- obviously there’s the fact that her critiques of DE are so unabashedly surface-level that you cannot tell if she’s actually played the game or read a plot summary/review of it.
- but there’s also the fact that she’s proposing a supposed improvement on what DE is with her own prompt, which in-and-of-itself is the lowest form of critique in my eyes–‘what if you had an entirely different idea?’
- and then the prompt itself is a doozy:
- she somehow found a way to both critique DE for being unimaginative with its scenario/having a white man protag and propose, in alternative, the absolute whitest possible scenario imaginable
- in the implicit shift from a grimy Eastern Europe to a comfy Western Europe, she’s managed to gentrify her scenario proposed in a critique about diversity
- she wants to keep disco elysium’s, unexamined by her, ‘wonderful writing’, while stripping it of all the rawness and deliberate confrontation that is at the heart of it that would conflict with the idyllic nature of her scenario and her stated opposition to griminess
- her idea of a more diverse story, if we’re taking it as she’s presenting it, is swapping a white guy with a white gal, which, I mean, diversity win, I guess.
- the fact that this is the most generic, safest-possible indie game idea imaginable. I could go on itch.io and find 50 of pretty much that game. this is the idea that like 50% of developers have when they’re thinking of a quick point-and-click game for a game jam.
i could go on, but the most scathing possible point I could make to this tweet is that this person is a BAFTA Judge 
A village in the Alps has absolutely zero potential for any interesting writing because there is very very little mixture of political beliefs, backgrounds and class there.
If you want interesting writing then your setting is essential, it is the material base from which the conditions are set that influence all possible options to writing.
witch—>early modern witch panics—>the religious wars in the old swiss confederacy; actually a fairly lush setting between the religious shitheads and imperial powers that transited the area and made use of swiss soldiers
the OP probably meant it as a no-friction generic fantasy setting tho lol
Yeah you can problem invent problems via exploring how a visibly obvious witch might be treated by the townsfolk of the middle of nowhere on the alps. But you’re essentially inventing that problem.
The best realistic conflict you could go for could be how women are treated. Honestly a Disco Elysium style exploration of misogyny and sexism could be interesting and I’m quite sure several characters from Disco Elysium would have treated the player completely differently as a woman.
But this person seeking “diversity” isn’t asking for that. Somehow they want idyllic cozyness at the same time as having fantastic writing. These two things don’t exist. Cozy comfyness can be lovely and healing but the story of your nice day out with your cat isn’t going to be incredible writing. That can be nice in its own right, I like several Slice of Life animes where literally NOTHING happens, but what’s good about them doesn’t come from the story but from the feeling and emotion they give you.
I don’t think you even need to invent problems, swiss mercenaries were only a thing because of how poor the swiss used to be, so that ‘idyllic village’ would be incredibly poor maybe at some point some people come back from a campaign by some french prince and some that left the village are now dead and some have gotten a little bit of money, like humanism in switzerland was explicitly against the mercenary system just because of how gruesome it was every 5th person would become a mercenary and a third wouldn’t come back. Humanists saw the buying and selling of flesh as immoral, and that it doesn’t enrich the mercenaries but rather professional outfits and foreign nobles. This all also happens around the time of the reformation so there’s quite a bit to explore.
You got local myths like Sennentuntschi where I’m sure there’s a lot of feminist writing that could be done, Mundaun did rewrite the ‘Teufelsbrücke’.
Of course that requires people to actually read about regions and their history instead of just using shit as wallpaper which too often switzerland is because they saw a ghibli movie at one point.
That’s to say that you can have incredibly interesting stories pretty much everywhere where people are it’s just that writers are lazy.
Aha! I think this is what bothers me the most about these sorts of “cozy” Stardew Valley-esque indie games. Everyone is just an idealised version of a person and they all get along really well. There’s no conflict, no assholes or jerks. Everyone is just happy and friendly, and that’s boring and unrealistic as fuck.
I think that’s kinda the point, games like Stardew Valley are for when you just wanna turn your brain off a bit and enjoy a comfortable atmosphere
I don’t mean Stardew itself, I mean a lot of “Stardew like” sort of games. Quite a few characters in Stardew are jerks to you, or seem like generally unpleasant people until you get to know them. A lot of games trying to recreate the atmosphere of Stardew miss that, and have every character acting like your best friend as soon as you meet them, just overly familiar and friendly, it feels really insincere.
Stardew Valley has an incel character nobody likes and some vet with PTSD from shooting too many brown kids in the face.
That’s probably what annoys me the most about this tweet. If anything there’s a bit of an excess of cozy cute indie games right now, everyone is trying to be Stardew. Feels like a bit of an over correction from the “dark gritty” stuff from a decade or two ago.
Weirdly I think it could work, if one flipped the entire premise on its head: “young witch” becomes “young witch only a few years out of magical grad school and already burnt out and falling apart” and “a small alpine town” becomes “the setting starts out as some sleepy idyllic town from an indeterminate time, but flows seamlessly between that and a decaying rustbelt town and a low-cyberpunk slum without any character acknowledging this” and “the missing cat” talks and eats cigarettes and becomes your inexplicably grounded foil for the rest of an incredibly banal plot that’s entirely out of sorts with the way the world is literally falling apart around you.
Yeah! Almost every magic-caster setting has an awful undercurrent of inequality where mages rule the “muggles” pretty much effortlessly, and any protagonist starting low is actually just elevated to hang with the cool masters of magic.
Or it could go the Technomancer or Case of the Toxic Spell Dump direction, where magic and wonder are as subject to being ground up to oil the gears of capital as anything else and the most common career for a young mage is decades on the Industrial Enchanting factory line, churning out flying sportscarpets or assembling Wands of Kill Insurgent.
Ottoman sieges? The fortress of national socialism? The rise and fall of Austria-Hungary? The slave labor of swabian children? Thats just of the top of my head here
Mundaun was alright. Think reformation era Switzerland could be a great setting for a game as well.
But they probably just want a nice slice of life game.
Have you heard of the game Pentiment?
Or “A Bavarian Tale”
Tell me you’ve never read Thomas Manns seminal novel “Der Zauberberg”
Also, the beloved children’s novel, Heidi, is literally right fucking there