prokopetz:

prokopetz:

The really hilarious thing about Homestuck as a media franchise is that it’s successfully transformed itself into a completely straight example of the exact genre of media it was originally made to parody.

@newthinkerer replied:

Elaborate?  Because I’ve no clue what you speak.

Let’s back up 35 years. Before sports sims, before MMOs, before first-person shooters, the new hotness in gaming was a genre that explored widely varying settings, but always with a curiously similar premise: you’d be trapped in a familiar location for some contrived, bullshit reason, and would have to devise an equally contrived, bullshit means of escape, typically by solving moon-logic inventory puzzles. Some games would change up the objectives from time to time, but they’d always return to the basic room-escape (or building-escape, or island-escape, etc.) framework for large parts of their length.

At the time, these games were known simply as “adventure games”, though in contemporary parlance this is often expanded to “point-and-click adventure games” in order to distinguish them from their purely text-driven predecessors and more action-oriented descendants. For a solid decade, point-and-click adventure games were the unstoppable 900-pound gorilla of PC gaming, far and away the most popular genre by sales, with the more challenging – some would say “obtuse” – examples of the type serving as badges of gamer pride in much the same way that being into, say, Dark Souls clones does today.

(The genre would abruptly vanish from both the sales charts and public consciousness during the mid 1990s for a variety of reasons, among them market oversaturation, competition from newer genres like first-person shooters, and also a whole lot of corporate sexism, but that’s another story!)

To the subject at hand, if that description sounds familiar to you, there’s a couple of reasons why that should be so:

1. It’s the genre of games that Andrew Hussie made his name parodying, first with his early interactive webcomics like Jailbreak and Problem Sleuth, and later with the opening acts of Homestuck itself.

2. It’s also the exact genre that Hiveswap occupies.

It’s my experience that a lot of younger gamers are under the impression that Hiveswap is some sort of exercise in turning the metatexual weirdness of Homestuck’s early acts into a working game engine, but nope – it’s just a totally straight example of the exact pre-existing genre that Homestuck was making fun of in the first place.