You Will Die In This Place

This is not the greatest TTRPG in the world, no. This is just a tribute.

This article is not our traditional critique model, but is about You Will Die In This Place. You Will Die In This Place is by Elizabeth Little and published by Shrike Studio. Material here is presented for review and critique purpose. We have received a review copy of You Will Die In This Place.

I have struggled a lot with how to even talk about this TTRPG. And yet, because of what it is, I must do it.

We don’t really receive many games at our desk. The overwhelming majority of publishers, designers and authors contacts us relatively early on the projects — usually ahead of a crowdfunding campaign. There is not much about those, as we have very little we can look into and analyze a game that still does not exist. So, from all artisans that reach us, only a tiny slice of those that reach to us when they have a game already out and for sale. Even then, most of it is just copy that me make a mental note of check up later, maybe pick the game if we can budget it¹.

However, because of the rarity of an actual completely game requesting our attention and then arriving digitally and/or physically to us, we always make sure to take the time with, no matter if any of us would ever be interested on it. This was very much the case with You Will Die In This Place.

I would never have in a billion years picked it on my own. At first glance, it seemed like another OSR-style adventurer-conquistador mega-dungeon. A quick flip through it, and it seemed like another Mörk Borg / Blanchitsu aesthetic copying game; the copy summary of the premise evoked yet another attempt at Plastiboo’s Vermis but for TTRPGs rather than for video games. It seemed like the thing we could not even apply our critique framework to, something added to a “maybe” pile and bring up in an outside-framework article.

Good thing I had to give it a deep dive from the get go…

You Will Experience The Sublime In This Place

There is no dancing around it. I believe You Will Die In This Place is one of important works of the artform… ever? From the last fifty years?

If you ever created something, if you believe TTRPGs are an artform, You Will Die In This Place is unlike anything else you have experienced. Denying yourself it, you miss an important contribution to scholarship, opportunity for growth, and the transformative energy of one hell of a work of art.

I cannot do this with the usual Split/Party Framework. However, there are so many levels to You Will Die In This Place that they can be analyzed from multiple sides. So I will rotate it using different frameworks. However, the nutshell conclusion of every single one is that you should get and experience You Will Die In This Place yourself — if you can do it.

You Will Die In This Place is a dark game, a work of fiction, genuine existential horror. It will be hard to confront to many of you — anyone that is trans, autistic, or a creator. There are many dark specters around it. It is something you need to be very careful tackling, depressive and with a strong bleed. Take your time, pace yourself, chat about it with someone else. Be careful and take precautious. I do not make this suggestion lightly.

We live in a creepypasta-fed world. Ooooh, the horror game, the cursed artifact, the vessel for some internet folklore. Exorcize those thoughts. This is no such object. And yet, there is plenty of horror in it, and it is haunted by many ghosts. Just none of those internet-poisoned brains may have conjured when reading the previous paragraph. Of course, You Will Die In This Place knows you have been living in this internet-poisoned world, so it fucks with you.

A final note before proceeding into the critique proper. It is impossible to do it without getting through many elements of the experience in this You Will Die In This Place critique. I have strived to always do so in a way that will enhance your enjoyment of this art piece, but it may well ruin it for those that really derive appreciation from the primary, novel experience. If that is the case, please, spend time with You Will Die In This Place before coming back to the rest of these.

You Will Have Frameworks In This Place

In a stage of the artform obsessed with artifacts of play — artisanal or brand-positioned TTRPG Funko Pops — and a lot of work around lyrical games — making those and content creation in their periphery, — something like this should have been inevitable. And yet, somehow, never accomplish. Oh, there are many things that claim to do this, to be this piece of art. But the effort, labor and skill in the craft and design required is so much more than to node towards the general vibes with an expensive prop or a performance done towards the consumer, or with notebooks and handbooks and telling you to achieve that on your own.

Trying to pin it to the existing frameworks we use for the artform of collaborative storytelling — mine, ours, from other scholarship or from colloquial discourse, — forced me to take a decisive step to properly think and write of this TTRPG. The language about lyric games in TTRPGs is as extravagant, excessive as it is useless and confusing to discuss the artform. I will not make use of it when discussing You Will Die In This Place. It is up to you to figure out if this is a lyrical game or not, what that means to you, and why it would ever matter.

You Will Have A Point In This Place

You Will Die In This Place is a masterpiece of what collaboration means in the artform of collaborative cooperative storytelling. Everyone eventually gets the cooperation part — buy-in in a game, pooling labor together to make a game happen/be played, agreement to be subject to rules, follow the mediation of a GM but it requiring everyone’s consent and endorsement, etc., — with more or less bruises, broken bones and dead bodies. Collaboration is much more elusive. Most designs and players treat it as given; they are making tools you will use, collaborating asymmetrically this way. It requires further consideration in certain games — for example, to a genre, solo games live and die by how much of collaboration you are getting from the design process; a truly solo game without collaboration from another human beings would be a miserable one. Essential taken as a given, people only really think about collaboration when it is drastically impaired: on the rare cases but common hypotheticals of when a game is bringing so little to collaborate with that the game may not even be there in the first place or when a game is a performance art piece being done at the players and refusing to take them in as fellow collaborations rather than a captive audience.

Like so many crafts which you only notice when something goes wrong, the difficulty and value of collaboration in TTRPGs is not acknowledged by most. Here, in You Will Die In This Place, what collaboration can achieve is explored with both mastery and the courage to center it above all other elements of the artform.

So, first of all, what is You Will Die In This Place? You Will Die In This Place is a work of fiction. Not in the way that all TTRPGs and imaginary improv or something², not in the way that things in TTRPG are fictional or ideological³, or even that there is a lot of fiction written in TTRPG manuals and sourcebooks — be it lyrical, prose or technical. No, it is a work of fiction: it requires you to fully be okay with a lot of things to experience its art, to accept it as a fictional reality you are experiencing. I know we are the artform with the biggest demand for buy-in and suspension of outsider pressures, but nowhere that is more lived than in You Will Die In This Place. It must lie to you with the confidence of those that can and must communicate clearly they are doing so.

This work of fiction is about game design. A designers is sharing with you not a story, but a discovery; the process of another designer — more fictional than the previous, if you believe in the difference between such things yourself — instructing, explaining and editing a game design. Yet, this is not the usual process of a designer using a fictionalized designer persona to try to do these things for a game you just got. The game you are getting belongs to both the first design and an absent, silent third designer — a woman that left this game behind.

You Will Games Be Like That In This Place

The game left by the original designer was unfinished, not meant or ready to be played. The You Will Die In This Place you get is, however, playable — curated, developed and transformed by the second designer. For the rest of the critique, we will refer the former as Charlotte's game and the latter as Samantha's game.

Charlotte's game, first impression, seemed to be some dark fantasy dungeon crawler that have become so popular in the last 15 years that we like to pretend they have always been this loved. There is a mega dungeon. Nobody ever mapped its contents. Chaos magic seeps into the world and blights it. Where Charlotte's game gets a grip on you is on its ambition: you do not play the monsters, you don't play adventures. You play exiles with nowhere else to go but the mega dungeon.

A game about being made an un-living un-person by being sent to the camp-form of the dungeon? Charlotte was cooking.

The fact that Charlotte had the ambition of making The Great Necropolitical Game immediately hints at the many reasons why Charlotte's game is not what you hold in your hands. More reasons appear when you learn more about Charlotte and how she saw game design. A repeated theme is why even bother making playable games? If you not the mainstream games or an indie darling — and even if you are — you will never be played. Why would one spend all that effort, labor and time to make something that would — by virtue of being collaborative, cooperative storytelling — would never be the art it was meant to be if never played? Why should she not be happy writing a book that would smugly present itself as the Great Necropolitical Game — and would never have this illusion shattered by play?

But Charlotte loved indie games. She was always playing something new, always spotlighting other designers in her home games. Charlotte threw herself at design challenges that defied accepted wisdom in the artform. Charlotte is less interested in Appendix N and classifying art on genres than she is in how things transform her and what they make her feel.

Because of all that ate at Charlotte’s design sensibilities, artistic hunger and world shattering frustration, Charlotte's game is unplayable - it may not even be the kind of unplayable Charlotte would have been happy with.

Samantha's game is different because she is a different designer than Charlotte.

Samantha was an indie designer but a pop gamer, cornfed by DnD and drawn to comfortable, mainstream and popular design choices. Samantha has very clear ideas of what a game is and what “things” a game requires to be playable: Samantha writes sections on What Is A TTRPG, claims about the genre and what games do, listing inspirations, grid maps and miniatures even when the mega dungeon itself handles movement on the game, feels the need to explain the concept of different geometric shapes and dice, has a grasp on performative safety and comfort concerns, but struggles with how to transmit the required information for actual safety and comfort in a way that is actually useful for anyone. Samantha cares a lot about what the “TTRPG Community” thinks and decides on the side of Accepted Wisdom even when her experience and skill as a designer and player tell her otherwise.

Samantha adds 1d20 based initiative and a round system. Is the reason why we have DnD attributes. Tries desperately to reconcile Charlotte's view on damage and injury with Hit Points and other clocks. Is afraid of diagonal movement and not knowing exactly where everyone is in a grid. Samantha knows how to develop specialized and local tools to actually help people be safe and comfortable, but is hesitant to admit that outside of design commentary. When the “Lore” of something makes designing mechanics difficult, she shrugs and borrows haphazardly from something popular (“this class is supposed to be about language, but that is hard, so I guess I will put worker placement mechanics from an Eurogame in here, since people like those”).

Characters in You Will Die In This Place have been made quite dull and boring by Samantha's game. Six DND stats and their class looms over them. Every adventurer-conquistador ever played. We cannot know what Charlotte's game wanted to make with their characters, but her notes pull in the opposite direction; the very same mechanics used in Samantha's game and the outcomes they produce are heavily mocked in Charltote’s design notes. She wanted Exiles, Unpersoned. Instead we have Adventurer-Conquistador Levelling Up To Hero Through Murder.

Classes are asymmetrical in You Will Die On This Place, but it is not clear how this came to pass. We know Charlotte's dislike for classes, but have no commentary on why she would put classes in this game then. Samantha refers to lore and incompatibility with mechanics a lot to justify her choices, but was this “lore” a class? Or Samantha's game takes different cultures and processes then into hard-coded classes?

The more interest moments of are when You Will Die In This Place are when both designers agree and converge — bias of course, being in Samantha's framework, — but are speaking past each other. For example: when talking about resting and safety, Charlotte speaks about how it feels to be unsafe, the illusion of refuge, how fear shapes behaviour and wants her own sense of permanent dread and lack of safe places should be a art of the game and makes a clear statement on it: Samantha agrees, but for different reasons: a game that wants to do horror, to be scary, cannot have safe and easy resting for balance and conforming to genre expectations. They agree while not not listening to each other, and is also when Samantha’s character shines the most — unburdened by the expectations of how We Do This In TTRPGS, she often spews advice that would help her with many of the design choices she struggles with.

You Can Actually Play These Games

The game mechanics in You Will Die In This Place are amazing, and the choices made tell much about both designers, who they are as person, and tell you so much about Charlotte's game that has been lost in making Samantha's game. Which may be as good anywhere else to answer the looming question: yes, you can play You Will Die In This Place; or at the very least, Samantha's game. And you are going to have to play it to experience the fiction — because Samantha is so good at deceiving herself, never opening with the sincerity and vulnerability of Charlotte, her words are calculated and uncompromising. But their truth cannot avoid but come through the game mechanics.

It is not clear from the text just how fundamentally Samantha misunderstands classes in TTRPGs or what Charlotte's game aimed to do with them — or how much she intended to use classes at all. But playing hits like a falling brick, filling Samantha's words with the dread of a confession. There is storytelling that you can only get by playing the game as different classes and seeing how they work — or not.

The Mercenary class still has all the trappings of a DnD character; however, only a single god-stat matters: the one that sets how many dice they have to allocate to locations. Different actions can be equipped to different locations. By assigning dice to that location, you perform a given action. What makes it a really interesting mini-game is that damage is also converted into dice into a certain location. There is also a number of maximum dice on a location. The result is they having more dice in a location from actions make the risk of injury higher… until you hit max dice capacity in which case you are protected from injury. Doubled on its importance, the same god-stat also clears dice. It is, overall, a very neat game, and other than some finicky thing to swingyness, it could carry an entire game. However, Samantha's game Mercenary benefits nothing from being DnDfied (has its own non-binary clocks and attributes just improve certain abilities in a band-aid to address problems from making Samantha's game a DnD), and is utterly divorced from the context. There is absolutely nothing here of Charlotte's game Mercenary — about the songs and stories of a people assimilated by the hegemony and using the last embers of a forgotten language. All that is left in Samantha's game is how the hegemony sees them: as a brutal warrior-race. Not only there is nothing of this duality, even that is really not represented in the mechanics of Samantha's game’s Mercenary: they are a generic fighter type that gets different actions based on which weapons they use. It is an immaculate engine, Samantha designed it pretty well, but it is burning coal, churning detached from anything — powering nothing.

The Headhunter is once again another game forced into the skin of DnD. It is about making poker hands, and when you run out of cards, you do. We do not know if Charlotte intended this to be a class ability, how everyone would have played You Will Die In This Place, or even if this was meant to be part of the game on its place. All we have are some notes from Charlotte's game(?) about poker hands and using them to make tarot drawings to generate the outcomes of exploring the mega dungeon. Samantha's game is an interesting mini-game (sans tarot), suffering from how swingy its outcomes are, uncertain about what this should be about, not really tying with the identity-less nature of the Headhunter class, albeit the poker hand abilities being more representative of that than the mercenary. Of course, that characterization seems an addition to Samantha's game, and may be the result from wanting a class to be the generic rogue adventurer-conquistador archetype.

The Corpse Engineer, unlike the other two discussed before, is well-preserved from Charlotte's games. Rather than that genre-fitting copy by Samantha, the Corpse Engineer is established through fiction and characters from within the world of You Will Die In This Place — a thing so unlike Samantha's game that one can trust to be Charlotte's game. The Corpse Engineer is all about an artificial companion: the Neverborn. The Neverborn has different abilities depending on which parts are cobbled together. You assign commands in advance to your Neverborn, which it will try to accomplish. Unlike what the Headhunter and Mercenary have become, the Corpse Engineer is all about the Great Necropolitical Game that Charlotte's game was meant to be. The mechanics of the class align perfectly with the fiction of the Corpse Engineer and are all about the themes of creation and communication that are so important for Charlotte. The Neverborn is about the characters we create and queer necropolitics. Samantha's light touch on the Corpse Engineer only makes the pain and stress points clearer: the first class that is near unplayable in a grid but also reminds you this game is supposed to have a grid, the initiative system bending backwards to accommodate the mechanics of the Corpse Engineer.

We may not have confident fiction confirmation that is the case, but the Channeler may be even more untouched by Samantha's game. Everything about it is repulsive to the homogenizing forces of DnDfication. The Channeler writes things on its sheet to make them happen. You have spells written in your spell book, and you redact them to cast them. When you take damage, you tear pieces of your sheet and forget all marked by it. The theme of language and communication is untouched here, a character about memory, forgetting, and the metamorphic power of language.

The last class, the Knight, is a battered mecha and its pilot. It is a quite interesting one, but one hard to position in the Charlotte’s game/Samantha’s game dichotomy. The only thing that we have about where the class comes from and what it seeks to be is a single drawing by Charlotte predating the inception of You Will Die In This Place. A de novo creation by Samantha, inspired by Charlotte’s art? Or salvaged from more extensive notes? Nevertheless, it is a mini-game of management like the Mercenary also reminiscent of a boardgame. The ancient demonic mech overheats when taking actions and suffering damage, and you must roll to see if you accumulate heat. Then you can choose to use actions to cool down or keep pushing the old machine even if it cooks you inside of it. I'm sure this is not a metaphor to anything.

You Will Necropolitics In This Place

Necropolitics keeps confusing people, as a term. It evokes the politics of dead bodies, of the act of killing, of different forms of necromancy. It is a concept that struggles against the constraints of English. When Mbembe writes in French, he defines necropolitics as the power technologies of enmity, of mass creation of enemies, and the depersonalization of those — to the mass condemnation of vast masses of humanity to no purpose except to die to create our own identities. This translates to something closer to “Animositipolitics” as much as to necropolitics.

As such, even if the end result is unpersonalization and unlife of the condemned at a mass scale, necropolitics is concerned with how enemies are created, how safety and precarity require enemies, and how identity is reaffirmed through the killing of enemies. But how are enemies created? How are the so unpersoned?

We touched before on how many ways Charlotte’s game touches necropolitics. The premise, the classes, etc. However, a great concern about how enemies are created is communication. Charlotte not only wanted communication to be a theme across You Will Die In This Place; she writes a lot about how difficult it is to communicate, the despair of using art for communication, the incapacity to understand others and be understood even when we understand the same language, etc.

This brilliant concern is fully manifest in Charlotte’s take on alignment. Charlotte's game, being necropolitical and focused on communication, played to the expectations to alignment to use it for language: how incomprehensible someone's language to the hegemon, the more acceptable hostility against them is. In Samantha's game, that is seen as just a parody of DnD.

Where necropolitics survives Samantha’s game the most is in the mega dungeon — the camp-form cannot help but be necropolitical. Despite the many attempts by Samantha, and her not really getting what different rooms and floors are trying to do, it still comes through — not even Samantha dares to touch the labyrinth and the minotaur. The camp-form, where you are condemned to, where you are already marked for death, where you try to reaffirm your own personhood through violence.

You Will Design In This Place

A boring take would be to read and experience all that and think, well, it is a sad fiction about game creation. How the genius of Charlotte was unrecognized and all we are left with is with the random Popular Things salad that hack Samantha put together as a “game”. Boring as it would be wrong; it misses so many layers of You Will Die In This Place.

Samantha has great instincts and is quite skilled as a designer — and yet, cannot stop making “bad” games as we define it here. They fail to produce the game states they desire or to achieve in the goals they set for themselves. Her actual capacities are not in question — if anything, she is much more capable than what she ends up putting in her games, fearing to stretch and flex her mighty muscles. What her games are, however, are maidenless — an Elden Ring-inspired joke of a term to define games that do not have maidens, that do not do things with purpose and in the service of them, where things just seem to happen because, things are there because they feel they should be there, where it fails to come together like a Tarnished without a Finger Maiden.

We will never know how good Charlotte is as a game designer, but she would be an extremely maidenful designer — the flip-side of the joke term: an accord is offered, things have reason, there are strong choices, every aspect of the game knows its maiden and is devoted to her. This does not mean she is a genius, or even good at this — she may not ever have made a game — but she knows what gamescape her games want, what they need to tackle to be success, has laser-targeted focus and was not afraid of culling anything that did not make the game “better” at what it set itself to do.

Does this matter? That’s up to everyone. But the genius of You Will Die In this Place is offering you a game and fiction where you can experience the two types of design and game designer and feel it in your soul. See what choices each made, what is sacrificed, and transforms you into someone better able to appreciate those choices and decide which sacrifices are too much or which ones you would not regret.

This is not lost in Samantha. The whole reason she made Samantha's game is because of how much Charlotte struggled with art, why she made art, and the anguish of things that can only be conveyed by art. Samantha admits she makes games for money, and that she lacks the maidenfulness of Charlotte. You Will Die In This Place is experiencing the struggle of Samantha trying to be the kind of artist Charlotte is — and what she learns, what she misses, and what she overwrote forever in the process. Conflict in the fiction, created by Charlotte's game, which she was used to desperate communicate to you, has to be processed through Samantha's game.

Samantha’s may regret getting what she’s wishing for in the game.

You Will Psychopolitics In This Place

This comes down to psychopolitics, to how any flaws are responsibility of you — of how you fail to heal, and to self-actualize. Why would Samantha want to be like Charlotte, to be infected with what hails her? Clearly Samantha is the best designer; she actually puts the work and has games out. And there is a good reason why Charlotte does not, and a good thing Charlotte does not.

Charlotte is a bad person and a bad designer. She is diseased and does not self-actualize or does the work to heal themselves. Selfish as they are, they seek to make her failures everyone’s problems.

That’s who Charlotte is under the psychopolitical lenses. A failed citizen-entrepreneur, that is not able to perform — and has only herself to blame. Why she cannot get games out? Because she is not willing to put the work Samantha does. Let’s not examine any reason why it may be more difficult for Charlotte, or the difference in material conditions, or how comfortable her work would be to the default audience for TTRPGS — middle class Canadian/Americans. It is all on Charlotte. That she, given the means to become a designer — “everyone is a game designer”, remember?, — to work for others, to fix herself as a person, to stop being so selfish.

To the psychopolitical, Charlotte is diseased and should be quarantined. Oh, you are consumed by this desperate need to create? How dare you, how dare you make this everyone else’s problem. When one is ill, it is their responsibility to get the cure. Oh, you admit that you are afraid all the time? Perhaps there is a good reason you are so afraid, perhaps you should do something about that rather than try to scare others. Oh, you lament so much about how difficult it is to communicate to others, how even sharing a language does not mean you share meaning and thus, are forever cursed to misunderstand each other? Have you considered this is for a reason: to build walls against vile people like you, so that the virus of your harmful language or the blight of your un-cozy, challenging art cannot spread to others? Letting it rot inside you is just good hygiene, and Charlotte is pressured by psychopower to practice it — and thus, already marching against material conditions, Charlotte’s You Will Die In This Place becomes impossible⁴.

Charlotte cannot pull herself through toxic positivity, to make herself into a project of a person comfortable and pleasing to the hegemon. And for that, she is a bad person that has only herself to blame. Good thing Charlotte and Charlotte’s game does not exist.

Thankfully we have Samantha to get us out of this mess. To salvage the project that is Charlotte, to make her live through her as a good citizen-entrepreneur.

You Will Queer In This Place

Despite Samantha’s dismissal of the importance of this fact, Charlotte is trans. Samantha's positioning is unimportant — she performs cis in this fiction. Charlotte's transness is in everywhere within Charlotte's game, and Samantha's failure to recognize that dims its presence within Samantha's game.

The relationship with fear, its omnipresent presence, the lack of safe places and the loneliness of crowds is one of the pillars of You Will Die In This Place — also a shared experienced among trans people, especially trans women, which I point out again, to Samantha is just about game balance for the tone of horror. The struggle with creation and communication (and their association with death) is also marked by transness: the queer necropolitical need of be made useful to justify one's existence, the difficult of communication causing problems with transness (maneuvering social transition, the whole aspect of gender expression as a form of communication, the overlap of autism with transness and how creation becomes the way so many of us can ever hope to truly communicate with others) where to Samantha these are things to cut because they are complicated to translate to game mechanics.

When Charlotte talks about Corpse Engineers and Neverborn, and how they overlaps with transitioning and playing characters and their reality, and how the denial of personhood is a fabricated process, this absolute gem of trans experience is sublimated by Samantha taking Charlotte's transness as a “irrelevant side note” and go on how making NPCs is hard if you have no talent for Drama school. There is an entire class influenced by the connection between estrogen- dominant therapy and the metamorphic power of language and Samantha included it as something unrelated to the game but that surprised her about Charlotte. The drawing that became the Knight class is literally of a woman that pilots a masculinized mecha-shell, and draws no remarks at all.

This, of course, leaks into queer necropolitics and queer psychopolitics. How Exiles struggle to gain a degree of acceptance as much as they reject the hegemony, the Corpse Engineer, how queerness itself is a camp-form like the mega dungeon — and how trans people are already marked as dead, impossible to mourn, un-living un-people and whose only value to the hegemony is on their deaths and manner of their dying. In queer psychopolitics, it is all what Charlotte is — the wrong kind of queer, that does the wrong type of art, that is more uncomfortable to the hegemony than an exotic novelty, that hurts “acceptability politics” and is labelled as “damaging“ to the Good Queers.

You Will Leave This Place

Charlotte and Samantha may be fictional, but they are too real to anyone that produces art in this period of time and to game designers in indie TTRPGs. The scholarship in this artform is quite lacking: it is shaped by things I discussed in the footnotes, by intentional obfuscation by people that have something to sell you, etc. This very space exists because of how lacking it is — I’m a biochemist, the wrong type of academic, don’t have any useful formal training; all I can bring to it is an ability to read and learn from other academic texts. Still, even as ill-equipped as I am, an effort needs to be made by those that love this artform.

Such as I stumbled on this role, You Will Die In This Place ends up as being essential scholarship about what it means to be in TTRPGs during this moment in time.

That it is also a masterpiece of fiction, which you read and game through to get its many layers, makes it extremely entertaining. This art will transform you, and anyone with any remote interest in the artform will be horrified in delight⁵. It made me treat these two persons as real, of deeply think of them and how they approach designing the “same” game.

If you are a game designer, You Will Die In This Place is a crucible though which you will emerge as a better designer.

As an acknowledgement the elephant in the room that I have avoided touching this entire critique: as a fan of the Firefall duology, I was positively surprised with what I was ambushed with at the end⁶.

1. In a rare candid moment in social media, it was shared among publishers and designers that this is based on the audience of the venue. How they assume that 1% of the audience of a positive feature will buy the book, so that they only send to when the value of sales would be more than the retail cost of a digital/physical copy — otherwise it is seen as wasting money. There seems to be an unanimous agreement between those that voice this or similar practices about how this shapes the review and critique space or how we even talk about games. We get the review and critique spaces we create and curate.

2. Which they may really not be.

3. Our imagination and what we make up is all construed through social processes, and is a result of material reality and conditions. Sorry; I know everything coming from the Imperial core is Homestuck or MCU, but all of them suffer from ignoring this. Follies of post-production societies and the art they produce.

4. If you noticed that psychopower prevented the existence of work characterizing necropower, good, you’ve been playing attention at how these dual engines of technologies of power support each other to create the world in which we live.

5. Seeing what going through You Will Die In This Place was doing to me and how much I struggled with this critique has made one of my partners think its author/designer is very hot and she would want to date her.

6. Confronting the final question of You Will Die In This Place on its owns terms, let’s say we consider seriously the idea that sapience and its associated lonesome flawed communication exists in order to contain language-virus and parasitic-ideas to an individual. The negative conclusion that this would be so the individual could be culled to save the herd, I think, requires psychopower intervention to have any validity — a 21st century technology of power, with little merit from an evolutionary point of view. Rather, if sapience and the ability and drive to do art acts as a powerful inoculation adaptation. An art-infected individual cannot share the raw, lethal, pluripotent language-disease — they must create a lesser form of it. This trait was selected from pressure because it helps more people better face language-viruses, lethal-ideas and some mental and social ills. Not social contagion but social inoculation: armed with this art, its ideas and concepts, individuals from the collective can build their own internal language of immunity, awareness and better combat it. Depicting the thing is not doing the thing; immoral art does not mean immoral artist — believing that is psychopower being applied, not a biological support for sapience. This is not purely altruistic: the need is not there just to save others, but to save others from something that is going after them either they be aware or not. When you take in the art of the others, when others make art from your art, you are receiving back new extensions to your own language. Neurons very rarely fire on their own; if there was a way you could fight the communication-disease on your own, you would have already done. You need the art-inoculates of others, to get your neurons to fire in novel ways, to expand the library of the possible on your mind and give your personal language novel tools to fight this. This is how social constructivism works, this is how artistic echopraxia can make you a new woman. As such, I see Charlotte’s final assay as a welcomed thing — she is proven wrong by the existence of You Will Die In This Place, for as much as this is a trial on Samantha, she put something out that is more than Charlotte’s game or Samantha’s game. And this book made me stronger — and, accepting her final argument, I choose to believe it would have made Charlotte stronger.