theartofmedia

[theartofmedia]

Kotaku and the Art of Game Leaks

(Full disclosure: this piece was commissioned by a friend. The topic has changed from the initial pitch, but still. I don’t know how that may or may not affect your view on this piece, but I still feel it’s important for me to be transparent about this.) On May 30th, 2019, Laura Kate Dale announced her departure from Kotaku UK. Dale is a controversial figure among the games journalist community for... multiple reasons (please note the latter link lacks any actual evidence and how she apparently didn’t report this Uber driver for ‘nearly kidnapping her’ despite posting it publicly on Twitter, hence the controversy around it), but that’s not what we’re talking about today. What we’re going to be discussing is what she is known for the most: video game leaks.

LKD is most known for leaking video game information prior to their release, from information about Dark Souls Remastered, to unboxing a PS4 Slim before Sony itself even announced its existence, to Switch software. It got to the point where LKD was blacklisted by Nintendo UK, most likely for leaking so much information.

Now as I was researching LKD, there was something I noticed. A lot of people supported LKD’s leaks, calling it “real journalism,” and commending her for doing her job so well. As shown by the link above, many people mocked Nintendo UK for blacklisting her for “doing her job too well.” People are always scrambling for new leaks, new information, though in many cases, this can lead to fake leaks, misinformation, and confusion among players.

And it got me to think: how do leaks really affect both the devs and the consumers of games?

The conclusion I’ve come to about it is: it does more harm than good on both sides, but especially to the devs.

Here we will be defining four categories of leaks (three of which are explained here by Griffin Vacheron of Game Revolution), though our main focus will be on two.

Accidental leaks are just like they sound: they’re accidents. Something happened, something went wrong, and people got a hold of information before they were supposed to. Like when Capcom put all the pictures of the roster of Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 on their website when a good portion of the roster hadn’t yet been announced, and the unannounced characters could be found via a small URL change. Or when Walmart’s Canadian site revealed around 40 unannounced titles due to a(n alleged) glitch in their system just weeks before E3 2018. Or when Bethesda accidentally streamed their E3 2015 rehearsal which ended up confirming the existence of Dishonored 2. Yeah.

The main component of accidental leaks is just that--accidental. Someone did something wrong, something in a system went wrong, someone didn’t think through the consequences of what probably seemed like a good idea at the time--it happens! Nothing is perfect, people included, and shit happens. But the key part is that it’s not intentional. Someone may (or, really, will) be reprimanded, punished, or even fired depending on the leak, but there was never any intention to reveal this information.

Company leaks are... not entirely proven, from my research. This is the idea that the developers themselves leak information in order to draw attention to their game and hype it up. Often, this will be the other determination of certain leaks--was it an accident, or a PR stunt? There’s no real definitive proof and seems to simply be rumor, but the possibility still exists, as there’s no real way to disprove it, either.

Ethic leaks are generally the exception, not the rule. These are leaks of working conditions, such as an employee from NetherRealm talking about the toxic work environment, or Rockstar employees opening up about how they were mistreated and underpaid and burned to ashes, or Blizzard’s layoff of 800 employees. (Further reading here on the abuse of game devs, as well as what can be done about it.) These are things that need to be talked about, because these relate to the treatment of actual, real people. These aren’t issues then of game content or development, it’s an issue of ethics in the workplace. Same with the leak of this document that details how AI can be used to encourage microtransactions, though that is an issue related to the consumer rather than the workers. Shady tactics and the maltreatment of workers is something that needs to be shown and discussed and talked about, because these things affect the actual workers, as well as the quality of a product and the company’s integrity in relation to the consumer. (Basically, if you intentionally make your game in such a way that players have to use microtransactions to make any significant progress, you’ve ruined your integrity as a company by trying to drain your player base of more money, regardless of the base price they paid for the game anyway. It’s a scummy business practice, and that kind of thing should be revealed to the public that you’re going to try to bleed dry.)

Intentional leaks are just as they sound: they’re the intentional leak of information. This is when people outside the company hack in and reveal secrets, or when people inside the company reveal information (whether directly or indirectly via being sources for journalists) before they are to be officially announced. The information given is given with the knowledge that yes, someone is going to reveal it to the public.

So let’s talk about the ramifications of intentional leaks on game devs.

Remember Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle? The cover image had been leaked before the team had a chance to actually showcase the game. Nobody knew anything about the game other than the cover, and universal reception at the time was: “This is going to be terrible.” Because of a leaked image, the public already had a strong negative opinion about it. However, the showcase that showed off actual gameplay was well-received, and the Metacritic score is 85. So the game itself was pretty damn good, according to the critics. An unlikely crossover turned out well! But the initial reaction was incredibly demoralizing to the team. It’s one thing to have criticism given to a game based on a trailer or gameplay showcase; it’s another to get criticism based on a single image and the concept alone with no other information given. As the director and music composer explain, the dev team was very worried and stressed not just about the game reception but about the showcase, as they were afraid that the reception to the showcase was going to be bad due to the already-negative opinion on the game.

Let’s also talk about how CD Projekt Red had demo gameplay and audio of Cyberpunk 2077 leaked by a journalist (who later complained about not being credited, about how his relationship with CD Projekt Red and the PR person he was friends with) after being asked not to. The company had their trust in the journalists--someone who they had a fifteen year relationship with--used and abused, leading to secrets being leaked. The devs had politely asked the journalists not to do so, but one did, and apparently saw nothing wrong with leaking private information and posting it to the public.

Or let’s talk about how, way back in the day, the entire source code for Half-Life 2 was revealed to the public and Valve (allegedly) lost $250 million dollars. The article actually states some of the effects of the leaked source code: “Meanwhile, the team at Valve, which had been in crunch mode for months, was left reeling by the leak. The game was costing the company $1 million a month to build and the end was still far from sight. The leak had not only caused financial damage but had demotivated a tired team. One young designer asked Newell, "Is this going to destroy the company?" (found under the heading “A Red Letter Day”).

Or we can talk about the Sm4sh leaks back in 2014 and how it led to an employee (allegedly) being fired and sued due to leaking this information. Now, this can very easily be viewed as justice being served to the leaker, and I would agree. But what is the issue here can be summed up by PlatinumGames producer JP Kellams:

The people working for years and years on a project suddenly have parts of their project--that they wanted to surprise players with, this particular instance being the Sm4sh roster--given out to the public before they wanted it to be. Imagine working for years on your life on a project, and then having someone reveal your work to the internet without your knowledge or permission. I know I would feel dejected, exhausted, hopeless, hurt, regardless of any positive reception to what was revealed. You, as someone who has worked so incredibly hard--and, in many cases in the game industry, been thoroughly abused--apparently don’t have the right to reveal the thing you’ve been working on the way you want.

I want to make this clear: I am not talking about “the Big Corporation” here. I don’t care about the higher-ups who put the pressure on the workers. I care about the workers, the little people that are being trampled on and forced to work in abusive, toxic conditions in order to meet a deadline and the outrageous demands of the higher-ups. They are the ones suffering.

Case in point: the Blufever leaks for Final Fantasy XIV. The details are a bit murky, as is with most leaks, but the story as I understand it is: user Blufever is/was an employee at Square Enix who leaked massive amounts of information on upcoming expansions/patches for FFXIV. Then, their account went dark, as they apparently feared for being found out by Square Enix. Vergeben, a known reputable leaker within the Smash community, had this to say about the situation:

Now, of course, there is no way to truly verify these claims. However, due to Vergeben’s reputation as an accurate leaker (and the fact that he was right about one of the upcoming DLC characters being from Square Enix) leads me to believe him. Assuming that his claims are true, someone leaking all of this information to the public put a lot of innocent people in the line of fire--and it’s very possible that these

So, what does this have to do with Kotaku?

Here’s something interesting.

When known E3 leaker WabiSabi was given a cease & desist warning from Nintendo for leaking information, take a look at some of the top replies. (Note that a lot of them are ninja gifs, here’s a sample so I don’t have to do it for every one.)

Not all of the replies are against WabiSabi, however, though a majority seem to be:

(About the above: I can’t really find anything suggesting that LKD was leaking things for “customer advocacy,” other than confirming that the next gen console (now known as the Switch) was not using the Wii branding like its predecessor did, thus easing some fears because of the bombing of the Wii U. Other tweets about that are here, but don’t really sway me in terms of “consumer advocacy.”)

As shown, the replies seem to be pretty divisive on whether or not it was a good or bad thing that WabiSabi got hit with a cease & desist.

However, let’s have a look at some of the replies to LKD’s tweet about how she was blacklisted by Nintendo.

And again, not all are supportive of her:

I actually had to look quite a bit to find any negative comments. Many were supportive of her.

(I would like to take this moment to get unprofessional for a second and unleash my full opinion of this: NO FUCKING SHIT YOU GOT BLACKLISTED, SHERLOCK. THEY TRUST YOU WITH THEIR SECRETS AND THEN YOU DISRESPECT THEM BY REVEALING THEM BEFORE THEY DID. I DO NOT FUCKING UNDERSTAND WHY PEOPLE WOULD SAY IT’S A COMPANY BEING “SHADY” WHEN IT’S JUST INFORMATION ABOUT UPCOMING PRODUCTS. NOTHING ABOUT ETHICS OR CONSUMER TRUST OR PRODUCT QUALITY. anyway,)

Now, you can say, “But Sakra! That’s a three-year difference!” And I rebuke with: people still support her to this day in spite of this. Kotaku UK kept her on though all of this and then some. It wasn’t until a kerfuffle happened in April with the “Persona 5 OST Has A Disability Slur” thing happened, and soon after, LKD left. It seems that the immense backlash with that was what fully pushed her off. (Now whether she was forced to resign or legitimately wanted to leave, that’s something only Kotaku UK and she know for sure.) The point is, her departure from Kotaku UK seems to have been completely unrelated to her leaks.

And why would it when Kotaku themselves--not just the UK chapter--are clearly very supportive of video game leaks of this nature?

Just have a look at their recent posts. All I did was put “leaks” in the search box. You may say “they’re just reporting the news of leaks!” But they put some of the leaked information IN the articles. The one on Watch Dogs Legion even confirmed the leaks. “Kotaku can confirm that this one’s real, as we’ve heard the name from several sources plugged into the company.”

Oh, and let’s not forget this lovely fucking article from 2015 where a Kotaku writer apparently speaks for the site and basically victimizes themselves for being blacklisted by Ubisoft and Bethesda. In fact, we’re going to dissect it, just because there is so much bullshit in here from the author, who is clearly speaking for Kotaku as a whole!

Buckle up, kids, your local Sakra is about to get fucking pissed.

The author describes how the Bethesda blackout came after “we reported insiders’ accounts of the troubled development of the still unreleased fourth major Doom game. In May of that year, we reported that Arkane Austin, the Bethesda-owned studio behind Dishonored, would be working on a new version of the long missing-in-action Prey 2 and that some at the studio were not pleased about that. When top people at Bethesda started making statements casting doubt on our reporting, we published a leaked internal e-mail confirming that those statements had misled gamers and that Arkane had indeed been working on a version of Prey 2.”

However, Kotaku at that time had also posted “our December 2013 report detailing the existence of the then-secret Fallout 4.” Reporting on troubled development isn’t an issue. Leaking emails just to confirm a game when Bethesda was desperately trying to preserve their secrecy that you had broken (probably not first, but Kotaku has a lot of mainstream reach) is an issue. I don’t like Bethesda, don’t get me wrong, but they were trying to salvage the secrecy of a project. Do I think trying to lie to the audience in order to keep the existence of a project secret is okay? No, not really. But I understand what they were trying to do. And whether you agree with their choices or not--no shit you would be blacklisted, especially if you have insiders as described here! You can’t go crying victim and martyr yourselves when you do this kind of shit. Especially if you were reporting on Fallout 4, a major fucking entry in a popular franchise!

As for the Ubisoft blackout...

“The current Ubisoft blackout is actually the second in as many years. The company tried a similar approach in the spring of 2014 after we published early images of the then-unannounced Assassin’s Creed Unity—images that had been leaked to us by an independent source. That article confirmed news about the company’s extraordinary plans to release two entirely different AC games in the fall of that year, one for new consoles and one for old. Ubisoft had warmed back to Kotaku by the summer of 2014, several months after the Unity report, but has cold-shouldered us since the Victory story one year ago. It’s possible other articles angered them, too. But that Victory piece is a safe bet.”

Ubisoft actually gave Kotaku another chance after leaking Unity, and the Victory (now Syndicate) story was, guess what, more leaks. You broke Ubisoft’s trust once, then you broke it again. Frankly, it’s fucking disgusting, knowing about how these leaks really affect devs, that Kotaku would dare to turn itself into a “journalism martyr,” as it were, because they were ignored by the devs whose trust they broke.

Now, you can say that maybe they didn’t know the information of how it affects devs--but a) the Sm4sh leaks and the fallout had already happened by then (it was 2014) and the Half-Life 2 source code fiasco had happened in the previous decade. Also, if they had insiders, wouldn’t they know just how serious leaking this information was and how it puts their sources and other devs at risk? Maybe Ubisoft and Bethesda aren’t as strict on their leak policies as Square Enix and Nintendo are--we don’t know. But I can’t imagine that they like it at all.

“I’m sure some people will sympathize with Bethesda and Ubisoft. Some will cheer these companies and hope others follow suit. They will see this kind of reporting as upsetting, as ruining surprises and frustrating creative people. They will claim we are “hurting video games,” and, as so many do, mistake the job of entertainment reporting for the mandate to hype entertainment products.

“We serve our readers, not game companies, and will always do so to the best of our ability, no matter who in the gaming world is or isn’t angry with us at the moment. In some ways, the blacklist has even been instructive—cut off from press access and pre-release review copies, we have doubled down on our post-release “embedding” approach to games coverage. We’ve experienced some of the year’s biggest games from street level, at the same time and in the same way as our readers.”

No.

It isn’t just about “spoilers” and “ruining the surprise.” In some cases, yes, a lot of people don’t like or actively avoid leaks because they do want to be surprised. But that’s not the only thing.

By “serving your readers” and trying to dig for this information, you’re putting devs at risk. You’re putting your “sources” at risk. Now, if you were reporting on development or shady tactics or awful work environments or specific negative incidents behind the scenes or things that should be talked about, I would absolutely agree with you that you should continue digging deeper. But that’s not it. The companies trust you not to reveal something until a certain time, and you go and do it anyway.

By claiming victim and demonizing the “big bad corporation” for blacklisting you, you minimize the actual stress and hardships it put on the smaller guys in the company that the entire company is built on. You completely brush it aside and paint the entire company as irrational. You completely neglect the plight of the actual people working on it, and disrespect them by revealing their information before they do, when they have worked for SO LONG on whatever project it is. Like JP Kellams said, devs earn the right to talk about their product because they worked on it for so long. You haven’t.

And then... this paragraph.

“Too many big game publishers cling to an irrational expectation of secrecy and are rankled when the press shows them how unrealistic they’re being. There will always be a clash between independent reporters and those seek to control information, but many of these companies appear to believe that it is actually possible in 2015 for hundreds of people to work dozens of months on a video game and for no information about the project to seep out. They appear to believe that the general public will not find out about these games until their marketing plans say it’s time. They operate with the assumption that the press will not upend these plans, and should the press defy their assumption, they bring down the hammer. We make our own judgments about what information best serves the news value of a story, and what our readers would prefer not to know—which is why, for example, we omitted key plot details from the Fallout 4 scripts that were leaked to us. We keep covering these companies’ games, of course. Readers expect that. Millions of people still read our stories about them. The companies just leave themselves a little more out of the equation.”

I never thought I’d see the day when video game companies were being victim-blamed.

Frankly, by leaking information, it ruins the relationship between the companies and the journalist, because then the company will start to make generalizations about journalists and not trust them, thinking that they will reveal whatever information they give them, which makes journalists like this press harder for information, and can you see where I’m going with this? It’s a cycle of mistrust, perpetuated by journalists like these who go against the wishes of a company that just wants to keep something a surprise until a certain date.

And then this motherfucker has the audacity to frame companies blacklisting reporters that leak information as bad! “They operate with the assumption that the press will not upend these plans, and should the press defy their assumption, they bring down the hammer.” Why are companies wrong for trusting journalists? Are you implying that all games journalists are untrustworthy, because they won’t respect the wishes of a company that gives them the information in good faith that they won’t leak it? You do say that “it is nearly unfathomable to me that a reporter would sit on true information about what’s really happening in gaming, that we would refrain from telling our readers something because it would mess with a company’s marketing plan,” so I don’t know, maybe you DO think that all games journalists should immediately report on confidential information that the game companies are going to eventually reveal anyway and while only really receiving clout in return. Oh, whoops, got a little bitter there.

“They appear to believe that the general public will not find out about these games until their marketing plans say it’s time.”

Maybe because people like YOU are the ones who leak it! You can just as easily, you know, not fucking do that! This feels more like an excuse to not accept responsibility/deflect criticism, because ‘the companies shouldn’t have expected us to stay quiet!!!’ This is just straight-up victim blaming. Like it’s actually kind of scary.

It’s this ideology that Kotaku seems to stand by, as LKD once stated that higher-ups look over the written articles to approve them, and to my knowledge, Kotaku hasn’t redacted any of these statements, so I’m assuming that they still stand by it. Them spreading this ideology is what perpetuates the idea of game leaks (of the non-accidental, non-ethics-related kind) being “good journalism,” and with how much reach Kotaku has, it has the power to be legitimately damaging.

“They have done so in apparent retaliation for the fact that we did our jobs as reporters and as critics. We told the truth about their games, sometimes in ways that disrupted a marketing plan, other times in ways that shone an unflattering light on their products and company practices. Both publishers’ actions demonstrate contempt for us and, by extension, the whole of the gaming press. They would hamper independent reporting in pursuit of a status quo in which video game journalists are little more than malleable, servile arms of a corporate sales apparatus. It is a state of affairs that we reject.”

And here it is: Kotaku was just the humble, underdog reporter just doing their job, and the publishers show off contempt for the entire industry (rather than just Kotaku itself, I guess blacklisting one site means you hate all of games journalism) for Kotaku simply doing their jobs!

No, you ignorant twat, you broke their trust, so they don’t want to talk to you anymore. You don’t get to play victim when YOU were the one who blew the whistle.

Now, I cannot stress this enough: I am only talking about leaks related to game announcements, content details, etc. that are deliberately leaked to the public from an inside source. I am not talking about leaks related to ethical violations or troubled development or other negative things within companies. Those are things that should be reported on. But that kind of thing isn’t primarily what Kotaku is talking about and promoting; they are promoting the reveal of information because it’s “just good journalism.”

Except, as shown above, it has some very dire, very real consequences for the people you don’t see, and maybe that’s why Kotaku is so adamant about defending themselves in this regard. Maybe they don’t see the living, breathing people who get affected by their leaks, and so they think they’re fighting against the Big Bad Corporation when, in reality, it’s much more complicated than that. It doesn’t feel real to them. Or, maybe they do and they just don’t care. I genuinely cannot say so one way or the other.

I really, truly hope that by reading this, you the reader have a new perspective on how leaks of that kind affect the industry, and the little people whose backs the companies are built on.

As for the article and Kotaku as a whole...

“Kotaku readers always deserve the truth. You deserve our best work. It doesn’t matter which company is mad at us today, or which companies get mad at us in the future. You’ll continue to get it.”

Fuck yourselves.

[theartofmedia]

YIIK and the Art of Plagiarism vs Sampling

Hot warning that this is going to be a rather short and very angry piece. I’ve been sitting on this for a while and recently got reminded of this, and I feel this strong need to talk about this because of how many people don’t think that this is plagiarism.

For anyone not in the know, YIIK was recently accused of plagiarizing Haruki Murakami’s novel After Dark. u/malphasia on Reddit made this post with the title “"can i copy your homework" "sure just change a few things so it's not obvious":

More examples of plagiarism were found by journalist Ryan Brown:

It’s pretty obvious the latter examples provided by Brown are straight plagiarism. (This is corroborated by NicheGamer’s writers.) But we’re going to be talking about the example from Murakami’s novel specifically, as some people have contested the idea that it’s plagiarism:

As well, Allanson responded to the accusations with. Well,

So let’s talk about references, plagiarism, and homage.

First things first: I honestly, truly believe that this is plagiarism. Maybe a sentence would have been a reference; not nearly an entire paragraph worth of words.

Second, NO ALEX FUCKING DIDN’T READ IT ALLANSON, BECAUSE YIIK TAKES PLACE IN 1999 AND AFTER DARK WASN’T PUBLISHED (in English) UNTIL 2007, YOU EGG.

Third, and this is more of a sidenote, Proto-Woman only exists for one part at the beginning and never appears again and only really exists to be a naked woman spouting cryptic bullshit for a bit. So add a new checkmark to YIIK’s sexism pile, as yet another female figure in this game prominent enough to get a portrait contributes absolutely nothing to the story.

Fourth, let’s talk plagiarism. From the Merriam-Webster dictionary, to plagiarize is “to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own : use (another's production) without crediting the source.” Kotaku (as much as I hate using that site) notes that Murakami isn’t named in the game’s credits.

So, what about the countless other pieces of media that have quoted other games or books? Literaryterms.net shows some excellent examples of what we would call a “homage,” or references to another work that the original author respects. Hot Fuzz pays homage to Point Break, even showing the main characters watching said movie. That 70′s Show pays homage to Star Wars by mimicking its intro text roll, along with other parts of the movie throughout that specific episode.

What separates those from YIIK, however, is this: those previous pop culture examples draw attention to the fact that it is paying homage at all. YIIK doesn’t mention Haruki Murakami once before that scene with Proto-Woman plays out. And, fun fact, the game isn’t shy about name-dropping other inspirations that it had, such as Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana. So why weren’t After Dark or Haruki Murakami mentioned at all in order to set up a future homage?

Because it probably wasn’t a homage. I don’t buy Allanson’s excuse of “it was a homage” for a goddamn second. He’s backpedaling because he got caught plagiarizing.

Allanson also claimed in his response:

At least in my experience going through YIIK? None of the parts of ‘broken reality’ made much sense or seemed connected in any way, shape, or form. They just sort of... happened. And maybe I’m just not well-versed in that side of pop culture, but none of those parts appeared to be references to anything. Which is a shame, because I love that idea! Having reality distort and be seen through someone’s eyes, a reality that’s influenced by the type of media they consume or the memories that they have. Yet, that really doesn’t feel like what happened with YIIK. YIIK’s broken reality segments all sort of just... blend together. That’s besides the point, though.

But let’s have a look at another counterpoint, that being this person mentioning sampling (often a practice in music):

Sampling is still a highly grey area legally and still contested heavily, mate. Also, general consensus is that you have to get permission from the original artist because then it becomes an issue of copyright infringement.

“The act of sampling without permission infringes copyright in three distinct ways. Firstly, it is a breach of copyright in the original sound recording. Secondly, it is a breach of copyright in the underlying music and lyrics, and thirdly, it constitutes an unauthorised use of one or more of the performances in the original work, such as a guitar riff, vocal hook, or drum part. In addition, the moral rights of the original artist may be infringed, if sampling is undertaken in a way that the artist objects to, or if the artist isn’t credited.”

“You've all heard of musicians being sued for "borrowing" another songwriter's material or famous published authors guilty of stealing from one another. Sometimes plagiarism profits the plagiarizer (if he or she doesn't get caught) and deprives the "original" creator of the "idea or product" of earnings (to quote the Webster's definition at the top of this page). In such cases, we are talking about copyright infringement, a legal issue.”

So yeah. General practice appears to be “get permission from the original artist before sampling, otherwise it can get very messy legally.”

Huh. Sounds familiar, don’t it?

Anyway tl;dr I wholeheartedly believe that Andrew Allanson plagiarized Haruki Murakami’s novel for his game, and the evidence of him plagiarizing dictionaries is also really damning. (Even worse is that YIIK is a public, commercial product, so it can be seen as Allanson profiting off of someone else’s words.)

Remember to cite your sources, kids. It’s why I have ten thousand links per essay--I try to source everything I can.

Moral of the story is: don’t be Andrew Allanson.

[theartofmedia]

The Art of Review: YIIK: A Postmodern RPG

I have been sitting here for about two hours with this tab open, trying to find out how to properly introduce this. At the time of writing this (May 7, 2019, 10:02 PM), I have just finished watching YIIK several hours ago. However, I have been doing just about everything to avoid actually writing about it, because I have no idea how to ease the reader into this.

YIIK is so reprehensible that I created this segment--”The Art of Review”--because I needed to talk about this game. I needed to explain just why this game fails on every single account, and is so blatantly offensive. Initially, I was going to do a piece on something creator Andrew Allanson had said about games and his protagonist, Alex. It had to do with character development, and a common criticism was Alex’s sheer lack of it; naturally, I decided to watch a walkthrough online in order to see this for myself first-hand.

I was not prepared for what I saw. I have never had to take as many breaks from any media before due to sheer anger at what I was witnessing. I have never seen a game that fails in every single sense, that is regarded as such high art by its developers. Except maybe David Cage, but he’s a topic for another day.

YIIK: A Postmodern RPG is one of the worst pieces of media I have ever had the displeasure of viewing... probably in my entire life. I wish I was exaggerating.

Before I go any further, I would like give immense credit to GrandmaParty and the others at the Something Awful forums for doing an LP of the game with commentary and cutting out the fights. GrandmaParty graciously linked the thread to me--which is full of sources that I will also be linking to throughout this piece--and made the entire game tolerable enough for me to power through. It wouldn’t have happened without you guys, so thank you very much for extending a hand to a small creator trying to get her footing in the world. <3

I will also be linking to the various episodes of GrandmaParty’s LP with timestamped links to show particular scenes or dialogue. I’ve heard that one Andrew Allanson likes to say that people doctored screenshots of his game to make him look bad. Sorry, but I don’t like being accused of forgery, so I’m going to just preemptively strike that claim down.

Now then. This is going to be a big, long review. Allow me to tell you how we’ll be separating this.

We’re going to have two main sections: a non-spoiler review, and a spoiler review. This is mainly due to the fact that a lot of the game’s issues come from its mess of a story, one that can only be understood fully if you’ve seen it through to the end (and its multiple endings).

But let me be clear here.

DO NOT BUY THIS GAME.

Don’t buy it for a laugh. Don’t buy it to see how bad it is. It’s broken, it’s offensive, and the creators and proven themselves time and time again to be genuinely awful and prejudiced people. Do not give these people money.

The non-spoiler and spoiler sections will be divided into subsections, which may also have subsections of their own.

With that said... let’s begin my review of YIIK: A Postmodern RPG.

Non-Spoiler Review

Plot:

The plot of YIIK (it’s pronounced like Y2K, but I’m going to pronounce it as ‘yick’ personally) follows Alex, a freshly-graduated college student, and the strange events that begin to occur once he returns to his hometown of Frankton. He follows a cat to an old factory/hotel, where he meets Sammy, a young woman who appears to live there. When she is taken by some mysterious creatures in front of Alex, he begins a journey to try and find out what happened to her, and begins to make discoveries that could endanger the very fabric of the universe. In theory, at least. In reality, the story is an absolute clusterfuck of vague metaphysics, and the rules of the world were never clearly established, so everything just becomes an incoherent mess.

Characters:

The characters are bare-bones at best and absolutely insufferable at worst. Alex especially is infamous among critics and detractors of the game for his arrogance, ignorance, underlying racism/sexism we’ll get to that, and lack of properly-written development. I’m not going to go into full detail with Alex just yet--there will be an entirely separate post on him. Something also to keep in mind that general consensus appears to be that Alex is an author-insert for Andrew Allanson. Whether that is or isn’t true is frankly up to the viewer, but there’s no definitive proof of it.

(Oh!!! Quick thing!! This image here keeps circulating around--this person is not Andrew! That is someone named Cr33pyDude on both Twitter and Reddit! He just so happens to look like the main character. Don’t rag on this guy, everyone, he doesn’t have anything to do with this shitshow. <3)

Most of the other characters are bland and underdeveloped, but all have potential to be better (Rory especially, in my personal opinion) if they were in the hands of a better writer. The female characters, though... either they are fawning over Alex, being written as nagging and overbearing, or having so little significance that taking them out entirely would change nothing. Don’t worry, we’ll get to that. Other NPCs are forgettable, and enemies are out-of-place monsters that hold no consequence to the story.

Writing:

And the writing--dear god the writing. The writers don’t know the phrase “show, don’t tell.” So frequently would Alex monologue about nothing. Upon coming back from seeing a woman get taken by supernatural creatures, he goes home and reflects--only to go on a tangent about his mother. Immediately after that, he goes on a rant about p/o/r/n/ when sent an email and how girls that he used to go to school with wouldn’t be doing “particularly unladylike” things. And the entire game is like this. Alex will go on pseudo-philosophical rants to himself, and they reveal nothing about his character except that he thinks he’s better than everyone else. He’ll also frequently describe things as though talking to someone--while this does get explained later, it still is completely frustrating when the narrative says “I said this and she said that” instead of just having dialogue or actions between characters. A lot of the dialogue doesn’t exactly... sound like anything a human would say. It’s stilted and unnatural.

Graphics:

The graphics are... bad. Really bad. The style is supposed to be a throwback to old-school, very polygonal games, but environments lack any and all actual texture, making them incredibly flat and uninteresting at best and painful for the eyes at worst. Everything is extremely colorful, but in the sense of neon colors. Everything is so bright and vibrant, and there is barely a place where someone’s eyes can rest--it’s balance in art. Brightness like this needs to be contrasted with darker, more muted shades, or else it just hurts to look at. The viewer’s eyes need places to rest, and the muted shades allow them that reprieve. You don’t get that with YIIK. It’s just a constant bombardment of colors and lights, to the point where if you are sensitive to these kinds of things, you may not want to look even at game footage unless you’re prepared. The character portraits are fine, even if some expressions are odd, but the in-game chibi-esque models are... bad. Really bad. They’re so uncanny and unsettling, and their expressions almost never change. (Also Alex has detailed teeth and it’s just as horrifying as you might think.)

Music/Audio:

The music is. Awful? It’s awful. It’s genuinely really bad. Case in point: one of the boss battle themes. You can hear this poor guy trying so hard to put power behind his voice, but it just sounds unnatural and strained. (Also he clips the mic at some points, and the balancing in general is. Bad.) He’s out-of-tune and occasionally off-beat, and it just makes for a very unpleasant listening experience. And a lot of the music is like this, being just an assault on the ears. The one real exception to this is the track “Into the Mind” made by one Toby Fox, presumably before he made Undertale and was doing freelance work. (He has since deleted his tweet promoting it. Screenshot of the tweet here, courtesy of @GameTheoryRejects.) The audio in general is poor, with irritating sound effects, occasional distorted audio that’s supposed to be scary but is so poorly done that it just hurts to listen to, and voice acting that’s lackluster at best and utterly emotionless at worst.

Gameplay:

Full disclosure: I did not personally play the game. But just looking at it shows how irritating, slow, clunky, and repetitive it is. Each character has a minigame that you play in order to attack, defend, use special attacks, and even run away. These minigames, unlike in something like the Mario & Luigi series, are slow, drawn-out, and completely break up the flow of the fight. And none of the other characters matter then anyway, because turns out if you max out your LUK stat, you can use a particular move that hits all enemies and completely one-shot them from critical damage. (And this move can even glitch out the game in some cases!) The menus are crowded and visually uninteresting, making everything sort of meld together. (Another minor criticism: YIIK has a tendency to put the player in unwinnable fights. You are never aware of what fights are winnable and which fights are designed to kill you. More on this later.)

Speaking of gameplay, the leveling system is... bizarre and tedious. You get EXP, but you don’t gain the ability to level up (yes that is an ability you have to gain) until a couple hours into the game. Leveling up is done in the Mind Dungeon, which you access from save points, and you have to go through doors that increase the stats you assign it. There are four doors per floor, and when you go to the next floor, you and all of your teammates (even if you haven’t met them in-game) level up. Sounds simple, right? Well. It’s slow and repetitive, and NOTHING HAPPENS. You walk in a door. You walk out the door. Rinse and repeat for 70 floors. (280 doors, by the way.) Here’s GrandmaParty doing this for an hour to get an idea of the tedium that this induces. You get to play a minigame when you banish certain enemies, but that serves less as ‘spicing up the gameplay’ and more of ‘adding more steps to this already-boring section.’

So to recap: Flat characters, word-salad plot, painful prose flat-out ugly graphics, backwards gameplay and leveling system.

Tl;dr: Game bad. Don’t buy it.

... This ends the non-spoiler portion of the review. And also the section where we start to talk about some... sensitive topics.

As such, I am going to issue a legitimate trigger warning: the following pieces talk about suicide/depression in detail, as well as physical & domestic abuse situations.

And a small content warning for those who aren’t legitimately triggered by these subjects but still feel uncomfortable reading about the following: homophobia/transphobia; sexism; racism; and the actual use of a real-life woman’s death as a plot device. No I am not fucking kidding about that last one.

So. Let’s get into the real shit about YIIK.

Spoiler Review

Plot:

Let’s start with the plot. There isn’t really a driving force for this plot; initially, it’s finding Semi “Sammy” Pak (well, everyone except Rory says “Park,” even though all of the written lines say “Pak,” so that’s great) after she is taken by mysterious figures. However, as the game progresses, the search becomes less about finding Sammy until she’s just a footnote, and becomes more about... meandering around the world going from one goal to another while fighting things. (The game points this out, but self-awareness doesn’t excuse the fact that it happens. Especially considering the upcoming plot points...)

Then the metaphysics start--people have been trying to decipher this world’s rules for a while with little success, so bear with me, I’m going to try to make as much sense of what we’re given as possible.

There exists a “place between places“ known as the Soul Space. It exists between parallel realities. A person can actually will themself into the Soul Space via... depression? One character, Vella, says that another character, Rory, left his body when he “surrendered himself to his misery” following the death of his younger sister, and explained herself that she fell into a deep depression as well before entering the Soul Space... but it’s not dying? Or it can be? Here Rory asks The Essentia 2000 oh we’ll get to her don’t you worry if dying means you enter the Soul Space. She says that it’s complicated. Her explanation boils down to, “if you care only about material goods and not about your bonds, when you die, you will cease to exist. If you don’t care about materialistic goods when you die, then ehhhhh???”

Also, if your reality is destroyed but you go into the Soul Space, you can become a Soul Survivor (aka the not-Starmen, seen in the cutscene with Vella and Rory linked above) and get stuck in other’s realities as you try to find a physical body. Also, people share a Soul across parallel realities--meaning, parallel versions of yourself would share the same Soul. But they’re not the same people. They have different lives, races, genders, names, but they share the same “Soul.” Only one person with that “Soul” can exist in a reality at a time, hence the form that the Soul Survivors take if they enter a reality where another person with that “Soul” lives. If, however, that person with your “Soul” is no longer in that reality, you can retake physical form and essentially take their place--though not as them, but as you.

And if you go into the Soul Space you apparently understand the secrets of the universe and are beyond normal human follies.

Confused yet? Me too, and I wrote this damn thing. The worldbuilding is so vague, and the players aren’t given set rules that the world plays by. Even when the more surrealist elements of the game start to appear, there should still be rules. Perhaps nonsensical rules, but rules nonetheless. Instead we get talk about Souls and parallel realities, scenes of bright colors and strange imagery that never gets explained or really acknowledged (other than a mention of them being “breaks in reality” like, once), and some plot twists that imply... a lot.

Let’s talk about the characters before we get to the ending.

Characters

Besides Alex, there are five major characters in YIIK:

Michael, who is Alex’s childhood friend and who doesn’t really have much relevance between the beginning and the end of the game. No, really, for the middle portion of the game, he doesn’t really do anything. He hangs around, that’s about it. He gains relevance again during the end of the game where he goes into the Soul Space and becomes Proto-Michael, and that... happens, I guess. I think it contributes to the revelation later on about reality breaking.

Vella is... a strange character. A strange character forced to contradict herself because the plot demands it. She’s shown to be a character who takes no shit, but also bends at the first flimsy apology Alex gives her. She is compassionate to someone like Rory, but spends most of her time calling out Alex. (And yet, somehow, they fall in love???) These notes I took previously on Vella’s first appearance show how what kind of walking contradiction that Vella is as a character:

”Stop creeping on me while i’m at work”

”Okay I’ll go to the house of two strangers who i just accused of perving on me, in the middle of my work shift, to look at these pictures of me on this website i’ve never heard of that can’t go wrong”

”So let me tell you about this traumatizing experience i had with a supernatural creature, saying how emotional and painful it was without any emotion in my voice”

”also i’m not going to tell you how I got to where the supernatural creature was because it’s very personal and I don’t know you and revealing that would make me vulnerable”

”By the way I’m going to give you my number as well as this other number for a training dungeon basically because I like you two”

... yeah,

Rory is probably my favorite character out of this dreck, and he deserves so, so much better than being in this shit. He’s a quiet scene kid who initially gets roped into the plot with the disappearance of his 12-year-old sister--turns out, however, that she killed herself, and Rory struggles with the resulting grief, trauma, and depression that follows. He’s a sweet kid who’s a pacifist, is teaching himself how to make games, knows a lot of random bits of information about many things, and overall deserves so much better than this game. Sorry Allansons you’ve lost your Rory privileges he is My son now

Claudio and Chondra... are just kind of there? Claudio’s a stereotypical weeb. Chondra is the “sassy black girl”/little sister type (which is later revealed to be even stranger, because she’s apparently a graduate student). They don’t have much outside of that, and that’s a shame, since they had a lot of potential to be really good. However, they also seem a bit... tacked on and included for diversity’s sake, as both of them mention racism at some point, and... yeah. The game isn’t very graceful with that topic, as I’ll soon get into.

There is also the character of Panda, who appears out of nowhere in the factory/hotel and is never questioned. It becomes very clear that he’s a figment of Alex’s imagination, and is Alex personifying him as his sort of “conscious“ when he is, in reality, only a stuffed bear. He only talks when Alex is alone. A lot of people really don’t like him, but I will admit that I got mildly emotional when he drifted away in space near the end--but only because I myself make stuffed animals and dolls, so nearly any stuffed animal holds a place in my heart. However, I can very much see why people wouldn’t like him at all.

Anyway.

The Fucking Ending:

So everyone just kind of meanders around for the middle portion of the game until surprise! On New Years’ Eve the world is going to be destroyed. Not just the world--the entire reality. And it’s going to be Alex’s fault, somehow. Also Sammy--who Alex becomes obsessed with--Vella--who is an explicit love interest for Alex--and an android--the previously-mentioned The Essentia 2000, who Alex has a dream about and immediately becomes infatuated--with all turn out to be the same person! Why pick between love interests when they can all just turn out to be the same person?! Also, Sammy was taken by apparent demons because her Soul was in the process of going into the Soul Space, and the creatures the took her were actually the other 2/3rds of her Soul that had already gone into the Soul Space and they were just collecting the last piece. I think.

The game turns into a watered-down version of Persona 3, where you have about a month--from Thanksgiving until New Years’ Eve--to train and get strong enough to stop whatever is going to destroy reality. (The actual Y2K thing is mentioned about halfway through and serves little relevance other than to mark when the end of the world is, since Y2K isn’t actually the cause of the world ending). Then there are some weird plot twists about how reality has been breaking for a long while (this was briefly foreshadowed in Alex going to Michael’s house only to be told that Michael doesn’t live there, and then going to another house where Michael is) and it makes a lot of things really confusing?? And then New Years’ Eve comes where everything is really breaking. Turns out the end of this reality is caused by a meteor with Alex’s face on it a la the moon from Majora’s Mask, no I am not fucking kidding. And it moves around like an inflatable arm-flailing tube man, no I am not fucking kidding.

And then everyone dies. No, really, this is an unwinnable fight. You die. Your entire party dies. Their reality is destroyed.

Alex wanders around the Soul Space for a while until he finds other versions of himself, and various “dark versions” merge together to create the Proto-Comet (’proto’ being the suffix to describe the end product of parallel selves merging together to form one entity). Alex follows the comet around as it destroys reality after reality until...

He finds one that hasn’t been attacked.

And gueeeeeeess what?

You, the player, are a parallel version of Alex. So he enlists you and another party of parallels (using the names you were supposed to input in the beginning) to destroy Proto-Alex. Here, you meet a spectre who is very obviously Sammy Pak, and she says that she’s sorry that Essentia “used her to get to you,” and you hug her.

Eventually you do get to Proto-Alex, as well as a different form of Essentia. Turns out that Essentia lied to you about Sammy and Vella--turns out, Essentia IS you. Well, Essentia is part of Alex, and she tricked Alex into destroying Proto-Alex in order to free herself from the “Soul” that they share. So you can choose to fight Proto-Alex, and if you do, you lose. Again. The boss fight in unwinnable.

And then this... really weird section happens with the character of Roy from Two Brothers, Ackk Studios’ previous game that got pulled from Steam due to bugginess and crashing. Roy basically says that people were “trying to stop his quest” (aka critics) and that Alex shouldn’t give up. (Note that this is a complete non-sequitur to anyone who doesn’t know who Roy is, where he came from, or the story behind the game being pulled.)

After that, you control both the player avatar given and Alex in order to “unplug” Proto-Alex and Essentia, which will make them “whole”? It basically means that all the versions of Alex will merge together into you, the player.

Then the game ends.

At least. Kind of. There’s more than one ending.

But... we’ll get back to that in a bit.

There are many questions the game raises without answers. Why was Sammy bleeding and screaming for the Soul Survivors not to take her because “you promised you wouldn’t move me again!”? Who actually is Vella? Why did no one question Essentia and Vella being in the same space if it was already said that they couldn’t be? Who actually is Sammy? Why is she a ghost and not a Soul Survivor? Why were Proto-Alex and the other “dark Alex”-es trying to destroy realities? Why does Proto-Alex look different than the other Alex-es, who look relatively similar? Who actually was the voice on the phone--it was implied to be Proto-Michael, but he didn’t exist when those phone calls were made? Is Claudio and Chondra’s missing younger brother actually a version of Alex, as this clip implies (esp. w/ the anime shirt)?

Good luck getting answers, because we sure as hell don’t get any.

Also--glad to know that the entire month of training that you spent the latter half of the game doing was all for naught, since the last two major fights you’re in are unwinnable. There are four minibosses to fight, so it isn’t all for nothing, but still. You don’t even get the satisfaction of killing the final boss. You pull a lever and he and Essentia get weirdly electrocuted.

One more thing: the twist of “Essentia lied to you” made a metric fuckton of exposition in her Mind Dungeon utterly pointless, and also feels like a flimsy excuse to absolve Alex of blame for the shitty actions of his parallel selves--more on that later.

So let’s touch on some controversy now that we have gone over the rest of this incoherent mess of a plot.

Elisa Lam

One of the most famous controversies of YIIK is the use of Elisa Lam’s death to propel the story. This is true--the creator admits that he “was very moved” by Lam’s death.

For those not in the know, let me give you a brief summary of the case of Elisa Lam. (Yes this is going to be primarily from Wikipedia but it also has news sources cited for it.) Elisa Lam was a 21-year-old Chinese-Canadian student who was reported missing at the beginning of February 2013. On February 17th, the workers at the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles (where Lam was visiting) discovered her nude body in one of the hotel’s water tanks after guests complained about the taste of the water. The police released footage of Lam, from the day of her disappearance, acting strangely in an elevator, appearing to be hiding from something, pressing elevator buttons, and gesturing and talking to no one. There was controversy surrounding her death, as people wondered how she could have locked herself in the water tank, and how the police could rule her death as accidental. People have suspected that it was due to paranormal activity that she was acting like that, or others said that she could have been having hallucinations (as Lam was diagnosed with bipolar and depression). Her death was quickly spread through internet circles as some paranormal myth.

YIIK incorporates this as a huge part of its starting plot.

Semi “Sammy” Pak is very clearly inspired by Elisa Lam. The two bear striking resemblance to one another, being young Asian women in their early twenties with straight black hair (even parted in the same place)--and this photo from the LA Times shows that Lam wore rounded glasses, like the ones Sammy wears. (Lam is Chinese-Canadian, while Sammy is stated to be Koren-American. Sammy is also 23 when Lam was 21.)

This photoset from JamJamJamJamuel shows the biggest criticism of YIIK: the recreation of the elevator video. It’s obvious by the angle and some of Sammy’s movements that this was, in fact, meant to emulate the elevator video of Lam. The game also shows that people are less concerned about Sammy as a person and more about the mystery of the elevator, like the internet stopped caring about Lam as a person and more of a supernatural myth.

However, there’s more than just this.

There’s a weird... almost fetishistic nature when the in-game protagonist talks about Sammy. Alex describes his meeting with her as “intimate” (they met for like. an hour), calls her “my Sammy” when comparing his story to the story of the news, says that he “misse[s] her. I didn’t know her really, but I felt like I did.” And the very next line is uh. “In the unreal twilight hours, in-between sleep and waking, she slipped into my dreams, got tangled in my thoughts, like the blankets tangled between my legs, her brain melting with mine.”

... Gross, to say the least.

And yes, by the way, Sammy basically becomes a love interest. That’s not completely disrespectful and disgusting to the actual human woman that the devs never met or anything at aaaaaaaall.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE.

Rory basically goes on to describe a “creepy urban myth” about the water tower near his town. You can imagine what that leads to. It’s a beat-by-beat retelling of the finding of Elisa Lam’s body, except they make it a “nameless girl,” and the writers basically insert their opinions of how it was definitely a murder and the police called it an accident.

More tasteless than a fucking saltine.

OH BUT WAIT THERE’S EVEN MORE.

Near the end of the game, you find the ghost of Sammy Pak. Since she’s not a part of Essentia, it seems that Essentia used her form to get to Alex. She says that she’s sorry and that she’s going to go back ‘home’ now, and you hug her.

But that’s not even the worst of it.

Allow me to tell you about the second ending.

Second Ending:

YIIK has more than one ending--both are considered canon. Ending 1 is the one described above.

Ending 2, however...

Just before leaving the house for the last time, in order to get this second ending, you have to look at the computer in Alex’s house and read this post. It implies that you need to go find Sammy. (It also has some things to say about postmodernism but that’s for another day.)

You go outside... and she’s hiding behind a tree outside your house. No I’m not kidding. (Granted, this is the part of the game where reality is beginning to break apart, so.) She also says “I love you” which, given her “inspiration” by Elisa Lam... yeah. That’s not creepy and tasteless at all. And it also doesn’t make any FUCKING SENSE BECAUSE ALEX KNEW HER FOR AN HOUR AND NEVER SAW HER AGAIN.

Okay, okay, anyway, if you go back into the house and leave through the back entrance, you’ll be taken to the world map. Your destination is the KNN--the Korean News Network, where Sammy had been employed before she vanished. The faceless NPCs only refer to Alex as the name you put in at the beginning of the game, so presumably, everyone from this point forward is now talking to you, the player. (Also everything is pink. Really pink. For no real reason unless it’s “””symbolic””” of something?) You wander around for a bit, doing menial tasks, until you finally get to a pink version of the room you first met Sammy in. She calls you on a phone and tells you that she’s sorry for dragging you into this mess (because Alex/the player went looking for Sammy in the first place), and that she “has a solution” to prevent Essentia from using Alex any more.

You find yourself in front of an elevator, the same elevator that you rode with Sammy when she disappeared. She calls you on the phone again and says that if you go through the elevator doors, there’s no turning back. If you step through, you see the spectre of Sammy again, and she wants to show you where she’s been. You hug her, and she says that she’s so glad that she met you, “even if it was just a game. We’ll be together in your waking reality one day, I’m sure of it. For all I know, we may already be.”

... Roll credits!

No. Seriously. That’s the second ending. You, the player, (presumably) go into the Soul Space with Sammy for eternity, and Sammy basically gives you a love confession (after all she says “I love you” before anyway).

Need I remind you all that she is based off of a REAL-LIFE WOMAN WHO DIED THAT NEITHER OF THE ALLANSONS KNEW?!

Hi, yes, sorry, I’m fucking livid about this. Not just because of the disgusting use of a real-life woman’s death in your game, not just because they fetishized her and turned her into a love interest, not just one of the endings--which is a canon ending--had her telling you she loves you and having you go off with her...

... but because this game has been in development since 2013.

Elisa Lam wasn’t even dead for a fucking year.

Yes, other media has cropped up about Lam’s death, and I think it’s just as tacky and tasteless as this. But these guys had so much time to change it, to have someone say “hey maybe you shouldn’t do that,” and it happened anyway. The sheer lack of respect that the Allansons have for not just Lam but also her still-grieving family is astonishing, and it genuinely makes me sick. My thoughts and condolences to the family of Elisa Lam, having to deal with the press, internet conspirators, and people like this. I hope that they all can still find some sense of peace, even with all of this going on.

Racism:

So this game can be really, really fucking racist sometimes. Let’s start with the more explicit dialogue.

In the very beginning, Sammy calls Alex a ginger, and he says “that’s our word.” He’s equating “ginger” to a derogatory slur.

Here’s the next instance, with Alex referring to Vella--an Asian woman--as “vaguely ethnic” and “exotic.” (He doesn’t face consequences for this, either. Just a slap on the wrist of “don’t talk about race.”)

Later on, Chondra talks about race in an actually not that bad rant about how “I bet if [my brother] had been a beautiful white woman, everyone would have cared that he vanished.” This actually is somewhat insightful, as... well, it’s rather true. POC, when it comes to investigations, are often pushed aside, ignored, or given the least amount of effort. And then Chondra also calls out Alex’s lowkey racist fantasy of “being the white knight swooping in and saving the exotic Korean girl.” However... that’s it. Alex doesn’t get any insight from that, or rethink his reasons on why he wants to save Sammy.

And that’s where we get into Claudio and Chondra and the more implicit racism in the game. Neither of them have much in terms of personality--Claudio likes anime, Chondra is there for quips. Neither of them have any significant arcs, nor do they serve much story purpose beyond being extra party members and talking about race--which feels racist in and of itself, just to have characters of color there to talk about race. (Claudio even goes into an extensive rant about how it’d be racist to think that he knows how to pick locks, but he does know how to pick locks, just not the type that they need open. It comes out of nowhere, is utterly unwarranted, and is completely against the rather chill persona that Claudio has had up until then.) Their characters had a lot of potential to be good! However, much like every other character, they’re very underdeveloped.

(Also, if you have either Claudio or Chondra in your party when you get attacked by cop enemies, they will only shoot at either of them, you know, the only black characters in the main party, and my god I wish I was kidding.)

And then... the love interests.

Sammy is a Korean woman. Vella is an Asian woman of unknown descent. The Essentia 2000 has shown that many of her parallel lives are women of color. All of them are love interests for Alex, the white hero. Yeah. And the game calls it out, but no actual repercussions are given!

Speaking of these ladies...

Sexism

This game is really fucking sexist. Like, genuinely, it’s really sexist.

I think a lot of Vella’s contradictory character comes from this sexism and seeing her as a love interest rather than a character. Though she calls out Alex and is upset with him most of the time, she still accepts his weak apologies very easily--apologies that seem very manipulative and insincere when almost immediately after, Alex tries to convince her to let him into her Mind Dungeon, and if you take that as a metaphor than it gets even worse.

As well, Vella’s backstory includes her being used by a much-older man. What can you do after she tells this traumatic story about her being used by a man? Kiss her. And she doesn’t even get upset or angry with you; she just blushes and says to head back to the others. Because that’s not gross and manipulative or anything. That’s not taking advantage of a vulnerable woman at ALL.

The only female characters of importance that aren’t lusting after Alex are his mom and Chondra--I’ve already mentioned that Chondra has little story importance and personality, and Alex sees his mom as nagging for asking him to get groceries, gets angry at her when she says that she lost her job and asks him to get one to support the house (please note that she paid for his and his sister’s college educations in full, including semesters she didn’t plan for), and gets annoyed with her freaking out when he went missing for five days.

So yeah. The game doesn’t have the highest view of women.

But let’s talk specifically about Essentia. Essentia mentions that Alex has hurt her in parallel realities--but it’s okay, because they’re parallel versions, not actually him! And Essentia reveals that Alex’s parallel was the person who hurt Vella! But it’s okay, because she’ll love him unconditionally no matter how much he hurts her. It’s... really reminiscent of domestic abuse. And it frankly doesn’t matter that Essentia turns out to be a part of Alex and that any of the story of Vella or Sammy isn’t true; the game frames it as perfectly okay that it might have happened. It’s okay that parallel versions of Alex have hurt parallel versions of Essentia, because she loves him. It’s incredibly twisted, and it’s honestly a dangerous message to be sending.

(Also, in a very weird instance of sexism against men, out of all of the parallel selves that Essentia shows Alex, the only man is extremely hostile and violent towards Alex. It’s... kind of weird, honestly.)

Depression/Suicide:

Oh boy. Oh fucking boy.

A little background on myself.

I’m two years into my undergrad for a Psychology/Criminology double major. Classes I have taken include classes about pathologies of the mind and mental health (Psychopathology of Childhood, Developmental Psychology, Personality Psychology, Seminar on Positive Psychology, and of course Basic Psychology to be specific). I have also been clinically diagnosed with anxiety/depression, and both of these are genetically based, meaning that I have lived with them my whole life and will continue to live with them. (I am medicated, for anyone wondering. The meds are the only way I can function at a normal level.) I have felt suicidal before, I have had friends who have been suicidal before, and I have talked others down from self-harm or suicide. I’m not an expert, but I know a thing or two about mental health, depression, and suicide.

This game... this game doesn’t fucking get it at all.

(Just a quick thing: the game makes an OCD joke. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder jokes aren’t funny, folks, since people who have it are affected by it all the time to the point of it often being debilitating. Just wanted to mention it a) to give you an idea on how the game handles mental health and b) because it really doesn’t fit anywhere else.)

Most of this surrounds the character of Rory, as he clearly suffers from depression and suicidal thoughts, as well as feeling grief surrounding his sister’s own suicide. When this is revealed, you know what Vella says to “comfort” him? “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. I understand what you were feeling. 'This depression is unbearable.' 'I can't take it anymore.' The 'depression/pain' part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can overcome it is up to you. You decide if you're going to keep going. Your sister is dead. Nothing can change that. [...] You can't help but feel the pain, but you can get through the suffering. That will go away. Look, I understand that it's easy for me to say. I'm not the one whose sister is dead. But you have to understand that I am telling you the true reality of the situation. You're playing with some otherworldly dangers here!“

Let me break this down to show you why this is not something to say to someone who is traumatized and in a deep depression due to the loss of a loved one.

“[W]hether or not you can overcome it is up to you.” This puts full responsibility of overcoming grief and depression onto the person suffering from it, which is not okay, and not true. Rory lost his 12-year-old sister to suicide! Very recently in the game’s timeline, as well!

Vella is basically telling him “it’s your job to get over your grief and depression.” Putting full responsibility on someone for feeling depression and grief is disgusting. If someone is grieving, what they should do is reach out. If they aren’t, reach out to them. Don’t let them suffer alone. Suffering like this is not a choice. People don’t choose to suffer.

By saying that suffering is “optional,” it subtly blames the person suffering for their own suffering, which makes their chances of getting better plummet. So frequently will people suffering from mental disorders put the blame on themselves for “not trying hard enough” or “being broken” or “not being good enough” because they think that this is all their own fault, and they won’t seek help, because “it’s all my fault.”

Now, when someone is in recovery? Yes, they should definitely try--even if it’s in small bits at a time--to to learn to cope with their disorders in healthy ways. However, when in recovery, the person is assisted by therapists, friends, family, and possibly medications. They aren’t alone. They aren’t alone, and are often guided by those who know how to help them and want to help them. The responsibility isn’t pushed solely onto them. One doesn’t “get over” being depressed. They learn to cope. They learn to accept it as a part of them, rather than all of them, and learn that they are more than their depression. The suffering never truly goes away; it can lessen, though, and a person can learn to live with it.

Some people may defend this by saying that the Allansons lost their mother very recently, and this is how they handle their grief. I lost my father in February of last year. I know this type of grief. And just because that’s how they handle their grief, that doesn’t mean it’s a healthy way of coping, nor the type of coping mechanism you should promote in your game. (I will admit that my own methods of coping weren’t great, and that I’m trying to improve on that now.) There’s a quote that I heard somewhere that goes something like, “grief never really goes away. We just learn to live with it.” That suffering doesn’t ‘go away.’ It ebbs and flows, some days being bearable, and other days not.

But that’s not the end, friends. Oh, far from it.

At one point, you can flat-out tell Rory to “stop being depressed. Being depressed is a choice.” It is noted to be the “wrong” choice, however, Rory barely reacts to it, making it not seem like the wrong decision. I don’t feel like I need to explain why “depression is a choice” is a take colder than the depths of space. Depression’s not a choice, folks. Hell, I would love it if it was, I would love to stop the fatigue, the emptiness, the lethargy, the lack of motivation, the irritability, the messed-up appetite, the fucked-up sleep patterns, the fits of crying. That would be fucking great. But I can’t. BECAUSE IT’S NOT A CHOICE, YOU WALNUT.

Okay, okay, sorry, back on topic. So let’s say you’re mean to Rory. You wanna know what happens?

He kills himself. And according to this user, the story doesn’t change and barely acknowledges Rory after his death. (Obviously there’s not footage out there of the characters mentioning that Rory committed suicide. However, the developers themselves commented on the previously-linked Steam forum post confirming its legitimacy. This is so unbelievably fucked up. Suicide is already a topic that should be handled with care, but having a main character commit suicide and have that death have no impact on the story? I don’t even have words for how deplorable that is. (Doesn’t help that the game basically pushes whether Rory lives or dies onto the player, which is also disgusting, because I don’t think the developers had the insight into suicidal ideation to know that it’s a multitude of factors that lead to suicide, and not just one person being )

(Sidenote: here are the links to the National Suicide Prevention Line and the Crisis Text Line in case anyone needs them. Please take care, friends. <3)

[Addendum: as I was working on this review and listened to the podcast linked a little further down, Andrew Allanson had this to say at 2:08:47: "When you make an unlikable character, people expect Sherlock Holmes or Dr. House. They want flawed heroes, but only to the extent that they’re beautiful and intelligent and slightly Asperger-y."

Thank you for basically saying that having Asperger’s Syndrome is an unlikable trait or makes people unlikable.]

Anti-LGBTQ+

So let’s talk about the prejudice against non-straight and non-cis people!

Andrew Allanson has been rather fucking clear about his prejudice against trans people and non-straight people. In the “The Dick Show” podcast, starting at 1:45:45, Andrew Allanson was interviewed by the commentators. I will be providing timestamps of quotes since I can’t directly link to them.

(Sidenote: I was listening to this podcast and waiting for Andrew’s pa rt to start, and one of the commentators was talking about Women’s History Month, and saying “If a woman doesn’t have a man, she’s going to expect the government to be her man. That’s just the way they’re wired.” [1:44:24 - 1:44:31].  Yeah. That tells you the type of people who run this podcast and the type of people that Andrew decides to associate himself with.)

[1:52:15 - 1:52:] “... we made the mistake of asking the player, ‘what name did your parents give you?’ And it turns out that that is a very offensive question. Because some people, um, are trans, and don’t use the name their parents gave them. So immediately the game is targeted as being transphobic. [...] So we wanted to basically create a character off of the player in the game, the first thing we ask you ‘are you a boy or a girl,’ ‘what’s your name’, and people were so bent out of shape over this. Look, I’m sympathetic to trans people, I understand why it upset them. But the problem was when we apologized, that wasn’t good enough. People then took it and said ‘what else can we find in this game to prove that it’s offensive?’”

So here’s the thing: that... is lowkey transphobic? Because it’s like you said, these people don’t use the names that their parents gave them. You’re asking them, intentionally or not, to deadname themselves. There’s a reason they call it a “deadname.”

Later on they ask, “which of these do you identify with?” and show a male figure and a female figure. Which frankly, is alright.

And then they changed it in an update to “what do you look like?” which feels like a very direct jab at trans people, especially the ones who were upset by the initial question relating to names.

Oh, and then there’s this part (I only know DIck and Andrew’s voices, I’m afraid I don’t know the third, sorry m8).

[1:54:35 - 1:55:10]

Andrew: So you play as this guy, Alex, you just come home from [college, audio cut out here], you’re an entitled asshole--

Dick: You get points for stomping queers, as I understand it, that’s the game, right? You go around and--

Andrew: The goal is to establish the white ethnostate.

[unintelligible as others laugh and talk over each other]

Dick: --you have a little ‘gaydar’ in the corner and it points you to the nearest homosexual, and then you go, y‘know, “Hammer [X]”

Andrew: It’s - it’s - yeah, it’s a hack-and-slash.

Dick: If you buy the game they send you a special overlay you can put on your controller that turns all the buttons into ‘K.’ So it’s not ‘A’--

Andrew: Yes!

Dick: --Just ‘K,’ ‘K,’ and ‘K.’

Andrew: Just ‘K,’ ‘K’--yeah, exactly, exactly.

So we not only have the mockery of gay folk, but also mention of murdering them (whether in a joking fashion or not, this still isn’t fucking funny and not something to joke about, especially if you are not LGBTQ+ yourself. And to my knowledge, none of these men are).

And that’s just from the creator himself, as well as the first few minutes of the game.

Let’s talk bout The Scene.

What is The Scene? Well, it’s the scene where Alex and Rory talk, where you can tell Rory that “depression is a choice.” Should you be kind and supportive to him, you know what you can do? “Try to kiss [him.]” And there’s art for it. There is literally no reason for this to be here other than “haha it’s a guy trying to kiss another guy, gay people are funny!” It seems to be an attempt at humor, but it fails... rather miserably.

The Legendary Third Ending

I call it “legendary” because no one knows if it actually exists or not, because people can’t find it, regardless of the hints given by the developers.

Andrew, while doing “The Dick Show” interview, mentions that he put DIck Masterson (the host of the show) into the game in the third update [1:45:56] , and that you have to give Dick a pair of aviator glasses, where he will give you a red pill [1:47:15 - 1:47:33]. Dick is also found in Chapter 4 of the game [1:47:40].

The devs also tease it on Twitter, saying that it’s “sad and challenging to complete”, and they give vague and unclear hints that don’t seem to help even the fans of the game--after all, no one has found it, apparently. Even the YIIK Discord (though this is just hearsay) has been losing steam in trying to find this ending.

I think it’s a testament to the quality of the game when one of your major three endings is nigh-impossible to find. (For the record, I feel the same way about how PT went about its ending, and how arbitrary it felt to do these very specific things that the game barely tells you about.)

Miscellaneous Other Things That Don’t Fit In The Above

There are a couple other things that irk me about this game, so time for a rapid-fire round!

You can kiss Rory, who’s implied to be a senior in high school (due to this talk of college). So he’s, at best, 18. Alex had 5 and a half years of college (the game says “five and a quarter” but unless I’m mistaken colleges work in semesters not quarters,), so he’s probably 23-24. Yeah. (There’s also the issue of consent--when you kiss Vella she just blushes and acts more docile, while with Rory, he rather vehemently rejects it. So women just accept an unwanted kiss? Hm.)

You fight a flasher as a miniboss. Because sexual harassment is hilarious. (And if neither Michael nor Rory are 18 yet, then there’s the possibility of minors being involved. YEAH.)

The title card is intentionally glitchy af and it hurts the eyes, honestly.

If you go through New Game+ and go to the 70th floor of the Mind Dungeon, Alex will basically talk to himself about some things:

It mentions that “crows are ugly.” You fool. You absolute buffoon. Crows? Excellent. Very intelligent birbs.

This is basically “hey we suck, but so does everyone around us, it’s fine”

This game unironically uses Wonderwall lyrics in an emotional scene, like I know it was popular and not a meme in the 90s but my guy, you gotta think about the connotations with the audience you’re releasing this for,

“I sighed as the elevator began to shake, vibrating with motion.” Thank you for using three words to describe the elevator shaking,

The One Thing That I Liked

Surprisingly, there is something I liked about this game. Not solely in concept, not in its potential, but in its actual execution.

It starts on the day of New Years’ Eve. It’s dark outside and inside. Alex suddenly starts getting many random calls, some from people he knows, others he doesn’t. Some voices are distorted, some aren’t. Some are talking to him, some aren’t. And they’re quick little calls before they hang up, and Alex barely says a word. He can’t leave the house, and keeps getting phone calls that get more and more distorted as time goes on.

That? I think that actually really works.

It’s a more subtle way of showing reality breaking: getting calls from people, both friends and strangers, that are slowly getting more and more broken, and you can’t do anything. You’re trapped in your house, you can’t see outside, you don’t know what’s going on. You can’t help your friends, even when Michael screams for your help. The slowly deteriorating stability of the calls are your only indication of what’s going on outside.

And for me, that works. It was the one section of the game that I felt legitimately invested in. So, kudos to the devs for that one.

Conclusion

YIIK isn’t just bad. It’s offensive. It’s ignorant, it handles serious topics incredibly clumsily, and the worst of it is that Andrew Allanson considers it to be ‘art.’ (If you’re wondering why I didn’t talk about the “video games aren’t art” quote, don’t worry. That’s going to be its own essay.)

YIIK fails on every level, from technical to storytelling. Please, I beg of you, don’t give this game money. Just go watch the LP.

You may have noticed that I didn’t talk much about the “postmodern” aspect of the game, nor much about Alex as a protagonist.

Both of those are going to be their own separate essays.

This wild ride still ain’t over, folks. Hang on.

[theartofmedia]

Game Theory and the Art of Persuasion

Full disclosure from the start: I don’t like Game Theory. (I enjoy MatPat when he’s in other things (like the Random Encounters musicals, I think he’s wonderful there), but just not Game Theory.) I’ve heard a lot of other people not like Game Theory either, both personal friends and strangers on the internet, for a variety of different reasons--namely, inaccurate research, twisting of facts, and allegations of art-stealing (but we’re not going to talk about that last one for the sake of staying on topic).

Yet, it remains incredibly successful, and its fans are loyal. Many people believe the theories, or at least parts of them. Even when the top comments of the videos are critical (or even hateful) in nature, the videos still do well.

So, why?

Well, there’s no denying that a good portion of GT’s audience is young. I think we’ve all had that one creator or piece of media that we wanted to defend because we loved it, only to realize later that it wasn’t that good. (And many people still enjoy these things and recognize that they aren’t good.) Younger teens have a strong need to defend what’s important to them, regardless of however valid the criticism is--in fact, giving any negative criticism at all often just spurs them on further. Young teens just don’t have that reasoning ability (and let’s face it, we were all like this when we were that young, whether we like to admit it or not). GT is going to be successful as long as that loyal fanbase continues to thrive.

So why do people believe the theories?

I believe I have my own little “theory”--MatPat, to some, is very persuasive.

Not with well-structured arguments, but with his rhetoric. It’s in what language he uses, the visuals he puts up, his tone of voice, and how he subtly tweaks the facts in order to slant the information in favor of his argument.

(Note: I am aware that MatPat not only has editors but script-writers as well, but he has to approve all of it and read out the script. So while I’ll use GT and MatPat himself as sort of umbrella term, I do know that he is not responsible for everything.)

Let’s use the video “Game Theory: Kirby...Dream Land’s Biggest THREAT! pt.1″ and break down some of the major points. (I’ll be putting timestamps so you can check for yourself or follow along.)

Whether intentional or not, MatPat uses a lot of strong, slanted language in his arguments. At 2:14, he states “So what is Kirby? Is he hero of Popstar, or world-consuming villain? A pink puffball for good, or a fiery god of evil?” This sets up a dichotomy--good and evil, right and wrong. People are naturally drawn to definitive, clean choices. They’re easier to understand and easier to grasp. Setting up this dichotomy sets up two sides: Kirby is good, or Kirby is evil. No room for other nuances and small details that add depth, or room for any explanations of the circumstances that could lead Kirby to act the way he does.

2:22--”Surprisingly, Kirby lore does have an answer.”

2:25-2:29--”The Kirby games have slowly been revealing more and more of what the true nature of Kirby is.”

3:09--”... what the designers are intending to do with his character.”

These three statements encapsulate a common criticism of GT: MatPat exerts his theories as truth. “Have an answer,” “true nature,” and “intending to do” are all statements that present his argument as factual, as truth. He even pushes that onto the Kirby writers, saying that it’s what they were ‘intending to do’ with Kirby’s character. Now one could make the argument of him just making blanket statements and that these aren’t all calculated instances, and you’re probably right--however, regardless if intentional or not, it still plants a sort of subliminal idea in the viewer’s head that ‘what I’m going to tell you is accurate and true.’

(Also, at 3:09, he shows a visual of “kirby lore” books connected by a pentagram. Very subtle use of imagery to send a message, which once more ties back to the binary he set up earlier. It’s pretty clear what he wants you to believe.)

2:30--”And the answers they’re starting to give are shocking.”

3:16--”... after this two-part theory, I don’t think you’ll be able to look at Kirby the same way again.”

This, along with the Satanic visuals presented previously, are priming the viewer to think that Kirby is evil. It’s setting up for that assertion, easing the viewer into it so that it’s easier for them to think “oh yeah that makes sense.”

And that’s just at the beginning of the video!

Now probably the biggest criticism of GT is that he spins the facts and intentionally leaves out information, inadvertently giving inaccurate information in order to support his argument. Well--he’s basically flat-out admitted to doing so in his emails to potential script writers (as shown by this video from Inside A Mind (timestamped for convenience), where MatPat actually commented on it and talked about the incident that IAM was referring to and never outright stating that the contents of those guidelines for script writing were false.)

I feel like we don’t talk about this enough: the Game Theory script writers are actually told to omit information that contradicts the theory. Now this makes sense on the surface--omitting information that would weaken your argument--but thinking about it even a bit makes it confusing and even a bit shady. GT frames its theories as though they were scientific theories, and intentionally leaving out information that contradicts what you’re trying to say isn’t how you make a scientific theory, especially if it heavily disproves what you are trying to prove. You would acknowledge that there is contradictory information and either try to provide a counterargument, or just admit ‘yeah this exists and we don’t have an explanation for it.’ It’s okay to have holes in your argument, no argument is perfect! However, GT flat-out ignores this contradictory information, and in doing so, it actually twists the facts. (Honestly, in my opinion, him acknowledging the contradictory information would make his theories more credible.)

For example, in the Kirby video, he discusses Milky Way Wishes in Kirby Super Star/Super Star Ultra, and how the main objective is to stop the sun and moon from fighting by summoning Nova, who can grant wishes, with the help of a jester named Marx. Marx, however, betrays Kirby to get his own wish granted because he wants to take over Popstar. Kirby has to destroy Nova in order to save Popstar and possibly the rest of the universe.

Now the way MatPat explains it...

(starting at) 6:19--“When the sun and moon are fighting up in the sky, one civilian speaks up with a solution: Marx. His proposed answer to this literal star war is to summon Nova, a giant space watch that grants wishes. [something something dragonball joke] Kirby travels planet to planet to harness each one’s star power, making him quite literally an alien invading army to the locals of that area. After decimating seven planets’ worth of creatures [something something metroid joke], Kirby successfully summons Nova. But before he can make his wish and justify all the damage he just caused across the galaxy, he is betrayed by Marx, who wishes to take over Popstar. [...] Kirby goes on to defeat Marx, but also has to destroy Nova in the process, leaving the universe one step back from where this quest first started, and ultimately invalidating all the bloodshed from all the planets he just visited.”

... he frames it as though nothing was accomplished, planets were destroyed, and everything was ultimately for naught.

Conveniently leaving out that the sun and moon stopped fighting--you know, what caused all of this in the first place--in order to work together and help Kirby stop Nova. And again, his wording frames Kirby as this monster, while also conveniently forgetting about player choice. One can choose to not hurt the enemies--and the enemies are enemies for a reason, because they hurt Kirby.

So in the end, while Marx was stopped and Nova was unfortunately destroyed, the problem that Kirby set out to solve was, in fact, solved, and peace was restored. Putting back these facts completely changes the meaning of what MatPat is trying to say, and omitting them makes them inaccurate information. He does this frequently in order to support his arguments--and the very fact that he has to twist the narrative in order to make it fit how he wants to at all implies that said arguments don’t have much to stand on to begin with.

However, if you didn’t play the game or didn’t just do a quick google search like I did it sounds plausible, because there aren’t many missing pieces there (unless you think about ‘what happened to the sun and moon?’). It seems that GT is trying to reach the people who don’t know about these games, as they would be the ones who would most readily believe it. Kirby fans would be skeptical or outright against what the theory says, but if you didn’t know about what the games actually were, then it would make perfect sense.

(I’d also like to mention how he says that Kirby’s Avalanche isn’t canon and then uses it for a full minute to support his argument it’s not entirely relevant to this but it just Grinds My Gears)

15:51--”And again, if you think all of this is a stretch, and I’m reading too much into these details, I’m not.” 

And at the very end, he once again asserts the idea that the information he just presented you with is true. It’s repetition; many times if you repeat something enough, people will start to believe it. It’s similar to repeating the thesis statement at the end of an essay so that it all ties together nicely.

To the average viewer, the Game Theory videos may sound very persuasive, especially with MatPat’s charismatic voice and assured tone, the editors very snappy and visually interesting editing, and the enticing words and phrases he uses in order to grab attention and prime the viewer for what he’s about to say. However, knowing even a little bit about the source material of what he’s talking about can make the theory videos fall apart, because in all honesty, the videos don’t have much actual substance. It’s like a house of cards; one light breeze and the whole thing topples.

Despite all of this, I still have hope that, someday, Game Theory’s content will improve, and these types of criticisms will be addressed. Until then, we can only wait.