a cat made of ones and zeroes

Check out the kickstarter for TUG, an indie open-world-sandbox/multiplayer RPG -- they're still a ways off from their goal and the kickstarter closes at the end of the month, and they're trying to do such cool things. I want to play this game so much.

Like -- here's a post on how exploring the world and discovering fragments of history is intended to be a key part of the experience. A+ nerd lure.

And then here's a post on creating diversity of character type and refusing to go the route of "a white male muscle-bound lunkhead or a scantily clad woman." Hell yes.

...Then just because the designs are adorable check out the posts on companion creatures and the local wildlife. I want one of those surly ram-bears so much.

Funding tiers start at only $10, and you get a playable copy of the game for that pledge. This team is trying to do so many neat things, and as I post this they still need another $40k to reach their goal. Please pledge if you can, and signal boost if you know people who'd be interested!

I will be over here trying to decide if I can afford to up my pledge to $45 and get the BABY SABRE TOOTH TIGER PET omg

Last night I finished Alice!

( FEELINGS and also PLOT ELEMENTS but mostly FEELINGS )

So I've been playing Rune Factory lately, on the bus and sometimes in the evenings when someone else is using a console. It's a farming sim, a game by the same people who made Harvest Moon only with the addition of dungeons and monsters. It's a quiet little game, and really good for the part of my brain that's soothed by accomplishing a lot of small tasks -- watering the field, gathering the crops, chopping wood, crafting items.

Mostly I find I have to not think about it on any analytical levels to get much out of it, though; it's very simple, story-wise, which means it does stuff like establish oppositions between Good Agrarian Kingdom and Evil Technological Empire...and it sets up one of the major goals in the game as "marry one of the girls in town."

So, you know, this means that every girl of a remotely appropriate age is a potential match for the player character; each one fits a fairly generic "type" and has a set of conditions you have to fulfill to raise her "love points" until it becomes possible to propose to her. There are a number of events in the town's social calendar on which boys are supposed to give particular items to girls as courtship rituals. So far as I can tell, it is entirely a one-way affair -- boys do/give/demonstrate, girls simply have conditions that must be met.

None of the game's mechanics are all that complex, so it's not really a surprise that the relationship dynamics function this way. But it still leaves me a little restless, and half tempted to write fic against the heteronormativity -- to just queer that little town as much as I can, because you know, we do happen even in little farm towns. I did.

( hypothetically speaking )