Asakiyume mita

I have started playing a video game! After the healing angel (youngest kid) told me about Disco Elysium, I thought, heyyyyy, I could try that. That sounds like something I might like. (I can't remember what she said that made me interested, but it was probably something along the lines of what raven says in her entry here about playing and loving the game. In fact, it was reading Raven's entry that CONFIRMED me in my desire to try the game.)

For context, I have played approximately zero video games in the past thirty years. The last (and only) video games I played for real were Tetris and Mac Man (Mac computer version of Pac Man). Somewhere we have a photo of me sitting with infant ninja girl in my lap, playing one of those like the happy but not very skilled addict that I was. Since then, nothing. But I was encouraged by comments on Raven's entry from another person who'd come to it with my level of video game experience. That person said, "I was generally able to learn how to do things by floundering around and fucking up (it helps that floundering around and fucking up is very much in the spirit of the game)."

I needed Wakanomori and the healing angel to turn off all the special bells and whistles that people with dedicated gaming computers enjoy when playing video games, as those were causing my poor desktop machine to huff and puff like the tired engine in The Little Engine That Could, and I need this faithful desktop to keep functioning. But they did, and then the healing angel sat with me through the first fifteen minutes or so, showing me how I could interact with things, etc. Good good! The next day I played a little on my own--Good good!

It was a while before I tried again, and to give you a sense of how incredibly out of it I am with regard to video games, when I decided that today was the day I was going to play some more, I happily opened ... the Discord app. (This also shows you how rarely I use Discord--I think it's been three years?) "Huh... this ... does not look right..." I said to myself.

Because it's Steam that you need to open, not Discord!

Oh, oops!

Then I opened the right app, and I played for almost an hour! 😌😌 I'm so proud of myself, and I'm having fun.

Below are two screenshots--I am not sure when/how I got the first one; it seems tutorial-like in nature? I have marked it up to show all the things that I'm ??? about (but you'll have to click through to see a large size to read). The second is an example of game humor--the last dialogue choice (well, and the third, too).
( screenshots )

“It seems that when you want to make a woman into a hero, you hurt her first. When you want to make a man into a hero, you hurt . . . also a woman first.”
--Leigh Alexander, “What Did They Do to You: Our Women Heroes Problem.”

I was going to argue that although this is powerful rhetoric, I don’t think it’s true, but I realized I was thinking of the realm of literature, whereas the writer was talking about video games. Sadly, I think she’s pretty correct about video games.

What the article describes is how male protagonists in video games are motivated by harm to women who are important to them, whereas female protagonists are motivated by harm they themselves suffer. The thing I dislike about this most of all, which I haven’t seemed mentioned, is that it denies female protagonists the opportunity for the same level of altruism as the male protagonist. He gets to be motivated by love for someone else and anger over harm that comes to them. . . but this is apparently not possible for the female protagonist in video games. Her concern ends up being only herself.