We Are OFK really is the culmination of the last 15+ years of the American Indie Scene. This is it, this is what everything that has ever happened in that scene has come to. The pretention. The immense lack of respect for games as a medium. Hiring people to do all the work for you while taking all of the credit yourself. The metaphorical and sometimes literal pedojacketed queer body count built up from using social justice language to cut off employment and housing opportunities to every actual talented queer developer who showed off a moderate amount of free will in a world full of conformist capitalism. A bunch of narcissistic buffoons who don’t have a fucking clue screaming into a megaphone about being genuine, when you don’t have an ounce of genuine emotion in your body. South Park Libertarians who don’t believe a single word that comes out of their own mouth who only know one way to finish a project: throwing money at it until it’s done. To them, you cannot spell Sincerity without Sin. Learning a skill like art or, God Forbid, music, takes time away from their STEM-based values and networking with other marketing execs. We Are OFK, not Takeshi’s Challenge, is truly a video game made by somebody who hates video games.
Every last aspect of this bullshit is calculated cynicism. The use of social justice lingo in the dialogue is cynical. 95% of the entire game being the characters looking down at their phones and texting each other while standing right next to one another like a Banksy piece is cynical. The representation is cynical. Getting Anita Sarkeesian involved with the game is cynical. You use the Blizzard Diversity Scale to try and get money from self-hating “Queer Is A Slur” idiots, while using these characters and Anita’s involvement as a cynical shield from criticism, because after all, who would ever criticize a game with at least one (1) Black Trans Person, other than Gamergaters??? The backgrounds are so obviously AI generated. The $300 motion capture is the most half-assed garbage that anyone with a week’s worth of Blender knowledge could have outdone for free. But then again, actually making your own art assets takes time and skill and a desire to learn something, and that’s getting in the way of making money right fucking now.
This is a game about “being genuine,” and the entire story is about a bunch of rich assholes deciding to start a band on a whim, but they spend more time to talking to investors then actually putting a single fucking song together or even playing an instrument. There are no emotional stakes, no material issues whatsoever, just a bunch of angry adult children getting mad at one another in situations that may as well have been written by a child who watched five minutes of an episode of My So-Called Life. Its use of LGBT identities and people of color is so fucking sanitized that it wraps all the way back around to being racist and homophobic as fuck. In the fictional Los Angeles of OFK, queer people are listless children with severe emotional arrested development and no life experience. If you are queer, We Are OFK says, you are fucking stupid. Every non-white character is either a walking stereotype, or their identity is so meaningless that they may as well just be another white dude. Marginalized identities exist only as a concept, not as actual, living people with personalities that didn’t come from some pick-me you follow on Cohost.
There is at least one scene where a character essentially forces themself on someone, but they make sure to ask for consent first. The problem with this is that you are given control of the other character, and you are given two options: Yes, and Yes. You can only continue by letting your manager sleep with you, which is truly such a great allegory for the Indie Scene (capitalized as a pejorative): the only way to make any progress is to give yourself sexually to someone with power over you. In case the creator of this game is namesearching and finds all these posts: brother, I sure hope you don’t have any allegations against you, because you are not beating them with that scene. And even then, sex is only ever implied in this game, because this is another one of those bullshit “comfort” games put together by people who think that gay sex is gross, that a queer body is an aberration. A very “you can be gay, you can be trans, just don’t shove it down everyone’s throat, okay?” kind of “representation.”
I have been struggling for the last couple of days to find a proper term to use for We Are OFK. All that comes to mind is that the only thing genuine about it is that it is genuinely evil and anti-intellectual. It was designed to be a piece of marketing first and foremost; parasociality (is this a word?) as a bullet point. 40 year olds selling themselves to people half their age in a desperate desire to be considered cool, and not simply making something people actually care about. It’s punk rock in the Sex Pistols sense; people with power mad that they don’t have more of it. The scene needs to be shut down. I mean, it’s needed to be for fifteen years, but this has to be a tipping point. Just tear it all down and start over with a much more solid foundation.
I can at least hang my hat on the fact that this game failed miserably.
