Dondoko Island-- Pixelated Proust

 there is something really poignant in how the DIYs in Dondoko Island are ALL the assets from the yakuza series; objects, buildings, even/especially seemingly random ones from all over the series become available for you to craft. For some of us, it’s a whole lot of memories. 

I don’t think the Proust cookies** will become craft-able, although they should. RGG is good enough that the joke would not surprise me, but I’m not counting on it. 

It’s an interestingly, intimate moment; almost like a lover taking off their clothes, because this, moving around these blocks of pixels, exactly these blocks of pixels, is what the RGG guys have been doing themselves all along; they are giving us a much deeper look at the programer’s world than we have seen before. 

So far, I have not found the desire to recreate stuff, or even, create, riff take ownership, of my resort. I put stuff places where it will function as it is supposed to, but, otherwise, pretty much at random. I have not built the arch AT all-- it does not belong on my haphazard Island. I LOVE that fucking arch so much. The arch will need to be deployed systematically, deliberately, if I ever use it. I don’t know that I can. 

You have all these humdrum tasks on the island, dealing with guests, crafting, resources. The sujimon farm, which it helps to get right for both the island and the sujimon system. Then you have the weight of the memories invoked by the DIYs. It all gives the island substance, for me it makes planning, taking ownership, making it appealing, all kind of demanding and stressful, but almost in a good way because if I ever create a good Island it will be in a space where I have worked, a space that means something. 

** I haven’t ever read a word of Proust but, come on, he’s the ‘remembering cookies for 900 fuckn pages guy’-- I would hope enough people know THAT that the joke is worth making; on some level, Proust is a pretty good joke, just by himself. 

I would actually be SORELY tempted by Proust if he wrote in English, or I knew French. But 900 pages of cookie memories IN TRANSLATION is just too much. You assume that if the project is worth reading, it has to do with a quality of the writing, an extreme deliberateness with which the French words were chosen, all 900 fuckn pages of them-- so you are asking my to buy into some other jabroni’s translation of cookie-guy? Some people who have read Proust in translation are all about that shit, but I just don’t think I have enough trust to do it.