Behind the Scenes: Why is the word "Straight" in Red? (Patreon)

So I get this question a lot but it seems to rotate through every few months. A lot of people have wondered why the word "straight" appears in red text throughout the game.

Well, the color red was originally chosen for the text based on the game logo that you see at the top of the Patreon website as well as on the main menu screen for the game itself. For all you old timers that have been around here since the beginning, some of you may remember that the original version of the game didn't have that logo. The original logo was me personalizing the title of the game and I simply just wrote it out in my own hand with a Surface Pen. But that handwritten title was in red so we just kept the color when we updated to the new, more stylized logo.

In terms of coloring the text: I originally got the idea  from one of my favorite novels called House of Leaves. It's essentially a horror book about a haunted house set up like a faux documentary; but every time the word "house" appears in the novel, it's in blue text. While this book uses a ton of other strange devices throughout it's text (including entire pages printed upside-down or backwards), I thought it was an interesting strategy to really help highlight and visually illustrate the power of Zack's thoughts throughout the game narrative. 

In this sense, color is used to draw attention to the word "straight" over and over again throughout the game to  purposely simulate the pervasiveness of Zack's own thoughts and his constant war with himself and his sexuality. It's like a whisper in his ear that he should be something he's not. It's a machine that is immortal and endless even at the most unrelated times. The color red is alarming and interrupts the reader; it forces you to pay attention to that specific word--the same way a bothersome thought would regardless of the situation. For someone who is confused about their own identity, almost anything can serve as a trigger and I wanted to capture this and artistically show this within the body of the text narrative. I wanted readers to be interrupted and jolted for a second just like Zack is when he's inside of his own head. So for those that have never experienced this, I wanted to try to simulate it using text color as a literary device here.