Animation Lead on Wanderstop! She/Her & Transgenderrific! Past: Radial Games, Gaslamp Games



So I'm going to tangentially discourse here and I'm going to start off by saying this is not about wanderstop, it has nothing to do with wanderstop, it is about my personal tastes, I am not doing game design on wanderstop

When I see complaints that there's two, three, five games in, say, wholesome direct that are farming games or etc it's like... look. I know that I enjoy these genres and can basically continue buying them forever. But the idea of, there's five of these, that's too many, in a world where we get something like 30 games a year that can be distilled down to "you shoot everyone you see" really reveals to me the maybe unconscious biases a lot of people have. I think we could probably see a Devolver showcase of nothing but shooters of various kinds for 2 hours straight and no one would come out of it like "this just goes to show you that the Shooter playbook is shallow and the devolver showcase shouldn't happen anymore".

I get it! A lot of people don't like the kind of stuff Wholesome Games is showing. Even I have reservations about the name. But I think that the degree to which this topic in particular gets scrutiny every year is absurdly outsized compared to literally any other subculture in all of games.


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in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

it is a particularly annoying and cyclical discourse. I get it cus it is the dominant showcase of the low-stakes gameplay of the cosy games genre but one aspect I don't understand is how critics of the genre have it locked in as a faux preservation and propagation of "wanting to be a landlord", pointing out how the politics of those games are insidious and how its players are stricter and worse than irl landlords they know.

Like, the usual criticisms I've seen on tumblr and twitter against the cosy farming games boil down to trojan horse ideologies and methods of play - which, if we wanted to be equally uncharitable to other genres, we could go about how strategy games express a manifest destiny ideal of right of conquest, or how shooters tug on the rugged individualism american libertarianism espouses. It's silly cus we know that strategy games and shooters can be a lot more than just these descriptors. At the same time, it is extra silly cus those genres are allowed to exist as just themselves! we understand a shooter can be a fun shooter w nothing deeper going on as much as a farming game can be a way to just farm some beets w nothing deeper going on

idk this turned into a rant, but it is just annoying how this particular genre that aims to use different verbs and alt methods of play gets the short end of the stick in not much dissimilar dismissive ways than say walking sims used to back in the day. It's annoying :/

right, like, so much of it zooms past criticism and instead becomes circular attempts to establish a moral arc for just, ordinary dislike/disdain. like no dog my random gaming opinions are actually me being very good and smart and anti-landlord.