I still have things to say about mobile gaming dangit!

So, several weeks ago I wanted to write about Derek, one of the characters from Project Makeover, and I was tired, and I second guessed myself so hard that I chickened out of the post. My point was valid, I think, but I simply didn’t have the evidence I wanted to make a whole article about Derek’s mistreatment.

You see, Derek is a character in Project Makeover, a game heavily leaning on surface level diversity to hide its conservatism. I mentioned this game in a previous newsletter but what I didn’t mention is how consistently in this game I am faced with a storyline that leaves me disappointed at best, where a person who has an interesting hobby or career is sanded down to the most generic version of themselves.

Derek is one of the consistent characters, the guy who handles the bulk of the work, the location - the Bobby if this is Straight Eye. Derek is also a husky Black man, with varied interests. He is consistently belittled for his interests, his anxieties (one of the running gags is that he’s afraid of anything remotely spooky like bugs or mannequins), and his love for the tools of his trade. In every makeover “episode” of the story, there are jokes about a) Derek misunderstanding a piece of jargon OR understanding the jargon if the client’s interests are “weird” enough b) Derek eating the food used as decor c) Derek naming his tools and d) Derek asking the player to do some work for him that is too hard or too frightening.

Derek’s masculinity is undermined at every opportunity, and his supposedly feminine traits are used along with his fatness to make him the butt of most of the jokes in the game. His colleagues make digs, his mother makes digs, and the game positions his genuine statements as punchlines consistently.

I wanted to write about how Derek is exactly the kind of man that, as a transmasculine person, I admire and want to emulate. A man with a wide range of hobbies outside his work, but a genuine passion for what he does. With a consistent and comfortable personal style, and someone who gets joy out of food and isn’t afraid to show his emotions. That’s not the kind of masculinity that I enjoy having made fun of in the game.

I guess I have done that defense now. But I’m not going through for 800 screenshots proving my point so you’ll have to take my word for it. But where I second guessed myself was - is the game simply being clumsy in its attempt to break stereotypes surrounding Black men? An extra few weeks of playing and paying attention to the pacing of dialogue leads me to say that I don’t think so, but there was genuine doubt in my mind when I sat down to write the first draft of this newsletter, and I’m willing to be argued with.

Short shout out spot!

If you want some fat Black man content for gay reasons like I do, check out D.J. Kirkland’s art.

If you remember me talking about Lily’s Garden, and how the first few stories of that game were compelling? The writer, Stella Sacco is on Bluesky.

Final ramblings about mobile games

Look, I think I’ve wrung just about everything out of this topic that I have at hand right now, and I want to start talking about farming sims so here’s my final thoughts. Recently I’ve been playing mostly Fishdom Solitaire, Project Makeover, and Balatro as my off-to-the-side-during-loading-screens games. And you know why?

Project Makeover’s worst story bits (the “drama” section) are entirely skipabble, Fishdom Solitaire has no story to speak of, and Balatro is not even pretending to have a narrative. And I think that’s the crux of longevity in a mobile game. Stop pretending you can have an infinite story and print infinite money with it. Give me a card game, or colours to match, and fuck off. Or, as I said in my first mobile game post, make it so dramatic I want to tell everyone about it. (I have dropped Game of Vampires, but mostly because the multiplayer side of it was… fraught, and the season pass was over $30. No shade to the writers who I am sure had no control over those aspects.)

Or be explicitly story focused. That’s fine too. Not my cup of tea for mobile, but I’m sure there’s someone out there looking for stories in their phone games.

Last but not least

Small piece of housekeeping. I took December off from Streaming because of the silly season, but we are BACK. I am streaming three times a week now, thanks to one of my fortnightly appointments wrapping up with the new year, and finally getting my full drivers’ licence which means no more driving lessons.

Those streams are:

• Monday, 10am NZT, Minecraft Hardcore

• Tuesday, 1pm NZT, Dwarf Fortress

• Saturday, 1pm NZT, Variety (this week we played Shadows of Doubt. Not sure what we’ll do next week)

Come join me on twitch if you're interested!

And that’s it for today. I’m going to genuinely attempt to write a post every week this year, but if I don’t… shit happens. Happy new year!