It Has Been Done!!!

I've said that organizational dysfunction should be a villain more often, mostly because of my belief that we need stories that give us information about how to deal with the biggest actual problems we, as a society, face. It's just very hard to write a story about organizational dysfunction that includes actually beating the organizational dysfunction.

But there's one place where organizational dysfunction does have an opportunity to show its villainous nature: videogames. Specifically, management videogames, where making decisions about organizational goals and who to hire is already central to gameplay.

Now, the average "management" game is not really about management per se. Everything is hyper abstract, you have a god's eye view, and you have ultimate authority over everything that you do. You are still looking for weak links and problems to correct, but a lot of that is pathing issues (if the game has that) or restructuring physical space.

So a management game that's about organizational dysfunction would be one where you're the new boss, looking to right the ship, and it would need to be an opaque organization, one where you can't just look inside someone's mind and see the "takes credit for others' work" trait.

I guess when I put it like that, I'm imagining something that's more like a detective game, as you do interviews and comb through piles of documents. And it's not as simple as "fire the bad people", because often those people are pulling a lot of weight, that's one of the reasons they've stuck around for so long, and replacing them is genuinely a hit to the company's ability to do ... whatever it's trying to do.

(Definitely also possible to do this same thing set in a government agency, a non-profit, or any other organization, though the actual problems will look at least somewhere different.)

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idk when we decided that explaining yourself shouldn't be part of an apology but like. if someone was a dick to me and apologizes but I still don't understand why they did it I'm not gonna feel any better

there is so much intimacy in creating something together

Tim and Bruce getting into an argument bcs Tim demands to be independent and NOT get involved in the mess of being a legal part of the Wayne family, and Bruce being final on the fact that Tim is FIFTEEN and needs a legal guardian. out of spite Tim asks the person he thinks Bruce would approve of as a guardian the least to sign some guardian papers.

Tim: you don’t have to do anything parental i just REALLY wanna make Batman mad and i get the sense that our wishes align on that specific aspect so if you could just sign here for shits and giggles-

Red Hood:

Red Hood, rapidly changing his plans on how to deal with getting revenge on Bruce because his replacement is actually kinda hysterical: if we’re doing this we’re fucking doing it right, kid

Bruce shows up to Tim’s next parent teacher conference because hey just because he’s being given the silent treatment over this whole adoption thing doesn’t mean he’s going to slack off on his parental duties, only to freeze in the doorway because Tim Drake-Hood is stood there with his shiny new CRIME LORD LEGAL GUARDIAN giving him the most SHIT EATING GRIN POSSIBLE, and he almost has a panic attack on the spot.

Jason’s really getting into this whole caretaker thing. he’s doing school runs, delivering home cooked meals to Drake manor, helping with homework, this was his fucking CALLING. Tim is having the time of his life because him and Hood actually get along really well, but then he realises two weeks in that it turns out Hood is actually Jason fucking Todd, and he has to deal with the existential crisis of causing the very thing he was trying to stop because he is now technically a legal child of the Wayne family.

out of embarrassment for the fact that he failed and amazement at the fact that he’s bonding so well with Bruce’s dead kid and his own childhood hero (who is now a badass crime lord that lets him call for advice about english assignments while organising drug runs and picks up batburger on his way home from weapon shipments, seriously what more could Tim want in a parent), Tim somehow becomes even more invested in hiding Red Hood’s identity than Jason is.

Bruce has just been in a constant state of panic for the past three months and he doesn’t know what to fucking do. Dick was concerned for Tim up until he demanded to have dinner with him and his new ‘guardian’ to vet the guy and Jason, who stopped caring about his identity when he realised how much being a working dad agrees with his mental health and is only actively keeping his identity from Bruce for Tim’s pride’s sake, takes off his helmet to eat and Dick stares at him frozen for fifteen minutes across the table before finally pointing at the two and saying ‘you know what? he didn’t even tell me Jason was dead until after the funeral. whatever the fuck’s going on here? he has it coming. proceed.’

Obsessed with these cats from my work. To me they are Harry and Kim