It's been some time since I've posted anything on my blog, due to overly high standards for myself and being busy with college and college-related projects. I think I'd like to start putting more of my scattered thoughts out there, because I want to be able to have dialogue and learn things, not just sound smart. Though I also do very much like that. I'm hoping it will be more interesting to see these slowly coalesce into more intelligent and thought out articles despite their protozoan beginnings. This is a very small edit of my transcript of yesterday's shower thoughts. Relevant tags: #storygame, #visual_novel, #business, #gamers Games mentioned: #13_Sentinels, #Honkai_Star_Rail, #Honkai_Impact_3rd --- I began by thinking about @maxkriegervg.bsky.social's recent announcement of the relaunch of his Aqualongue.tv channel. I'm looking forward to his stream on Sunday where he'll go into more detail, but the idea of developing post-gaming identities has really resonated with me. With the wealth of kinds of things that can be *called* a Video Game, I often feel sort of out of place from a singular Gamer Identity. For example, I would say my core favorite genres are storygames\[[[#^bb0a2a|1]]\] and visual novels. But I feel storygame seems to imply a game that is ONLY story whereas I am most interested in games that fully utilize their systems to aid in the telling of a story; adding further gameplay. I would consider **13 Sentinels** to be something that could fit in this. Though its explicitly story section and gameplay sections are separate, story still happens in the fights themselves and in the logs/lore. They all work together to create a complete picture. How might one market visual novels or storygames more directly to an audience? How does it compare to traditional publishing? Books are relatively cheap to produce, and there's usually one writer and one editor involved in the work, with visual artists brought in to design covers or illustrations. Books as I think of them tend to be in the $10-40 range, $20 being the sweet spot. But does that pricing hold up well for games? Obviously, it takes a lot more resources, but we tend to think of games as being a max of $60, and only for prestige triple A games. Art should be experienced, but laborers need to be compensated for their work, especially in a very capital-dependent society. Thinking about how investors work. I was having a conversation with my father, about if I should be trying to get my money out of banks given the state of the United States right now. He talked about putting money into investments, but I feel like everything seems too volatile to trust putting money into stock. Investors are trying to avoid risks and looking for the biggest return. I want to put more of my money into things I care about instead of things that seem Too Big to Fail. A company like Google seems like a safe investment, but I don't care much for many of the decisions they make. I don't really want to support them. Could we make games businesses where people contribute to specific projects? I guess I'm just recreating Kickstarter, and there's a lot of risk inherent in that model. Is there any world where it would ever be financially sound to contribute your money to a game company? Is the nature of the market such that this is impossible? By having investors, companies need to stick to the safest and most popular ideas in order to make sure investors don't bail out. But by pursuing only the safest and most popular decisions, games become homogenized. Every game becomes whatever the current Profitable Model is. Before it was triple A open world rote quest structure games (okay this wasn't the case across the market but I feel like this somehow crystalized as the Video Game Structure in many people's minds when I read game design documents and look at the questions people ask in games research), now it's live service. When everyone goes to do the same thing, people get tired of it, and there are too many people fighting for the same piece of the pie to sustain everyone. Beyond that, live service games often feel like a chore, which makes it even less appealing to have more than one. I enjoy Honkai: Star Rail okay, but I do tend to feel that way when logging in for dailies. The parts of the game I enjoy are gated by grinding that is there to keep me logging in every day until the next update so that I'll be able to pull for the next character or have a character strong enough to beat extra content that will ALSO let me pull for the next character. I want to engage with the story of these games, but Honkai Impact 3rd is even worse. It often feels like a fight to catch up with what has come before; the ideal way to experience its story DOES just seem to be to watch a recap video, but I want to experience it as a narrative game, not just as a narrative. Doesn't help that a majority of the limited time events are lost. No conclusive ending, but those are the things that were swirling around in my head this morning. Footnote(s) --- 1. Storygame is a word I've seen before, but it came to mind again because I recently spotted it while researching for a game criticism paper. It was mentioned in Chapter 10 of The Digital Gaming Handbook, published 2021 by CRC Press. This chapter was written by Alex Mitchell. Haven't had the time to read through it yet. ^bb0a2a