[Karunamon]

Tens of thousands, involved in a scheme? No, of course not, and I have no doubt that a lot of people liked it. That was a subjective judgement on my part - I think it's low effort nonsense.

Here's the thing - would those tens of thousands of people have seen it in the first place if Hernandez hadn't talked up her friend on Kotaku? Would that niche of a title have wound up on the site at all if not for the personal connection between those two?

I suspect the answers to both those questions are "no".

[TazeTSchnitzel]

> I think it's low effort nonsense.

Have you ever actually made a video game yourself, or written a piece of literature? Do you appreciate the effort this actually takes?

> Here's the thing - would those tens of thousands of people have seen it in the first place if Hernandez hadn't talked up her friend on Kotaku?

Sure. For one thing, Quinn had at least that many Twitter followers. It's a game, also, that covers mental illness, which isn't a frequent topic. On that novelty alone, it was likely to get some attention regardless of who Quinn's friends were.

> Would that niche of a title have wound up on the site at all if not for the personal connection between those two?

There's a good chance it would. Depression Quest was novel. Kotaku likes showcasing novel and interesting things.

[Nadya]

\\Edit

I got DQ mixed up with another Twine game I had heard of at the time. This post can be more or less disregarded. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10254524

\\End Edit

>Have you ever actually made a video game yourself, or written a piece of literature? Do you appreciate the effort this actually takes?

Using the same tool ZQ used to make her game - it's literally 5-15 minutes online. The effort was next to nil.

http://twinery.org/

As someone who has actually worked on creating even a simplistic Zelda-clone, you're fooling yourself if you think it took any real amount of effort.

>written a piece of literature

The entirety of Depression Quest reads like simplistic hipster angst. Similar to "Will You Save Your Son", except at least WYSYS has some self awareness and was meant to mock this type of storytelling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSm1Rn7Prcs

Maybe an hours' total of work for a low quality Twine game using a script written during a lunch break.

I think it's generous to even call it "low effort".

[Karunamon]

Eh, the quality of her game doesn't really matter anyways. It's interactive fiction with some graphics showing - it's hardly Call of Duty, but it does take a lot more than "15 minutes". Quinn is a game developer in the same sense that my gran playing Words With Friends on Facebook is a gamer - both terms still apply, even if casually.

Play around with something like Inform7 or even Twine with the interest of making a full story - it still takes a lot of thought.

Still, having played it, I'm not a fan (and that goes double since I've fought with depression and do not care for her treatment of the material!), and I think it comes off as amateur hour. I think Steam could do a lot better than IF-style "games" in general.

Good point WRT her Twitter following. I had not considered that.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

> Using the same tool ZQ used to make her game - it's literally 5-15 minutes online. The effort was next to nil.

Writing something the length of Depression Quest, creating graphics, mapping out the story, quality assurance testing, composing music... this does not take 5 to 15 minutes. It is not nil effort.

If you think it's so easy, please, go ahead and recreate Depression Quest from scratch in 15 minutes.

[Nadya]

I'm going to have to apologize. I got DQ mixed up with a different hipster Twine game that I heard of at around the same timeframe. One that was no more than 10 or so panels and 3 lines of dialogue that also garnered a fair amount of attention. I confused the two (and no more than a brief Google search showed me that I had...)

At 40,000~ words + music/still graphics, DQ is a fair chunk of work.

Again, apologies. Definitely more than "next to nil" effort.