Today (October 16) is my birthday.
It’s the day after polls for IFComp are done, which may be a bit too early to write up a postmortem. I have no idea how the game is received in the competition, but I’ve received enough reviews and commentary that there’s enough material to help me reflect on the game, what it means to me and others, and so on.
And being the birthday nonbinary, I believe, allows oneself to be egoistic without criticism. So, without further ado:
Before the Bomb Dropped
I was in Japan studying Japanese for three months. While I was interested in the language, there was a part of me that felt alienated from the entire experience. It felt like I was masking, pretending that I was someone who I’m not.
It was exhausting especially when the news events we’re reading to improve our reading comprehension dealt with LGBTQ+ issues. My teachers were not equipped to discuss such issues, and there’s a clear divide between the older people who think trans people are a joke and the younger people who are well-intentioned but not truly getting what’s happening in the community.
I had to channel my disillusionment elsewhere: there was a competition called the Toxic Yuri Jam, which was organized by people I knew. It was already underway, but I had an amusing idea that I could work on and help me destress from what’s happening in the country. That game would be called Uranium Gays, a shitpost game incorporating RPG Maker 2000 aesthetics and a ridiculous premise where girls having good sex will create toxic radiation.
The game was a success. It was extremely short compared to the other entries, the humor resonated with people, and everyone had a good time. Some people even saw a deeper meaning into the game, which I didn’t see: I only captured a few elements of the trans experience in order to tell a story that exaggerated the transphobia of today, but people saw it as more truthful than so-called real art. It was a strange phenomena, but fine: I used it as therapy and if people enjoyed it, that’s a bonus.
Then, the Itch takedown happened. Many games were delisted and others removed entirely. Uranium Gays was temporarily delisted, going from one of the most popular games to virtually unknown in a matter of seconds. I wrote about this experience in that game’s postmortem if you are curious, but suffice to say it was frustrating.
As this was all happening, I started to lose it in class. I tried to remain calm, but my classmates and teachers knew my composure was a bit off. As I received interviews about the event, I told the people around me about what was happening. They were sympathetic especially when I asked for advice if I was ever interviewed by a Japanese journalist (I didn’t), but they were also indifferent: once I entered the classroom, I was just a student and I should take solace in that.
I understood the intent, but I still detested that. As I was mindlessly going through class, I started thinking about IFComp 2025 and whether I should submit something to it. As mentioned in another thread, I was hesitant because I wanted to have my first entry be a banger. But that public relations part of my brain was turned off as everything around me told to just be quiet and follow the curriculum.
And I said to myself, “You know what: I’m gonna make this silly game in just a month.”
This Silly Game as Essay
So, what is this silly game exactly? Everyone more or less agrees it isn’t a “subtle game”, something to do with intimacy and censorship. It’s also apparently very funny, which I won’t comment on – comedy is subjective. But I sense that they disagree on its form and structure, thus creating ripples of differences in how they perceive the work.
Let’s then take a tour through what has been written of the game during the competition period. Cerfeuil wrote in their review,
It feels like this story wasn’t planned out in intricate detail, and the author wrote it off the cuff. As a result, there are many wonderful and blackly comedic bits of worldbuilding that feel like they were tossed in almost arbitrarily … But the details didn’t quite cohere for me, and the overall effect is rather slapdash. The story doesn’t take itself that seriously, which made it difficult for me to take it that seriously.
There is some truth to this. I came up with the premise on a walk from the supermarket as I was thinking up a spiritual successor to Uranium Gays. People who’ve read my games have noted that I often make follow-ups to previous games without realizing, and I’ve embraced that: I wanted to make something very quickly and building on things that I know worked in the past.
That said, the game was directly inspired by the Nukitashi duology. This visual novel series imagines the sex island setting but actually realized in Japan: what are the political implications of this? How can this tackle the infamously low fertility rate of Japan? How did the Japanese state turn this island with people already living there into something that works for them? It approaches all these political questions with the humor of American Pie and builds upon these implications and humor to create a strong message about sexuality and censorship.
As such, I quite like jkj’s description of my game’s structure:
The story has a “stack-popping” nature, whereby various “worlds” are popped, rather like waking from a series of nested dreams.
I certainly thought that I was writing something like pulp fiction. I was thinking of Lester Dent’s Pulp Fiction Formula as I was drafting the game: you gotta “shovel more grief” to the protagonist. The only advice I didn’t follow was try to not make it weird. A. E. Van Vogt’s writing approach also comes to mind too: he changes scenes like rapidly changing dreams. I read The World of Null-A quite recently, and the story was so bizarre that I enjoyed the journey if it made no sense at all.
But this approach has its issues, especially for someone who doesn’t write pulp fiction that much. Bruno Dias has correctly noted that “it struggles to maintain its energy throughout”, and he found the shift too “tonally harsh” as a result. It’s a shame as what I intended is closer to how Mike Russo describes his experience with the game:
… while each segment of the game is very clear in its themes and they all mesh together quite neatly, the narrative manages to swerve as much as it escalates, broadening and complicating its dialectics at the same time it keeps its high cards for last.
This was such an interesting observation for me. I knew going in, the game was about this and that. But I also wanted to complicate the picture, to allow new angles on the subject matter. How would an asexual person live in this setting? Are their opinions valuable, even important to a work like it? I should know, I’m gray ace. When Tabitha playtested the game, ey brought up how they agreed with the overall message of the game (in particular, the school section) but em’s thoughts are not represented. I wanted to incorporate viewpoints that might clash with the thesis, allowing the reader to navigate this complicated web of ideas and themes that’s supposed to be a blunt and simple story.
I think this is why Dias refers to NAKED HUMAN BOMBS as “this really brash piece of gonzo queer storytelling”. It’s a “really interesting mess” because it is so highly personal to him. No wonder reviewing such a game may feel like “poking and prodding at someone’s spilled guts on the floor”.
But while I recognize the tendencies to view this game as a personal game and won’t disagree, I like to push back a little and say that the game first started off as something like an essay on why I don’t feel at ease with the censorship of pornography. I kept rewriting, retouching, and revisiting the ideas inside the game: why do I feel so uncomfortable about how people talk about sexuality in hushed tones? Why does one need to search for the LGBTQ+ shelf in order to find authors who are queer? Is the normative a world that removed the concept of sexuality entirely? These questions troubled me, hence I explored them in great fictional detail.
I’m not at all interested in writing a coherent narrative with pertinent ideas. If anything, it’s the opposite: I wrote about a thought I have, with the narrative as one of the tools for this essay. I accept all the criticisms of the narrative structure, the lack of polish, and the lack of believability in the setting since they’ve never been part of my priority.
I wanted to know what I thought about intimacy.
What Do I Actually Know About Intimacy?
When Victor Gijsberg suggested that the game “is an allegory for a particular way of thinking about sex”, it was so profound to me yet so obvious. I wasn’t sure what I was making – I admitted as much on the Neo-Interactives Discord as the deadline approached – but I think Gijsberg describing my game as an exploration of a certain paradigm on sexuality opened up so many neural pathways for me.
His read of the game brings up how the wish-fulfillment found in the game (i.e. sex and fetishes) do not necessarily translate to intimacy. He emphasizes,
Crucially, intimacy is never mere wish-fulfillment. It essentially requires a vulnerability that is more than physical; a working through of problems, both our own and those of the other person; and the terrifying work of self-knowledge. You can’t get it for free.
This is where I must again admit ignorance of what I’ve actually made. But there are times when the critics and the readers are able to peer into the work better than the artist: I remember how the creative director of 1000xRESIST said they truly got what they were doing after reading my article, and I now feel the same about this game.
So, that’s what the game is about. That’s so obvious, duh.
I’ve never believed I had original, profound ideas. The games I’ve made are all inferior copies or shallow rehashes of things I’ve loved throughout my life. If there is something I can use from my life, it wouldn’t be my own experiences or wants but what I’ve seen and read about.
I think it has to do with the fact that I’ve been writing reviews since I was a teenager. I enjoyed rereading, analyzing, and critiquing works, but I don’t actually know how to create. I can only retell like a child explaining the plot of a movie they’ve watched to their parents. And this mentality is now part of my creative process.
My works are, in a word, derivative of the world I live in. Like Roland Barthes in his inaugural speech, “I must admit that I have produced only essays, an ambiguous genre in which analysis vies with writing.”
But I’ve been reading about theories on essayistic thinking in preparation for my new game. Theodor Adorno proselytized the value of essay-writing in many different ways in “The Essay as Form”, but the most valuable sections to me render the unoriginality of essays as exciting and freeing:
Instead of accomplishing scientifically or creating something artistically, its [essays’] efforts reflect the childlike person who has no qualms about taking his inspiration from what others have done before him. The essay reflects what is loved and hated instead of presenting the mind as creation ex nihilio on the model of an unrestrained work ethic.
This sounds like he is chastising the essay form, and he is to a degree. But this childlike enjoyment of writing allows people to try out ideas and techniques that would be taboo in a more scientific or artistic creation. He notes that when authors note the “flaws” of their essay, it isn’t merely self-deprecation but a recognition of their limits. It is their subjectivity, themselves on the paper. You read their equivocations, their ums and ahs, their trains of thought contradicting each other, etc.
This is heresy. What happened to good narrative, good design, good argument? But it is precisely this transgression that excites me about essays. Adorno is on the money here:
Even in its manner of delivery the essay refuses to behave as though it had deduced its object and had exhausted the topic. Self-relativization is immanent in its form; it must be constructed in such a way that it could always, and at any point, break off. It thinks in fragments just as reality is fragmented and gains its unity only by moving through the fissures, rather than by smoothing them over. The unanimity of the logical order deceives us about the antagonistic nature of that on which it was jauntily imposed. Discontinuity is essential to the essay; its concern is always a conflict brought to a standstill. (emphasis mine)
I don’t have strong ideas on sexuality. I’m just an essayist, a plagiarizer of science and the arts. I’m remixing these ideas, moving through these fissures, and hoping I find something out of this strange odyssey.
Put another way, essaying is the way I learn about things. Max Bense’s’ “On the Essay and Its Prose” concludes that essaying comes from our need to experiment and learn about the world. This methodology is not deductive, it is experimental. You’re just trying out everything out that sounds interesting to you.
This is why I found it fascinating that Gijsberg was able to find a thesis in all this experimentation, one that resounds throughout the work. I was, of course, thinking about intimacy and the lack of as I explored what an anti-sexuality world will look like. But as I poured my experimentation, the game is very much a distillation of what I know and don’t know about the world of sexuality. Here are all the myths and the truths I have bottled up in my brain, laid out on my game.
And to me, it reads like I still don’t get it after everything. I made the game and even thought why I made the game, but my “satire” lacks a concrete target. If there is an enemy, it is the conformist need to shape every subjectivity/perspective into the same, lifeless body. If we reveal a little bit of our skin/subjectivity, others will explode. All forms of intimacy – sexuality, essayistic, or otherwise – remain suppressed, passe, and too nonconformist for people’s taste. And I’ve absorbed too much of that to be any different.
The most value I have completing a work is reading what others have perceived in my own experimentation. I am always curious about how people read my works when I’m so self-absorbed, so unsure if my thoughts truly matter in the long term. I’m not seeking validation per se, just critical engagement so I can make sense of what I have derived from the world.
It is not an exaggeration to say that I’ve learned about how I understood intimacy from the way others talk about my work. The few inklings I have about my work are finally elucidated by the people who’ve read, rated, and written about it. So, thank you for reading my work and even writing about it. I make games in order to understand the craft and by extension myself, so it’s nice to see precise insights on myself via the criticism of craft and writing techniques.
Is This Really a Postmortem?: A Conclusion
I’m not sure how my game will be received in the IFComp. I would be pleased wherever I place as long as it is above a chat prompt. I was never intending to win the competition, maybe the Golden Banana yes but that’s likely going to be Violent Delights. That title deserves it.
At the moment, the game is highly rated by IFDB standards as it sits comfortably on 4 stars. Perhaps, I might place higher than I expected. In that case, I’d like to use the money I get from IFComp to purchase more solo tabletop RPGs to explore game design.
But other than that, I feel reinvigorated reflecting on my game and what I think of its process. I don’t know if it will clear up misconceptions and ambiguities that people may have on the game, but it crystalized a vision of the kind of games I want to make moving forward.
I’m interested in making interactive fiction that may be narrative-driven or gameplay-driven, but the keyword is “may”. I don’t mind throwing narrative and gameplay down the cliff as long as I can explore the ideas that’s been nagging my brain.
I am fascinated by the conceit of so-called essay films, a genre where people would explore an aspect in their home movies, archival footage, and whatnot with film production to talk about what they think of something. The works of Chris Marker (Letters from Siberia) and Agnes Varda (The Gleaners and I) are good examples, but I’ve recently watched Blue by the late Derek Jarman and the way it explored HIV/AIDS and loss so moved me. In order to distinguish the movies that talked about HIV/AIDS as a spectacle, from the viewpoint of an outsider, Jarman made the movie as an insider, articulating the disease inside his body:
To make a film about illness is dangerous because the parameters of any epidemic change rapidly. So far the films we have seen articulate from outside. Since the virus is essentially invisible, the Blue reflects it more accurately.
Another movie that really resonated with me was Tongues Untied, a film composed of poetry and performance art relating to the Black gay male experience. “My body contains as much anger as water”, one of the performer says. I like that line a lot. I wonder how long the poet took to find that line. I cannot imagine it. I hope I can approximate my anger and grief the same way he did.
I’m not sure how postmortems are supposed to go, despite reading and writing them multiple times already. But I guess I’m describing the ways I’m going to move on from this work, one of the methods I use to cope with death and trauma. All I know is that I want to essay through the medium of games, and I hope that this exploration allows a message to emerge that others can read and then untangle with me.
I don’t have anything insightful to say about the world and the future, but I am pretty confident in the breadth of subject matter I have and I want to invite you to explore this junkyard of ideas that is my consciousness. Maybe, we can find some treasure together like in silly games like 3XXX: NAKED HUMAN BOMBS. Or maybe, we don’t. But whatever happens, I hope it’s fun to read as it is fun to write for me.