#84 - All About Ooblets

Recently, on a bad second date, I was stunned to find that once again, I was tasked with trying to walk a man towards the idea that just because we don’t enjoy the same type of video game, it didn’t mean that I didn’t play video games.

It’s such a weird thing to have to explain to someone about an artistic medium that is so incredibly vast. There are different types of games!! Enjoying varying genres actually doesn’t diminish the mechanics of them, actually, it’s just indicative of what gameplay style someone most enjoys.

But then again, I am growing increasingly convinced that most people actually have no fucking clue what brings them joy, they’re just following the steps of what they’re told should bring them joy with very little introspection as to if it actually does. It’s scary to ask ourselves if we’re happy or if we’re just like pretty sure that ~this is what happiness feels like.

(I have been so happy in the last year. In ways that have made me question if I had ever actually felt happy for extended periods of time before or if I was just temporarily relieved of suffering and mistook it for genuine joy. But these days I feel like myself, I feel authentic, I feel surrounded by people who like genuinely respect me and demonstrate love and care and I hope I return all of those things in kind because I feel immense gratitude and admiration and love for them right back. But feeling these levels of happiness has illuminated just how dire the sadness before actually was. And in the acuity of my new awareness, there is grief for my past self who really thought she was doing just fine for all those years. (When, at best, we could call it coping.) It’s a grief worth acknowledging but not spending much time on tbh! Can’t change the past!!)

Anyway, Ooblets. It’s a little farming simulation game (my favorite chill genre of games because the über-competitive side of my soul gets to optimize for efficiency while having absolutely no reward system beyond patting myself on the back about it) with an adorable animation style and little fun buddy characters (the titular Ooblets) that act a bit like pokemon and follow your character around in a long and windy line as you run around town doing tasks.

The map isn’t massive but it’s big enough, managing energy levels is really the only thing that takes some getting used to, and the main play mechanic besides exploring/farming is having Dance Battles with other Ooblets. You have a random stack of moves and face off for seeds and prizes, it’s a cute little minigame that I actually found much more enjoyable than I was expecting. I hate grinding in games (which is why DragonQuest11 is one of the only JRPGs I’ll ever play—you can auto-grind in low-stakes battles and I am all for it!) so this was a delightful discovery.

The only thing I’ll say that’s like slightly negative is that this game—like other farming sim games—could do a better job of introducing new players to the mechanics and…objectives. Reading something in a letter one time on the second day of play is not enough to make it stick, game devs of the world! But there are wikis and walkthroughs and helpful little tips out there so it’s very possible to find the answers outside of the game itself. I powered through my first game as a scrappy little underdog who never had any money (aka “gummies”) and was constantly out of energy. My second playthrough is going in a completely different direction because I bought the coffee maker as my second self-imposed mission. Love a game that has multiple approaches depending on play style!

I’m not going to pretend like I don’t know the answer to the question of why games that are enjoyed by a primarily non-male audience are subject to so much scorn and derision.

It’s misogyny, babes!

But like, it’s self-imposed and postured and I’m just…so tired of being made to feel like this unwind-at-the-end-of-the-day hobby of mine has to include violence in order to be a “valid” form of the medium. And like, in general, I just ignore the gamer community, but it seems that I managed to accidentally let one of them inside of my home so I’ve just had a bunch of feelings bouncing around that are mostly just pure frustration at the gaming developers who caved so quickly and easily to the demands of their audience rather than furthering the storytelling mediums they invented.

(They create beautiful worlds and then only allow for one violent style of engagement. What’s the point of historical accuracy in the Assassin’s Creed series if I can’t even spend a single day of gameplay walking around Rome as a nun???)

And I’m really glad that indie developers have so much access to their audience and are creating really beautiful worlds and pathways in their offerings. Games like Spiritfarer and Night In The Woods both deal with grief and loss in ways I don’t think any other medium could. It’s fascinating to see conversations about “immersive details” in AAA games made by the big devs that have nothing to do with the actual immersion into the story or the attachments that we’re able to form through the narrative. (“You can take the saddle off your horse in Red Dead 2!” …okay but you can’t actually put the saddle down anywhere and if you think any horseperson in history has thrown theirs on the ground I have NEWS for you!)

But when I respond to “What games do you play?” the kneejerk reaction to my response is always “that’s not a real game”. To which I roll my eyes so hard. Like. Find a better argument. Be more articulate. Attempt specificity! The question they’re really seeking the answer to is, “What war-based combat-driven games would you be willing to watch me play?” but they temper it a little bit and then get mad when my answers don’t align.

I love Red Dead 2 solely because of the horse mechanics and the ways I can wiggle around the narrative to play the way I want to. Also because when you have to go somewhere far away, you can put your horse on a trail and set the camera to “cinematic mode” and smoke weed while the game autocompletes the task and (bonus!) allows you to admire the best scenery ever rendered. These facts rarely lend themselves to being a more “legit” answer to that question, but wow do ears perk up whenever it comes up on the list. “Oh finally, a real game!”

I am a competitive person and the youngest of my deeply competitive siblings. We had video games early in my life and controller time was often dictated by who could go the longest without dying/failing. In high school, my friends and I clocked an unimaginable amount of hours playing Mario Kart. I usually won because I had somewhat accidentally gotten really good at the game while trying to unlock Baby Luigi for a friend. (You had to beat the ghost on like eight different time trials and it was a nightmare but I DID IT and my dexterity for the game has truly never lapsed so shoutout to my 10th-grade self!) And while winning had been my priority for my entire life up to that point, winning every game against my friends stopped being fun very quickly. I never celebrated the win—because that would have been so tacky—but I also learned to be a very good sport about others winning. Mostly because a lot of my friends at that time were kind of assholes who liked to make it a Big Thing that they had Beaten Me and I think they wanted some kind of reaction from me to make their gloating make more sense? I remained carefully neutral. It wasn’t fun to win but it became important to the sanctity of the night because anytime I lost the energy would get sucked out of the room when someone would always be a little too mean about their win and everyone else just had to kind of sit with the aftermath of those actions.

Anyway, in college, Mario Kart made its triumphant return and once again illustrated for me why the people you surround yourself with really do make all of the difference.

No one was competitive. Like, sometimes we were, but the goal was never really about winning or bragging rights or any of that. We played Smoke & Drive (take a rip and hold it in until you hit the first item box) and explored the actual details and art style of all the different levels. Lil’ explorers going off-course and stopping in the middle of a tunnel to admire the art style of the fish we otherwise would have whizzed right past. The ultimate form of Mario Kart is playing while rolling on Molly, with Justice’s Cross album blaring from the speakers. If you hit a drift at the right music cue you will, in fact, feel like a god. We were giggly and silly and yelling “Wheelie, wheelieeee!!!” at each other the whole time.

The game was the same. The approach was what mattered.

So when my date, who was the one who suggested we play the Switch because he never had before, deflated after losing the first round, I fully checked out. Why would he expect to beat me at a game he had never played? Oh that’s right! Misogyny strikes again.

And like, this isn’t just a him thing. Dudes throughout my life have decided to go toe-to-toe with me and genuine rage has been revealed when it turns out I had the skills to back up my shit-talking. Which I should mention was done in jest (and mistakenly assumed they were too) because little animated cars looping tracks is not a serious matter for me as an adult. My dignity is not contained within how well I play a game! Particularly one as unserious as Mario Kart!!! Look at how stupid Link looks in one of their downloadable Mercedes ad-insert vehicles!!!!!!

I’ve been very keen on exploring how people consume their media rather than focusing on what they consume. Because I may have no interest in the genres that they do, but we may nerd out about them in the exact same way. I’m someone who usually enjoys critical analysis and finds it enhances whatever I’m watching/reading. I love cultural context! You’ll never catch me defending a monolith corporation but I will go to bat for the exploited workers who create under the increasingly weird conditions set forth by those companies!!

And it truly sucks that everything is so corrupt now that we can’t just enjoy our hobbies. We have to first acknowledge that someone somewhere is exploiting us and the artist/art we are attempting to connect with. Whether that’s the company those artists work for, the game developers pushing “crunch” times to extremes, the ticket companies who want to skim off the top, the managers who ruthlessly exploit their clients, or the advertisers who leverage the parasocial relationships into something much more sinister.

But I like video games. No one will ever convince me that The Sims isn’t a real video game. It might not be one they enjoy playing, but that doesn’t make it less real. (I’m unshakeable, I grew up dancing and horseback riding two activities that fight to be considered “sports”. I know a futile argument when I hear one, but I also think that once again, these things are categorized as such because they’re deemed something that only women enjoy. As if dancing is not a core human reaction to hearing music. As if our ancestors did not have to fight tooth and nail to be able to sit in an actual saddle rather than hold their legs together in a “side saddle” for propriety reasons.)

It’s not that they hate these games, it’s that they hate women. They hate that their hobby is not their own gendered bullshit and they despise the exploration of it as a medium because it’s somehow threatening to “their” games—which, by the way, have not slowed in production. Just this week the bro gamers had a really wild reaction to queerness being included in HBO’s adaptation of The Last Of Us. It’s as if they missed that canonically, The Last Of Us II, is really explicit about Ellie’s queer identity. (I get that they only focus on the machismo and badassery of Joel in pt. 1 but like…again, in the game itself, the entire point of Joel’s evolutional journey is to understand, care, and protect Ellie of his own volition.) There is grief being explored in the game, but unfortunately, the exploration is marred by the heavy-handed cognitively dissonant gameplay that requires the player to go murder-spreeing NPCs but then tries to make a point about senseless death in the pre-made narrative cut scenes. (For more on this and ludo-dissonant narratives in video games, check out NakeyJakey’s video essay about it!)

Anyway, dating is weird because I have to go through all of these realizations in front of a new person and then temper my reaction.

Is it really so bad that I want a chill vibey video game where I can collect things and pick plants and wander around a simulation in a low-stress environment rather than shoot people on a simulated military base? (The US Military btw finally ended its contract with Activision after two decades because once it was revealed to the general public that the games had been intentionally designed as recruitment tools, they were no longer effective. But I watched multiple classmates in high school get really into the Call Of Duty games, and I watched them sign up for the National Guard that same year. It was real, it did work, and the horrifying videos of US soldiers treating the deaths they caused of real people as if they were scoring points in a video game will forever remain. Activision can’t wash off the blood on its hands. So, I guess I hope the money felt worth it, but we know that exchange didn’t leave anyone with an intact soul, right?)

I am someone who will defend my interests to the core because I know that the dismissal of them is rooted in a patriarchal standard for what is considered “serious/cool/real” and not any actual measure of merit. I will not bend to the wills of men, because I don’t care about their underinformed opinions that have nothing to do with the reality of my life. Or where and how I derive pleasure from my existence. They don’t see me as a person, why would I allow their views to influence how I live?

So.

Ooblets cost about $30 and I would say it’s not overpriced, but probably worth waiting for a sale to come around before purchasing. It’s fun, it’s wiggly, the art design is squidgy and non-serious, and the plot is solid. It’s not reinventing the wheel by any means, but hey! They made a very nice little wheel!

For more thoughts about games I enjoy, check out this essay! I also have one all about Red Dead! And if you want to hear me talk about games, I did a podcast about it once with the aforementioned friend whom I unlocked Baby Luigi for!

Play the games you want to play, listen to the music that brings you somewhere else, and seek joy unabashedly because what else are we here for? There’s enough suffering in the world, let me have my heavily-modded Sims games in peace.