DESERTOPA'S PROFILE

I think the New Game+ store or menu option is a good idea, but I'd add to that that you shouldn't necessarily restrict yourself to offering the player options that'll preserve challenge. The players being offered a New Game+ have already completed the game; some of them may want to find more ways to challenge themselves, others will want different ways to get enjoyment out of the game. Sometimes a New Game+ can be a source of catharsis, allowing players to obliterate obstacles which were challenging the first time around.

author=emmych
tbh i don't really like writing stories about discrimination because

a) if i'm talking about certain topics, like race, it's probably Weird for me as a white person to write an impassioned story about what it feels like to be a POC and experience racism when i have never experienced that in my life (like legit, why would i want to tell that story so bad), and
b) when it comes to discrimination i actually face irl, i don't usually feel like spending my time creating something getting upset about real bullshit i have to deal with. i recognize the place and value of stories that folks like me will tell about their experiences (case and point: Dorian from DA:I being written by a gay man and having part of his plot revolve around Fantasy Conversion Therapy), but maaan i just don't wanna do it? if i'm gonna tackle a serious topic, i'd rather it not be "here have a collection of characters you're all supposed to empathize with. now let's make one of them be a blatant homophobe so the gay character can get Uncomf but ultimately teach the homophobe to not be homophobic."

i just wanna make a game about underrepresented people being excellent, man. if you wanna write a v personal story, go for it! it can be real cathartic (THE LAST ENCOUNTER IN FREE SPIRITS IS BASICALLY MY MOMMA ISSUES) and can do some real cool things for other folks who share that experience/teach people who want to learn, but for the most part, nah. count me out.

I realize this doesn't appear to actually answer your "but how to do this" question, but it does! My answer is "don't bother, write about something nicer than systemic oppression unless that's the point of the story" which is not the "correct" response here, but it is the stance I usually take.

I think it's good to be able to incorporate elements of prejudice or discrimination into a narrative without feeling compelled to make the story about those things. They're significant elements of human experience, and as a writer I prefer to be able to draw on them whenever it seems narratively appropriate. Prejudice isn't pleasant, but neither is violence, and lots of stories are made more interesting by the inclusion of violence, even if they're not stories about violence.

As far as writing about things you haven't experienced, I think it's perfectly appropriate to draw on the experiences of others. If you want to preach or moralize to your audience, people will tend to tolerate it more if you have the right credentials, but I don't really want to do those things in the first place.

author=eplipswich
Yeah, I don't think this is really a problem. I mean, if I'm underleveled and I find that I can't beat a boss, the natural thing I would want to do is to grind some more so that I'll be strong enough to fight the boss.

Well, at least that's for experienced gamers like me. But beginners will slowly learn to do the same.

EDIT: Actually, I wouldn't grind. I prefer to beat a boss by strategy rather than grinding :)

The trouble is, there are a lot of players who avoid battle as much as possible when it's easy to do so, and if they end up significantly behind the level curve, then that will tend to necessitate a large amount of grinding to get up to an appropriate level. So the player will have to deliberately impose on themself an extended period of exactly the thing they've been going out of their way to avoid.

Like Alice said in Alice and Wonderland, it's pretty bad to go a week without eating, but it'd be even worse to have to eat a week's worth of meals at once.

author=kalledemos
Huh. This makes me feel weird because I've experienced the opposite: easily avoidable touch encounters make me wanna fight battles. If anything, hard to avoid touch encounters are the kind that seem silly to me: If you're gonna have dozen touch encounters running aroound mach 200 in a narrow 3-tile wide corridor (yes an actual rpgmaker game I played did this; I forget which one) you might as well give me random encounters, cuz' at that point, it's just the illusion of choice. I feel if you deprave the player of the usual & inevitable random encounters, they'll actually have a sense of choice, being passively encouraged to engage in battles from their periods of non-action instead of going "OHHHH GOD I ONLY TOOK 10 STEPS ANOTHER BATTLE ALREADY?!" or "GEEZ ANOTHHER ROOM FILLED WITH INSTA-AGGROED SONIC SPEED SPAWNS" to the other encounter options available.

I think it's best when avoiding enemies is possible, but risky. You can get past some enemies without fighting, but attempting to do so carries a risk, usually of being subject to an ambush. So players may attempt to avoid some battles, but facing the enemy doesn't feel like a self-imposed obstacle.

Even if touch encounters are very difficult to avoid, they're still meaningfully differentiated from random encounters in that, once you defeat an encounter, that area is free of enemies, at least until you go through a zone transition. A random encounter system will tend to impede exploration more than a touch encounter system, because in a random encounter system you can always get attacked while backtracking or wandering, whereas with a touch encounter system you'll only be facing enemies in the parts of the map you haven't explored yet.

I'm going to second AlterEgo here. I think it's generally a mistake to treat character flaws as something that must be corrected over the course of a narrative, or have a spotlight shone on them calling attention to how wrong they are, and I think it's better to treat bigotry according to the same standards, rather than putting it in a class of its own.

In fact, because so many audience members expect authors to grant it special status, I think those strong expectations can give an author interesting material to work with. It's one of the reasons Deliberate Values Dissonance can throw audiences for such a loop.

You can also play off audience expectations by, say, creating a conflict between species, where one species deeply mistrusts the other, and presumes them to be inherently evil and dangerous, so that the audience will expect some kind of pat message on tolerance and understanding, and then subvert that by showing that the other species really is inherently dangerous and has values utterly incompatible with human society. Lampshade the fact that the protagonists erred by trying to generalize lessons about tolerance and understanding between humans, who're all fundamentally very similar in the grand scheme of things, to an entirely different species with completely different psychology.

That's just one possibility. I think that there are a lot of other interesting ways you could play around with themes of tolerance and bias, specifically because audience members so strongly expect writers to retread the same lessons over and over.

I asked the original translator for permission to do an edited version quite some time back. I've been putting it on hold until my work with Chronicles of Tsufanubra is finished, so it's not an immediate prospect, but I haven't discarded the project. I may put out a call for support when I pick it up, so if you or anyone else wants to get involved, I could probably use the help putting it all together.