Line Analysis: "You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you?"

[droqen]

Regarding Aaron Suduiko's
"Line Analysis: "You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you?""

[droqen]

Lately I have been recognizing that the 'ludonarrative' of games is very important to me. To start by quoting some shit I was saying in Paradise:

if a person is choosing to play a shooting game because it's fun (it is) and the game-world is trying to paint an image of the shooting game as shooting & killing people with a gun, then a part of that world -- the part that is the most in focus -- is that the player-character is choosing to shoot & kill people with a gun because it's fun.

[..] imagine if nobody could ever write a book where the protagonist enacts violence and disliked it

if it was just functionally impossible or extremely difficult to produce a book like that which people could engage with. what long-spanning effects would that have on culture?

I recognized later that my thoughts were based on a presumption of a certain perspective:

a big part of my thing is the presumption that we have a story,
and in this story we regard the player as the protagonist

Okay. The stage is set.

[droqen]

[..]who, exactly, is the audience of the Salesman's words? The obvious answer is 'Link', but I think that what I just said above should give us pause:  as we have discussed before, Link is less of a substantive character and more of an avatar that directly links the player to the universe of the game.  Combine this with the Salesman's position adjacent to the general domain of Termina, and I think we can plausibly interpret him as speaking both to Link and the player

[The Happy Mask Salesman is] fallibly claiming to the link between player and game universe ('Link')

I don't know how intentional it is or who else has talked about this before or since, but wow, 'Link' as a name is exactly the thing I was talking about... Wowzers.

[droqen]

Then there is the analysis of met with a terrible fate:

I argued in the examination of Mikau that Termina is brought into reality by Link encountering it [1].  Using this argument, we can gloss the meaning of 'meeting' as 'creating through encountering'.

The conclusion is that the Happy Mask Salesman is saying

[Link] has brought a morally negative set of softly determined timelines into being by encountering it.

Meeting the Happy Mask Salesman is non-optional to the player once the game is started. The only thing that "encountering it" can possibly refer to, as a message to the player, is "encountering the game" and choosing to start it up. As player-Link superposition, you-Link have brought a morally negative set of softly determined timelines into being by bringing yourself into existence, by playing this game.