Product description. 'Creatures Such As We' is a philosophical interactive romance novel. Play both your character, and the character of the game-within-a-game. Decide for yourself the best way to bridge the gap between game players.
Laputans - Absentmindedintellectuals who live on the floating island of Laputa, encounteredby Gulliver on his third voyage. The Laputans are parodies of theoreticians, whohave scant regard for any practical results of their own research.They are so inwardly absorbed in their own thoughts that they mustbe shaken out of their meditations by special servants called flappers,who shake rattles in their ears. During Gulliver’s stay among them,they do not mistreat him, but are generally unpleasant and dismisshim as intellectually deficient. They do not care about down-to-earththings like the dilapidation of their own houses, but worry intensely aboutabstract matters like the trajectories of comets and the courseof the sun. They are dependent in their own material needs on theland below them, called Lagado, above which they hover by virtueof a magnetic field, and from which they periodically raise up foodsupplies. In the larger context of Gulliver’s journeys, the Laputansare a parody of the excesses of theoretical pursuits and the uselessnessof purely abstract knowledge.
Creatures Such As We, Choice of Games, 2014There is so much going on here.Yes, it’s a game within a game. But that’s not just a wink-wink-nudge-nudge mechanic. It’s a game within a game about games. You play as Director of Activities on a highly-corporatized moon tourist colony.
You’re not thrilled about your job. The loneliness gets to you, as does the necessity of maintaining a chipper and courteous customer service demeanor nearly 24/7.
You’re also — startlingly, for a cog-in-a-factory mentality character — keenly aware of the fact that your underlings maintain life-support services on this moonbase, and that your only job is to be a constant chaperone to the tourists. You feel that, fancy title or no fancy title, your work is less difficult than anyone else’s, and that they resent you for it. (They do.) There’s more self-awareness of privilege to your character than to the average space Dilbert.To escape, then, your loneliness and your lukewarm regard of your career, you play video games in your rare off-hours. One game in particular, Creatures Such As We, you beat right at the beginning of this iOS/Android game of the same name. But you’re furious with the ending, because you couldn’t save your beloved. The one you’ve come to love through all the previous levels. The game ends, and you have to go back to your job, and then you realize that the next batch of tourists is comprised entirely of developers of the game you just finished.Meta enough for you yet?But it doesn’t stop there.
Through discussions with the game devs — all while warring with the question of whether to maintain your chipper, professional distance or to engage in picking their brains about this game you love (especially the ending! You have to know if there is a way to fix everything!) — you dig into topics ranging from casual sexism pervasive to the industry, to the dangers of slapping “obvious” evils like Nazis into games (the easy knee-jerk regard of which enables bigots to congratulate themselves on being progressive, while in fact continuing to hold their more subtly damaging worldviews unquestioned), to mental health issues in the workplace and how one does (or doesn’t) feel capable of addressing them openly, to privileging author vs. Reader perspective, to weighing the potential loss of individuality gained from a big corporate gaming merger with the increased resources that would then become available.I did not plan to play this game all the way through this morning. But I had to.
The dual narrative of what happens to your character as she tries to make the best of a rapidly-deteriorating space situation, vs. Her attempts to come to terms with what release games can and cannot offer her, was too compelling.Because it’s not just a conversation with the game devs that is on offer this week at the Spacejoy moonbase. Things go wrong up there. Plus — and I’m going to use romance as a transitive verb again with the caveat that I want to write a whole post on how that even emerged as a thing; do other fandoms do it? — you can romance the devs. Again like in the game they make that so enchants your character. The game whose ending, we are told, was hugely problematic and angered vast swathes of fans.coughcough.
Sound familiar?All this is playing out on an actual moonscape. You as the tour guide know something about how they will react to stimuli before they do, because you’ve seen it thousands of times before. Opening up the skydome for a full-in-the-face view of the universe, unfurling into infinity above them. Their first moonwalk, and the panic that can ensue. The ways to deal with that panic. Your character is shepherding these people she respects for outside reasons through motions which she already knows quite well.
That was so endearing it made my stomach flip. You’re tired and a little jaded about your job, and your superior’s an asshole, but you do in fact concern yourself with these people given into your care, and you’re capable of helping them navigate your world as you navigate theirs, in your rare moments of gaming downtime.The game gives you access to the full spectrum of RPG romance, too: you can remain strictly professional and distant, or (I suppose) throw yourselves at these people, your career be damned: but you can also reroute your path when you realize what they need really isn’t what you’re offering. I was friendly enough to Sadri, to start with, because she had all sorts of cool ideas about how to play with the space colony software to make it do more things, and she wondered if I might be open to letting her play with it.