Well, the ever-turning wheel of years has revolved around to another spoke, which is to say that it’s now March and that means there’s another Question of the Month!

As you’ll probably know by now, 2019’s QOTM format involves members of the community coming together to devise one element at a time of the greatest and most awesome hypothetical video game that there ever was. In January we developed our setting: a floating ocean within a spaceship lost in the deepest reaches of the cosmos. Then February identified our protagonists: detectives looking to solve a mystery.

This month, we need to pit a threat against our heroes. We need a terrible force, a bastion of evil, something for our protagonists (and players) to overcome in this mysterious setting. It’s often said that a story is only as strong as its villain, so we really need to get this one right.

So what does an antagonist need? Well, they need to have some things in common with the heroes in order to be an effective foil, and to be standing in the way of the heroes’ goal (or be looking for the same thing). They need to be competent and well-suited to the environment, in order that they’re capable of presenting enough of a threat.

And, because shipping and fandoms help make games popular, they should be sexy.

I’m gonna take some of that on board and ignore some of it, and say:

Epistemological nihilist blobfish.

Here’s the thing, right. A blobfish is very hardy, capable of surviving in extremely difficult deep-water conditions. It’s just the sort of thing that would appear in such a challenging environment as deep-space-ocean. It doesn’t have to look exactly like an Earth blobfish (and in fact the bizarre appearance we associate with blobfishes is at least partly due to the fact that their bodies devolve in peculiar ways when out of their natural and extremely high-pressure environment) but I think something alien and just slightly eldritch-looking would make sense. It should also either have the ability to physically affect things at a distance (tentacles etc.) or have lots of little minion-fish things, so that it can always be a threat.

As for epistemological nihilism, epistemology is the study of knowledge. An epistemological nihilist would therefore be someone who asserts that it is impossible to know anything. What better counterpart to a detective, whose whole job is to know things?

So this is obviously the most perfect antagonist anyone could possibly conceive of, but perhaps you think you can come up with something better? Fortunately it’s very simple: all you have to do is write a post, tweet, article, whatever – or, heck, post a video or something – and drop us a link, and perhaps your Ultimate Video Game Antagonist will be the winner.

Peace out.