I don't usually do these but uhhhh I guess TW for Uterus Talk and Bodily Dysfunction Talk?
This game tapped instantly into all of my weird parental urges that have been overwhelming my body and soul as of late. Amongst any one, even animals that I cross by on the street when I'm out in the city, I find myself defaulting to this sort of role my brain registers as inherently 'parental'. I consider myself, for some reason, the owner of whatever responsibilities exist for us, and all these hormone pills I'm taking for my bodily conditions leave me an emotional mess whenever anything vaguely bad happens to any of them.
Due to my birth conditions, I cannot have a child naturally. Not that I'd really want to, I consider anything but adoption immoral on a completely personal level (i.e., I do not extend this moral expectation to people who aren't myself). But, over the course of the past year, even though I already know I'd never do it, and I'd never want to, the chance that I might eventually be able to medically conceive and have a child has been constantly offered to me by medical professionals, only to be taken at the last moment. I don't really know why I care, but I imagine it has something to to do with all the hormone treatments.
So I definitely cried at this one. I'm a crier, y'know.
Steam Summer Sale struck this year, me and my friends all excitedly shared gifts we'd been planning for each other all month. I gave one of my best friends a copy of Shadowrun: Hong Kong, since I heard they liked Disco Elysium and that they'd been branching out into RPGs with some more combat-oriented gameplay. That same person sent me this, and I'd never heard of it before, but I vaguely knew about this whole 'parenting as a maths simulator' game genre from getting scared at the gruesome endings of Long Live the Queen as a kid and, very recently, trying this wonderful but egregiously difficult game called The World According to Girl from the Steam Next Fest this year.
And, while this game has a ton of weird aesthetic choices that offput me at first (switching perspective from the parent and the child on such crazy whims I had trouble following a couple scenes being the most notable, and the mobile game-esque look and feel being the other) it just started affecting me emotionally, like, every third scene.
For the first hour or so of this, I was on the phone with that friend I mentioned earlier and we were shooting the shit joking over this. Some of the hardest laughs I'd had in a long ass time, I'd say. At some point, I realized we were both pretty Into It, though. I didn't even realize it was one in the AM at some point, when we started at ten that night. We'd stopped talking about our days eventually, throwing out 'what ifs' about what this kid we were virtually co-parenting could get up to.
I woke up this morning after and, after going through my morning routine, made a beeline for my computer desk and got right back to it. I think my interest in this particular piece, a few hours separate it now, came from a recent fascination with the mundane and more 'wholesome' or placid tales. After writing so many stupid thoughtpieces to my colleagues about the current state of our cinema, which I can't imagine read (or meant) anything much more than 'old movie good new movie bad', I've found myself completely absolving myself, on accident, of the tolerance so many of us have for 'world ending stakes' so many generic narratives default to. Or, in the case of many of my complaints, more complex and interesting narratives that suddenly default to such huge stakes as a way of enforcing that 5-part act structure for film they teach you every day in screenwriting classes.
Straight up, you can just ignore the world ending threat in this game. I got 80% of the way there and stopped, humbling myself as a person and entertaining the idea I probably shouldn't have such expectations of even this virtual kid I trained to use swords for seventeen years. The game ended, and things were fine. Not perfect, but fine. Everything I'd been stressing to get through from the parent's perspective were all just those same stupid worries I have every other day of my real ass life.
And you probably know how the ending of a game like this is structured. The music starts playing, there's a series of snapshots telling you how every one's lives went after or whatever. I'm a pretty simple person when it comes to my tastes, I think, and y'know that's all I really need to get to weeping. Maybe all the other stuff I wrote here is like- some sort of way to internally 'justify' what might feel like a silly reaction, or maybe it just works and I shouldn't pretend to have stupid high standards.
This game tapped instantly into all of my weird parental urges that have been overwhelming my body and soul as of late. Amongst any one, even animals that I cross by on the street when I'm out in the city, I find myself defaulting to this sort of role my brain registers as inherently 'parental'. I consider myself, for some reason, the owner of whatever responsibilities exist for us, and all these hormone pills I'm taking for my bodily conditions leave me an emotional mess whenever anything vaguely bad happens to any of them.
Due to my birth conditions, I cannot have a child naturally. Not that I'd really want to, I consider anything but adoption immoral on a completely personal level (i.e., I do not extend this moral expectation to people who aren't myself). But, over the course of the past year, even though I already know I'd never do it, and I'd never want to, the chance that I might eventually be able to medically conceive and have a child has been constantly offered to me by medical professionals, only to be taken at the last moment. I don't really know why I care, but I imagine it has something to to do with all the hormone treatments.
So I definitely cried at this one. I'm a crier, y'know.
Steam Summer Sale struck this year, me and my friends all excitedly shared gifts we'd been planning for each other all month. I gave one of my best friends a copy of Shadowrun: Hong Kong, since I heard they liked Disco Elysium and that they'd been branching out into RPGs with some more combat-oriented gameplay. That same person sent me this, and I'd never heard of it before, but I vaguely knew about this whole 'parenting as a maths simulator' game genre from getting scared at the gruesome endings of Long Live the Queen as a kid and, very recently, trying this wonderful but egregiously difficult game called The World According to Girl from the Steam Next Fest this year.
And, while this game has a ton of weird aesthetic choices that offput me at first (switching perspective from the parent and the child on such crazy whims I had trouble following a couple scenes being the most notable, and the mobile game-esque look and feel being the other) it just started affecting me emotionally, like, every third scene.
For the first hour or so of this, I was on the phone with that friend I mentioned earlier and we were shooting the shit joking over this. Some of the hardest laughs I'd had in a long ass time, I'd say. At some point, I realized we were both pretty Into It, though. I didn't even realize it was one in the AM at some point, when we started at ten that night. We'd stopped talking about our days eventually, throwing out 'what ifs' about what this kid we were virtually co-parenting could get up to.
I woke up this morning after and, after going through my morning routine, made a beeline for my computer desk and got right back to it. I think my interest in this particular piece, a few hours separate it now, came from a recent fascination with the mundane and more 'wholesome' or placid tales. After writing so many stupid thoughtpieces to my colleagues about the current state of our cinema, which I can't imagine read (or meant) anything much more than 'old movie good new movie bad', I've found myself completely absolving myself, on accident, of the tolerance so many of us have for 'world ending stakes' so many generic narratives default to. Or, in the case of many of my complaints, more complex and interesting narratives that suddenly default to such huge stakes as a way of enforcing that 5-part act structure for film they teach you every day in screenwriting classes.
Straight up, you can just ignore the world ending threat in this game. I got 80% of the way there and stopped, humbling myself as a person and entertaining the idea I probably shouldn't have such expectations of even this virtual kid I trained to use swords for seventeen years. The game ended, and things were fine. Not perfect, but fine. Everything I'd been stressing to get through from the parent's perspective were all just those same stupid worries I have every other day of my real ass life.
And you probably know how the ending of a game like this is structured. The music starts playing, there's a series of snapshots telling you how every one's lives went after or whatever. I'm a pretty simple person when it comes to my tastes, I think, and y'know that's all I really need to get to weeping. Maybe all the other stuff I wrote here is like- some sort of way to internally 'justify' what might feel like a silly reaction, or maybe it just works and I shouldn't pretend to have stupid high standards.