To each their own, of course, but “waste of time” seems like the kind of comment that shouldn’t be worth your time to bother typing without adding at least some level of critique beyond a — let’s be honest — irrelevant technical concern.
I found this game particularly charming! Especially how it frames itself as a cultural-political project — positing the Cyborg and the Goddess as restrictive archetypes — but then ends up committing itself more and more to describing the implications of taking these archetypal metaphors literally, the metaphorical act loosening itself more and more from its recognizably real-world moorings. And so the whole piece kind of hangs in a nether space, the reader/player/whatever unsure whether what we’re seeing is an allegory run amok or an allegory for a world gendered not quite identically to our own. It’s neat.
Not sure if the game is a “I am multiple and contradictory – deal with it”-statement, or what I think “nobody” was aiming at, namely a warning sign for taking those archetypes “literally”, meaning that one has to ditch the romanticism of mud, communities based on essentialist identities, etc which are associated with eco-feminism, deep ecology, Wicca, etc, if one is to be an enlightened cyborg. Quite enthralling in either case, and I do believe the two points are actually two sides of the same coin, meaning how to deal with the real-world moorings of what our instincts tell us (I bleed, I am woman, I am earth), and what we are able to carve through with our intellect in an academic or intellectual setting (I am a node in an interconnected field of blablbla insofar as we take being to be blablabla).
Hm, isn’t “taking things too literally” one of the trappings of essentialism? Hugging your mother (which is the sun) and then getting burned is an example of taking things too literally, and it happens while one is a goddess, which would mean that being a cyborg is the better option, seeing how the cyborg doesn’t take things “literally”. But the rhetoric of the piece that both cyborg and goddess are restrictive archetypes just seems to be so strong that my reading has to be wrong. Yet I cannot bring it into a coherent understanding of the piece. Like what’s up with petting the cat to death?! Where in the cyborg mode of being can one not name one’s cat Luna and then pet it?
So is the leftmost goddess supposed to be blank… ?
… well that was a waste of time.
I also think it’s pretty sad they couldn’t put the music with the game instead of embeding another player for that.
To each their own, of course, but “waste of time” seems like the kind of comment that shouldn’t be worth your time to bother typing without adding at least some level of critique beyond a — let’s be honest — irrelevant technical concern.
I found this game particularly charming! Especially how it frames itself as a cultural-political project — positing the Cyborg and the Goddess as restrictive archetypes — but then ends up committing itself more and more to describing the implications of taking these archetypal metaphors literally, the metaphorical act loosening itself more and more from its recognizably real-world moorings. And so the whole piece kind of hangs in a nether space, the reader/player/whatever unsure whether what we’re seeing is an allegory run amok or an allegory for a world gendered not quite identically to our own. It’s neat.
Hug Error! I’ve definitely been there.
Not sure if the game is a “I am multiple and contradictory – deal with it”-statement, or what I think “nobody” was aiming at, namely a warning sign for taking those archetypes “literally”, meaning that one has to ditch the romanticism of mud, communities based on essentialist identities, etc which are associated with eco-feminism, deep ecology, Wicca, etc, if one is to be an enlightened cyborg. Quite enthralling in either case, and I do believe the two points are actually two sides of the same coin, meaning how to deal with the real-world moorings of what our instincts tell us (I bleed, I am woman, I am earth), and what we are able to carve through with our intellect in an academic or intellectual setting (I am a node in an interconnected field of blablbla insofar as we take being to be blablabla).
Hm, isn’t “taking things too literally” one of the trappings of essentialism? Hugging your mother (which is the sun) and then getting burned is an example of taking things too literally, and it happens while one is a goddess, which would mean that being a cyborg is the better option, seeing how the cyborg doesn’t take things “literally”. But the rhetoric of the piece that both cyborg and goddess are restrictive archetypes just seems to be so strong that my reading has to be wrong. Yet I cannot bring it into a coherent understanding of the piece. Like what’s up with petting the cat to death?! Where in the cyborg mode of being can one not name one’s cat Luna and then pet it?
i think i’m gonna die over how awesome this is