• they/them

plural system in Seattle, WA (b. 1974)
lots of fictives from lots of media, some horses, some dragons, I dunno. the Pnictogen Wing is poorly mapped.

host: Mx. Kris Dreemurr (they/them)

chief messenger and usual front: Mx. Chara or Χαρά (they/them)

other members:
Mx. Frisk, historian (they/them)
Monophylos Fortikos, unicorn (he/him)
Kel the Purple, smol derg (xe/xem)
Pim the Dragon, Kel's sister (she/her)


JuniperTheory
@JuniperTheory

okay it is fascinating though how all these "here's a wholesome game where you play as a small business owner" rely on like. an endless flood of customers just Existing, none of them having any characterization, none of them presenting any problems, just faceless guys

like, every single shop management game i've played EVER does this. i'm not sure this is a bad thing? i'm curious about it though. fascinating thing. is that just necessary?


pnictogen-wing
@pnictogen-wing

one of the worst things about capitalism is that it sells "running your own business" as the key to riches (and practically the only respectable way to make it in life, aside maybe from becoming some variety of officially-uniformed killer) and one of the crucial assumptions is that If You Build It They Will Come: there's somehow an infinite pool of customers out there ready to be fleeced by you, and if you haven't pulled them in, then welp you're just not trying hard enough! after all it works in video games, doesn't it?

and then there's the even more destructive corollary: not only is there an infinite pool of customers and you just need to wait for the right suckers to come along, there's also an infinite pool of workers also ready to be fleeced by you.

yeah, thumbs down to this garbage. EDIT: if you listen to even a few scraps of cryptobro talk it's full of assumptions about potential customer bases that seem like they're reasonable—"imagine if we take just ONE PERCENT of these billions of dollars!!"—but are simply empty daydreams based on that false assumption that there's always customers out there and you just need to "work harder" to pull them in.

~Chara


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in reply to @JuniperTheory's post:

Gotta feed the progression model, which is probably growth forever. Would be interesting to play a game where you have a set population for your town and got to chat with more of the people though.

some day i will make an anti-stardew valley. lovely game but it really does just full buy-in to some of the worst propaganda of the system. we should imagine something different, not an idealised, unattainable version of what we have.

(also, the requirement to engage with animal agriculture to complete the game, and it just being like exactly how AnAg corps market their products, makes me so uncomfortable)

There was some fantasy adventuring gear shop game where the customers were recurring adventurers who as far as I could tell got more money to spend and leveled up based on how good the gear they bought from you was? But it was also on kongregate so it might be hard to find/play anymore.

I don't think retail gets genuine portrayals unless it's in games that are primarily narrative-driven, as this sort of "customers are just numbers in the business flow" approach definitely skips over the perspective of doing the actual work and dealing with actual people. It's unavoidably bleak to be beholden to a company that regards you as slightly more insignificant than the people you are obligated to interact with and suffer abuse from, and that doesn't gel with games that want to stimulate the accountant region of the brain.