Gamergate



Welcome to Game Maker text adventure!

You are sitting in the office of mega-game-journalist Jim Wilson discussing your latest game.

What do you wish to do:

EAT THE Grue.


As you take a bite of the grue, Mr. Wilson becomes enraged that you are eating his food. He lunges across his desk towards you.

What do you wish to do:

*What *relevance ?! She’s a nobody who published one low-tech interactive fic. Which hasn’t exactly swept the nation to become the new Minecraft, or broken new ground - even in the relatively narrow spectrum of interactive fic, of which there are quite a few on Steam and the Android market. *DQ *isn’t the second coming of Planescape:Torment for crying out loud !

Absent the personal drama surrounding her, nobody would know her name.
Which is kind of amusing in and of itself, considering the seminal motivations behind said drama. It’s like a reverse-Streisand effect !

No care ever!
Cha-cha-cha!
Internet high school!
Cha-cha-cha!

Turn off Jim Wilson.



Welcome to Game Maker text adventure!

You are sitting in the office of mega-game-journalist Jim Wilson discussing your latest game.

What do you wish to do:

EAT THE Grue.
As you take a bite of the grue, Mr. Wilson becomes enraged that you are eating his food. He lunges across his desk towards you.

What do you wish to do:
Turn off Jim Wilson.


You begin undressing to reveal your hairy back and buttcrack in an attempt to turn off Jim Wilson, but it has the opposite effect.

What do you wish to do:

No, and it’s not misogyny to criticize a woman for cheating on her significant other. It is misogyny to criticize a woman for having sex with a large amount of people.

Not remotely comparable. By your logic, it’s an endless loop – she cheated on him because he cheated on her, or he behaved badly in some other way, so it’s his fault just as much. But that would be ridiculous, so we can only blame the public release and subsequent strife on the one who publicly released private information.

Then why did you even mention it?

If so, then why did you number and list her sexual proclivities?

No, it’s really not. I don’t care about Quinn. It’s just a really, really shitty game. But, given that she submitted it for the Greenlight process on Steam and given that she presents it as a game, I’m going to criticize it as a game rather than as a magical empowering art piece or whatever. As a game, it’s complete garbage.

The glowing published reviews all remind me of the Onion story: Nation Afraid To Admit 9-Year Old Disabled Poet Really Bad.

To get a good handle on Depression Quest, imagine going to a movie, except that for 150 minutes, you watch text slowly scroll down the screen. And then imagine that the story the text conveys sucks. That’s basically DQ in a nutshell.

I wonder if there has been a single woman in the history of mankind that has been accused of slut shaming for outing their cheating boyfriend.

Who asked? It’s a free game that takes less than an hour to play. Why do you think anybody needs yet another review?

So one of the VLOGs discussing the Paris Watchdogs event is at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0di20SPIPVQ&list=UU-_VTaWqRsZ1nzZLHQIGwQA

At about 3 minutes in, he mentions that he overslept and missed his flight, called Ubisoft and they were able to re-book the travel arrangements.

I know he’s been more direct saying that his way was paid in other videos for both this and for a PS4 pre-launch event last year, but a lot of times he talks about such things in the middle of a minecraft video or something, so it’s hard to find. But I know he wouldn’t be flying from northern Sweden to Paris just to spend a day at a press event if he was paying the bills for it.

Ooh, good point, because historically men have struggled against being defined entirely along a virgin/father/gigolo spectrum, with the Virgin Father being the ideal of a major religion, and historically men who have lots of sex are seen as somehow less than fully human and society turns a blind idea to the abrogation of their rights, and in every way the outing of a man for cheating carries exactly the same cultural baggage as the outing of a woman for cheating.

I say this as someone who steadfastly refuses to blame a politician for stains on dresses or hiking the Appalachian Trail or otherwise engaging in shenanigans that are none of my goddamned business. Nobody except the loved ones should care about issues of fidelity; it’s not our goddamned business. At the same time, the phenomenon of slut shaming is inextricably tied into our unequal gender dynamics, and it’s not really possible to slut-shame a man.

That sounds like a terrible handle on the game. It’s not for you, obviously; but just as obviously it is for other people, and frankly their reviews of the game sound like they’re a lot more thoughtful and insightful than you are, with your Hur Hur, Reading Hard! review.

This a truly fantastic post and deserves to be stickied whenever these idiotic conversations come up.

Because all the previous critical reviews are (supposedly) only unfair attacks on Quinn? Maybe he’s leading the charge with real reviews!

Of course a video game with the cultural significance of Depression Quest deserved mentioning. It was about showing the world what Depression is like. The fact that blindboyard thinks it didn’t deserve to be mentioned because he personally didn’t like the game tells me all I need to know.

There’s nothing wrong with not liking the game. In fact, I would say that was the entire freaking point. Depression isn’t fun.

The game isn’t a traditional game. It’s an art piece like Dinner Date, that French game where you wait for a girl to show up and get drunk waiting. It’s more interactive fiction than a game.

You may not like it, but that’s no reason to say it doesn’t need to be mentioned, just like Dinner Date was mentioned and greenlit on Steam. (And I absolutely hated Dinner Date. Depression Quest has a freaking point, Dinner Date didn’t.)

That’s just it: Gaming “art pieces” have been done. There’s nothing new in the whole “Let’s deconstruct what it means to be a game” schtick. Dinner Date, The Graveyard, Rock Simulator, Peter Molyneux stuff, whatever. There’s no points to be gained or shields awarded for “But it’s not a traditional game”. It still fails as a non-traditional game because all of those were still technically or artistically better than Depression Quest. That’s not to say that no one should ever attempt “deconstructing game as art” thing but you’re going to be judged on it now based on other attempts.

The “depression isn’t fun” bit is a cop-out. Lots of things aren’t fun but can still be turned into compelling and interesting experiences. That didn’t happen here.

It’s cultural significance is about nil. The only reason most people who know about the game (which is a small percentage of the population) are aware of it is because of the whole Five Guys/Feminist/Social Justice hash tag Twitter fights, not because Depression Quest is itself significant.

There is not a single positive review on Steam that cannot easily be placed in the “facetious” category. Not one. Every single user on steam who took the time to review this game either gave it a thumbs-down, or is one of the five users who gave it a thumbs up with text that obviously indicated that they had no interest in taking it seriously. It’s got a metacritic score of 1.2, with a grand total of one (yes, we’ve finally found one!) non-facetious positive user review.

Uh… No. It doesn’t deserve to be mentioned for the same reason that, I dunno, my poetry from my emo phase doesn’t deserve to be mentioned when talking about meaningful contributions to poetry. Sure, it talks about meaningful things, like depression. It just happens to do so in a manner that sucks. Like, Spec Ops: The Line is a game that is explicitly unfun, and deals with PTSD and the complete insanity of war. It’s a massive downer and to this day I feel like shit if I think about the last mission for more than a minute. It’s a game that addresses serious issues. But you know what? It does so in a way that actually works! Even if your work is about depression, at no point should I be thinking to myself, “God, how much longer do I have to slog myself through this crap?” There is, after all, a difference between Messaein and a cat on a piano. Just because this difference can be hard for some to grasp does not mean that you hammering on the keys like a drunk man with a sledgehammer is fine art.

Neither is PTSD. And Spec Ops isn’t fun either. But it’s engaging. Take away the blam-pow-shooty-fun, and the narrative would still be engaging in and of itself. It makes the target audience want the message. There’s nothing like that in Depression Quest. Regardless of all other factors, if you’re trying to get a message out, this means DQ fails by comparison.

So… How do you determine weird but meaningful art from crap? How do you tell the difference between a cat walking around on a keyboard and Messaein? How do you tell the difference between a John Cage masterpiece and some jackass tooling around with a radio tuner? From where I stand, Depression Quest fails as a game on every level. Art piece? Sure. But it fails at that, tbh, by being a really shitty art piece. I mean, I intentionally avoided talking about things like it being “engaging” or “compelling” or “interesting”, because hey - maybe that’s the point. But sacrificing every single reason for anyone to give a shit about your piece for the sake of making a point? Bit of a heavy toll, dontcha think?

You don’t appear to be worth engaging on this topic, but this isn’t true. There are a few positive reviews if you go far enough.

It may have significance as an educational game. Something I liked about it was how some options could not be selected, like (not really but for example), “Just cheer up already, sheesh” as a response to text about how the protagonist was feeling unmotivated, unfocused, and worthless. People sometimes have trouble grasping why depressed people don’t take certain actions and make suggestions they wouldn’t offer to people with other mental illnesses.

“Why don’t you stop listening to the bad voices?”
“Have you considered just not having these episodes where you run down the street naked while fleeing from monsters?”
“Remember, anti-social personality disorder is just a state of mind! :)”