pretty cool. I think my unfamiliarity might have hampered my perception in some way. This is an earnest piece of writing. That's important.
The major takeaway that I got from this game upon first playing it is this acknowledgment that there aren't that many critically acclaimed girly/feminine games. That IS true. As a cis guy I think that's an important point that I hadn't really thought about before. I find this point to be even more poignant after seeing the release of Princess Peach Showtime, recently. Especially with how a lot of people seem to look at a game like that. An industry where everybody feels there are ample games made for people like them and by people like them is a better industry than where we are today.
I love mechanics in video games. I love how much there is going on in a game like Metal Gear Solid 2, that kind of nitty-gritty where there's detail pouring out of every button press, every possibility, every corner of whatever world you're in; in my mind that is some of the best of what video games have to offer as art. I think when first reading this, the frank style of writing made me feel as though I was somehow wrong for thinking that way, like I was being reprimanded as this silly guy gamer. But that's really a reactionary way of looking at it, I think. I don't think that's its purpose. In retrospect I think I was really thinking about it all wrong. I think my older review, and I suppose the divided reviews on this game on this site are a showcase in how a site like Backloggd can and does play a part in the way in which we perceive art. I honestly wonder, if I had found out about this game through a recommendation from a friend, or some other kind of website, would I have reacted to it the way that I had? In a place like this, a piece of writing can end up commodified, as just another product to review and rate, and because it has strong writing it must have some sort of finger-wagging point to say to any and all gamers that come across it. Though I often criticize reactionaries and their culture wars against art, this was a case where I found some other ways that somebody can get sucked into that. Even me. That's humbling, and it has profound meaning to how I engage with art going forward. I realize that it's something that was present with how I engaged with other perspectives in the past, too. I never really understood the whole "liminal space" thing that was popular online, and I don't think I engaged with those feelings in an empathetic way. This was meaningful, important reading for me to have had.
This writing is another perspective. The best thing you can hope for with something like this is that it'll make you think, or at least feel. If it's lucky, it may even change some minds, open up mental doors. Evidently, it's successful. Based on Princess' perspective shown here, I'd really like to check out her games.
The major takeaway that I got from this game upon first playing it is this acknowledgment that there aren't that many critically acclaimed girly/feminine games. That IS true. As a cis guy I think that's an important point that I hadn't really thought about before. I find this point to be even more poignant after seeing the release of Princess Peach Showtime, recently. Especially with how a lot of people seem to look at a game like that. An industry where everybody feels there are ample games made for people like them and by people like them is a better industry than where we are today.
I love mechanics in video games. I love how much there is going on in a game like Metal Gear Solid 2, that kind of nitty-gritty where there's detail pouring out of every button press, every possibility, every corner of whatever world you're in; in my mind that is some of the best of what video games have to offer as art. I think when first reading this, the frank style of writing made me feel as though I was somehow wrong for thinking that way, like I was being reprimanded as this silly guy gamer. But that's really a reactionary way of looking at it, I think. I don't think that's its purpose. In retrospect I think I was really thinking about it all wrong. I think my older review, and I suppose the divided reviews on this game on this site are a showcase in how a site like Backloggd can and does play a part in the way in which we perceive art. I honestly wonder, if I had found out about this game through a recommendation from a friend, or some other kind of website, would I have reacted to it the way that I had? In a place like this, a piece of writing can end up commodified, as just another product to review and rate, and because it has strong writing it must have some sort of finger-wagging point to say to any and all gamers that come across it. Though I often criticize reactionaries and their culture wars against art, this was a case where I found some other ways that somebody can get sucked into that. Even me. That's humbling, and it has profound meaning to how I engage with art going forward. I realize that it's something that was present with how I engaged with other perspectives in the past, too. I never really understood the whole "liminal space" thing that was popular online, and I don't think I engaged with those feelings in an empathetic way. This was meaningful, important reading for me to have had.
This writing is another perspective. The best thing you can hope for with something like this is that it'll make you think, or at least feel. If it's lucky, it may even change some minds, open up mental doors. Evidently, it's successful. Based on Princess' perspective shown here, I'd really like to check out her games.
everyone please stop having opinions
there were maybe 3 lines that emanated annoying-twitter-queer-person, despite what the title and cover art may suggest. no "girl dinners" in sight. video game feminization hypnosis is actually a porpentine video game manifesto for people without horrible trauma/a guide on how to think more critically about the media you enjoy/a study on how male-dominated gamer culture ia. the writer didn't use the word bl*haj a single time. i'm proud of them. the reason this has so many .5s is because people felt challenged by it, which is good- that's the point. no, the exaggeration that "all video games should be forcefeminized" is not literal (by definition), it's exaggeration to make a point about how many gamers act as if the mainstream should only cater to men ie the common denominator. how about y'all try having media literacy for a change?
backloggd user @Cjer gets a 25% revenue cut of this review
backloggd user @Cjer gets a 25% revenue cut of this review
I've come to the conclusion ideologies are a sort of mental poison which utterly stifled any actual thought in its victims. Case in point this slapdash discord rant masquerading as an essay. In this case it seems the primary game design ethos of the author is escapism. They want to escape and exist in another world and mechanics serve as a barrier to that. This betrayed in the cliche 2000s teenage girl writing style which show a desire to exist as someone of a different age in a different time (your wannabe 2000s cringe culture is dead sparkle dog bimbo brainrot disease aesthetic isn't unique its an epidmic).
This leads to some baffling claims like talking about how comfy the world of the half life games, a military installation and eastern Europe respectively, are. None of the locations except the alien planets are particularly unrealistic in half life the author could always just fly over to eastern Europe and see some brutalist architecture. Ultimately its not the locations in games OP wants to escape into but into the simplistic feeling of a game. An abstraction of reality where hunger, drinking, insecurities, ugliness, and complexity don't exist. Where cutting grass and slashing slimes can give you enough honest days pay to keep you going. The pixels and polygons smooth over so much of the harshness of reality making even a dystopian world like half life seem comfy in comparison to the real world. Its like Japanese anime where a common plot trope is someone killing themselves and being transported to a magic world just like mmorpgs and jrpgs the protagonist/watcher are familar with. Its not an escape to a new an unseen world (like many past fish out of water stories) but instead an escape into a simple and familiar world. Its creepy and shows a lack of imagination (I seriously question the normalization of suicide and sexually charged fanservice in a country with a high suicide rate and gender segregated train cars) . You have only one life and one chance in this world don't waste it wishing you were something else in a world of 5th gen polygons. I promise the real world is not as scary as your toxic online communities and brainrot ideologies have made you think.
This leads to some baffling claims like talking about how comfy the world of the half life games, a military installation and eastern Europe respectively, are. None of the locations except the alien planets are particularly unrealistic in half life the author could always just fly over to eastern Europe and see some brutalist architecture. Ultimately its not the locations in games OP wants to escape into but into the simplistic feeling of a game. An abstraction of reality where hunger, drinking, insecurities, ugliness, and complexity don't exist. Where cutting grass and slashing slimes can give you enough honest days pay to keep you going. The pixels and polygons smooth over so much of the harshness of reality making even a dystopian world like half life seem comfy in comparison to the real world. Its like Japanese anime where a common plot trope is someone killing themselves and being transported to a magic world just like mmorpgs and jrpgs the protagonist/watcher are familar with. Its not an escape to a new an unseen world (like many past fish out of water stories) but instead an escape into a simple and familiar world. Its creepy and shows a lack of imagination (I seriously question the normalization of suicide and sexually charged fanservice in a country with a high suicide rate and gender segregated train cars) . You have only one life and one chance in this world don't waste it wishing you were something else in a world of 5th gen polygons. I promise the real world is not as scary as your toxic online communities and brainrot ideologies have made you think.
I learned how to do hypnotism... for girl s
im only going to gdc if it stands for girldick conference
A game that explains what exactly is wrong with our society today.
Dawg what
true
Too often I think we are chained by the systematization of concepts and sensibilities to truly grasp the way in which the vibrations and rendering of place and action can exist through digital spaces. Within a ten-minute text-adventure game on itch.io (constituted almost entirely of raw-text sentences on a blank wallpaper) I've intuited more textures and tastes of imagery and landscapes than any video-essay or structured analysis I've ever seen. Maybe it's a sort of cathartic and utopian awakening to touch a work that manages to portray this sort of ambiguity regarding the lens through we which we "feel" aesthetics in games (which is almost uncharted territory in terms of definition since we can't even manage to determine what 'game design' is) and not succumb to this cynic preposition of everything needing function and purpose through some sort of utilitarian perspective regarding "intention", that is, the sort of evaluation that seems to look at art from the outside instead of the inside, and I think that's the key point overall I'm trying to make. In order for something to "succeed" or to be "convincing" to one's understanding of art there's a certain undertone that implies a sort of staticity in our "digestion" of those experiences, a voyeuristic excitement at 'consuming' works that are, to our eyes, something that exists in our plane first and in their plane last.
"feelsgood" and "gamefeel" are wide-ranging adjectives I've seen be used in game criticism for a while in both bad and good connotation but we sometimes forget how those concepts of "crunchiness" or "pleasure" traverse for one person and the other. The popping little explosions of Kingdom Hearts' keyblade plummeting the enemy away like a ragdoll and Doom's shotgun ravaging its way through the fleshy insides of a demon is a very superficial comparison I'm making on the fly to demonstrate the differences in "feel" interactive fiction can create, but in that sense why do we tend to use this word as if it somehow systematized and encompassed all sorts of feel into a concept that can be 'good' or 'bad' depending on context? Sometimes it feels good to hit things. Sometimes it feels awful but it is also compelling. Sometimes a world can exasperate its breath through traversal and physical connection like Breath of the Wild does with its ephemeral assimilation of challenges and progression, and sometimes it can inspire action and improvisation on virtual architecture like Sonic Adventure, begging us to ramp and spindash through hubs and places that mechanically only exist to grant a sense of friction to movement, but inspire the imagination and playfulness of running through their skies, water and colors --- Sonic Adventure's "jank" gives these spaces life in the unpredictability of direction and speed. If there's one thing I learned with Video Game Feminization Hypnosis is that most things I love about games I love will probably remain unspeakable, verbalized mysteries until the day I forget what words mean and only feel the sunshine of Outrun 2's skybox peeling the anxiety of my mind through the sound of Magical Sound Shower. Until the day I can only remember the drifting piano of Breath of the Wild's biotic world orchestrating its digital stillness, like a God breathing on my shoulder while I move and slide aimlessly like a lost wanderer. Until I can only recall the melody of Demon's Souls' Nexus and the sound my footsteps raise when walking through the water mirror on its center. Until I can only reminisce about Proteus's singing flowers and its island that dances through optics and observation. Maybe that's why we write reviews and want our loves validated or to be seen as something 'higher', 'mightier', something complicated and mystical as the maths that reveal humanity the mysteries of the universe since centuries ago. We want answers we'll never be able to grasp as long as we try to analyze, and to analyze we need to lie in the exterior. We need to watch, study and patronize; we need to put these architectures and spaces into boxes and views of 'critique' and 'deliberacy'. We need to leave its heart and embrace the surfaces of technicality.
Maybe we should try to feel more, see more, hear more, sense more. To be inside those worlds and not inspect them, but love them. Or hate them. Or feel nothing. It'll always depend. But I don't want to pretend that I know anything anymore, I don't want to play jigsaw and piece it all together.
I've always questioned my taste for existing in spaces. In my dreams I'm often attached to the unearthly and chaotic logic that conducts the sights and people that I see in my own mind. I want more than anything to exist in places that can make me feel something about who I am or the people that surround me, I want to belong and to discover. I know that I want to not know, I want mystique; the dialectics of discovery, wonder and impermanence. Maybe that's why my favorite Super Marios are 64 and Galaxy, because I'll never forget how mysterious and dreamy the castle felt on my first way through in 64, expanding unto itself as if it had a life of its own; and I'll never forget how silent and empty the starred void could be in Galaxy, even if I couldn't traverse it --- picturing it through a looking-glass was enough to capture its scale in relation to Mario, its gravity pulling me with ease and swinging me around spheres as I grasped the cosmos' force beyond what I could jump on despite the universe looking so calm. Maybe that's why Danganronpa's claustrophobic and unworldly, exaggerated style of pink blood and flipping cardboard cut-outs resonated with my urge to pull the paper off the stage, exploring and gathering evidence towards nonsensical, absurd truths. It's not that I want to exist in worlds that make me forget I am here, but worlds that remind me how much there truly is in the unseen, between the lines of the material. Those hypnotizing physicalities we conjure of body, mind and soul. If we broke away from all the systems, equations and measuring, who knows what frontiers we could uncover.
"feelsgood" and "gamefeel" are wide-ranging adjectives I've seen be used in game criticism for a while in both bad and good connotation but we sometimes forget how those concepts of "crunchiness" or "pleasure" traverse for one person and the other. The popping little explosions of Kingdom Hearts' keyblade plummeting the enemy away like a ragdoll and Doom's shotgun ravaging its way through the fleshy insides of a demon is a very superficial comparison I'm making on the fly to demonstrate the differences in "feel" interactive fiction can create, but in that sense why do we tend to use this word as if it somehow systematized and encompassed all sorts of feel into a concept that can be 'good' or 'bad' depending on context? Sometimes it feels good to hit things. Sometimes it feels awful but it is also compelling. Sometimes a world can exasperate its breath through traversal and physical connection like Breath of the Wild does with its ephemeral assimilation of challenges and progression, and sometimes it can inspire action and improvisation on virtual architecture like Sonic Adventure, begging us to ramp and spindash through hubs and places that mechanically only exist to grant a sense of friction to movement, but inspire the imagination and playfulness of running through their skies, water and colors --- Sonic Adventure's "jank" gives these spaces life in the unpredictability of direction and speed. If there's one thing I learned with Video Game Feminization Hypnosis is that most things I love about games I love will probably remain unspeakable, verbalized mysteries until the day I forget what words mean and only feel the sunshine of Outrun 2's skybox peeling the anxiety of my mind through the sound of Magical Sound Shower. Until the day I can only remember the drifting piano of Breath of the Wild's biotic world orchestrating its digital stillness, like a God breathing on my shoulder while I move and slide aimlessly like a lost wanderer. Until I can only recall the melody of Demon's Souls' Nexus and the sound my footsteps raise when walking through the water mirror on its center. Until I can only reminisce about Proteus's singing flowers and its island that dances through optics and observation. Maybe that's why we write reviews and want our loves validated or to be seen as something 'higher', 'mightier', something complicated and mystical as the maths that reveal humanity the mysteries of the universe since centuries ago. We want answers we'll never be able to grasp as long as we try to analyze, and to analyze we need to lie in the exterior. We need to watch, study and patronize; we need to put these architectures and spaces into boxes and views of 'critique' and 'deliberacy'. We need to leave its heart and embrace the surfaces of technicality.
Maybe we should try to feel more, see more, hear more, sense more. To be inside those worlds and not inspect them, but love them. Or hate them. Or feel nothing. It'll always depend. But I don't want to pretend that I know anything anymore, I don't want to play jigsaw and piece it all together.
I've always questioned my taste for existing in spaces. In my dreams I'm often attached to the unearthly and chaotic logic that conducts the sights and people that I see in my own mind. I want more than anything to exist in places that can make me feel something about who I am or the people that surround me, I want to belong and to discover. I know that I want to not know, I want mystique; the dialectics of discovery, wonder and impermanence. Maybe that's why my favorite Super Marios are 64 and Galaxy, because I'll never forget how mysterious and dreamy the castle felt on my first way through in 64, expanding unto itself as if it had a life of its own; and I'll never forget how silent and empty the starred void could be in Galaxy, even if I couldn't traverse it --- picturing it through a looking-glass was enough to capture its scale in relation to Mario, its gravity pulling me with ease and swinging me around spheres as I grasped the cosmos' force beyond what I could jump on despite the universe looking so calm. Maybe that's why Danganronpa's claustrophobic and unworldly, exaggerated style of pink blood and flipping cardboard cut-outs resonated with my urge to pull the paper off the stage, exploring and gathering evidence towards nonsensical, absurd truths. It's not that I want to exist in worlds that make me forget I am here, but worlds that remind me how much there truly is in the unseen, between the lines of the material. Those hypnotizing physicalities we conjure of body, mind and soul. If we broke away from all the systems, equations and measuring, who knows what frontiers we could uncover.