I AM LA REVACHOLIERE. I AM THE CITY.

VOLITION — An RPG, huh? That phrase feels familiar, somehow.

INTERFACING [Medium: Success] — Not just the phrase. These mechanics, the feel of arrow keys under your hands.. You’ve done this before. Not this exact game, but similar.

ENCYCLOPEDIA [Challenging: Success] — The game you are looking for is OFF, an RPG made in ‘08 by one Mortis Ghost about something called The Batter, an entity sent to purify the world he resides in.

CONCEPTUALIZATION [Medium: Success] — That sounds just like you.

COMPOSURE [Medium: Success] — Yes, but despite the respect you hold for this noble mission, you never quite finished the game. You got stuck on one of the last bosses: The Queen.

INLAND EMPIRE [Formidable: Success] — You just could not do it. Looking at her made you sick.

PAIN THRESHOLD [Medium: Success] — So you don’t know the ending. This has apparently been subconsciously eating away at you for a while.

LOGIC [Easy: Failure] — ..Maybe the lieutenant knows something? You should ask him. Ask him if he has ever beaten OFF before. It’s the only way to calm your lore-driven heart!

YOU — “Kim, can I ask you something?”

KIM KITSURAGI — “What’s the question? I hope it’s related to the investigation.”

RHETORIC [Challenging: Success] — Watch out! You say “beat off” here to mean completing a playthrough of OFF, the RPG video game by Mortis Ghost. However, the phrase “beat off” is also euphemism for masturbation! Without context, it would appear you were talking about masturbating!

YOU — Whoa… I’d better be more careful!

RHETORIC — Yeah, you’d better. Now say “never mind” and never ask him anything like that. Ever.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Success] — Ever? What a party pooper. It’s cool, man. You’re cool. Kim’s cool. It’s important to get to know your partner.

YOU — “Actually, never mind.”(Don’t ask him)

PERCEPTION (SIGHT) [Medium: Success] — Out of the corner of your eye, you see a gigantic centipede on the ceiling.

YOU — Turn to look at it.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.