BeeMar 14

So I’m about 40 hours into #mewgenics, which is just a beautiful thing from a game mechanics perspective.

I really wish the humour wasn’t #cringe. And it really is. It’s full of stuff that would be horrifically offensive if you took any of it seriously, but it is also full of poo jokes and so is very clearly trying not to be taken seriously. But I have thoughts.

Show threadBeeMar 14
Skipping past the horrifically problematic name, I can’t help but notice a bunch of stuff that’s racist and misogynist- for example a song on the in game radio called ‘Black Pussy’, which, the game seems to want to say, is a cat pun in a game about cats, so get your head out of your ass.
Show threadBee
I notice myself, as a white woman, holding my nose and looking past that little nugget of intersectional edgelordism, but I also notice that I’m not living at that particular intersection. But of course there’s edgelordism elsewhere in the game aimed at my stuff. That’s the bit I wanted to discuss, but I didn’t want to step over the #racism on the way to processing my #cognitiveDissonance in being 40 hours into an objectively terrible thing.
Mar 14 at 5:04pmWeb
Show threadBeeMar 14

so the whole game revolves around breeding cats and sending them to fight in dungeons. There’s therefore a life sim mode where you hoard cats, and dispose of a great many unwanted cats.

Unwanted kittens go to a guy named Tink, who is pink, fabulous, and massively closeted, and that’s the whole joke, badoom-tish.

Show threadBeeMar 14

Tink gives you UI upgrades in exchange for unwanted kittens. These let you detect inbred cats, gay and bi cats, and asexual cats. In a game about breeding cats (so many cats) you’re strongly encouraged to dispose of all of these, since they reject attempts to breed.

There’s some representation here. I am one hundred per cent hoarding pair bonded lesbian cats in my imaginary cat hoarding situation. And yet.

Show threadBeeMar 14

We’ve got gay male cats who attempt to hump straight male cats and get rebuffed.

We’ve got female cats who only reject sexual advances from males if they are lesbians.

There are apparently non binary cats, whom the game they/thems, but who turn out to have a ‘real’ gender for breeding purposes.

And so on.

Show threadBeeMar 14

As I’m thinking about this I feel like what we’ve got here is a decidedly libertarian flavour of edgelord. And I really feel like this hah hah aren’t we terrible flavour of humour is just *baked* in to our culture at this point. And the game is almost an equal opportunities offender, like #SouthPark. But probably not if you’re a straight white man with a job.

I don’t like it. I also don’t like that my ADHD has locked on to this game.

Show threadBeeMar 14
I feel like the kind of nihilistic stance the game seems to take, and the sandbox aspects of play, are supposed to excuse the humour. Mewgenics lets me subvert its ‘gotta breed em all’ philosophy by maintaining a massive queer polycule of fictional felines, but in doing so I’ve seemingly entered into a perverse relationship with a piece of #gameDesign.