Imagine for a moment you are a player for the game and somehow it hit emotionally right.
You’re angry about injustices in the world, in your head you just played out a poor trans woman getting tortured and destroyed by the medical system.
Five minutes ago you might’ve been curious, now you’re angry.
The next thing you see is a review box on steam. Well, that rage has to go somewhere.
I made a game that makes people angry and all of that rage boomeranged back on me and hit me on the head.
Then since games can be played forever it continued to hit me for years - over and over - with each new player.
It’s counter intuitive for me to say this but it wasn’t that the reviewers didn’t get it, it’s that I didn’t get the nature of players and reviewers at the time.
When I made the game all I wanted was for players in a few minutes to understand how the psychological medical complex had hurt me. I didn’t think about players feelings of rage and where that anger would go.
The player wasn’t at fault as much as me as a newbie game designer not understanding them enough yet.
I wouldn’t say I am ashamed of the game, more it was a good experience for me to have as a developer.
I don’t know if you ever played HFTGOOM but that was built on a lot of lessons learned from this game.
I could have ended the game on a note of pure despair but instead I blatantly ended it by literally asking players to “accept me”.
I begged for empathy because I was at such a low that I couldn’t take another “saving you from yourself” anger mob but I also desperately wanted to be understood and accepted as a person.
Players were kinder to me as a result because at the core of it: players will mirror back at you whatever you put into a game.
x_x
