25. "- I have this in my head for my next game, though we are not a farming game. We still have the basic game loop of accumulating currency to exchange for goods, which has the possible issue of leading players to try to accumulate faster with no thought to the community. I want to keep the game grounded within something recognisable to current life, so that the feeling of subverting it hits better. We need the exchange of goods and labor for the fantasy of being able to have autonomous control over your own labor, the ability to value other’s efforts, and the choice to spend some of your labor towards your community. We have a bit of an easier puzzle to solve, because our game is not strategy based. But I still don’t want to mess up the core incentives in the game. Pokopia does an interesting thing where you can barter and trade for items. It’s a cool subversion, though there is still money in the game so it gets undercut a bit. And you again are incentivised to hold onto whatever resources you do have. If we do have foraging, I want to include the ethics of foraging, which include only taking a small amount, leaving enough for other people, animals, and the plant itself. Maybe an incentive to donate what you don’t need? Stardew has that system with the community center, where you are incentivized to give back to the community. Unfortunately with the growth system, it can end up paralleling a “relying on generous billionaire” type thing, so a system that takes it automatically may work better? Though there are pros and cons to both. In concept, you WANT to give your players the agency to make pro social choices on their own. Forcing their hand undercuts that lesson. Anyway, just initial thoughts!"
If I were making a game like this, I would think really hard. It is not easy. But I outright disagree with the idea that we need money and wealth accumulation in a game in order to "have autonomous control over your own labor, the ability to value other’s efforts, and the choice to spend some of your labor towards your community". These things can and will exist even when money no longer exists, and it existed before money existed. They exist now even in situations where money is irrelevant. We can think. We can rise above conventions. We can create new and interesting core incentives that do not rely on propagation of fascist values.
For example, I am making a cooking game about "running a soup stall". Most games about "running cooking stalls" (or bars, or what have you) either feature wealth accumulation or explicitly have protagonists who are "above" wealth accumulation in some fashion due to having extreme power or magic. I am talking about games like VA-11 Hall-A, Magical Delicacy, Burger Bois, Galaxy Burger, Coffee Talk, Tavern Talk, Kemono Tea Time, Sips and Sonnets, and more. These games either explicitly include money as a central mechanic, or they explicitly explain why their protagonist alone does not have to worry about money even though everyone else does.
I want to think about a game set in a better future.
So, in my game, the protagonist lives in a commune where money does not exist. Instead, everyone works for a couple hours a day, and they can choose not to work, but people do because, as you said!, most people find work over which they have autonomy fulfilling and meaningful, and most people love to craft for others, care for others, and/or help others. The protagonist gets ingredients and supplies delivered from others in the town. People come to the protagonist to request soups, and the protagonist makes them soup.
This game's complexity comes from having to make soups which nourish the people who come to the stall, in a combination of puzzle-like activity and self-expression. For example, a vegan character may request a meal with balanced micronutrients and so much protein, and you have to figure out how to make that happen. A character may be looking for yummy soup and have requests for specific outlandish flavour combinations that you have to wrangle, and this character's arc involves them explicitly healing and becoming happier as they get fatter by eating delicious food. Another character may be trying to lose weight for health reasons while still finding yummy and nutritious food to eat, and they may require special consideration to ensure that they have enough nutrition and flavour in their dishes while limiting calories. Another character is trying to recreate the flavours of their hometown. Other characters may have religious dietary restrictions, or severe allergies to many common ingredients, or very strict flavour/texture control due to autism, or folate and iron deficiency due to pregnancy, or other health issues leading to particular food considerations, or personal preferences requiring careful thought in how to maintain.
The character will have to juggle flavours of a dish, such as salty or spicy, with more esoteric characteristics, such as texture qualities or mouthfeel or uniqueness, with macronutrients and micronutrients, with cultural considerations. The ingredients available will change over time due to seasonal agroforesty practices which include conservation, shortages, windfalls, traders from distant markets, and so on.
The player will unlock new ways of cooking ingredients and new ingredients through maintaining mutual aid networks throughout the commune. The player is not a saviour and so cannot control everything, but the player can make individual lives better and so nourishing one's community which in turn improves the player's life.
The player will be able to influence NPCs through how the player chooses to nourish them.
I plan to use this game to interrogate relationships with food at the site of cooking and eating, to show the difficulties and tensions of such a world, to showcase a better future, and to ponder the ethics of how we raise people dependent on us, such as children, to interact with food. For example, the player is also raising A Creature and must feed it, and I have been thinking about mechanics which will give the player autonomy over raising their Creature, while also demonstrating that the Creature has agency in its own right, while also reflecting on what I want to say about nature vs. nurture. I want to instill good habits about respecting autonomy, not forcing food consumption, and voluntary exposure to new food, without forcing the player because, as you said, forcing the player undercuts the learning. I am still working this out. I am also still working how exactly I want to handle player agency in terms of influencing NPCs by nourishing. I have prototyped a few substories to test various methods, wherein I want to respect both NPC autonomy and player agency in the story of influencing those around them. I have a lot of work to do, and fortunately I am working with my best friend! But, I am always trying to root through my work for fascist values and explicitly expel them or revise them.
Note that I am not calling my mechanics The Right Way To Go, just A Way To Go Whereby I Resist Fascist At Every Possible Turn.
I am certain that my game will still let some fascist values slip through because I am indocrinated in fascism. But I will listen to critiques. I am making this game for myself. If I do get a seething review about how my game is fascist slop, I will read it earnestly and genuinely, delighting that someone cares about my game and this genre and this future enough to have seriously thought about the mechanics. Obviously, if I get a review from some white supremacist who hates that I value fatness, I will just laugh. But if I get a review from someone who wants to make the world better, I will take that seriously.
I am not saying that you have to do that. I am just sharing my thoughts! Genuinely!
Back to your game!
You accurately identify the tensions in your game design which will undercut the themes you are trying to achieve. You accurately identify where the fascist values slip through due to genre conventions and poison the beautiful game you are trying to create. Do not let the poison in. Resist. Fight. Show a better world and a future worth fighting for. Let me escape from the grimness of the world for two minutes by showing me a world that isn't grim, not because I am closing my eyes and ignoring its poison, but because we have actually healed. I believe in you!
Or don't! But then, do not be surprised when people regard your game has espousing fascist values, in addition to non-fascist values, because...it does!
Here is a content warning I would appreciate: content warning that a "cozy game" still wants me to reduce my bodily autonomy to how much profit I can make with it, that a "cozy game" still wants me to demonstrate that I value others' efforts by expecting them to reduce their bodily autonomy to much little wealth I am willing to give them for their body. In wealth accumulation, we are all selling our bodies for profit. Show me a better way. I cannot escape to a world that is only light and fluffy by virtue of ignoring the fascism that undercuts all the beauty and goodness.
(I do not use beauty in the fascist sense here. I think that sewers, sludge, piss, shit, vomit, etc. can be beautiful because it is part of our world that is ours. Ugliness, too, is good.)
26. "More reactionary Post script: I made Calico bc it felt radical amongst all the (warning, reductive) War With Guns and Girls with Boobs games, and even the beautifully depicted games that were either gender neutral in expression or viscerally masculine (gender expression is a lofty concept so caveat again that gender is a concept and I happen to be both a woman and feminine, and I don’t assume that’s always the case) to make a game with exactly what I personally wanted in one. The community of devs I know making these games are all people wanting to express unique perspectives. Literally everyone in our game’s discord is autistic and queer. To call that ENTIRE genre fascist is genuinely mind boggling and we gotta stop. You gotta abolish the cop in your head telling people (especially marginalized people) to stop making certain kinds of art, and you gotta just make more art."
I agree completely that it is radical to make games that include women, autistic people, or queer people at all. I, too, do not want to make more War With Guns and Girls with Boobs games. But you also have to abolish the cop in your head telling people (especially marginalized people) that they have to incentivize people with money and wealth accumulation, or no one will feel cozy in their game. You have to abolish the cop telling people that they cannot dream of worlds where wealth accumulation doesn't exist, or where we honour sustainable and Indigenous farming practices, or where we have to keep propagating these fascist values jsut because the games we played in our childhoods or the other games made by other marginalised people did those mechanics too. You have to abolish the reactionary kneejerk reaction (redundant statement is redudant) that anything made by a marginalised person is automatically above critique. You and I are just as capable of being fascist as the whitest, straightest, able-bodiedest, cissest, most masculine man alive. We cannot ever forget that. We can hurt with these hands and we can also heal.
I have not seen a single take in this jam that the entire genre of cozy games sucks. I have seen takes that specific common mechanics within that genre suck, and I stand by those, just as I stand by the fact that the mechanics which teach players to gun down brown people in first person shooters suck. Would you say, "You gotta abolish the cop in your head telling people to stop making certain kinds of art" when those "certain kinds of art" are War With Guns and Girls with Boobs? I would definitely tell people to stop making War With Guns where white people kill all the brown people and are heroes for killing all the brown people. And I would tell people to stop making Shops With Labor Exploitation where profit and wealth accumulation are king and we have to deprive our patrons, whom we supposedly love, of wealth in order to progress in our game.
I would love to hear your thoughts. I have tried to read good intentions and discuss in good faith. Please let me know if I appear to have misunderstood anything. I greatly care about your work and want to see you succeed and be happy.
Thank you for your time and for sharing your thoughts with us!