(no subject)

I’ve never understood what it means when people say they’re “queer as in Magneto was right.” If I actually thought Magneto was right, I wouldn’t use the word “queer” in the first place. I mean, I don’t think cis gay people are inherently better-equipped to understand nonbinary identities than cis straight people are. And there are certainly individual gay people who are bigoted against everyone else under the “queer” umbrella. But the reason I use “queer” is because I think people who are different from each other are generally capable of understanding each other. I want to build alliances, and “queer” is a broad term with which to do that.

I tried playing AI: The Somnium Files

I’m thinking about that old Jeff Vogel post about how Persona 5 has good variance in tones: http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2017/08/persona-5-cartoon-cats-depthless-evil.html One point he makes is that even though the game has both humorous and horrific elements, it picks some elements that are always horrific, and it never trivializes them. Even when it makes light of its villains for their outsized self-importance, it’s serious about the consequences of their actions, and the price paid by those around them.

Well, I’d like to draw a contrast. On my first path through The Somnium Files, I watched an unarmed youth desperately fight off a knife-wielding serial killer. He failed and got brutally murdered. I later found his mother crying while staring at a picture of him, but she refused to talk to me because she blamed me for his death.

On my second path through The Somnium Files, I distracted a group of mercenaries by blowing up a vending machine full of porn magazines. They were so excited by the porn scattered everywhere that they forgot to keep shooting at me.

So is this the kind of game where the bad guys always miss, and fighting for your life is just a fun adventure? Or is this the kind of game where fighting has realistic consequences? Who the hell knows? Certainly not me, because I don’t care enough to keep playing this.