#also fun facts anarchisma the game was nominated for basically the in-universe equivalent of game of the year

[irkenheretic]

ok fella, go off on your au and talk about red’s video game and why it’s important to his character arc but also try to stay out of spoiler land. Also as a bonus + describe red’s role in that au with a vine

ok so a schimillion years ago a videogame called anarchisma was released and completely redefined an entire genre and nothing was ever the same again

ok let me explain a little more

a genre of irken videogame is the "rebel sim." basically a game that has a very anti-empire slant to it, ranging from surface-level critiques to extremely controversial ideas in it. it doesnt have to be a simulation game (the genre of "rebel sim" predates the lifesim, an extremely immersive VR game with time-dilation properties so it feels like youre experiencing years of gameplay in real-time, but in reality its been an hour) but thats just what theyre called

to this day, many popular rebelsims (especially those released by established companies and not indie devs) play their stories extremely safe, diluting the genre from a true expression of anarchism to a sort-of vent about the little frustrations of irken life, without an actual rallying cry or call to action or really anything daring about them. back when anarchisma came out, this was mainly seen via the stories being very surface-level and safe, picking a couple scattered issues and not really exploring them other than going "hey.... did you know.... that x thing.... is bad?" (i.e. a short scientist being brushed aside despite their skillset and the fact that they meet the height requirements for their job, as opposed to stating that height requirements for prestigious jobs shouldnt exist at all.)

enter anarchisma. at first you play as a lil' dude named myx, a short engineer. he has a friend named thirteen-13 that follows him around, and myx as a protagonist goes thru the game in a very "safe" way, following the conventions of your period-typical rebelsim that acts smarter than it really is... except for one thing. he keeps referring to thirteen-13 as the "dhar bitae," an irken term meaning "all-seeing..." and the period-typical slang for the control brains

once myx's route is over and done with, you're able to play as thirteen-13. and thats where the real game starts.

thirteen-13, in the game world, is the equivalent to the control brains- he's a computer that ruled over the fictional world but was kept under strict lock and key by his technicians. every time he escaped or was deemed "too defective," a new "instance" of him was reloaded, hence the number at the end of his name. thirteen is his name, and 13 is the instance number. and oh yeah! due to a loophole where he's a computer and not an irken per se, he's actually the first canonically defective character in all irken media!

needless to say the game was pretty controversial when it came out but it also redefined the entire genre. thirteen-13's plot gave rise to the "rebel ruler" trope, a trope that is very common in rebelsims to this day but watered down beyond belief- in anarchisma it works because theres a REASON thirteeen-13 couldnt just fix everything with his vast power: the societal ills the game addresses were around long before any iteration of thirteen, and they're going to be around long after he's gone. it's a bleak game with themes of powerlessness, futility, and imprisonment in an abstract way- when your enemy is a system of ideals and not one lone person, how do you fight?

anarchisma was the first game red played as a smeet. deemed defective and cast away from everything he'd ever known, a rejected smeet only kept alive because his outpost couldn't afford to kill him, this game was red's lifeline. like i said, thirteen-13 was a revolutionary character in that he was defective and proud of it- and that was what kept red alive during all the horrible things that happened to him in his smeethood.

due to the nature of irken videogames, especially irken indie videogames, there are a lot of conspiracies surrounding it. irken videogames tend to be heavily influenced by their developer's real-life experiences, and while this is not always the case, there were some... speculations on the plot of the game and its enigmatic developer. nobody knows anything about this guy so its impossible to confirm or deny if this was pulled from real-life or if he just made all of it up, so a lot of people got obsessive with the game's messaging, and wether or not the developer was trying to tell the populace something with it.

red was one of those people.

the idea that the control brains themselves wouldn't, couldn't, didn't hate him for existing... he was young, and didn't know anything about the world. of course it appealed to him!

as he grows up, his relationship to the game itself and the theories surrounding it becomes distant. he tucks his old comms unit he got from his outpost away- the only thing old enough to play this game; it's too old to run on modern systems. he stops reading theories. he has a nightly audience with the control brains, and he never even so much as looks for evidence about the theory. is he just trying to protect himself? he insists he's not defective; does he know, deep down? does he know that the "treatments" never worked, and he's always going to be defective? is it too risky for him to attempt to find the answer? is he scared of the answer?

and if he is, which is he scared of more?

being wrong...

or being right?