Author: Kilgoar

INTERNET — Recent controversy over several blogposts from the anonymous ex-boyfriend of author Zoë Quinn alleged that Quinn promoted her work, Depression Quest, by exchanging sexual favors with powerful “gaming journalists,” who then helped her promote her game. However, at least one of the allegations appear to have been dismissed as little more than veiled slut shaming in the virulent, twisted form given by a pathetic ex-boyfriend. A major complaint among the chauvinists piling on Quinn is that the game is barely even a game and no fun at all. In some yowling sex-deprived voice, they all say something like, “She must have been prostituting herself for that to be popular.” The veil for their attacks is their interest in protecting the sacred objectivity of gaming journalism, something which is not even at stake, as the reviews of her game fall in the realm of criticism or opinion.

Like many others fascinated by this absurd non-controversy, I fired up corporate-controlled Steam and downloaded a free copy of Depression Quest, hoping that by reviewing this video game I could restore my castrated manhood. Clocking in at 105 megabytes, I expected something more involved than the retro web 1.0 visuals that looked lazy juxtaposed with repeated appearances of the Netflix logo. An ominous epigraph from David Foster Wallace boded well, and the introduction played up the game’s potential descent into depression with trigger warnings and a link to a suicide hotline.

It might be wrong to classify Depression Quest as a game or even as an interactive fiction. In interactive fictions like MUDs or text-based dungeons, players respond to a textual world with text commands, participating, in a sense, as a writer of a story within the framework of an already-created world. Depression Quest, however, has a much more limited interface and is closer to a choose your own adventure paperback.

It takes about twenty minutes to read through Depression Quest, and the reader is given a few choices at the end of most frames. Each frame is a roughly page-length second person story about the painful banality of a depressive’s everyday life. While there are some evocative vignettes of the interiority of a depressive, most especially in family scenes, I found myself scanning over repetitive fragments of cliche or stereotypical thought patterns of any depressive. The protagonist is an empty container who cannot bring himself to work on a project that is never described, but constantly referred to.

The protagonist’s depression is charted by three textual scores at the bottom of each frame, one rating the depth of depression and the other two tracking cumulative visits to the therapist and use of medication (A combination of depression and medication, I assumed, was the only way to win). There seems to be no continuity at all between frames, which creates a disorienting effect that contributes to the unpleasantness and fragmentation of a depressive’s everyday life. However, at one point I found myself wondering if the cat the protagonist adopted had disappeared, only for it to appear a few frames later to console him. In the last syrupy-sweet frames, the protagonist whispers to his totally clueless girlfriend that he’s depressed and seeking help, and then he honestly tells his mother that he is feeling well.

I would have liked Depression Quest much better if it hadn’t come off as a doctor’s prescribed program for how to deal with depression, although there were a few times when calling in sick to work or vegging out on Netflix did relieve the depression score. At its best, Depression Quest does achieve the goal stated in its introduction by evoking the interiority of a depressive to foster understanding, but much of this is undone by the kind of stereotypical advice it takes to win. I found myself wondering if anyone could ever empathize with the game’s empty narrator and his unspeakable project when continually steering him away from depression with the kind of glib advice that is never advisable to foist onto a depressed person. I assume if I went back and truly inhabited the mindset of a depressed person, I would lose and the story would end with suicide, but then again perhaps I (or the writer?) approached the text wrongly by treating it as a ‘game’ that needs to be ‘won’.

It is little wonder that this minimally game-like text that purposefully inspires icky unpleasant feelings in its readers has received so much scorn from gamers, but I could not at all connect the story to the controversy over its author’s personal life, except that it has achieved some moderate popularity and chauvinists out there can only rationalize this with some kind of sexual conspiracy. As a first foray into writing forked path narrative, it’s not a bad effort and even interesting in concept, but I have no desire to go back and explore all its corners.

FERGUSON –Thousands of internet users were drawn into a body armor fundraising drive for protesters in Ferguson, in what has been exposed as a covert astroturf campaign that may be directed by body armor salespeople.  Alex Jones, who has recently doubled down on ads for body armor, claims that Ferguson is a “staged race war” that has been controlled by Black Panthers and Islamic Nationalist terrorist groups acting as patsies for globalists in yet more fake theatrics to increase the rate of the omnipresent clampdown on Liberty. Anonymous hackers promised to donate stolen bitcoins to the cause, pouring millions into the purchase of full body armor suits. It can be said as a fact that the plans for a full-on race war are finally going through and the plastic FEMA coffins are going to start filling up, and soon.

Dr. Angstrom H. Troubador, weapons expert, laughed at the suggestion of body armor for protesters in Ferguson, saying, “Militarized police would be using high powered assault rifles at close range, making body armor little more than a preposterously unsubtle provocation. If the protesters want cost effective self defense they should follow the lead of other militarized civilians across the world and refuse to identify themselves as a possible combatant. IEDs and AK-47s are low cost, covert solutions for self defense against any modern armored infantry unit such as the Ferguson police department.”

FERGUSON — Neil DeGrasse Tyson bravely marched with protesters in Ferguson last night, inspiring millions of atheists on Reddit and drawing their secular, but moral, recognition of injustice taking place not only in Ferguson, but in black communities everywhere. Tyson’s cosmic and scientific point of view, revered and followed by millions of rational atheists everywhere, has generally only crossed into the territory of social consciousness or activism when touching on topics such as global warming or the proper classification of planets.

However, Tyson broke his silence on the militarized crackdown on the poverty-ridden community dominated by middle-class whites in Ferguson, saying, “The universe provides us with no natural moral system, but statistics and science shows that what’s happening in Ferguson is not only unfair, but truly evil. Whatever controversy there is about Mike Brown committing robbery is irrelevant. The autopsy shows Mike Brown was shot to death with his hands up, corroborating the eyewitness accounts. The statistics of wealth distribution, political power, and the nearly all-white police force convinced me to take to the streets last night.” Tyson lifted his shirt, showing several welts from rubber bullets, and added, “I am very skeptical of the call for a return to so-called ‘peace’ or ‘normalcy’ from religious leaders who joined me in the march. Are they just not aware of the science that shows the general unrest is a result of poverty and racism? Do they really want to go back to that, and call it peace? What the people need is more unrest until these problems are corrected!”