sev @sev@witches.town

@KoBunny sock dreams also sells a bunch of different sock garters; some of them adjust long enough to go around thighs. the ones I have are super-sturdy and functional but they've got prettier ones, too.

oh, hello, intense social anxiety. You're right on time.

You kept me home this time last year but dammit this year we're going to do something different. I've been immersing in solitude for days and now it's time to give some other parts of me a chance.

@starkatt https://radiatoryang.itch.io/hurt-me-plenty

@starkatt I'm glad too! My game design discussion muscles are rusty; I haven't done this in awhile. :)

I presume you've heard about Robert Yang's Hurt Me Plenty? I think I recall people Losing Their Shit when the game responds to a consent violation by locking the player out of the game entirely.

@starkatt The story I got was "womanizing cad gets what she deserves" where "deserves" means "gets the crap consensually and pleasurably beaten out of her" & that turned out to be super-enjoyable. But I got there because there were several points in the first day where the narrative explicitly pointed out that it would be in-character to not worry about the points at all, and I latched on to that and ran with it.

@starkatt Yeah, I can see how moving back and forth between those threads makes for an incoherent narrative.

@starkatt for me they ... inform each other? The mechanics provide boundaries for the narrative, so I work to avoid the lose condition (which I assumed was the Suspicion mechanic).

@starkatt I think when we chose to manipulate people in order to score points, we felt like assholes -- which holds in real life, too.

You're not wrong -- nothing you've said in this discussion, either today w/me or previously -- is incorrect. The game totally has lots of places where the mechanical reward isn't synchronized with good behavior.

@starkatt That wasn't how I responded to it?

I have this conversation periodically with my game design friends and they tell me that I have fun in spite of the rules instead of because of them, so this might be a recurring problem for me.

I picked the option that sounded the most fun to me, and the points helped me make decisions when the fun wasn't obvious.

@starkatt yeah, my take on it was: this game totally gives me the option to be gross and skeevy! I don't think that means the game doesn't treat consent meaningfully -- but I also don't feel like something needs to have mechanics attached to it in order for it to be important in a game & I know not everybody agrees with that.

Given my particular proclivities I felt generously rewarded for choosing to walk away from the Hacker. But somebody's who's not a piggy bottom would have a different experience, I'm sure.

@starkatt I don't think I missed out by doing one night with the hacker & the rest with the Beauty,. I think I would have been less pleased had I done them half-=and-half... though the Hacker content is significantly more boring.

But there was no way to tell that beforehand.

@starkatt that was my response to the first night. Actually, it was "this is exactly why I stopped kissing drunk straight girls" but, yes.

@starkatt There's a statement in the structure of the game about which parts of the consent discussion are no-brainers, and I like that, because the line is drawn in a different place than most other stuff I've seen -- better than average and also better than feminism 101.

But I think I'm glad that consent wasn't gamified at all -- I made the diecision not to go back to the Hacker's room because the first night skeeved me out, but the game doesn't penalize that choice.

@starkatt ...so I can totally see how a middle-ground playthrough could get you both the questionable-consent content from the hacker but also the opportunities for the protagonist to moralize about consent during the day, and that sounds like that's the experience you had.

And I'm still bothered by the contrast between the clear labelling of being-a-jerk (complete with color-coding!) for the daytime content vs. not, for the who-to-sleep-with choice. (also, no "neither" choice was uncomfortable.)

@starkatt I felt like the flashback structure really let me off the hook with regards to how much my choices matter (though a second playthrough suggests they mattered more than I thought they would).

In my second playthrough, where I was purposely going for points above other goals, I didn't feel like the game was trying to tell me I was still in the land of properly negotiated consent.

But my first time through I got a bunch of the "I'm a good person" content and a lot less of the manipulative jerk -- just that first night with the Hacker, which felt so iffy I didn't go back again...

@starkatt and second, I took the framing as an explicit signal that the protagonist was a person-of-questionable-morality, and came at it as a piece of interactive-fiction rather than a roleplaying experience where I was supposed to have agency. Which I think gave me some distance?

@starkatt so, I finished my initial playthrough of LKiaB & then I went back to reread what you'd written about it & I think I see at least some of why we had such different experiences of it. For one, I never went back to the Hacker's room after the first, mostly-chaste visit.

Looking back at the game, I find it really *weird* at how carefully the game labels the moral choices for daytime scenes -- but never for the choice-of-where-you-spend-the-night. Most of the conversational options come with an explicitly-labeled judgement, even more often than they come with game-mechanics-guidance. But late-night comes only with the mechanics.

aw, c'mon, now my lunch is just fucking with me https://witches.town/media/EJgDWo-jQniuqPA9viU

playing the sexy IF when my lovers are out of town ... I've made more foolish decisions, but I'm definitely too distracted to think of when, just now.

I would like to stop being *surprised* when I find that a clothing brand only makes clothes up to $my_size, that will be too small even if that size fits me in other brands.

This whine brought to you by me returning yet another pair of shorts that doesn't fit and doesn't come any bigger. (and omg would somebody please make shorts for fat girls that aren't butt-ugly. Sigh. Another summer of skirts, it appears.)