I still think Chris Avellone is responsible for what I think is the biggest creative breakthrough/insight in his field - "Games are inherently a 'meta' medium and a smart game must be a meta game" Ironically, that's exactly why I can't separate his games from him being a creep
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*Any kind of game*, and this subtle ugliness of how games work is much more insidious in a cutesy dating sim than a violent war game about blowing up buildings Which Avellone was self-aware about, and why he was skeeved out by Bioware companion romances
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But hey, it turned out he knew whereof he spoke Because that's how he treated his whole career and the women in it A game of Rock Star Game Dev Simulator where you can try to bed every woman you meet as a sidequest for XP
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And the game might be this gloomy thing about being a self loathing tortured alcoholic but you're still the main character and so no matter how many times this ends in disaster you might as well shoot your shot each time because hey there might be content behind that skill gate
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Just like the Nameless One, being this apparently unstoppable endlessly respawning menace blundering thoughtlessly through countless people's lives leaving a trail of carnage in your wake Treating them all as learning experiences you somehow never learn from
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The design doc for Torment was this ridiculous fratboy leering sexist thing ("Blonde babes, undead babes, demon babes, Asian babes") And I always thought the character of Deionarra was him transcending this toxic game bro culture he was coming from, indicting and condemning it
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Lolsob and the whole core mechanic of Torment with the amnesia and the past lives and the alternate personae is really just this complicated fantasy metaphor for "Wow I must've been drunk again"
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(So much of this fantasy and horror stuff is just a metaphor for booze Like the magic potion in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is just alcohol You can translate the whole story into just "He became an alcoholic")
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even games The Hunter: Call of the Wild lean pretty hard on this, surprisingly nominally it's just a realistic hunting simulator but it's also implicitly a fantasy of being so preposterously rich you can wander around a vast game park minutely catered to your interests
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the game warden voice in your ear is friendly, collegial, but also on some level subservient: she's an extremely expensive concierge, there to make your experience entirely frictionless to serve you without ever mentioning that she's there to serve you
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