missingrache:
varietyshow:
heybattabattaswing:
Perspectives may have been warped, initially. But you saw the child as he truly was. You could have stopped. You always could have stopped.
I’ve seen it said before; OFF is interesting as a game because on a metatextual level, despite the player being narratively present as the ‘puppeteer’, the control you possess is superficial and the only choice you have to avoid the outcome of events entirely is to stop playing part way through.
But as a player and a ‘puppeteer’, it is almost inevitable that you’re going to play through to the end. (Games are meant to be played, after all!)
YES YES THIS!
#go variety go
Aw, I’m only partially regurgitating commentary I’ve read before, you know. (There’s a post somewhere in my likes that makes interesting points about the Batter + the puppeteer + the topic of control that I’ll reblog sometime.)
I love the fact that it opens up discussions on games and the nature of narratives, though. Some of the things I have thoughts on are how Zacharie is written, simply because there’s multiple ways to play that, especially if you were to write him from a first/second person perspective. Is he really stepping outside the boundaries of his role in the game, or is that irrelevant too because his irreverence and self-awareness are themselves written into the game? In other words, control again.
Of course (to go off on a tangent), the other fun thing is then getting into the canon narrative versus fan narratives. Comic artists and fic writers can re-write pivotal moments how they’d have liked to see them happen or think could be interesting. I personally really liked ‘Strike Four’, I think it’s on Ao3, because as a player, the last few battles of the game hurt, and that fic gets revenge on the Batter for that in a rather cathartic manner.
This is the only fandom I’ve been in where I actually want to see a character get hurt, defeated, degraded, you name it, and all out of vindictive feelings, and I think that has a lot to do with the direct ‘involvement’ the player is given with the narrative and the level of culpability you’re charged with for the outcome. It eliminates some of the objective distance you feel from watching events unfold. (I think it should be pretty clear that I often don’t feel as strongly about characters as many other people do, after I’m past the emotional moment in a story itself. Or sometimes during it.)
This is the reason why I love OFF.