I played 12 Minutes and hated it. CW: Incest, libertarianism
To explain why I hated it, I need to tell you that I spent several years of my early 20s hanging around libertarians. That, in itself, is embarrassing enough. You know that The Onion headline meme, “Heartbreaking: The worst person you know just made a great point?” That’s libertarianism. For all they get right on things like ending all wars including the drug war, stopping mass incarceration, and advocating for freedom of speech and freedom of association (all in theory), Libertarians tend to, uh… lose face on other issues, like for instance: “we like capitalism, but not crony capitalism(???),” and “there won’t be any legal ages of majority under a libertarian society!” and “bitcoin rules,” and “it’s okay to fuck my sister if and only if it’s consensual.”
This last one is, for all intents and purposes, the entire plot of 12 Minutes, folded into an exceptionally bad puzzle box of an adventure game, that involves a lot of assault and murder, especially of the uh sister-wife in question. To put it another way, the game revolves around you finding new ways to “kill the cop in your head” who also happens to be your dad trying to get you to stop your incestuous relationship.
What a lot of libertarians will do in order to get you to stop asking “why do you want to fuck your sister so bad” is put the argument into a legal frame, i.e., they will say “well, not to say that wanting an incestuous relationship is right, but legally there would be nothing preventing it from happening (in a libertarian society, they usually add). You could still organize a society that morally found the concept abhorrent, even if they didn’t have any punishment for it!”
And, like, yeah, sure, fine, that would be a coherent application of a no-rules-just-right capitalist anarchist hellspace, I guess. But going this hard on this argument path about incest still is pretty fucking wild, huh? Because it never stops at just the legal frame. 12 Minutes is an example of this. It’s coming up with all of these wild goddamn justifications and possible ways in which the story might play out in the protagonist’s favor (getting to be with his sister) without ever considering the possibility of… not continuing the relationship.
A path where he listens to their father, and he disengages, and he stops seeing her. Hell, if you want to take the tack that the feelings of someone who finds themselves attracted to their sibling are valid, you could do that, in an approach like this. It would respect the agency of everyone involved more, that’s for sure; it would involve much less murder, drugging and assault, and I’d argue that you could probably write the fucking characters better if they were able to have the difficult fucking conversation, maybe get into some therapy, and move on.
What’s wild is that for all the buckwild shit on display in this video game, it’s gotten less than a tenth of the backlash another game by an indie studio, one focused on queer relationships and involving a stalker who uses emotional manipulation tactics, got just a week ago. Really makes you wonder about the priorities of this industry and the attendant culture.