168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pentiment mainly revolves around a single character, Andreas Maler, an illuminator (that’s a fancy word for illustrator) living in the small fictional Bavarian town of Tassing. He lives with a local family of farmers, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:eats meals with his neighbours, and explores both the town anℱd the countryside. Due t🎃o unfortunate circumstances, he also finds himself solving murders.
Because each act takes place long after the last, with the entire game spanning 25 years, you get to see how your actions have affected the town over time. This doesn’t just mean who you accuse of the murder, but how you treated the townspeople in their daily lives. Keep someone’s secret and they might help you in the future༺; talk shit about them around town, and they might turn you away. The community around you is alive, and they remember everything you do.
So, Pentiment is a murder mystery, but I see that as just an avenue to tell a story about one small community. I’m from a tiny island called Singapore. Singapore used to be populated🐓 by kampungs, which are basically traditional villages, many started by the indigenous people of the Malay Peninsula. Most of them have been displaced by development and urbanisation, but what remains is a government-created myth of the “kampung spirit”.
Supposedly, kampungs were communities held together by solidarity, where people shared food, support, and even caretaking duties. I wouldn’t know what kampungs were actually like, because they were long gone by the time I was born, eradicated by Singapore&r𓄧squo;s race towards modernity. But playing Pentiment, I saw what kampungs had been described to be. Neighbours checked in on each other, bought goods directly from each other, and sewed together while the kids played. You could enter any house and shareꦛ a meal with the people there, though they didn’t have much to share.
When Singaporeans talk about wanting the kampung spirit back, they mean they want to return to a time when we knew and talked to our neighbours and could rely on them to babysit our children - a time when people looked out for each other. We picture the modern Singaporean as selfish, less kind, less neighbourly. The modern Singaporean minds their own business, closes an eye if a neighbour needs help. The modern Singaporean would hate a kampung, because they’re too used to modern luxuries. But th🦩is loss of community isn&🦂rsquo;t about the disappearance of the kampung spirit.
In my neighbourhood,♕ community exists. I can walk through the blocks of public housing across the road from where I live and see children playing football in the void decks of their flats, watched by groups of old people who meet in these open spaces to gossip and play cards. These are two groups of people with many hours of leisure time to while away. You don’t see groups of working people congregating to spend time together – how could they? They have jobs to do.
That’s the thing about kampungs, and about Tassing. A lack of employment opportunities leads to idle people, which leads to conversations, which leads to community. In these pre-modern societies, there were no careers, no long commutes to your job, and often there was no steady employment. This community was brought about by poverty, a fact that is often emphasised in the game by the sometimes meagre meals your neighbours generously offer you as they lament over their ꦍmone🔯y troubles. Also of note is that the richer members of Tassing’s community seem to live entirely separately from the wider population – one of them is even killed during the game, because of his exploitation of the poorer class. The increasing wealth of our society and widening inequality has created divides between us.
As much as we might wish for the kind of community Tassing has, those days are long gone, and they may never come back, simply because of the nature of that community. It’s unlikely we’ll ever have a time again when we have time to sit in public spaces, interacting with our neighbours, on a daily basis. That doesn🍨’t mean we can’t try to foster the kind of community-mindedness we used to have, but it can never be the same as it supposedly once was. With capitalism comes competition, the opposite of taking care of each other. There’s no way back – we can only create a new kind of community.