Well, yeah, like what feels like, what does feel like a video game is a good question.

I feel like that's always grounded in trying to identify what is it that the game's narrative design is trying to accomplish, and then finding what is the writing voice that feels natural inside of that, and that feels like reveals something and kind of unveils things about that.

When I write for video games, I'm always very concerned about the ways that the medium is going to really stylistically affect how the writing is received.

To give a more concrete example, on Fallen London and really in any kind of interactive fiction type thing, I was talking about using the whole animal.

Because in Fallen London, when you take an action in that game, you get the main body of text for the result of your action, but you also get all the quality change messages that say how the game state changed.

And those messages don't have to have any custom text on them, right? They can just say, you know, oh, this quality is increasing.

You know, you've gained wounds, you've gained money, you've gained this.

Sure,

[laughs] We should all be so lucky.

We should all be so lucky.

But the thing about, um, that story is that it is kind of a rewrite of a much earlier and much less known story called, uh, Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family, where this one is not about fish people.

This one is about, um, ape men from Africa, and the protagonist just, like, he realizes, you know, he's descended from ape men from Africa, and as the title implies, once he realizes that, he kills himself, right? The...

He decides he doesn't want to live, right? Um, and th- that story also kind of, like, points more in the direction of where those stories are really coming from, which is a racist trope, right? The, the, the Shadow over Inns- Innsmouth, Arthur Jermyn, and a bunch of, like, earlier stories by other writers that we know Lovecraft read and was influenced by that, like, kind of point directly into this idea of, like, fish people even.

Um, they are coming from sort of the tragic mulatto trope of the character who passes for white, has Black ancestors, and is, uh, is undone by this, right? Which has been done in sympathetic ways, has been done in, like, unsympathetic ways, has been done in all kinds of ways throughout, like, American media for centuries, right? Like, people were making movies, uh, with this idea into the 1960s.

Um, and so back to the Sinking City 2, there is one storyline where you encounter a character who's turning into a fish person.

But tell me about a Thousand Hells.