salt meat and fear of failure

salt meat simulator
ant simulator
gorilla simulator

i love simulator games. at first i loved rpgs, then my love developed into roguelikes, and now it has evolved into weird made up simulator games i wish people would make. hyper-involved faux realities that highly emphasize one abstracted form of existence, whilst also enhancing the scripts within those realities that support that abstraction.

i.e. it would be cool if someone made a 'homeless person in a fantasy world' game, where you had to live in weird little tent cities on the edges of medieval villages or become a wandering vagrant/beggar...sometimes you'd wake up in the middle of the night and someone in the camp was a werewolf and mauled somebody. sometimes orcs or slavers wander in, split a skull or two and take a couple children to sell.

maybe the camp gets disbanded by men-at-arms of the local lord and send you scattered, each of the members in time arriving at other villages or cities. maybe you could wander from town to town with a trading caravan, or theater troupe, become a scoundrel? like the beginning of the Sergio Leone movie "Once Upon a Time in America", but set in Middle Earth instead of turn of the century New York, or maybe you could never rise above your station as a lumpen-proletariat, maybe you're trapped as a hobo, slave, petty thief, a henchman being the highest promotion possible? a petty thug or burgler of lower class homes. maybe you could get hired by an upstart thieves guild as extra muscle? the masked brute in a heist, positioned at an alleyway to scare people into going down a different street, ensuring there'd be no passersby to the 'real' thieves' break-in.

What about those goofy tough guy assholes in anime? Those Big Toughs, the royal guards of the local warlords that walk around in town like they own the place, beating up little kids and treating women badly until the hero shows up to put them in their place? Fist of the North Star is full of these guys. Why can't we play as them? What's their motivations?

you stab a priest who's been dipping his fingers in the black lotus shipments that pass through the basement of the local church, pinching a bit too much from the  bosses' pockets. dispose of a body by feeding it to black slimes that live in the sewers.

But I like more the idea of struggling for existence in a world that doesn't care about you. Typically in games you play as Somebody. You're in the world to Do The Thing. In this simulator phantasy, you're lowercase 'nobody' and you're in the World to get kicked around and fail.

Games are, for most people, a chance to lay aside your real life and be somebody important. I think that pays a disservice to your real life. I think games should be about exploring alternatives, and after you're done exploring you can take what you learned apply it to real life. In a game about suffering and failure, you can explore the possibilities of failure and learn from it, be humbled by it. I know that real life is about doing this, but that's difficult and scary and we use every chance we can to avoid our mistakes.

I choose to do it differently. I revel in my failures--no, revel is the wrong word. I accept them as part of growth. Ever since the First Birth (whatever that was, enzymes electrified by plasma or something) decay has come before birth.

So a game about a hard life, where you have nothing to lose but your avatar (at which point you can just make a new one), might give you some tools you can take to real life. Or maybe you can just enjoy in your avatar's suffering, as the crazed demon from another dimension which has possessed them. Such joy can't be fruitless?

I liked Dark Souls because you played a suffering nobody in a suffering world of death. I disliked Dark Souls because the whole point of the game was forcing you to discover The Point. If I were to make Dark Souls it would be about wandering, fleeing, interacting with the suffering of others in a helldeath planet. There would be permadeth. It would be open world. The difficulty would still be there, and you could become a bad ass longcoat still (it would be hard), but the option of doing nothing and being nothing would be emphasized (the path you couldn't take in Dark Souls). And neither would be "better" than the other.

an interview with Berserk artist Kentaro Miura that's nearly 20 years old. I learn how to do things by studying how other people do things, I think that's a pretty natural way. In both chimps and people you learn things by watching others do it. When I read an interview like this, I imagine myself at Kentaro Miura, drawing a graphic fantasy comic about a bad ass hero, what that would look like, what it'd look like if I took my own history and put it into a comic.

Then it starts piecing itself together and I think to myself, what if I actually did that? Took my hopes and anger and fears and put them in a visual format, that's what he did right? That's what all comic artists do.

But my interests don't stop at making comics. Anything where I can create a world, tell a story, express myself. Anywhere but in the "real world" or meat world. The meat world is scarier than the nightmares we dream up, because you can always rewrite the nightmares. You can't rewrite meat world. If you try to do that, you end up with just another nightmare, and meat world is still there. If you try to invalidate meat world you only invalidate yourself.

I played an artsy indie game recently where, at the end, the creator inserts the 'moral' of the story, that games aren't just distractions, that they teach us humbleness by forcing us to deal with problems as-they-are, instead of just wishing they were different. 'Life' and 'Fantasy' aren't so inseparable.

A problem with our society as it is now, and by that I mean the way the world is  as my generation becomes old enough to change things in our own image, is that we spend a lot of time wishing and hoping. I have friends that beat themselves up because they feel impotent, unable to follow their dreams, to do the big things they want, to create, change, evolve, shape, build, all of it. They kick themselves emotionally, and then they kick themselves for kicking themselves, and that drives them deep into a hole. They say things like 'I don't deserve that', even if it's something they want. They feel weakened.

Something in our culture caused this, this is a symptom of a bigger problem. What's the problem? You could probably point to anything and be right in some way. It's the economy, is a common one from sympathetic older folx, but i prefer It's capitalism, but that also feels like a cop out. A right winger I know says It's the lack of strong male figures in child rearing, referring single mothers, and the lack of discipline in child rearing, but I think that it's the very concept of 'discipline' that causes selfishness, and helplessness. Those two things are different expressions of the same nameless pain.

So dreams, and avoidance, and fear, that's what we have when we're paralyzed by things-as-they-are. We can't change them, or think we can't, so we become fearful, and in our fear we become afraid to act, because what if we fail? What if we take up arms against a reality that rejects us, and fail in doing so? Where do we fall to? Most people don't know rock bottom. The rock bottoms they've experienced have been cognitive rock bottoms, places they've gotten to and told themselves 'this is rock bottom'. In reality there is no true rock bottom, and things can always get worse.

It's easy to imagine a possible reality in which life is even more of a hell than it is now, so that it becomes pointless to try to imagine those realities. Instead, we can look at where-we-are-now and what the next step down from there, because it's that difference between now and worse off that creates the damage that shift causes.
Or even better we can throw away the yoke of that fear and start fresh.

A quote from Berserk: "Dreams. Each man longs to pursue his dream. Each man is tortured by this dream, but the dream gives meaning to his life. Even if the dream ruins his life, man cannot allow himself to leave it behind. In this world, is man ever able to possess anything more solid, than a dream?"

Here's another: "If you can't even live your life as you want, you should just die."

I think the advice is sound. People hold themselves back with imagined barriers too much. I can't is such a dangerous thing to say to yourself, and we all do it. I know I do it every day. You do it, and if you're shaking your head no, then you probably do it all the more. We have at our disposal, for the first time in recorded history, the complete base of human knowledge at our finger tips, in an easily accessible format. You can, with a little effort, learn to do anything.

Unfortunately people hear the second part of Guts's brash statement (the dying), and not the first part (the living). Don't choose death, choose life. Do what you want. You're the only thing you have to answer to at the end of the day. This isn't an excuse to act selfishly, but to act naturally. Do what comes naturally. YOUR hate YOUR pain. The fear that holds you back is the collective voice of all the fucked up shit telling you I can't, the poisonous juice of the black lotus which lulls you into dreaming death. I'm talking about admitting to your own will and ego, instead of living in a lie that sugars it up for others, or suffering in the lies of other's sugars.

You VS. the Fear (just look at that sword)

wander around kill skeletons
build an army kill zombies
browser based demake of dark souls
ambient mixtape 16
be the subject of racism..with cats!