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'Real gamers cut to the chase. They power through all the nonsense and go for the gold.' Who is Vriska Serket????????

AKA: If You Win In The Game, You Win In Real Life

In January of 2011, Vriska Serket is already the most talked about character in Homestuck. The debate is constant and neverending, and even so soon, there’s not much to say about her (positive or negative) that hasn’t already been said.. I’m a huge Vriska fan and I’m certain this bias will show, but I’m not interested in defending her actions, only exploring her as a character.

I’m specifically interested in Vriska as gamer, and how game logic and mechanics are the guiding principles of her entire life. She succeeds in any area that she can treat as a game, and fails in areas she can’t. On a narrative level, her gaming mastery links her more to powerful game-themed villains like Jack Noir and Lord English than to her peers, and given that Homestuck itself functions like a game, she’s perfectly positioned to achieve that same level of power.

Structured around her official introduction (p.2195), this essay primarily focuses on Vriska in Hivebent, and also discusses her role in Act 5 Act 2 up to page 3360. It’s 8,000 words in total below the cut – the Vriska Number – but for a quicker read, you can take section 1 as a standalone (1700 words).

Content warning for discussion of abusive dynamics (sections 2 and 6) and addiction (section 4). You can read the game studies articles I cite here.

1. You are a master of EXTREME ROLE PLAYING. You can't get enough of it, or really any game of high stakes and chance.

AG: Red team is going to 8ite the dust! (p.2122)

This is Vriska’s first real line in Homestuck, immediately establishing her as a competitive gamer. In her personal timeline, Vriska might argue that her life began with gaming. Freshly pupated trolls undergo dangerous trials in the brooding caverns, and those that survive are rewarded with a lusus, a hive, and an opportunity to live. Since many games on Alternia extend into the actual world and directly risk players’ actual lives, they’re no different from these initial trials which offer similar defined objectives, dangers and rewards. Vriska may have always seen her life through the lens of gaming, or, following her impressive FLARP career that takes up the majority of her time, she may have later reframed it as a series of level-up opportunities that she’s excelled at every step of the way.

Vriska moves seamlessly from her trials in the brooding caverns to FLARP to her own Sgrub game to meddling with the kids’ Sburb game, allowing her life to literally be a series of games without much time in between – it only makes sense that these would affect how she thinks about life outside of games, too. She specifically views Sgrub as a ‘sequel’ to FLARP, for example seeing her own assignment to Sgrub’s red team as Aradia’s revenge for killing her over their FLARP dispute while Aradia insists that it’s unrelated (p.2276). Vriska’s perspective is ultimately validated by the narrative itself and by Doc Scratch’s involvement in both games, which ensures that the FLARP team’s cycle of revenge does carry over into Sgrub.

Vriska’s mindset, both in and out of games, is one of continuous improvement, optimization, and minmaxing. She often claims to have ‘[s]o many irons in the fire’ (p.2198), has ‘more [FLARP] levels than any member of the PETTICOAT SEAGRIFT class ever’ (p.2196), and upon learning that Aradia has seen Bec Noir up close, she immediately asks about his ‘weaknesses, tactical disadvantages, stuff like that’ (p.2792). She refuses to ‘get sidetracked 8y films a8out wounded, muscular renegades’ despite her crush on Nic Cage (p.2975), and in general, she doesn’t have the luxury of distractions or taking breaks. She’s constantly competitive and looks to favorably compare herself to others in all cases. She considers herself the best player within the red Sgrub team she’s assigned to, saying she ‘did most of the work’ exiling the Black Queen (p.2547), but also considers her arbitrarily-assigned team to be better than others, saying that ‘Prospit is the 8est. Derse is where all the rejects hang out’ (p.2661). She’s even competitive about text color (p.2736) as well as blood color when it benefits her, telling Karkat that ‘[her] 8lood's the prettiest’ (p.2296) – but she wants to be the best and could never settle for being fifth out of twelve, so she otherwise doesn’t buy into the hemospectrum, disagreeing when Equius says she’s a little worse than he is (p.2222).

By prioritizing mechanical progression above all else, only understanding gameplay through the lens of competition, and valuing tactics and advancement for their own sake, Vriska can best be described as a ‘power gamer’, a style of gameplay that involves willingness to work hard and ‘grind’ at the game for the sake of winning. Writing about massive multiplayer online games, Robert Silverman (2006) says that power gamers ‘define the limits of what is possible in the game’ and ‘place a great deal of significance on achieving an elevated level of fame and social status in the gameworld’ but also ‘approach the game with […] a megalomaniacal disposition’ – or perhaps, megalovaniacal?

Vriska demonstrates her power gamer mentality both as a player and as a designer, two roles that exist within both FLARP and Sgrub (player and clouder or client and server, respectively). As a clouder or server, Vriska imposes her playstyle on others, and designs scenarios with specific solutions in mind that expect her players to mechanically optimize their character builds the same way she does instead of allowing for exploration and story-driven or open-ended gameplay. This desire isn’t inherently bad, and many games are designed to be played this way – for example, unskippable boss fights in video games, or tabletop roleplaying games where most mechanics describe combat abilities. However, some players prefer open-world and low combat games, something Vriska refuses to accommodate – for example, Tavros FLARPS as a Boy-Skylark because it’s the ‘CLASS [HE] THINK[S] IS MOST FUN’ despite being tough at low levels (p.2168), and Vriska attacks him with high-level monsters where his only option is to engage them in combat.

Later, Vriska engineers a Sgrub scenario where she guides Tavros to her hive, and writes a script expecting him to overcome his paralysis and kiss her. Again, this is at odds with both Tavros’ playstyle and capabilities, but also goes beyond the immediate scope of a server player’s job. Additionally, it’s something she planned in advance of Sgrub, asking Kanaya to make her outfit for the scene (p.2388) – in essence, she’s modding Sgrub, creating new gameplay modes and story additions that aren’t present in the base game but provide Tavros with additional challenges. Sgrub encourages players to co-create their gameplay experience to some extent, by giving server players significant power over the client, allowing them to build their client’s house in ways that can make the game easier or more difficult (p.2349). Vriska’s choice here, to build Tavros’ house exclusively with stairs, is mechanically optimized in that it’s a more efficient use of her limited build grist than a series of wheelchair ramps would be, but again it’s not an appropriate choice for her client player’s needs.

Vriska takes this same modder’s mindset into the kids’ Sburb game by guiding John, even though extradimensional alien guidance isn’t a typical Sburb feature. Her efforts with John are more successful than with Tavros, largely because his gameplay style better aligns with hers. While he isn’t an extreme power gamer, he’s goal-oriented, capable, and believes in his team’s possible success, the ‘winner's attitude’ she prizes (p.2663).

Even a mechanically optimized playstyle necessitates weakness in some areas – many games don’t allow players to max out all their statistics, and require choice and prioritization. In FLARP specifically, game attributes ‘will always relate in some way to [...] real life attributes’ (p.2171). Vriska’s social and rapport stats are probably low, as these are her weakest areas outside of games, though she sometimes compensates for this with mind control powers (discussed in section 4). She dismisses absconding as a legitimate strategy, so her stealth statistic may be low, and she has little respect for puzzles, lore and anything she considers ‘8oring’ (p.2369). Her stats almost certainly allow her to breeze through combat and assume she won’t need to employ any of these other skills. This is effective in many games, including FLARP and Sgrub, but when she takes this ‘steamroller’ attitude to non-game situations, she runs into problems. She’s not completely immune to sentimentality and allegiances, valuing her partnership with Terezi as the Scourge Sisters (discussed in section 6), but this partly comes from a game-based understanding that teammates are sometimes necessary for success. She’s equally willing to dismiss these people when they’re no longer useful for her advancement, whether or not it hurts her emotionally to do so.

Saying that Vriska ‘can’t get enough’ of extreme roleplaying has a double meaning. Colloquially, it means that she loves FLARP and wants to do it all the time, but its more literal meaning is that no matter how much of it she does, it’ll never be enough to satiate her lusus, who reaps plenty of the rewards. Importantly, I think both meanings are true. Writing in 2003 about power gamers in massive multiplayer online games, T.L. Taylor argues against articles which demonize this playstyle and suggests that power gamers ‘constitute a group who play in ways we typically don’t associate with notions of “fun” and leisure’. They consider their gameplay to be ‘reasonable, rational and pleasurable’, are self-motivated in goal setting through a ‘desire to be best’, and straddle the dichotomy between leisure and labor. One player describes pushing through physical pain to reach level 50 in a single fourteen-hour game session, and afterwards said ‘I’d still rather be doing that than other things. This is my goal, it’s going to be fun when I get there.’

It’s usually clear in the narrative when Vriska pretends to like something or someone, but hates and fears it deep down, something I’ll discuss more in section 2. This never happens with FLARP or Sgrub. These games are responsibilities and sources of stress for her, but she loves them all the same, and the delight on her face when she completes a quest and finds the treasure always feels genuine to me (p.2517). With her mind control powers, there are surely other ways that Vriska could find and provide spider food, but she chooses FLARP.

On Earth, many people use video games for escapism and purely as a hobby, but that’s not universal. Some people play video games professionally, for example as Twitch streamers or esports players. For these people, gaming is a source of income (often an unstable one) and no longer being able to play due to injury, technical problems or loss of followers or sponsorship deals could mean having no money to pay for food and housing. Vriska’s ability and willingness to keep playing games day in and day out to feed her lusus and maintain basic survival, and her gaining large amounts of power and treasure through games that translate to the actual world, make her an effective parallel to these professional gamers.

Skilled high-level gaming and constant focus is generally necessary for these careers, and while I think Vriska’s love of games and power gaming attitude are genuine, I also think that she can’t afford to even consider other playstyles or attitudes to gameplay because they could affect her livelihood. Finding joy and value within a constraint doesn’t mean the constraint ceases to exist, and Vriska’s games are both mandatory and permanent where her friends’ are not, something which definitely affects her mindset. Part of her obsession with Tavros comes from recognizing him as someone who also loves games and trying to ‘convert’ him to her own gameplay style, because the alternative – that she could get any enjoyment out of games from playing the way he does – is a luxury that to her is unthinkably dangerous.

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2. Your lusus is VERY HUNGRY, ALL THE TIME. She can only be appeased by the FLESH OF YOUNG TROLLS.

Like almost all young trolls, Vriska has a lusus, an Alternian monster who lives with her in a supposedly mutual caretaking relationship. Unlike other trolls, Vriska has a secondary mentor in the form of Doc Scratch, her planet’s First Guardian. Having such a powerful mentor gives Vriska tactical advantages in the form of information and someone to model herself after, but places her at a disadvantage in the relationship itself.

Compared to other troll-lusus relationships, Vriska’s appears very onesided. It’s her job to provide her lusus with a constant supply of food in the form of young trolls (something which takes regular extensive effort on her part), and it’s not clear what, if anything, she gets out of this arrangement besides not being eaten herself. Vriska keeps her lusus at a physical distance down ‘like fifty million stairs’ (p.2205), most likely for her own physical safety, and keeps a doomsday device strung up on top of her. Vriska’s lusus makes her life much harder, but their agreement is ultimately simple, and the motives behind it are simple too – base needs of food and survival. This can be likened to a game, in that the rules are defined at the outset and made clear to all parties.

Vriska is openly jealous of Kanaya’s kinder and more nurturing lusus, outright saying that her own lusus ‘sucks’. When checking on her lusus after Kanaya suggests she might have died, she quickly covers up her disappointment by telling herself it’s relief, claiming to think ‘[i]t would be devastating if anything happened to [her] dear sweet custodian’ (p.2207). Later, when Vriska does find her lusus nearing death, it falls to Vriska to put her out of her misery – a mercy kill, but also another act of survival, guaranteeing once and for all that she won’t be eaten by her lusus. If Vriska had admitted to herself sooner that feeding her lusus was a burden, she could have saved many trolls’ lives by killing her own lusus much sooner, but her desire to set herself apart and believe that she alone is capable of handling this responsibility hindered her from doing this.

Vriska’s relationship with Scratch is more complicated. Scratch shares Vriska’s gamer mindset, and the chess games they play together are key to their relationship. Vriska calls Scratch ‘a path8tic, lonely gamer’ (p.2244), an insult that’s both accurate and could include an element of projection, and while she’s visibly distressed about the ways he manipulates her, it’s more important to her to beat him in a game than to out-mastermind his bigger schemes. Winning at chess is another defined goal with clear stakes, giving Vriska something concrete to aim for, and while she never ends up beating him, she makes real progress towards this goal – presumably learning from his previous strategies and her own past mistakes to decide which questions to ask her magic cue ball. Games are also something she can clear her head to focus on, even when she’s emotionally invested in the outcome. In contrast, Scratch engineers his schemes, such as manipulating her into killing Aradia, to happen at Vriska’s most emotionally vulnerable moments. The stakes and long term consequences of this are clear to Scratch but entirely obfuscated for Vriska, and without a specified outcome to aim for, Vriska can’t focus and gives over to her emotional response entirely.

In both of these relationships, Vriska can’t ever match or exceed either her lusus or Doc Scratch in power. I believe that ceding power to anyone is terrifying to her, especially entities as dangerous as these. For that reason, she’s forced to alter her mindset so that she believes she’s willingly complicit in their schemes and could be choosing otherwise – she claims that Scratch ‘didn’t exploit [her]’ and that ‘all [she] did w8s humor [him]’, though elsewhere in the conversation she’s in clear distress and states she wants to ‘go 8ack to never ever talking’ to him (p.2202). Her actual feelings towards both her lusus and Scratch are clear to the reader, but not to her, because they contradict the lens through which she views the world: according to her, she can win any game she plays if she just tries hard enough, and if it seems like she’s losing, that’s actually a situation she’s consented to for her own reasons.

With this in mind, it’s no wonder that Vriska is uncomfortable receiving exile commands from Snowman and being at the mercy of a Sgrub server player. These forms of control are much more direct than the power her lusus and Scratch have over her, and much harder to pretend to be choosing. As such, Vriska is ‘[c]ompletely unresponsive to [exile] commands’ in the early part of her session (p.2521), and can’t help but protest ‘No, don't!’ when Kanaya threatens to upend a load gaper over her head (p.2356) despite feeling justified in taking advantage of her similar power over Tavros just a moment earlier.

Vriska’s desire to restore her physical body by ascending to God Tier is of course mostly motivated by a desire to advance in Sgrub levels, but it could also be seen as a desire to regain control over her physical form - Equius maintains potential control over her robotic arm (p.2223), and though making her slap herself after a minor dispute is insignificant, the fact that he could interfere during a critical FLARP or Sgrub battle is likely a source of fear for her, particularly after Aradia and Equius successfully wrestle leadership of Sgrub’s blue team from her.

Vriska appears to bring her competitive, gamified mindset to all her interpersonal relationships, always seeing room for a potential winner and loser. It’s likely that this attitude first came from her lusus and was later reinforced by Scratch, and through learning from them she’s able to seamlessly slide into ‘their side’ of the role. She’s deeply influenced by both of these relationships, with Scratch seeing her as ‘unpleasant, simplistic […] [v]icious and predictable, like an insect’ (p.2202) due to her straightforwardly goal-orientated approach to the world, while she’s also picked up some of Scratch’s cunning tactical mastermind persona. Both of their control over her is extremely overt, and she also rarely tries to hide it when she’s trying to manipulate someone else.

Vriska telling John ‘You will speak to me only when I am ready to contact you, is that clear????????’ and knowing his name but being angry that he’s learned hers (p.2784) are tricks lifted directly from Scratch’s playbook, someone who Vriska wasn’t able to message unless he initiated conversation. Threatening to kill John was ‘o8viously just [her] way of getting to know [him]’ (p.2653), which could also describe Vriska’s first interaction with her lusus. By her own logic, Vriska should be proud of John bending the rules and figuring out how to message a troll without invitation, but I think her base terror of the power dynamic between them being inverted (putting her back in the situation she grew up in) prevents her from feeling this way.

Vriska does appear to genuinely like John and feels some desire to see him as an equal, for example, saying he ‘should have no reason to 8e scared of [her]’ and acknowledging that he might become even stronger than her (p.2976), in contrast to her feeling flattered when Gamzee says he’s scared of her (p.2792). So, she’s stuck between wanting to build that relationship of equals, but unable to avoid recreating the only dynamic she feels confident about.

Notably, every game Vriska plays is hierarchical – in FLARP, clouders have power over the other team’s players (similar to the Dungeon Master role in Dungeons & Dragons), and in Sgrub, each server player has power over a client, although Sgrub does ensure that all players will fill both roles (more akin to the rotating Game Master in Ars Magica). Within tabletop roleplaying games, players intentionally buy into this power structure, ceding in-game control to another person and trying to solve problems on their terms in hopes of receiving a positive game experience. This could be how Vriska views giving up control to her lusus and Scratch, believing that what she’s getting out of these relationships compensates for the power she loses, and that she could change her mind at any time. However, it doesn’t translate to her relationship with John, because he hasn’t ceded control to her on game terms. He listens to her advice and trusts her based on her timeline advantages, but ultimately sees her as a potential friend, while she sees him as a Sburb player she’s stepping in as server for.

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3. You are something of an APOCALYPSE BUFF, which is something you can be on Alternia.

You are fascinated by end of the world scenarios, and enjoy constructing DOOMSDAY DEVICES for the hell of it.

The coming apocalypse and corresponding end of troll civilization is a major part of Hivebent and Sgrub, so it’s surprising that this interest of Vriska’s isn’t often mentioned in the story. Prior to Sgrub, Vriska thinks that ‘the world can't end soon enough’ due to her current string of bad luck (p.2197), suggesting she knows the apocalypse is imminent. So, one explanation for this interest is that where other trolls devote time to preparing for a future career as a legislacerator or threshecutioner, Vriska spends time learning about the apocalypse to be best prepared for it when it arrives. In general, I think Vriska thrives best when she can plan her moves in advance and engineer the best possible chance of success. She also wants to be involved in the biggest and most important events, and these two things combine into a fascination with the end of the world.

Vriska is in the process of building a doomsday device, which hangs between her and Equius’ hives, and (like FLARP) utilizes dice mechanics. Despite its link to her interests this device is ultimately a fakeout, breaking as soon as it’s activated and only causing damage due to being a heavy object. The successful doomsday device Vriska eventually ‘constructs’ is Bec Noir, whose creation she claims responsibility for once she has access to the kids’ timeline. In her first conversation with John, Vriska stresses that it’s important for him to get Jade into the Medium so that his group can complete their prototyping chain, suggesting that she made this plan immediately upon finding their session and is directing all her meddling efforts towards it.

In Hivebent, Vriska is very focused on exploiting and living by the mechanical aspects of games. However, her stated motivation when meddling with the kids’ session is more about exploiting the rules of narrative – it ‘only makes sense’ that she’d be the one to create Bec Noir, since she also plans on being the one to kill him (p.2975). Vriska does not have a choice over whether Bec Noir is created, since ‘[r]egardless of what [she] did, he is already here’ in the trolls’ session (p.2975), and if she didn’t ensure his creation, paradox space would likely have done so through other means. She does have a choice as to whether she’s directly responsible for his creation.

I think this parallels a video game narrative more than any other type of story. Video games often offer players small choices that influence how a story plays out, such as which faction to align with, which NPCs to befriend, which order to tackle challenges in, and whether or not to accept sidequests. However, it’s rare for games to allow players to radically change the main story. Often, the final boss is the final boss from the moment a player first installs the game, and the choices made along the way can’t change that (except for the choice to stop playing the game entirely, something Vriska wouldn’t even consider). In Sburb and Sgrub, timelines provide this ‘railroading’ aspect of games, keeping the game on track even while players otherwise have a lot of freedom when facing challenges. Vriska’s decision to create Bec Noir is a story-based choice within the game’s constraints, and is significant because it marks a shift towards Vriska caring about other aspects of games besides optimized mechanics.

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4. You are drawn to means of DARK PROGNOSTICATION and the advantages they offer, particularly in gaming scenarios.

Your abilities in this department were hobbled with the loss of your VISION EIGHTFOLD, and you have since sought alternatives through various BLACK ORACLES.

Vriska constantly seeks advantages of all kinds, likely because of the life-threatening nature of the games she’s a part of and the unequal power dynamics she’s placed into. She’s generally dismissive of others who don’t seek out those advantages or fail to do so, for example making fun of Tavros for not being able to walk since she quickly acquired robotic prosthetics after she herself became disabled. She also expects that other people will behave similarly to her, assuming that Aradia will trick Sollux and ‘pull[...] the finely woven silken mesh over his dum8 different colored eyes’ (p.2144) despite Aradia saying that it isn’t like that.

Vriska tells Tavros that ‘[his] real strength is surrounding [himself] with allies who are much stronger than [him]’ (p.2369), but to an extent, this is true for her too – some of the advantages she seeks out are social. She makes alliances with Equius and Eridan, both higher on the hemospectrum than she is and willing to perform favors for her, as well as Doc Scratch, who acts as an oracle in his own right. She uses FLARP to seek out more concrete advantages, and begins Sgrub with midgame and endgame-level magic items like her rocket boots and the Fluorite Octet. She appears to keep one eye open for any advantage that might cross her path, such as seeing Jade’s holographically projected Pesterchum screen and seizing the chance to read her messages with Tavros, which gives her access to new information (p.3058). She may have used Karkat’s memos the same way, despite disparaging them later. She keeps a stack of FLARP manuals and guidebooks in her room, presumably poring over them for any rules and loopholes she can exploit.

Vriska is also handed advantages by Sgrub itself, and given special treatment within the game. She’s assigned the Land of Maps and Treasure, a beautiful planet that appeals to her existing interests where she can excel. It’s filled with treasure, making it much easier for her to advance and earn boondollars than other players, on top of the huge amounts of treasure she’s accumulated pre-game – Sgrub has no interest in evening the playing field. Sgrub even gives Vriska the cosmetic upgrade of a dreamself who wears red shoes, instead of the ‘standard model’ of shoes matching a player’s text color (p.2505).

One of Vriska’s biggest advantages is her psychic powers, which allow her to mind control other trolls and intelligent Sburb constructs, and to put humans to sleep and wake them up. She claims to have a high level of access to the minds of others that may include reading thoughts, as she finds Karkat’s mind ‘totally unpalata8le to 8rowse’ (p.2178). She never seems concerned with how other people will feel about being mind controlled, even when in service of highly distressing and uncharacteristic actions, such as forcing Sollux to kill Aradia (p.2245). In essence, she treats others around her like NPCs whose primary job is to facilitate her game experience, instead of as their own living, thinking, feeling beings. Her FLARP character name, ‘Mindfang’, directly invokes the way she uses these powers to damage her foes.

Vriska is very dependent on her psychic abilities, which aren’t unique to her but also aren’t universal to trolls. Realizing her abilities may not be effective on humans is a source of concern for her, and her immediate response isn’t that it’s not possible, but simply that she’s not trying hard enough (p.2636). She’s proven right when she tries harder and successfully wakes John up, and then spends extensive time practicing her powers on a young Jade (p.3059) before deploying them at more critical moments – arguably equivalent to level grinding in a game before tackling a major fight. These efforts validate Vriska’s existing worldview that personal effort, including brute force of will along with tactical use of advantages, are enough to solve any problem. According to Vriska, people should be proactive in finding their own solutions – the best weapons, loot, NPC allies, shortcuts, glitches and cheeses – and are deserving of failure if they can’t or won’t do this, explaining why she can’t understand Tavros’ inability to overcome his paralysis and get up from her floor.

Another of Vriska’s biggest pre-Sgrub advantages is her magic cue ball, which ‘make[s] predictions with alarming precision and specificity’ for anyone who can see through its opaque surface (p.2260). Vriska is capable of this with her vision eightfold, and places a lot of trust in this device, calling it her ‘faithful little oracle’ (p.2261) and not expecting that Terezi will reveal that she has this, even after their feud begins. Terezi considers Vriska’s use of the magic cue ball during Skaian chess games with Doc Scratch to be ‘CH34T1NG’ (p.2256). This is technically true, but Vriska is really just giving herself similar advantages that the omniscient Scratch already has, leveling the playing field instead of giving herself an edge. This is the context where it’s most beneficial – outside of a game, Scratch would be able to twist his words to justify why her victory against him didn’t actually ‘count’ in the grand scheme of things, but victory in chess is undeniable.

Both Terezi and the narrative text liken Vriska’s dependence on the magic cue ball to addiction, a theme that has previously appeared in Hivebent with Gamzee. One possible parallel between drug addiction and Vriska’s cueball use is that both can provide genuine advantages until suddenly they don’t – Vriska’s use of the magic cue ball to gain information literally blows up in her face (p.2267), just as long term drug use can lead to serious physical or mental consequences for the user. Vriska’s desperation to use the cue ball and inability to resist its pull (p.2259) is also characteristic of addiction.

At the same time, instrumental drug use doesn’t always cause drug addiction. Use of mental stimulants and technological advantages are both fairly common practices in professional competitive gaming, and players using stimulants may not be addicted to the drug itself, but simply want or need to excel in tournaments. They might exhibit Vriska’s same desperation to use if poor tournament performance would lead to being dropped by a team or sponsorship. Since Vriska’s desperation to use the cue ball comes right after Terezi has told her she’ll ‘B3 D34D 1N 4 COUPL3 M1NUT3S’ (p.2258), it seems clear that Vriska’s use is less about addiction and more about survival.

More generally, Silverman (2006) is critical of the idea that high levels of commitment to gaming – to the point of suffering health problems like carpal tunnel, migraines, and insomnia – is a sign of addiction. He suggests that power gamers’ continued play is better described by positive social comparison compared to other players, self-improvement and identity formation, and maintenance of a social network once part of the ‘in-group’ of elite players to the point that players’ internal and external commitments to the game mean players ‘begin to discount, ignore or become outright blinded to both costs and benefits [of continuing to play], and not be able to effectively weigh between the two at all’. Video game addiction may be a popular theory to incite debate around, but I do not believe this accurately describes Vriska.

Notably, there are moments when Vriska elects not to use advantages. Vriska threatening to use mind control to make Tavros’ FLARP move for him takes him by surprise as ‘iT'S AGAINST THE RULES,’ (p.2173), suggesting she hasn’t used psychic powers before in their friendly game. She also chooses not to mind control Tavros at critical moments, including when she first tries to kiss him after luring him to her hive (p.2383-5) and when she asks him to kill her to help her ascend to God Tier (p.3114). Sparking a ‘chumpy impressiona8le human 8oy-off’ with Terezi, Vriska promises not to use any powers ‘to prove it's no 8ig deal’ (p.2792).

It seems that Vriska only uses advantages when she’s in direct danger or when the win itself is particularly important to her. The challenge of a game is rewarding in itself, and she likes to stretch and exert her natural/game mechanical capabilities if she feels like she’s capable of winning through these alone. She may reach for her advantages again if she feels like she’s struggling to succeed under the conditions she’s created, such as putting Dave to sleep during the same human boy rivalry with Terezi (p.2838), and she certainly has no aversion to or moral qualms with cheating in games. Vriska’s use of advantages and cheats under some circumstances may well get her kicked from a server or tournament if she was operating in our world, however, I don’t believe Terezi’s assertion that ‘[VR1SK4] 4LW4YS CH34TS 1F SH3 C4N F1ND 4 W4Y’ (p.2256) is accurate. Terezi doesn’t distinguish between how Vriska games for survival vs how she games for pleasure, a distinction which I think meaningfully affects Vriska’s playstyle.

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5. […] with each you destroy, you add to an insurmountable stockpile of TERRIBLE LUCK. You have to stop. But addiction is a powerful thing.

Vriska’s strife specibus is ‘dicekind’ and her fetch modus is ‘8 ball’, both of which operate via luck. In Sgrub, Vriska’s title is the Thief of Light, and according to Terezi, ‘FORTUN3 1S TH3 3SS3NC3 OF L1GHT, 4ND 1T SH1N3S ON THOS3 WHOV3 M4ST3R3D 1T’ (p.3097). On Earth, some people believe in luck and unlikely outcomes can be described as lucky or unlucky, but there’s no evidence that luck exists as a concrete, measurable force. In video and tabletop games, however, luck can be a character statistic that directly effects in-game outcomes – just like in paradox space, where ‘LUCK 1S 4 V3RY R34L TH1NG’ (p.3097).

At the same time, Kanaya claims that Vriska’s bad luck ‘Is Inseparable From His Perception Of Events As Intrinsically Negative And As Tailored To [Her] Personal Dissatisfaction’ (p.2204). Vriska sees stepping on a pointy four-sided die to be bad luck, while Kanaya suggests that it’s a consequence of Vriska not cleaning her room. Bringing these ideas together, luck measurably exists within Homestuck, but there are concrete actions characters must take if they want to improve their luck statistic.

Hivebent Vriska feels incapable of taking these steps to improve her luck, whether that’s cleaning her room or acknowledging Scratch’s promised amnesty (p.2202), possibly because she feels deep down that she’s deserving of her bad luck. It also means she focuses on the times she has bad luck instead of the times she doesn’t – any time she walks across her messy floor and doesn’t step on a d4 is good luck she doesn’t acknowledge. Vriska’s roll of the Fluorite Octet to guillotine her lusus gets the job done quickly and easily, but Vriska focuses on the ‘rotten luck’ of triggering an avalanche (p.2274) and getting ‘nasty 8lue 8lood all over [her]’ (p.2276).

I believe that part of Vriska’s hopelessness in early Hivebent is because she’s lost the social aspects of FLARP. She’s persisted with the game following her accident as much as is necessary to feed her lusus, but she no longer has Terezi as a co-conspirator, or her ‘just for fun’ group. Though dedicated video game players are stereotyped as socially isolated loners, many games (including FLARP) have strong social and teamwork aspects – Yee (2007) surveyed 3,000 massive multiplayer online roleplaying game players and found that social motives were among the top three reasons for playing. Power gamers specifically are ‘distinctly social players’ who ‘form complicated systems of trust, reliance and reputation’ and ‘rely on building strong social networks so they are able to call on help as needed’, and are unable to achieve the same degree of success alone that they can with other players’ help (Taylor, 2003). Without the aid of her teammates, Vriska’s enjoyment of FLARP is reduced, as is her mechanical success.

As such, it’s no coincidence that Vriska starts to believe in herself again through playing a new achievement-based multiplayer game, Sgrub. This game validates Vriska’s game-based attitude to life in general by transporting its players into the game world full-time for its duration. Where Vriska’s former moirail Kanaya doubted that luck is a real thing, Sgrub tells Vriska that she’s right to believe in it, and that she can have all of it if she tries hard enough. Where on Alternia Vriska ran into situations like the breakdown of her friend group that she couldn’t solve through game mechanics, Sgrub lets Vriska use her preferred tools to succeed by applying mechanics to all aspects of life while awake and asleep, and gives her countless sidequests to occupy her time with (p.2516). The game appears to like her personally, because she plays by its rules and slots perfectly into its framework.

Overall, Vriska’s luck is extremely tied to her emotional state. Believing she’s unlucky and believing she deserves bad luck are a vicious cycle, while believing she has all the luck is tied to genuine increases in her confidence and perceived abilities. I’d also argue that perception of luck is a more important factor on Alternia, which operates to some extent on ‘real world’ rules, while the actual luck statistic is the most important factor in Sgrub, which operates far more on game rules.

Since luck is Vriska’s Sgrub domain, every step she takes up the echeladder effectively boosts her luck stat and automatically minmaxes her in this area. By the end of the game, she’s reached such a high level that rolling eight 8s on the Fluorite Octet against the Black King is all but guaranteed (p.2596). Based on the nature of timelines, it could be argued that Vriska’s perfect roll marks the alpha timeline, while her other 16,777,215 possible rolls all create doomed timelines. However, my preferred reading is that due to Vriska’s ascension to God Tier and embracing of her roll, Vriska’s success here was guaranteed in all timelines, and any fight in a doomed timeline simply didn’t progress to the moment where she rolled – because that moment is the single roll she’s prepared for throughout the game, and throughout her life.

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6. Your trolltag is arachnidsGrip and your st8ments tend to 8e just a little 8it overdramaaaaaaaatic.

Vriska spends plenty of time talking to her peers through Trollian, and regularly initiates conversation (particularly with Tavros) despite socializing not being her strong point. Her communication style is both highly self-centered and characterized by emotional extremes. She often dominates conversations she’s in by wordcount, and has a desire to ‘get the last word in’ even if it means logging back on after she’s logged off – in one instance, she’s annoyed that she didn’t ‘just get th8 last w8rd and sign off real qu8ck like [she] usu8lly [does]’ (p.2204). When other people respond to her, she doesn’t always read their messages, instead forging forwards with what she already planned to say. She only apologizes for her actions when she personally has something to gain from this, and she holds different rules for how she’s allowed to talk versus how other people are allowed to talk – for example, having ‘SO MANY people to meddle with tonight’ while thinking Kanaya doesn’t ‘realize how rude it is to meddle’ (p.2200), or expecting John to ‘8e sensitive to [her] cultural ways’ by putting his bucket away but not making an effort to learn about human customs.

It seems Vriska would prefer for people to love, admire, respect and fear her, but given the choice between someone hating her and being indifferent to her, she’ll always pick the former. This is partly because of a personal desire to be important, and partly because hate is an emotion she understands personally, while indifference is not. Aradia’s passivity towards Vriska makes her furious, and she ‘only regret[s] killing [her] cause it m8de [her] so 8ORING!!!!!!!!’ (p.2276).

Vriska experiences sudden shifts of emotion, falling in love with Nic Cage after watching a single clip of Con Air, flipping from thinking it would be ‘gross’ to go on a date with a human (p.2662) to being extremely attracted to one. She also exaggerates other people’s emotions – when John comments that it’s ‘too bad’ he won’t speak to Vriska again for a while, she believes she’s ‘clearly done a num8er on [him] to engender such a frothing o8session so quickly’ (p.2736). Even while expressing these strong emotions, Vriska doesn’t always know how to describe how she feels – she ‘[doesn’t] really understand’ the ‘really special kind of h8’ she feels for Tavros (p.2296), and even after kissing him can’t decide whether her feelings for him are flushed or caliginous (p.2381).

As mentioned above, Vriska’s interactions with others cement her belief that she’s the main character of each game she plays, with everyone else only there to facilitate her heroic adventures. This is often subtle, showing more through her lack of care or thought for others than by direct actions, but it’s sometimes overt – she tries to select Tavros’ dialog option by telling him to say ‘THANKS VRISKA, fOR sAVING UHH MY LIFE,’ and to call her ‘8RAVE AND HEROIC AND PRETTY’ (p.2350). Though Hivebent establishes Karkat as the ‘troll protagonist’ by introducing him first and showing parallels between him and John, the narrative subtly reinforces Vriska’s protagonist status in other ways. She has far more screen time than Karkat throughout Act 5, and is allowed to be multidimensional and dynamic in ways that other characters are not, for example having a typing quirk that varies according to her emotional state (p.2199) and being established as ‘mysterious’ and interesting prior to her actual introduction (p.2145).

Vriska using ‘game logic’ to inform a real relationship is best demonstrated through Aradia. Even though Vriska and Aradia’s FLARP game was supposedly friendly, Vriska is ‘used to thinking of [Aradia] as the enemy’ due to being on different teams (p.2144). When Vriska kills Aradia, destroying her physical body and leaving her as a ghost, she commissions Equius to build a new robot body for Aradia and believes this leaves her ‘in the clear’ and ‘[t]otally redeemed’ from her earlier actions (p.2237). In the same conversation, she claims she didn’t hurt Terezi that badly, because Terezi ‘only’ lost two eyes in their feud while Vriska lost seven. Friendship for her operates purely by numbers, or by points that can be gained and lost without consideration for any lingering feelings that might remain from earlier interactions. This may be true for NPCs in many games, where doing them a favor or successfully rolling to charm them will cause them to ‘forget’ earlier slights, but it doesn’t work in friendships between actual people, which leaves Vriska lost as she struggles to understand why her usual logic isn’t effective.

Bringing things back to the opening section, Vriska also judges others based on whether they conform to her ideal of the ‘correct’ way to play games. Tavros is just as much of a gamer as Vriska, and he’s the only troll seen playing a game (Fiduspawn) that isn’t FLARP or Sgrub. However, he games ‘incorrectly’ by her logic, prioritizing enjoyment, exploration, puzzle solving, and finding noncombat solutions to problems. In power gamer communities, it’s common for players to have little time for each other’s in-game mistakes, connectivity issues or out of game commitments, with one top EverQuest guild’s requirements including the following requirements: ‘If you are the best player on the face of the earth but can only play once a week for 2 hours, that’s not good enough’, ‘If you come to join us on a raid and we notice you [disconnecting] or lagging a lot we won’t accept you’ and ‘You MUST be able to tolerate harsh language and abuse […] [we’re not] for the sensitive, touchy-feely types’ (Silverman, 2006). Vriska causing Tavros’ disability and then berating him for it is horrifically cruel on an interpersonal level, but makes perfect sense through power gamer logic – if he can’t overcome this, there’s a skill mismatch and he’s not good enough to play on her team.

Vriska’s prior kismesissitude with Eridan is arguably a kismesissitude between their FLARP characters instead of their actual selves, though these lines are blurred given that their characters are based on themselves. This explains why their relationship falls apart as their FLARP careers come to an end, despite being ‘in alliance an unmatched terror, and in competition, unbridled tempest’ within the game (p.2459). Even after their games are over, they continue addressing each other by their former character names in conversation. Of all Vriska’s friends, Eridan is the closest to her in playstyle, willing to spend several weeks straight camped out in his Sgrub land killing angels which each require ‘at least a minute of sustained fire from only the most legendary wweapon evver’ and ‘DIDN'T EVEN GIVE [HIM] ANY GRIST’ (p.3321). Consequently, they’re an incredible team when gaming together towards shared objectives, and through their skills it’s no wonder they kept two monstrous lusi fed for years – but similar to players in actual power gamer guilds, this doesn’t mean they have anything in common or any reason to continue a relationship outside of the game.

Vriska’s other primary FLARP partner was Terezi, the two of them as Team Scourge in both friendly and lethal/competitive games. Terezi was able to ‘dismantle huge teams of Flarpers with nothing 8ut politics and head games’ (p.2237), suggesting that her social statistics were particularly high, and that her strengths compensated perfectly for Vriska’s weaknesses. However, they differed in morality, with

Terezi only wanting to hurt people she saw as ‘B4D GUYS’, while Vriska was willing to kill anyone. Like with Eridan, Vriska defines this relationship primarily through gaming. She later believes that their post-FLARP truce is about ‘NOT PL4Y1NG G4M3S TOG3TH3R’ (p.2237) any more, an idea which Terezi disputes.

A parallel here could be a gamer who wants to follow informal social rules as well as formal game rules to reach the top level, versus one who is willing to break those informal rules, such as by stealing kills from other players, initiating player-vs-player combat with lower level players, or using high social status to take more than her fair share of loot. However, just like with Terezi’s belief that Vriska is a cheater, the difference is that FLARP is always a choice for Terezi but a need for Vriska – just like a competition between a high-performing amateur gamer and a professional esports player, the stakes are always uneven.

Hammer et al (2018) discuss power in roleplaying games and note that while ‘[p]ower relations in the game are carefully regulated by game rules and game materials’, these games and their rules always exist in a wider social context, and social dynamics outside of the game will always affect how power manifests within the game. Vriska typically has a lot of power within FLARP not only because she is such a high level player, but also because she’s aware of her eventual plan to feed rival players to her lusus (out of game knowledge that she possesses and intentionally hides from them), and because her social world allows her to see this as morally justifiable. However, in her feud with Terezi, Vriska’s power is reduced because Terezi has (and takes) the option to stop playing, while Vriska cannot force Terezi to continue.

Vriska may like to think her gaming achievements are all her own, but in truth, she couldn’t have gained quite so many levels or quite so much treasure in FLARP if it wasn’t for these partnerships. This remains true in Sgrub – the Black King can only be defeated as a team effort, and once Vriska reaches the top of her echeladder, she can’t progress to the god tiers without help. Aradia needs to beat Vriska almost to death and Tavros needs to carry her to her quest slab, both crucial contributions even with Tavros’ refusal to land the final blow. With self-preservation being a defining aspect of Vriska’s entire life, I doubt she would have the force of will to stab herself on her quest bed, if Sgrub would even allow this.

Never done with seeking out new challenges and further levels to gain, Vriska now plans to singlehandedly defeat Bec Noir, both to prove the extent of her game mechanical powers and to solidify what she sees as her heroic protagonist role in the game’s narrative. Vriska is a god tier player, beloved by and in perfect harmony with Sgrub itself, with extreme confidence that her own self-belief, force of will and eagerness to work as hard as is needed to win will be enough to bring her another victory. It’s possible she’s right, and she’ll once again be rewarded for her mechanical, goal-oriented gameplay. It’s equally possible that her lack of social power external to the game will lead to her failure. She’s cast aside former teammates she believes she no longer needs and struggles to mend lost friendships, ultimately neglecting this critical social aspect of gaming.

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Final thoughts

Vriska loves and understands games above all else, in part because so many aspects of her life are painful and terrifying. The clearly defined rules and objectives in a game provide a counterpoint to the confusion of her manipulative social relationships, and understanding these rules allows Vriska to excel in her role as a true power gamer. Through high level success in both FLARP and Sgrub involving commitment, skill, and selective deployment of her own advantages, Vriska is able to materially improve her luck and her life, actualizing the subtitle of this essay: if she can win in the game, she wins in real life. The future of Vriska’s story is uncertain, as she prepares alone to fight her most powerful boss battle yet. Even so, her legacy is secured – it will be hard to dethrone her from the top of the leaderboard as the most talked about character in Homestuck.

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