have some composure

where is your posture? | wilde/ryan/basil. he/they. 24. i was a warrior cats kid in my youth and it shows.

[ceechow]

After three months of labor-conducive love, my silkscreen book is complete! 

Based off of the video game ANATOMY, it tells the story of what it really means to live in a haunted house

This game has some of the best writing and one of the most original ideas I’ve seen in a while, so please, take a look!

[treecitysessions]

So true<3

[rabbiteclair]

why would I camp somewhere named Hole Where You'll Freeze To Death

[mysterycat-isme]

Yeah I'm going on a camping trip to the Hole Where You'll Freeze to Death. No I won't be back soon.

[horreurscopes]

none of these words are in the necronomicon

[dorindameddler]

WYLLSTARION NATION WE WON

[thenyanguardparty]

fantasy is a genre of magic and imagination where any story can be told, such as:

what if races were real

what if the divine right of kings was real

[sexygaywizard]

Thinking about how stupid the name Christian is. Imagine if someone was just named Muslim. Gonna name my child Agnostic

[sexygaywizard]

Apparently people do name their kids Islam and Muslim. I still think this is silly but I stand corrected

[sexygaywizard]

[kahzu]

[511am]

Evolution of Nissan

[thetyrannosaur]

My cat does this before throwing up

[geezmarty]

you put up with what you think you deserve, and the things you want you resent

[schrodingo]

By far one of the DOPEST sheds found. This pic is very telling and shows sometimes the predator underestimates the prey; inevitably paying the ultimate cost. I can imagine seeing this buck stroll about with a rotting carcass hanging until it shed that late winter/early spring. Imagine all the doe loving it missed out on spooking the ladies with a predator puppet adorned its crown. (SRC: Urban Outdoorsman on FB.)

[hyumjim]

JEREMY FRAGRANCE - "My heart beats for Revachol, I want to have a girlfriend soon!" The well-groomed man beams at you. He has said these two things, one after the other, seamlessly, as if they are related somehow.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY - Oh, he's definitely on something. Ask him what he's on. It's got to be the good shit.

LOGIC - Let's not be too judgmental. He is not from here. Maybe this is normal behavior in.... wherever it is?

PERCEPTION - He smells amazing. Perhaps forgive him his eccentricities?

SAVOIR FAIRE - This suave motherfucker is wearing the hell out of that outfit! Ask him what he’s wearing!

JEREMY FRAGRANCE - "I am really preciously looking now for a girlfriend. I wanna find the right one.” He smiles, again, beatifically. His teeth are gleaming white.

DRAMA - He means it, sire.

EMPATHY - It’s been a long, long time.

HALF LIGHT - You need to get the fuck out of here immediately.

[bellshazes]

dreaming up a syllabus for an imaginary course on metanarratives about gameplay, which i think would go something like:

unit 1: who do you think you are i am - auto-documentary & games

Vlogs and the Hyperreal, Folding Ideas

The Slow Death of Let's Play Videos, Meraki (to ~10:00)

World Record Progression: Mike Tyson, Summoning Salt

ROBLOX_OOF.mp3, hbomberguy

Life as a Bokoblin: A Zelda Nature Documentary, Monster Maze

optional: Braindump on the History of Let's Plays, slowbeef

unit 2: what like it's hard? - intro to challenge narratives

Chapter 26: Games as Narrative Play: Two Structures for Narrative Play, Rules of Play

A different kind of challenge run: Minimalist 100% (BOTW), Wolf Link

Surviving 100 Days on Just Dirt, Mogswamp

Can You Beat DARK SOULS III with Only Firebombs, the Backlogs

Is it Possible to Beat Super Mario 3D World while permanently crouching?, Ceave Gaming

The Pacifist Challenge - Beating Hollow Knight Without Collecting Soul [CHALLENGE] - Sample

optional: How to 100% Snowpeak Ruins in under 15 minutes, bewildebeest

unit 3: nelly you don't understand, i AM the narrative - form and function

The Future of Writing about Games, Jacob Geller

Can You Beat GRIME Without Weapons?, the Backlogs

Mushroom Kingdom Championships, Ceave Gaming

My Life as a Barber in Hitman 2, MinMax (Leo Vader)

MyHouse.WAD - Inside Doom's Most Terrifying Mod, PowerPak

optional: Mega Microvideos, Matthewmatosis

the theme and structure is mostly intended to introduce at least one critical or historically contextual work followed by examples of the type of narrative in question.

in unit 1, this is the idea of "How do people talk about their own experiences in the context of YouTube and playing video games?" across three rather different kinds of documentaries. unit 2 is intended to take that lens of who is telling what tale and dial in on challenge running, where i first noticed the way some videos turn the story of overcoming a challenge into its own narrative that is distinct from but related to the narrative events of the game itself. unit 3 circles back to the bigger picture with a variety of examples that, to me, are maximally metanarrative, the emergent story of the player-narrator now functionally replacing the game's embedded narrative.

bonus unit: broken narratives

Glitch & the Grotesque at the MLA, Sylvia Korman

Watching time loop movies to escape my time loop, Leo Vader

The Stanley Parable, Dark Souls, and Intended Play, Folding Ideas

Breaking Madden, Jon Bois

The TRUTH about the Pizzaplex in FNAF: Security Breach, AstralSpiff

this one is highly underdeveloped, but i'd love to work out something more robust building on randomizer challenges that produce intentionally bizarre, semi-ironic "lore," and bois-esque endeavors to break games so hard the story itself crumbles. but that's really out of scope so i'm just including the links to things i couldn't bear to get rid of. more rambling abt the challenge runs I chose under the cut.

Challenge runs represent one of the most obvious places to start, due to being extremely plentiful and having a hook that makes a "here's how I did X thing in Y video game" format almost unavoidable. Minimalist 100% is an underrated and sweet straightforward example that I mostly include as a baseline for reporting-out style narrative; here are the facts, here's what happened, this is the thing that it is. Mogswamp's 100 Days on Just Dirt is similar in style, but the physical measuring of days is a delightful and, more importantly, external narrative device.

Now oriented, we get a taste of Ceave Gaming's narrative approach to Mario challenges with the no-crouching run, and while we still aren't at the degree of player-characters being constructed for the narrative's sake, the spirited belief in crouching sets the stage for other rhetoric in more extreme cases we'll see later.

The Backlogs' entire body of work qualifies here, but GRIME is the strongest inspiration for putting this list together. I include the DS3 firebombs run because what was initially a factual description of how his wife's use of firebombs inspired him to play differently in the original DS1 firebombs run has developed into full-blown multi-game narrative arc with the Firebomb Goddess (his wife, who also voices the character) compelling his in-game character to achieve his destined quest. Grime takes that even further,

In-Game Documentaries

I include Life as a Bokoblin mostly as a contrast to My Life as a Barber - there is a level of fictionalization and roleplay involved in the Zelda in-game documentary that highlights exactly what I want to single out when I am talking about metanarrative, the story about a story.

[shreksstepfather]

Some lessons stick with you for the rest of your life.

[blubebbie]

i dont even post my art on here anymore, but i made so fucking many homestuck bg3 gifs and i could only think of this dumb webbed site to throw them into. and yes this was mostly inspired by my friends saying that shadowheart and lae'zel are each other's kismises.

[snailmailthings]

THE LIVING HAUNTED HOUSE

The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson (1959) / House by the Railroad, Edward Hopper (1925) / The Fall of the House of Usher, Edgar Allan Poe (1839) / Haunted House, Paris Painting, Thomas Flint (2015) / Wuthering Heights, John Frederic Greenwood (c. 1924) / Flowers in the Attic, V.C. Andrews (1979) / Flowers in the Attic dir. Jeffrey Bloom (1987) / Flowers in the Attic: The Origin dir. Declan O'Dwyer & Robin Sheppard (2022) / Guillermo del Toro on Crimson Peak in W Magazine / Crimson Peak dir. Guillermo del Toro (2015) / Guillermo del Toro on Crimson Peak in The Sydney Morning Herald

[filthyprotozoan]

incredible television

[her0-se7en]

Concerned Ape knows what's up

[danispookypumpkin]

HEY THIS IS FUCKING GREAT BUT YOU LEFT OUT THE BEST GODDAM PART

DAVID LYNCH IS THE OTHER EXCEPTION AND I AM FUCKING LIVING FOR IT.