I'll stick up for global variables in this context. Think of it as a DSL for stories. For a story, most state is inherently global. Story progress is global, hi

I'll stick up for global variables in this context. Think of it as a DSL for stories. For a story, most state is inherently global. Story progress is global, history is global, much as it is for the actual globe. The current scene is global, because the inputs and display are global. It's not a coincidence that globals are also intuitive for relatively non-technical people who won't just go straight for Python, because that's the default mindset until you build something complicated enough for globals to bite you. Re Pickle, besides the counterpoint you already mentioned, people probably aren't downloading saved games off the Internet, so to exploit Pickle an attacker would already need to have disk write access. At that point, exploiting a VN would appear to be low-ROI. I haven't used it, but I don't love the script syntax. I think it wants to look like a screenplay, but it actually looks like the unholy lovechild of Python and assembly. I can easily believe it gets worse from there.