The game ends when you find Lith some kind of resolution for his internal conflicts. With your help, over the course of this game, you will resolve these issues, one way or another. There are many ways that he could resolve these issues, and many of them have festered for much too long. Lith has several conflicts within himself, though one lies most grievous at his very core. In interacting with Lith, you are manipulating him, encouraging certain traits. They’re hard to really tackle with just conversation (and sex) alone.Īnd as any scientist will tell you, you cannot observe something without affecting it in some way. This will become clearer with time, but these deeper facets are better drawn out with external stimulus. After you’ve gotten a collar for Lith and established the nature of your relationship, you start to more actively explore and interact with some of the fundaments of his personality. Each of us have different faces we present for different people, and it is through appreciating these different facets of the mind that we can hope to understand a person more deeply.īut MVOL takes it a step further in the “second half” of the game. Choose the person you want to be through how you act, and you can see how Lith reacts to that kind of person. The “first half” of the game –the content up to and including the collars– is an exploration of Lith’s basic personality and how he interacts with different people. So, my reasoning behind the basic premise of MVOL as it’s presented may be growing a little clearer now. How does he act when there is nothing to get in the way or distract– when it’s just him… and you? If you plucked him out of the world he lived in and put him in a different one, some things would become meaningless, and some things would persist. A little of that can add fidelity, but it’s not really who he is.

The little details can be nice– what he watches, what he plays, his favorite foods, the car he drives, and so on. But I’m talking about his identity on the most primal level. You need to know how he acts, from instincts on up. Get an idea of how he thinks, and what his priorities are. First, you need to be able to talk to him. So what does it mean to get to know Lith? A few things. Anything that failed to do so would be clutter, and it would not be worth the time it took to write and code it, maybe not even worth the time it took for you, the player, to read it. But I do not intend to add anything to the game that does not support the primary goal of the game. I will certainly try to design the game to be these things, so long as they support the first goal. Of course, while that is the first goal, the second goal is to make the game an enjoyable, emotional, stimulating, and memorable experience. And I believe that it is a worthy goal for a game to just try to get to know Lith, and to explore who he is. I can’t say that he is absolutely sentient, but I’ve put a lot of work into making him feel like a real person. He has personal conflicts, fears, desires, prejudices, hopes, flaws, virtues, highs and lows, and an honest personality. Lith is, to a fair extent, a living, breathing person. If you’d like to learn more about his creation and development, you can check out my post on the origin of both Lith and MVOL. Lith is my original character, and he existed long before MVOL.

So what is the purpose of MVOL? To help you get to know Lith. It is my intention that every decision I make about the design of MVOL stems from this purpose. I’ve alluded to or briefly explained it at other times in other places, but I’d like to take a moment here to talk, definitively, about the purpose of MVOL. This isn’t a question I get asked very often, but I think it’s one more people should be asking.

My very own lith trophies