# cheesy writing in the old city garme > what we can say is that we are dealing with a lot of inherently philosophical themes > ~ a tall claim from the old city consider that the trailer for the old city by postmod softworks suffers from the classic narrative design assumption that walking simulators(tm) must be ponderously self serious to seem remotely meaningful - ready to topple over with the swooning weight of overly heartfelt prose achingly slow cinematic pans weepy minor chords and weighty lens flares a possible test for cheesy writing in video garmes: pretend you don't know what you're watching is a video garme; watch the trailer in question and ask what you're supposed to read this thing as being what are the ways the trailer tells the viewer the supposedly 'correct' way to read it? what kinds of automatic and uncritical suspensions of disbelief does it tell its audience it 'should' have? // video here "(..) calling my name as if to strip me from stagnation?" a graceless swan dive into vague and cringe-worthy corn; the nameless bodiless speech give which arrives from nowhere to float romantically over largely uninteresting and by now standard visuals (complete with undead crate use) seems born from a lack of awareness regarding the true possibilities of narrative in / as digital garme spaces there's considerable and jarring gap between what the trailer is telling itself it means and displays - and its actual lack of anything truly interesting or arresting to say; however vague such an expositionary telling seems hopelessly forced again rather than attempt to 'tell a story' - something that other forms outside video garmes have long mastered but are themselves still innovating - think in terms of 'narration via play' - of a story as something that emerges as a result of interaction with a necessarily abstract system of symbolic (potential) meaning one baseline for such an understanding is of course "emotions polygons and ellen page" by the mighty stephanie sterling // video here in short: rather than try to impose story let's hope the devs allow the interface between the player and the narrative experiences suggested by play to express itself and any detectable philosophy in the world will take care of itself level update on teh garme's ideas an email to one of the devs reveals interesting (and unfortunate) insights into teh garme's background > it might help when talking about the writing coming from the main character of teh garme to know that ir's absolutely insane. ir's a schizophrenic in fact so essentially nothing ey says will make any sense or is in any way trustworthy. ey is talking about something tangible though and the meat of teh garme lies in trying to figure out what ir's /actually/ talking about amidst all of the nonsense > ~ a developer of the old city while an unreliable narrator could potentially make for an interesting approach to any garme's storytelling its unfortunate that the devs seem to be confusing 'schizophrenia' with "absolute insanity"; in doing so they could be perpetrating unfounded cultural prejudices surrounding mental illness despite all this the devs seem to be talking about something tangible; the meat of the development of the old city lies in them trying to figure out what ir actually talking about - what exactly they want to say about whatever real ideas they have amidst all of the arguably unimaginative nonsense // republic of bob