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Last night I had a dream that I was playing a Metroidvania game starring Kirby. The game was stylized and gorgeous, sort of like Hollow Knight. Unlike Hollow Knight, it had a Kirby level ease of gameplay.
The difficulty of the game was that its story and imagery were uniquely upsetting, and the challenge of moving forward was sort of a Shadow of the Colossus situation in that what you were expected to do was awful. The gameplay mechanics were complicated in the way that dreams (and actual games) often are, but the basic idea was that you were solving puzzles to create situations in which people would feel compelled to commit suicide. Once they killed themselves, you had to flee their vengeful ghosts as you transported the essences of their souls to a sacrificial altar. When you collected enough souls, you would grow powerful enough to devour the world and become a god.
Let me be real with you, it was a fun game.
I'm a hardcore moral relativist, but something that's never been up for debate with me is that it's not okay to try to get someone to commit suicide. It's also not okay to attempt to justify someone else's attempts to get someone to commit suicide. This may seem obvious, but I've lost real friends because I feel so strongly about this. Like, I refuse to be friends with anyone who thinks concrete acts of suicide baiting targeted at an actual person are in any way justifiable.
That being said, the entire year of 2018 changed my personal relationship to suicide. Now that I'm on the other side of that experience (I hope), I think suicide is funny in the same way I think the dead baby jokes that came out of the 1990s are funny. Some things are just so miserable and awful and ridiculous that you can't help but laugh at them, and what may seem like poor taste to someone on the outside of that experience can actually be deeply therapeutic to someone who's closer to it.
Still, maybe it might be a good idea to drop the suicide references if I decide to explore this idea.
The difficulty of the game was that its story and imagery were uniquely upsetting, and the challenge of moving forward was sort of a Shadow of the Colossus situation in that what you were expected to do was awful. The gameplay mechanics were complicated in the way that dreams (and actual games) often are, but the basic idea was that you were solving puzzles to create situations in which people would feel compelled to commit suicide. Once they killed themselves, you had to flee their vengeful ghosts as you transported the essences of their souls to a sacrificial altar. When you collected enough souls, you would grow powerful enough to devour the world and become a god.
Let me be real with you, it was a fun game.
I'm a hardcore moral relativist, but something that's never been up for debate with me is that it's not okay to try to get someone to commit suicide. It's also not okay to attempt to justify someone else's attempts to get someone to commit suicide. This may seem obvious, but I've lost real friends because I feel so strongly about this. Like, I refuse to be friends with anyone who thinks concrete acts of suicide baiting targeted at an actual person are in any way justifiable.
That being said, the entire year of 2018 changed my personal relationship to suicide. Now that I'm on the other side of that experience (I hope), I think suicide is funny in the same way I think the dead baby jokes that came out of the 1990s are funny. Some things are just so miserable and awful and ridiculous that you can't help but laugh at them, and what may seem like poor taste to someone on the outside of that experience can actually be deeply therapeutic to someone who's closer to it.
Still, maybe it might be a good idea to drop the suicide references if I decide to explore this idea.
