The Stack

One thing I neglected to mention in my previous post about the gamelike attributes of Homestuck: sometimes Homestuck is difficult. Sometimes just reading it is a challenge. That’s not just because it’s a sprawling and complex work with a lot of characters to keep track of. It’s also because the text is often obfuscated in some way.

Most of the story’s text is in the form of chatlogs, and quite a few of the characters have “typing quirks” of some sort, such as leet-style letter substitutions, which somehow carry over into their speech and even sound effects. The simpler and more consistent substitutions are easy to get used to, but then you get contextually-variable ones, where the same substitution has more than one meaning. For example, one character uses “8” for both “B” and the sound of the word “eight”, or sometimes even for just a long “A” sound, and when she’s upset she just starts sticking 8’s into words where they don’t make sense at all. Occasionally the quirks become incomprehensible enough to baffle the other characters.

There’s one character who speaks in white text — the website’s background isn’t quite the same color, but it’s still most easily read by highlighting it. The effect is sometimes that you see other people’s reactions to what he said before you see what provoked those reactions. There’s an infrequently-used alien alphabet, stolen from the Elder Scrolls games. There’s a character who’s a firefly, who’s completely mute and communicates (or tries to communicate, anyway) by blinking in morse code, transcribed for the reader in dots and dashes. There’s a brief appearance by a character who speaks solely in bad Japanese. It all becomes a sort of gesture of amiable hostility on the part of the author, who knows that anything he does to thwart his readers will be decoded in short order and posted online by the more dedicated ones. And that adds up to another bit of gamishness: even outside of the interactive sequences, people are getting to the full content by looking up hints online.