![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I said I have 3 WIPs. That is not entirely true. I have 3 stories I'm working on long-term who I hold near and dear and beloved to my heart who are my big projects and my recurring priorities, but I also have smaller and shorter fleeting ideas for things I don't really want to let go of, because that's just inevitable. And since one of my Big Stories has the same name as this blog I feel like it's more fun to hold off on that, so here is Play to Pay.
Sort of like pets, or houseplants instead of children.
Play to Pay is a video game. I mean, I don't know how to code and it would take a while to learn, so I usually say it's going to be a short story, but ideally, it's a video game, because the story itself is a metafiction commentary on the video game industry and video games as a medium. Look. I'm not a games guy. But you can't help having ideas when you engage with a certain medium even a little.
Our POV is Sol, a software engineer who is self-admitted weirdly name but otherwise regular. He dreams big and thinks of himself as an artist, but to make ends meet while he's still working on his own game, works for a small indie dev company, no more than 20 people including the interns, whose primary source of income is an overextended series of streamer-bait, kid-targeted "horror" games riding off the success of the mascot horror trend, with a marketably childish cast of cartoonish monsters and a method of design that can put them out faster than once a year. Namely: labor exploitation, because the crunch times at the studio are nightmarish, and Sol finds himself completely unable to even work on his own projects. Frustrated and stifled, he submits a resignation to his boss, but accidentally lets slip an implication that he also intends to whistleblow and cause a controversy about this well-loved horror game's creators. His boss retaliates with the reason I call the story "sci fi body horror"—reveals the true nightmare of his games by trapping Sol inside the next installment as one of the enemies. I think it works better as a game because it's so short but it also very much dates itself to the time period I came up with it (now, currently).
I hate how self-aware I am that most of my story ideas are just "I hate my job" or "I hate needing to have a job." Also I feel now's a good time to mention that for the posts about my WIPs I've been using the music field to recommend the song that makes me think of it the most. I would never have put Lemon Demon otherwise.
Sort of like pets, or houseplants instead of children.
Play to Pay is a video game. I mean, I don't know how to code and it would take a while to learn, so I usually say it's going to be a short story, but ideally, it's a video game, because the story itself is a metafiction commentary on the video game industry and video games as a medium. Look. I'm not a games guy. But you can't help having ideas when you engage with a certain medium even a little.
Our POV is Sol, a software engineer who is self-admitted weirdly name but otherwise regular. He dreams big and thinks of himself as an artist, but to make ends meet while he's still working on his own game, works for a small indie dev company, no more than 20 people including the interns, whose primary source of income is an overextended series of streamer-bait, kid-targeted "horror" games riding off the success of the mascot horror trend, with a marketably childish cast of cartoonish monsters and a method of design that can put them out faster than once a year. Namely: labor exploitation, because the crunch times at the studio are nightmarish, and Sol finds himself completely unable to even work on his own projects. Frustrated and stifled, he submits a resignation to his boss, but accidentally lets slip an implication that he also intends to whistleblow and cause a controversy about this well-loved horror game's creators. His boss retaliates with the reason I call the story "sci fi body horror"—reveals the true nightmare of his games by trapping Sol inside the next installment as one of the enemies. I think it works better as a game because it's so short but it also very much dates itself to the time period I came up with it (now, currently).
I hate how self-aware I am that most of my story ideas are just "I hate my job" or "I hate needing to have a job." Also I feel now's a good time to mention that for the posts about my WIPs I've been using the music field to recommend the song that makes me think of it the most. I would never have put Lemon Demon otherwise.
◾ Tags:
