Renkon

AMFV is maybe my favorite IF game to this day, though I can't really claim to be an expert on the genre. It's been a long time since I last played it (maybe 15+ years ago), so I kind of honestly expected people would think its political dystopia is outdated and quaint these days. After all, it's 2023, how much could we relate to something written in 1985?

The fact that it still hits incredibly well today is both kind of a relief, and kind of horrifying.

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in reply to @highimpactsex's post:

🌊@wave4/7/2023, 8:08 AM

i've heard of this game forever but never really heard what it was actually about. i somehow find this reality of it so surprising.

kastelpls @highimpactsex4/7/2023, 8:30 AM

yeah, it took me by surprise. i wish this game was rereleased lol.

Rastagong @lrwerther4/7/2023, 11:51 AM

This is more of an aside, but I'm so impressed by how much of the IF "canon" you've been able to play in such a short time! (You're way beyond what little I managed to read myself.) Must be quite the experience, and doing it along Aaron Reed's IF50 project must be even better.

I can't wait to see you get to 80 Days if you do get to it, I feel like you would have such interesting reads of it (not throwing preconceptions of how you'll experience it at you, it's such an impressive work, but having any form of non-Western background makes it such a diff experience to play through, sometimes in strange ways, I think).

Also I've always thought that someone who managed to acquire a lot of knowledge on both eroge, doujin, VNs on one hand, and parser-based interactive fiction, Twines, Emily Short & cie's theory on the other hand would become like… a Nasuverse True Magician of Interactive Fiction who's reached the Root and a higher plane, ahaha. You're legit the first person I've ever seen going so far off the deep end on both sides of the spectrum. It's so rare given both communities' different styles/demographics/lineage. This is so exciting!

kastelpls @highimpactsex4/7/2023, 12:08 PM

i've been jumping back and forth between time (i recently finished and enjoyed Violet and Rameses, but there's not much to say about those two besides pretty cool). but it's been pretty fun and figuring out the "history", yeah.

i find emily short's theory to be also enlightening. in my mind, she and sylviefluff are the best designer-critics in game thinking. their vocabulary is lucid and i enjoy seeing how their insights are informed by their emotional connections to the story too. i wish i were as good as them when it comes to this kinda stuff lol.

also, who/what is cie? i'm curious to learn more.

and yeah, i do have 80 Days bought a long time ago but never played it proper. i'm looking forward to the inkle titles and i know 80 Days does some interesting stuff with colonial history, though i might want to read the jules verne's work first. which i should've since i'm honestly into french literature lol.

Rastagong @lrwerther4/7/2023, 1:26 PM

Nice to hear for 80 Days!! I should read the original myself, never did so either...

And sorry, just meant "Emily Short & company" as in, other critics/designers in the IF sphere broadly like Aaron Reed, Sam Kabo Ashwell, Jon Ingold, Meghna Jayanth, etc.

kastelpls @highimpactsex4/7/2023, 1:38 PM

ah yeah, i love reading that crowd. who knew that writers love to write about their own craft?

John Colagioia @jcolag4/7/2023, 12:14 PM

It's been forever since I've tried to play this, and I never quite committed to it, so thanks for drawing attention to it.

The key to your question is that the game is not actually prescient. Like all good dystopian fiction, it only shows what vulnerable people were already suffering. The '80s consolidated a lot of the backlash against the social progress of the '60s. In a lot of ways, that's when conservatives consider America "great," because they could still be horrible, but the vast majority of people turned a blind eye. (See also, The Handmaid's Tale, which wasn't about the future, either.)

Depending on your age, you may already know this, and I apologize for speaking authoritatively about race relations as a white guy, but one huge reason that anti-Asian hate seems so shocking today is because the '80s politicized the Asian-American community by casting you/them as "the model minority," to justify worse treatment of Black people. But it was also a time when we embarrassingly recast "Yellow Peril" narratives as a fear of Asians "taking over" by buying up real estate, because a handful of businessmen bought some skyscrapers...