Uploaded October 2021 | Updated September 2026, 4 days ago

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I'm making a game called Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, about buying and selling the fleshy meat parts of sentient beings in a strange and evolving universe. This required making an intergalactic stock market. Which required defining the value of a given organ. Which required defining a list of organs. Which required defining what is and is not an organ in the first place, and so on, in an endless line.

The process broke our team. Not in terms of crunch, or mental health, but in the realization that so many of the systems and definitions used in every aspect of our reality are *invented*. False. Arbitrary decisions from someone else we'd never meet.

In this lightning talk, we're going to show the necessary and powerful existential hell of unravelling your game's systems to discover the implicit ethical considerations beneath. A seemingly simple or absurdist game can reveal the arbitrary nonsensicality of the systems we live within every day--and cause one to demand better systems in the process.

Existential crisis: the dev talk.

Radicalization via viscera.

Viva la revolorgan.