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Oh my gosh, this is hecking rad!! I love the format, the interplay between the characters, your insight into S&M and yourself, your take on game dev, and especially I love your definition of masochism…. Wow, a lot for me to think about here!

I hope you keep enjoying making these wonderful games and that you keep making them! 🐈✨

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I got there completely by accident, but i really like your storytelling and your humor. Even though this theme seems not interesting for me at all, i finished this game and read everything and actually had fun, thanks!

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I'm not sure if this is on-topic or not, but maybe you will find it interesting (I hope!). Because I've myself thought of games in a sense of domination/submission for a long time now.

Basically I think the view of games that a majority of games players and games discoursers have is one where the player is to always take a dominant role (might be misleading to call it 'sadistic'...) and this is assumed to be the only form of game design to strive for. So any game that challenges this dichotomy by wasting their time or misleading them or such is considered 'flawed'.

And a lot of people who think like that would question why I like games that do waste my time, that mess with me or make me go through repetitive or annoying sections. And I think the answer is the same as "real" (person-to-person) masochism - it's all to do with trust. A game asks me to do something and I trust it to let me feel annoyance or tedium or whatever, because we have that kind of relationship. I go through the tedious part happily because of this. I guess you can apply that to any art that asks you to go through traditionally "negative" emotions, but of course games are more intimate since you are a participant.

This might be the core of the entire way I think about games - I've summed it up with "gamers need to be more willing to let the game be the dominant one in the relationship" before - but it's hard to get people to understand that I'm not talking about 'difficulty'. My favorite games aren't even hard at all, they just ask you to trust them and not give up when they put something that *seems* ridiculous in front of you. They *want* you to succeed, and you always will if you keep playing because you allow them to make you do these ridiculous things. That's very different than a normal kind of hard game where you're expected to defeat it through your own skill and power, which often does end up empowering yourself over the game by the end of it (I just realized I always like the early parts of these games, where youre getting easily beat up, more than the later parts...).

As for myself, I don't have vivid fantasies at all, but I can see the masochism in me. Sometimes it's kind of messy and unhealthy in my mind, but maybe in an ideal world I could understand it better.

Oopsie, I typed so much. I hope what I said doesn't come off badly.

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It doesn't come off badly at all, I'm really happy to get interesting comments like this!

Thinking about it more, I think some players do expect games to "serve" them, by providing them with a certain kind of "fun", and get frustrated or bored when their expectations aren't met. On the other hand, some players go into games with minimal preconceived notions, and let the game guide them and shape their expectations as they play.

These loosely correspond to dominant and submissive roles, but actually, it also reminded me of something interesting. I remember seeing a pro-domme complain about submissive clients who approach her with really hyper-specific expectations for a scene, or sometimes even a script, and get disappointed when it doesn't live up to their fantasies!

So I think people can have either one of these mindsets in different contexts, regardless of whether they tend more towards being dominant or submissive. I myself have probably approached some games with that "dominant" mindset, especially when I've heard a lot about them before playing. But I definitely really like to let games surprise me and twist my expectations, and I like designing that kind of game as well.

This also makes me think of the discourse around playing rereleases of older games that have emulator-style features like savestates and rewind. Is it a submissive act to ignore these modern conveniences and play those old games on their own terms? I definitely don't think it's wrong to use these features, but I've noticed some people get a bit of an attitude about it, like "I paid for the game, so I'm entitled to see all the content". What if I don't want to show you all my levels and bosses?! I'm too shy >_<

I think I'm rambling and running out of things to say now, but I want to thank you again for leaving such a thoughtful comment!