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I don't know what this game is, but it's incredibly creepy and off-putting already, and I'm going to be watching avidly because apparently I'm a masochist. Yikes.
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Feb 6, 2019 03:22
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nine-gear crow posted:It just struck me that Alex is a dead ringer for Ernest Cline visually and philosophically. This game does kind of feel a bit like Ready Player One but for the 90s rather than the 80s (which itself is more about the late 70s if you actually examine all the things Cline really focuses on, so it’s also as unfocused as YIIK). This is depressingly apt. Both of them are definitely coming from the same kind of ideological space; I'm not sure I want to think about the fact that multiple people decided to make these ideas the backbone of creative works, but it definitely says something about how widespread this kind of thinking can be.
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Feb 9, 2019 20:45
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I was thinking more about the misogyny and gatekeeping (and fandom-knowledge superiority complexes) than nostalgia per se, but point taken. Edit: I just watched the video Combat Lobster posted. gently caress this game. I have no words to describe what I just saw. Explopyro fucked around with this message at 21:10 on Feb 9, 2019 |
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Feb 9, 2019 21:06
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 what the gently caress did I just watchThis game is loving creepy on so many levels. I don't know what else to say about it.
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Apr 5, 2019 20:35
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Drakenel posted:This, basically. It really is a maturity thing. While people write all the time about experiences they've never had, as it's very common to take different perspectives through the lens of empathy, there's no real substitute for experiencing things first hand. Him getting mad about it shows that he doesn't really understand the material he's trying to write about. While I'm not going to argue with this general sentiment, I think someone has to say this. Do we know what he was trying to write about? When it's not being creepy and gross, this game is so loving incoherent that I find it genuinely incomprehensible. It doesn't have a plot, just a sequence of events that happen because the devs/writers want them to (and even then, fails to give a lot of them even the barest attempt at a justification); the most interesting question to ask about most of the events in this game is "why the gently caress did the devs want them?". There's a sense in which it also doesn't have characters, because for the most part these people don't act in consistent ways and often say bizarre things because the writers force them to, or else just demonstrate their gimmick (the only one who's at all consistent is Alex, and he's just consistent about being awful). Most of this is just... here. "I'm a lovely writer, therefore good writing is impossible! Waah!" is a hell of a thing to believe. He may as well just say "Hi! I'm self-absorbed and narcissistic! Validate me!"
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Apr 20, 2019 23:07
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Wow, that's even more painful to listen to than I'd anticipated. Ironically, even whilst talking about how unlikeable Alex is supposed to be and how the audience couldn't comprehend that with their puny brains, he sounds exactly like Alex.
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Apr 21, 2019 04:54
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Well, that's all kinds of gross. But I honestly can't say it's that surprising to me that people involved in making this game turned out to be abusive misogynistic shits, all things considered.TheGreatEvilKing posted:I'm not sure what the gently caress yiik's politics are tbh. It has moments that seem almost like it wants to be woke (Chondra on racism, gay "romance" option) but then ping pongs to Alex hating women. I honestly think its only coherent political statement is "women are objects".
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Apr 21, 2019 21:04
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It could be interesting to try to do a "how could this be fixed" post, I for one would be interested in seeing it (I've seen a lot of very good attempts at this with other instances of bad writing etc), but I'm not sure there's really anything to work with in Yiik.TheGreatEvilKing posted:Then I think about it and mostly its incoherent. If we take out the Elisa Lam stuff, is it still Yiik? (No). If we make Alex someone genuinely trying to help others but being a dick because he's frustrated that he can't make a real difference, is it still Yiik? gently caress no, that character is written as a sociopath. You sure can't remove the nonsensical metaphysics, that's half the dialogue. I think this is pretty much on the nose. There might be one or two concepts you could salvage, but Yiik's core identity is so tied to everything that's awful about it that you wouldn't be so much fixing it as just writing something else. As much as the core ideology of Yiik is incoherent (as we've noticed when trying to pin down what exactly it's trying to say), I think it's still very much an ideological story tied to saying that very incoherent nonsense. There's no way to fix it without making it say something else, at which point it's no longer itself.
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Apr 23, 2019 16:47
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Wow, he's an idiot. I mean, we knew this, but it bears repeating. His explanation is utter word salad. Reading that, I'm genuinely at a loss as to whether he failed to understand postmodernism, or whether he just doesn't know that words (or, for that matter, things like symbolic elements) mean things at all. He seems to genuinely think that if you mimic the surface and stylistic elements of a thing, that's the same as being the thing; put differently, he seems to think that postmodernism is just a name for these various aesthetic elements. Whatever postmodernism is, it isn't that. Whatever you happen to think of postmodernism (and the fact is, it's a term that gets misused quite frequently; I'll admit it was a bit of a shock to me to learn what it actually is when my first encounter with the word was people like Richard Dawkins sneering at a strawman of it), it was an intellectual/philosophical/critical movement that had things to say about things like the ways we process information, tell stories and think about things. Allanson doesn't even rise to the level of engaging with straw-postmodernism. He's just doing a cargo-cult imitation, and thinks that makes him look deep or something. The Dunning-Kruger effect is alive and well.
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Apr 23, 2019 23:02
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I am definitely liking the "WarioWare is postmodern" angle also. I'm not entirely convinced, but I think there's definitely something there. (The plot is literally "these games exist because of capitalism and greed, and they've been made with minimal effort, but you're still going to play them", isn't it?)
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Apr 24, 2019 00:28
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I was going to bring up Undertale also. The idea of asking the player to interrogate their own cultural assumptions about the medium seems like it fits right into that space.
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Apr 26, 2019 20:28
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"We're one in the same." That's an actual line from this game. Oh dear. ...it happened again. They seriously think that's the correct phrase. AAAAUGH. I know there are things more worth complaining about here, but that's a pet peeve of mine. Ugh. I'd say "get someone competent to proofread your drat writing" but in a case like this, if they had, they'd have been told to scrap the whole thing so I doubt that's a viable solution. Still. When we got to the scene with the two people in chairs and that dialogue began, the first thing that went through my mind was this: "does the climax of this game really come down to 'believe the man over the woman, you know that's the right thing to do'?" I'm still not sure that isn't what it was trying to say, given everything else we've seen in this game so far. I agree with everyone else that this game is basically narcissism personified. Or, perhaps more specifically, narcissism as filtered through a lens of Gamerbro. Watching the credits... Cassandra Khaw was involved in this? Noticed her name go by, I wonder what she did. I recognise her name because she wrote for the storyline of Magic: the Gathering; I don't actually know anything else about her, but just like Toby Fox it's weird seeing the names of people who've worked on things that were Actually Good or at least Okay showing up in this garbage. (Okay, I didn't actually like the stories Khaw wrote for Magic that much, but they weren't Awful, I just wasn't fond of the prose style. That's a different kind of complaint.)
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May 3, 2019 00:16
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I'm really not sure what remains to be said about this game at this point, but I feel like I need to say something after having seen all of it. This game is gross. It is also incoherent, and the ending(s) made that worse, but honestly that pales in comparison to the creepiness and the fetishisation of an actual dead woman, as I think we've already said many times before. I would thank you for showing it off at least, because this game needed to be torn apart, but on some level I wish I had never seen it so that's a bit difficult. Still, you deserve a medal for suffering through this for us. 
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May 5, 2019 16:02
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Not quite. the video description posted:The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a compendium of invented words written by John Koenig. Each original definition aims to fill a hole in the language—to give a name to emotions we all might experience but don’t yet have a word for. Follow the project, give feedback, suggest an emotion you need a word for, or just tell me about your day. This may well be where  got the word from, but it doesn't seem to be in proper dictionaries. (Further on down in the video description it says they literally created it as a portmanteau of 'onanism' and 'monism' so, well, the jokes about onanism in the LP were somewhat prescient.)
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May 8, 2019 04:16
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Of course there's plagiarism. Of bloody course there is. I have no idea what to say about the Rory thing now that I've seen it. I think it's pretty drat disgusting that Rory says, essentially, "I think it was probably inevitable, so don't blame yourself" when the game itself literally contradicts this. Rory's suicide is not, in fact, inevitable in the continuity of the game, because whether it happens is literally determined by a choice Alex makes. And then it has no actual narrative consequences, Rory just... isn't there. Which suggests that the game doesn't value his character enough to make him matter, if the plot doesn't have anything to do with him. Now, in real life I'm sure it's theoretically possible for someone who's already experiencing suicidal ideation to decide to make an attempt after some (relatively minor) incident that just happens to feed that impulse. But it seems especially tasteless for a game to do this and make that hinge on the player's actions. And then Alex goes on to monologue and make the whole thing about himself, because of course he does (and Rory's ghost spends more time telling Alex not to blame himself than talking about his own mental state or anything to do with his own character). I'm rambling and I don't know how coherent this is, but goddamn.
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May 20, 2019 19:40
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Wow, that was stupid and unearned. Even if we think it's real, which... I'm genuinely not sure. It's definitely the real game assets and such, but it'd be a lot of effort for someone other than the original creators to make this; at the same time, there's a level of self-awareness here (even if incredibly badly written) that would surprise me if it's actually coming from Allanson. And as others have already pointed out, this video doesn't show how to actually access it, so even if it is by Allanson and/or the Yiik team generally, it's fairly likely not to actually be in the game as it was released and accessible to players. It wouldn't at all be surprising if this was yet another attempt to invalidate the critical dislike for the game, by incorporating a response to some of the criticism and trying to claim they intended this all along. I don't think this actually changes anything, really. This is yet another failed mess of bad writing on top of what was already a pile of basically nothing else. I'm not sure why anyone should have expected anything different. Die as you lived, Yiik.
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Aug 26, 2019 16:57
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