Last time, you decided that friendship is better than interrupting conversations. You must be very good friends, if your friendship is more important than your desire to butt in. And now I know I can butt in and you’ll just accept it. This week, we pick between an unfathomable conception of flesh and a matter of convenience. What’s better, invert mouse or undo?
Invert mouse
I don’t get it. I know it’s important but god help me, I really don’t get it. I know its absence will be loudly decried by invertors but I don’t understand why they are this way. Someone once described their use of invert mouse to me as “Like you’re pulling down on the back of your character’s head to make them look up”. Alarming. Why do you think about inhabiting flesh in this way. The very concept distresses me. How do you live. What are you. What is the world to you. Hell, what’s the point in even asking: as Wittgenstein said, “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.”
But if someone’s concept of self, their whole model of existence, is irreconcilably different yet we’re able to resolve that by adding a harmless option, shouldn’t we? After all, isn’t there a minor chance that anyone who sees flesh as puppet might be an otherworldly with the ability to bend reality into whichever form they deem correct? Maybe it’s best to agree so we don’t wake up with our own musculature somehow inverted.
Undo
The ability to undo is a wonder. Make a mistake or simply want to see an alternative and wham, hit the undo and back you go. The game doesn’t want to punish you, it wants you to experience it without fuss or bother. What would be the fun in making you repeat something, or ruin your game with a misclick? Undo says hi, looks like you’re in a pickle, need a hand? What a pal!
I mostly know undo from puzzle games, rewinding actions so I don’t have to run through the busywork of repeating a puzzle up to the point I make a mistake. That’s nice. Strategy game Old World lets you undo, too. Then some games wrap themselves around undoing. Time-twisting puzzle-platformer Braid is all about the undo, taking it being convenience with puzzles built around rewinding. Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time builds rewinding into its world and story too, with a magic dagger letting our man re-do missed jumps or avoid attacks, or just rewind time because it looks cool. A thing which looks cool, helps you out, and makes you feel like a wizard must be a pretty good thing.
But which is better?
I want to say undo. But I don’t want to wake up having been inverted. But if I pick undo, if I wake up staring at the floor I can just undo this catastrophe. Alright, undo it is, in the hope that I will eventually be able to handle my inverted controls just enough to mash undo.
Pick your winner, vote below, make your case in the comments to convince others, then we’ll reconvene next week to see which thing stands triumphant—and continue the great contest.