#elden ring doesn't have to be a novel and it does not try to be and so that lets it express worldbuilding differently but like. yeah

[infinitelystrangemachinex]

elden ring is actually genius because it's one of the more recent works of fantasy i can think of that actively criticizes the very concept of a "hard" magic system that can explain everything versus a "soft" one that's fluid and explains nothing. a very GRRM-ish idea btw

the ruling world order is the Golden Order which is overseen by the Greater Will, the emissaries of which are (parts of) hands, old and withered, hands that direct the world and try to puppet the empyreans and make things work a certain way. turtle pope says that under the Golden Order, "all things can be conjoined." take any one thing in the world of elden ring and it can fit into the Golden Order

except again and again we find that the Golden Order is misguided, the Golden Order tries to pick and choose its rules and people suffer and things fall apart as a result, the Golden Order isn't even the original order that governed this world. there are Outer Gods we can't see meddling in the land that the Golden Order lore can't explain. you can try and try to hunt and mine all the lore you can, but there will always be things that don't fit into the Golden Order, things that can't be attributed to any Outer God we know of either. you find out that the Golden Order kicked out anyone it didn't like or didn't think "fit" but that doesn't mean they don't exist or don't matter, and they wind up having their own culture and their own "orders" that have all changed over the course of history. there has always been rules to the world but they can and have changed, shaped by politics and powerful individuals and collective movements. that's what keeps the rich tapestry of elden ring's fantasy world changing and evolving, and the rigid hand of some author is an intrusion upon that complex, diverse reality. we and the characters will never know it all, and nor should we

[callmearcturus]

As the resident ITA hype person, I want to again say: you should listen to Into The Aether, a Lowkey Video Game Podcast.

I have listened to at this point a hundred media/hobby podcasts and dozens of video game-specific podcasts, and ITA is the best one. It's just the best one! I'm so glad to be the person to tell you this.

The entire conceit of ITA is that: this is a podcast that celebrates games and is built on love of games. The hosts only bring games to the show they enjoyed or found interesting. There is zero "let's talk about how bad this game is for 45 minutes."

HOWEVER, and this is the secret sauce of ITA to me, is a focus on positivity does not mean putting on blinders. Brendon and Stephen are super aware of the troubles of the games industry, of the continued crunch on the developers and creators, and... look, sometimes you enjoy a game and bring it to the show but also you can point out when it does something kinda terrible.

That is half of why I love ITA, that it can accentuate the positive without erasing the negative. And this show is like the standard-bearer for "A 6-out-of-10 game is more interesting than a 10-out-of-10 game." These are the guys.

The other reason I love ITA is their focus is timeless. If there is anything ITA should be Known For, it is they will play anything and don't really care about release calendars. Yeah, they will play the Big Event Games when they come out, like Elden Ring or TOTK or whatever, but they have a MASSIVE focus on older systems and older games.

To that end: their Season Four premiere episode was a full retrospective on the Game Boy Advance and its entire library. Since then, they have continued this tradition, spending months playing through the catalog of a single console and then opening each season with a huge episode focused just on that console. To date, they have done Game Boy Advanced, Nintendo DS, Sega Dreamcast, and today the Nintendo Gamecube.

(They also have a patrons-only retrospective on the Nintendo 3DS which IS worth the price of admissions, I promise.)

There's a lot of other reasons to love ITA.

The hosts are very conscious of burnout and their mental health and have now made it a tradition to take a few weeks off in the summertime before the season premieres. This last Summer Vacation, they did a special set of episodes hosted by their fabulous producer AJ in which they invited people onto the show to discuss different aspects of the games industry and those episodes were FASCINATING and excellent.

Stephen is a hardcore Theatre Kid Soul (who didn't get to do much Theatre, long story) and has the weirdest outbursts and bits that have had me in stitches.

Brendon has, over the course of ITA, gone from a person who doesn't like RPGs into a massive RPG fan, and watching that journey happen is really nice.

They explicitly will give games a second chance; they both bounced off Golden Sun during their GBA Retrospective and have been recently replaying it and enjoying it much more.

The original pitch of the podcast was "Stephen and Brendon try not to talk about The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind." The frequency at which they fail this is amazing.

They are currently trying to get into visual novels/dating sims and are huge fans of Tokimeki Memorial. The confidence with which Brendon can drop "Boku No Natsuyasumi" in conversation is Indicative of something. IYKYK.

Due to the lack of focus on what's Hip And Recent, the episodes have an uncommonly timeless feeling. Diving into the backlog is really fun.

The Season Seven Premiere is over the Nintendo Gamecube. It's a great place to start. I will also just list a few episodes I love off the dome.

Pokémon Crystal Bonus: as someone who has always loved Silver/Gold without having the language for why, this episode helped nailed down why. HUGE fan.

Berethor & NotGimli Are Dead: THE STORY OF THE LOTR GAME IS JUST GREAT.

Pretty Good Statham: FINALLY someone talking about the Playdate, yessss

Pigma's Allegory of the Cave: just an average episode but I remember really loving the Tetris Effect/REZ discussion.

X-Strike Summer 1: Break Glass in Case of Bandicoot: the first of the guest episodes that features a group of people with very different jobs in the games industry and have VERY interesting perspectives. HUGELY rec.

An Introduction to the Sega Dreamcast: Originally a patron-only episode but I was one of many ppl who yelled "PUT IT ON THE MAIN FEED" and you're all welcome! This episode features guest star Chris Plante (Polygon EIC) guiding the boys through the history of the Dreamcast. It's both a fascinating piece of history and also has a Plot Twist that uh. It... made me cry? Yeah.

I could keep scrolling back more but I think you all get the picture. ITA is the best game podcast. Please give it a shot.

[diamondeyes-deluxe]

Buuuut if you DO want to learn about early, PC-98 and early computer visual novels without shying away from the porn (weird or otherwise), I am so pleased to introduce you to one of my favorite YouTubers: Amelie Doree!

She does summary/review videos for older VNs that really touch on the revolutionary or influential qualities these individual games had; what place they occupied and what they contributed to the genre going forward.

And for a more general but extremely in depth history of visual novels themselves that doesn't ignore weird-porn powerhouse Leaf's contribution to the medium, I highly suggest Bowl of Lentils' "The Origins of Visual Novels" and it's sorta-sequel, "The History of Leaf: Pioneer of The Visual Novel Genre"

And this is really only touching on visual novels which, even 30ish years ago, is still hardly the beginning of interactive fiction being used for porn! As far back as 1981 (and this is just a *popular* example I'm pulling out of a hat; there are almost definitely earlier examples) games like Softporn Adventure (precursor to the corny, porny, "Leisure Suit Larry" adventure games) were being made. These were text based adventure games without any graphics at all!

It's important to note these kinds of games influenced not only later works in the genres they belong to exclusively, but also ALL VIDEO GAMES. Text-based, graphic-less adventure games were a huge stepping stone between the CYOA novels and TTRPGs of the 70s, and the video games we have today. I'm not saying that you wouldn't have Elden Ring without Softporn Adventure. I'm just saying... whenever there is a new technological achievement in spaces of fiction or entertainment, 5 minutes later you will find a human trying to figure out how to use it to jerk off. And they might accidentally revolutionize the industry in the process! And we shouldn't be trying to sanitize that part of interactive fiction history.

The reason it's so difficult to get a handle on the history and development of interactive fiction is that we're never going to be working with a complete picture until we're prepared to acknowledge the vital role in that history of all the weird porn.

[yusuke-of-valla]

Ok so basically at some point in the last week it was announced that Dragon Age: The Veilguard is supposed to have an optional no-death mode and this resulted in many of the usual people being upset and declaring that they no longer intend to buy the game. When asked why someone responded with this:

Now I could dunk on this but other people have done it so in the BEST CASE SCENARIO I'm going to pretend this is poorly worded.

Using Nazi shit as an example of something people would boycott a game over and comparing it to an optional game mode is dumb and bad because those things aren't equivalent, but let's pretend they mentioned ai art

Lots of people, myself included, would choose not to play a game they were otherwise interested in if it was announced they were using generative ai to make the character models or something, because we don't want to support AI Art. At it's core they're right that this is a thing people do.

And I'm going to be polite and assume they don't think the thing they're taking a principled stand against is that disabled people can play games (even though, since this is an optional mode, that is ultimately what their principled stand is against) and more the concept of games getting easier or being "watered down" as a whole (which frankly does not appear to be happening, as based on my understanding Dragon Age is not a 'git gud' kind of series). In which case they're rather misinformed but at the end of the day no one can force them to play a game they don't want to play.

I do however want to bring up the argument this attitude is sort of appropriating, which is "not every game is for everyone/don't like, don't play," something again, I agree with in theory! As someone who likes Visual Novels, I really wish people who just don't like them would just stop trying to say they're bad.

However, what that misunderstands in the disability discourse context is that disabled people DO want to play these games, which is why they'd like a better entry point or to be able to pause. It's not that someone with crohns doesn't like hard games or soulikes, it's that they should be able to pause when their body decides they hate them and not lose progress. It's that someone who struggles with fast input times would like to get more leeway.

I'd even go so far as to say that telling people not to play these games kind of does the games a disservice, since it implies that the only reason anyone would enjoy this game is the combat as opposed to the lore, map design, characters, branching narrative, structure, all the stuff that comes from having an emergent narrative and makes games unique as stories (and can be lost with a let's play so I don't want anyone saying to just do that. if someone's gonna be stupid and make a choice that gets us all killed I want it to be me)

And of course all of this comes down to in 99% of cases (Pokemon not withstanding, but that's another post) these changes aren't forced upon the player. If there's an accessibility feature you don't want to use, you don't have to use it and the game would try to lead you to using it the way gachas are designed to make you use the gacha. The people who are the most upset about this don't have to be affected

Besides. If people can't complain about games being too hard because not all games are for everyone, then certainly that means you shouldn't complain about a game having an optional easy mode as well?

And if you decide a game having more options for other people that you literally do not have to touch means it's not for you, then that's a personal problem but there's no need to complain about it like the choice to add a no-death mode means you'll never get another Elden Ring, because there's always going to be a market for super hard games.

*lies on the floor* the gamers are being stupid againnn