Annotated X14-1
Picking up from yesterday…
Even though killing one of our leads (or lead-adjacent characters, depending on how you count) felt necessary for the story, it always felt like a little bit of a betrayal to write a character after we’d decided their death scene. We were asking you to invest in this person, knowing full well that in some ways, that investment wouldn’t be realized. Like we were insider traders. Like we sold you a bill of goods. That feeling’s at war with the feeling that we’ve made the story better and ultimately enriched your experience, but it exists in its own space. Shit’s complicated.
In Rachel’s case, as it happened, we had a ready-made character who could serve as the perfect surrogate for the audience’s investment in her. Zeroing in on Lia’s version of loss could show a lot of detail about how the game works (and fails to work) that we’d kind of hand-waved away before this point. And as Flo pointed out, we really needed to roll these characters out in a low-stakes story so you could relax and get to know them before we made them part of the main plot.
This scene did help a lot to reduce the sting caused by Rachels death. “Oh, haha, right, that was just a game!” Which runs a bit counter to the idea that Arkerra was every bit as real as Sepia World, although by this point in the story the effect on me was more adding detail to Sepia World than making Arkerra less real.
Also: All the detail I missed in the first read! Matrix poster, nun statue, and Penk on the screen — which probably means that Penk is an NPC. I had considered him a player character up to this point. Although he’s posed in a way that kinda looks like we’re not looking at representative background image but rather a character sheet/generator … but what would that mean?
I think Flo or T or Jason said on the original page that that was not supposed to be Penk, but rather a generic troll. Which I’m not sure adds up, because that looks a lot like like Penk’s armor.
Do these guys really run backups and can they run backups? There’s of course no question about it that they SAY they run backups…
Well, most people (bar perhaps no more than two), think it’s just a tech company. I’m sure they DO run backups of local data, with strict orders to never actually use them without the express orders of HR himself. Of course, against all odds, Arkerra is the only MMO that has never suffered a catastrophic loss that required the use of any kind of backups!
Kinda figuring it like that too. And any event that got too big too fast was just prelude to our new DLC! The Death Plague That Got Out Of Boss-Fight And Kept Killing Everyone Over And Over Again!
Or TDPTGOOBFAKKEOAOA for short! XD
Another thing to consider, if Arkerra has a habit of doing its own thing that may or may not match what the players want, being GM support in there must be a nightmare.