Big game hunter: Our inability to hold games to equal standards (when they nick stuff from each other)

Last week Our Zach Alexander pulled the still-warm corpse of the last round of !!CLONING scandal!! discussions from our collective freezer and got me thinking about it all over again. Channelling Mattie Brice as if by séance from earlier in the year, he discussed the ugly head-rearing of the double standards we often encounter when the contentious topic of cloning is raised. Both Alexander and Brice are quick to identify that decrying something as a clone is a heavily subjective act, and that how one approaches the debate and frames their standpoint within it is highly reflective of their ideals both politically and humanistically. I’d like to take their sentiments and step back just a little, if I may, and try to unpack the contradictions surrounding why it’s often, but by no means always, seen as damnable to wear inspiration on one’s sleeve. 

Brothers: how Riddick saves the writing

Or

How mechanics can enrich a story, foster relationships and underwrite an entire experience

PLEASE BE AWARE OF THE SPOILERZ WOT FEATURE HEAVILY IN THIS PIECE OF WRITING

My mum is, thankfully, still alive as of this writing. If she were to die I’d be terribly upset. She brought me up, fed me, clothed me, drove me places, steered me in the right direction, supported me, let me drink in the house as a teenager because I’d “do it anyway, so may as well do it safely”: she sorted me out basically. My dad did all these things too (‘cept the driving), but he doesn’t work as well within this situation, but he’s still a very upstanding chap. If my mum were to die it would be pretty horrible for me. ‏You, however, wouldn’t really care. I don’t hold that against you, you simply don’t have any of the necessary context (see above) for it to concern you. Likewise, that’s why the one-two dead mother and a dying dad opening of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons didn’t wash in my house of unflinching cynicism. By the end of the game, however, I was invested in the characters and their plight, to the point where I genuinely cared about where everyone ended up. That’s not to say that the writing resonated with me any more than it had when it went whizzing past my mark at the beginning, it just means that there were other bits of the game that filled the emotional-investiture deficit.