vampires: an allegory for exploitation or just teenage disco balls?

Ah good evening my budding young socialites. Today we're going to be discussing mental illness in video games at topic i feel more than qualified to handle because i play a lot of video games. To fully grasp the topic we need a deep understanding of the human mind fortunately most of you already possess one, or if you are not ghosts might be one, but let's not get bogged down in the philosophy of personal identity because they will never have any bearing on our lives, until we invent transporters.

To catch you all up here's a quick run down of the work of sigmund freud and carl jung. You want to shag and or kill either of your parents (or parent if you conceived via Parthenogenesis. Or maybe yourself if you simply budded off from your parent like a strawberry.) and as such you need to dream in order to properly deal with your messed upness and that cocaine and goes well with trying to understand the human mind, Simple. you may as well apply to be a psychology professor at this point. If you can survive statistic. Speaking of statistics the RPG game vampire the masquerade: bloodlines. Has an average of too many syllable in it’s title which is my biggest grip against the game. A non-extant sample of any population finds ostentatious manifestations of multisyllabic compositions gratifying to peruse.

In the game you play as a vampire forced to pretend not to be one in a sort of social  Masquerade with abilities and tendencies dictated by your bloodline. Based on a dice rolling tabletop game with a similar name which everyone compares to dungeons and dragons but for brevity's sake i will avoid doing so. Far be it from me to waste my readers time and attention with useless facts when we have something much more important to discuss. The point of which ought to take centre stage in this article, that being… vampires. First lets look at the symptoms then lets talk to them to make them better.

Vampires are members of the living dead, think the grateful dead but less LSD and more hanging around in graveyards. There stichic is obvious to anyone who's ever met one, they act really pretentious because they live a long time like elves but weren’t awakened by Eru Ilúvatar close to the bay of Cuiviénen in the Years of the Trees that took place in the First Age. so don’t have the OG street cred going for them. They don’t like garlic but that part of the pretentiousness angle. Aside from this the whole being undead thing reeks of a Schizotypal disorder with some NPC displaying antisocial behaviour when they don’t speak to me and reject my sexual advances, this accounts for 95% of npcs which is a statistical significant portion and thus we can say there is a significant interaction between those that don’t like garlic and are mentally ill.

So if you offer someone some thick crusty garlic bread and they turn you down, you can be fairly certain they have a disorder and need to told that, therein accounting for the talk aspect of talk therapy. Phrases like “pack it in” and “have you tried being happy” have been proven to be. It’s also really important to level up melee because it’s overpowered. over the course of the game You chose a faction to side with, fight a werewolf and deface some art (not in that order). The latter of which i found to be a cathartic experience as for the longest time have i stared at pictures of rich men on horses and felt my blood boil of with a mavelent rage building to a white hot crescendo of me vomiting on the floor and being asked by staff if i was alright. I told them i didn’t need psychoanalyzing and proceeded to ask them for their height, favorite colour and last purchased brand of surfboard. (i will finish that stats course).

The game is set in LA, so is well suited to the supernatural, being a city of angles. Running perpendicular to this is the characters which aside from being pale and mad are kind of nice except the mean ones. An acute point to make is The game makes you talk to people which really brought the fantasy aspect home for me. Not meaning to be obtuse you can spend most the game in the sewers if you want to avoid people, how considerate.

Time for some Garlic bread. Games is fun.

Skullgirls: a tool of social reform? Or the greatest threat to social order ever conceived?

Right then, i have a train to catch in half an hour so a full review is out of the question… or is it? Could i perhaps summarize my feeling for a videogame with such little time? Only a sentance ago i thought it couldn’t be questioned so maybe if i was wrong about that, my premise might be wrong making this entire paragraph a needlessly long tangential introduction that only serves to waste my already notedly scarce time, meta (therefor good). So with that in mind it think it’s about time we talk about waifu’s.

Skulls girls is a game that a handsome and musty friend of mine suggested a few years ago and then i brought it. It is a game where you fight, which is a rather unremarkable thing, games like watching fire and watching paint dry ( a classic look it up sometime haha millennials, you’ll probably go watch someone else watch paint dry and then gasp in shock as they call the paint the N word) have left the narratively limiting concept of conflict on the cutting room floor as of late, a trend which have not gone unnoticed by some developer opting to leave most the game on the cutting room floor in a hopeless and vain attempt to turn their 1930’s esq cutting rooms into the sleek plastic laden digital studios of the 1980’s, we’ve all seen ashes to ashes and we know that their hair was silly and that the 1980’s was actually REDACTED all along (numb nuts, the people literally died at the beginning so it's not a spoiler to say that it’s the afterlife)

I heard a song about steamy sex with a snowman once, frost bite aside i thought such things should be relegated to the realm of VIDEOGAMES and we’re back on topic. So like in this fighting game you play as a girl or sometimes a trumpet if you brought that, but it’s extra. Which is a complex way of getting the player to imagine what it might be like to be systemically underpaid in a historically patriarchal system that hold double stands as the norm and make you walk around the office with pointy shoes…. and have jiggly parts/ whatever those things on the trumpet are called that make to DOOOT noise are.

I’m pretty sure several people have committed ritual seppuku at the mention of a wage gap but i’m about to make you forget that with my brilliant heel turn (in pointy shoes) you see at the beginning of the last paragraph i made reference to a song by singer songwriter and all round BAE kate bush, she wrote a song about if you like could swap places with your waifu then you’d understand their troubles, wants and desires and then like your relationship would be swell, like how narcissus now has a profound understanding of the plight of the Daffodil. I’m not sure exactly how to go about this, maybe beating the snot out of a trumpet might be a good start?

Maybe empathy might take a genuine exerted effort of mutual respect from both parties to understand not just the conclusions but their motions of how they came to believe that, free of pretense. Speaking of pretense i’ve been banned from my local music shop for smashing up the trumpets while dressed in a revealing sailor outfit and high heels. The owner and me and got to chatting as i explained why i was doing what what i was doing, i felt like we we’re really connecting when turned out this was just a ploy to stall for time while the fuzz arrived, jokes on him i can’t run in these fucking heels. I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have resorted to such draconian methods if i’d have been dressed as trumpet.

Game is pretty fun.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt? A critical mind’s comments on fear itself.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt? A critical mind’s comments on fear itself.

Shadows are an often used mechanic in video games, your character casts a shadow, depending on your graphics settings and this forms a basis for a game where the sun's being blocks from things makes them darker behind, good, now i’ve got the heavy science out the way it’s time to take a look at two games with very different approaches to how they handle shadows. That’s right, two games in one review and it’s not just because one alone fill the words count, because i don’t have one. My review of resident evil two spinning out into a tantalizing 14,000 word while my coverage of animal cross is currently non existent… in the literal sense.  

Anyway, video games. Alan wakes is a game released sometime a few years ago by google it, it’ll take you two seconds. The game follows protagonist that writes stories; a writer, in a idyllic new england setting experiencing the terror of a vast and unknown cosmic horror, probably inspired by roald dahl then. The evil lives under the nearby lake, probably the loch ness monster. Already the game presents you with a synergistic theme of having a writer as the protagonist, writer normally aren't the protagonist. a trope subverted in many works from a very key and prominent figure of which a lot of the events and themes in the game draw inspiration from, dante’s inferno and the other ones that no one can be bothered to google for their game review.

Dante’s inferno is also a game now but it wasn’t when it was published by dante (writing man and protagonist ;) ) back in along time ago. Weirdly enough i’m not going to talk about the game because i haven’t played it and therefore can’t relate it to alan’s awake, FUN! Anyway the game has you fight shadows that possess the townsfolk at night and you shine a light to get rid of the shadows, just like in real life, and then shoot them with a gun, killing the townsfolk in an act of cold hearted murder, this part shouldn’t happen in real life and sets an unrealistic standards for ones exchanges with neighbours. Normally they just say ‘put the light away’ and ‘is that a gun’ i am truly disappointed, FUN!

Anyway the point is that what alan wake did that no one else thought of, other than being post-modern in a videogame (resident evil 2 rip off anyone) was, like a true son of liberty, take shadows and make them the baddies stopping our protagonist from getting on with his whole sale slaughter of a small town, the things we do to get rid of writer's block. I didn’t finish the game it’s been sitting on my steam for 3 years installed and one hour of play from completion, i’m not convinced the goodies will win so i’m not going to find out.

In darksouls if you hollow you don’t cast a shadow, FUN!