Just Having Fun

I am, in fact, still playing Infinity Nikki. I'm not even very far along, because I keep resisting advancing the plot into the next zone, trapped in some vain delusion that I can identify and complete everything of value where I am. The reality is, checking off items on my quest log has a tendency to make it longer rather than shorter. XP I am going to have to just force myself to run full-sprint toward the next MSQ marker and refuse to look at anything or talk to anyone on the way there. I know I can always come back, but the next place will most certainly have an equivalent sea of things to do, so I don't have any illusions about flipping all those levers and returning to what I left behind. 

The photography element of the game is interesting. It's fun that they gave us some sliders to approximate camera settings and built a few sidequests around taking shots of various landmarks and characters. Your milage will of course vary, because you can just get the target the game requested in the frame, upload and move on and receive the same result as if you fiddle around with the settings and boop the angle around trying to make something ~*aesthetic*~ and you might even make things harder for yourself because I can't tell you how many times I have been trying to "compose" the shot, and what I think looks nice doesn't get the right part or enough of the assigned target in focus and the game won't take it as a completion.  

It's also relevant that most of those quest photos won't be seen by anyone but you, unless you go out of your way to share them. Whether or not it's done matters to the system, but making it nice nice is just for you. But, also, you're playing Pretty Pretty Princess Dressup Dolly Delux 3D. May as well lean into the vibe. I feel like there would be something not-right about just slapping up uncomposed, utilitarian documentation photos for completion. 

As a photography fantasy, it's a studio guy's dream. You have a willing model who always understands your directions, always looks perfect in everything you put on her, and has infinite time and patience as you fiddle with your composition. You have a world made entirely of lovely backdrops and repeating animation loops, so if you miss "the moment" it looked best, it'll come around again. You have even, reliable natural light everywhere, indoors and out, and your studio lights work as well in the middle of town as they do on top of a mountain (and you don't have to carry them anywhere). 

I kinda got into doing little fashion photoshoots when I found a website that hosts a searchable catalogue of every single wearable item in the game, and lets users post the outfits they have created, with a little photo gallery of the outfit in action, and links to each of the components. You can go through and check off all the items you've got on hand, click any one of them to see what kind of outfits other users have included them in, and in turn see without being logged in to the game which components they used that you already have, in case you want to recreate the look yourself. It also gives you at least a hint as to where the pieces come from, so if you see something you like and don't have, you can seek it out. Since you can save like, 4 outfits in the game (tho I hear they're expanding that soon), it's nice to be able to record things so you can find them later, or at least not feel like they're gone forever just because you needed to save over them. Plus, other users can <3 react your work, and so you can get a little validation-based dopamine boost. If you're into that sort of thing. 

Personally, I think I just have a thing for cataloguing. Its the same kind of hype I got when I was playing a lot of Magic the Gathering and discovered deckbox.org. I didn't really care about the collector's value of my cards, or really about sharing or comparing notes on deck compositions. I used the mana analysis tool a couple times out of curiosity, but not to make any sort of optimization efforts. No, I just got really excited to sit down with my box of cards and painstakingly enter each one in the database until my whole collection was accounted for and documented. This gave me a similar reaction, where I sat down with the game open on one screen and the website on another and went, category by category, through everything I have. Now that it's done, I always have it up off to the side. Every time I pull the gacha lever, or gather enough components to craft an item I've been sitting on the recipe for, or get a quest reward, I dutifully check it off in the catalogue. No one can see my catalogue. I can't link it, or show off how many pieces I have, beyond if someone cares enough to note the various things I use in posted outfits. I don't get a score. Heck, I can't even look at it all together appreciate my horde. Like, I can click a category (shirts, hats, hairdos, whatever) and set it to only show me things I own, but there is no "my closet" type page. I don't feel particularly compelled to acquire all the things, either. But everything is logged and accounted for, and I like that. Inventory. And every time I post an outfit, I do it again on a smaller scale by logging every item shown in the pictures. This is me having fun.