The Dating Sim That Won't Tell You Why [Podcast]

I open with Sagan Yee's Last Call for the Redding District, a 3D narrative game that asks what would happen if mermaids had the life cycle of Pacific salmon. You swim home to a town modeled on Saskatoon, catch up with everyone you went to school with, decide who to spawn with, and then everyone dies. Danny Snelson, who advised Sagan's MFA thesis at UCLA, joins me to talk through clips from my interview with Sagan.

We get into the dating sim as a power fantasy, a game that won't show you the meter behind someone's affection, and a surface meter that works like an oxygen gauge for desire. Along the way, Angela Washko's The Game: The Game, Jessica Hopper's "Emo: Where the Girls Aren't" and Ted Chiang's lesson from Clarion West that world-building is one premise followed all the way to its end.

Then three pieces from the site: Studio Oleomingus's new work for the 8th Anyang Public Art Project, Is it any wonder that I hesitate even at the gates of paradise?; You+Pea's book Videogame Architecture: Building Virtual Spaces, which draws Doom and Elden Ring as building plans; and Palestine Skating Game, where the soldiers can now surround you and you can fight back.

We close on Dann Beeson's sticky-note storyboards for Messhof's Blood Dungeon and Dave Shuff's Big Steel Battalion Box, the refrigerator-box cockpit we first climbed into in 2014, now in the permanent collection of The MADE. Plus the new Killscreen events page.

Links

• Fish Make O-Faces, and Other Lessons From the Redding District, my feature on Last Call for the Redding District
• Studio Oleomingus Shows a Game About Mapping Paradise
• You+Pea Redraw Doom and Disco Elysium as Building Plans
• In Palestine Skating Game, the soldiers can surround you
• Sticky notes storyboarded Blood Dungeon's animated intro
• Dave Shuff's Big Steel Battalion Box Wins Editor's Choice
• Here's what it's like to play Steel Battalion in a tricked-out refrigerator box, from 2014
• Killscreen Events

Hosted by Jamin Warren with Danny Snelson. Music by Nick Sylvester.