[Comp01] The Best and Worst.
ems...@mindspring.com
of them, and then became massively unhappy, and stopped. The fact
that I was running a fever may have been involved, but, in any case,
after about October 8 or so I don't think I even tried any more games.
That said:
There were two games about which I have enough to say to make it worth
posting about them. One was All Roads, which was my favorite, and
which I am fondly imagining will win. (We'll see.) My notes:
-------
It didn't make a lot of sense to me; this is drawback one. And it
seemed, even on the first playthrough, fairly railroaded; this is
drawback two.
Mitigating circumstance: I had a fever when I played, so it's probably
my fault about the not making sense.
But: first of all, I love games that center around intrigue and subtle
political machinations. If I thought it would have any chance of
pulling entries, I would run MachiavelliComp. I loved the shifty
Italianate mystery. Score 1 point here.
But the second: I was won, and I can't tell you why, from the moment I
found myself in the Empty Room, with the pigeons flapping through the
light, and the rib vaulting above me. So whole and complete was the
evocation of that room that I haven't been able to claw it from my
brain again since: the light with its oblique angle, the sounds, the
various smells. My version owes not a little to the top of the tower
at Cologne cathedral, where the light comes through a stone birdcage--
a high place, not a low one, but still defined by masonry ribs and
shafts of sun.
Any game that can do that for me has accomplished much of what I seek
in IF. It was confusing, okay. I didn't get it, okay. I need to
play it again, and then I need to talk to the people who have figured
it out. Fine. But that doesn't *matter*, because the place, and the
quality of the place, are in my mind deeply. Something particular and
rich remains behind, when so much else is utterly forgettable.
------
Point the second: Kallisti. Man, do I wish I hadn't entered this year
just so that I would have had the pleasure of voting this a 1.
First, the surface issues.
I didn't like the narrative style; the shifted tenses reminded me of
Winchester's Nightmare, but the default responses were not as cleanly
replaced. I didn't like the rather pretentious, self-satisfied
feeling that settled somewhere betweeen narrative voice and Gustav's
internal monologue. In some games, you can ignore the prose style;
this is not such a game. If there's anything on offer, you feel that
it is supposed to be contained in that bombastic, self-consciously
important writing, since there's certainly little enough to entertain
otherwise. This is prose that demands to be taken as Literary.
Unfortunately, it is also the kind of writing that makes people hate
writers. Moreover, it's beleaguered by sinister errors:
I could be dancing at l'OpČra now if it hadn't of been for the
accident.
[what should Gustav have drank?]
Word to the author: if you insist on writing in a style that aspires
to sophistication and elevated diction, then you had damned well
better at the very least get your basic grammar right. Errors of this
sort glare hideously and, inevitably, draw attention to the pomposity
of the rest of the writing.
Then, well, the substance.
My original notes say:
I can't say I care for the character interactions, but that's mostly
because I can't see how to make them go forward, find the writing
somewhat turgid and uncompelling, and would like to do something else,
I guess. The virginal woman doesn't seem to react to my stripping
naked in front of her; shouldn't she? You'd think.
Further play leads me to suspect that the stripping naked was a bug,
not a badly implemented feature. But: one of the reasons I played
this through was because I was intrigued by what seemed to be
presenting itself as an attempt at realistic NPC-drawing, and thus
worth comparing to my own work (and indeed someone else referred to
the game as 'Galatea-porn'). The attempts to find something to talk
about with her seemed forced and uncomfortable, though: there was
often no way to follow up on her statements, and nothing particularly
interesting to get out of them, and I suppose this was reasonable
enough, given that the protagonist was only marking time before he
could slap her on the ass and take her home. Nor did what she say
seem to add up to anything but the most artificial of characters.
Hard to believe that a woman of flesh and blood and feeling existed
beneath or through or around these words.
So there's no character there. Fine. And there's no literature,
either, and god knows there's no game: interactivity-wise, this is
difficult and depressing. Is there an idea? The prose style seems to
say, "Take note: I am the writing of a clever person."
Well, no, there's not an idea, though there is a suffusion of weary
cynicism and a few haphazard symbols strewn around. And this, I
suppose, is why I really got impatient with the game: because it
represents, and by implication defends, a view of the world that is
ultimately as tawdry and degrading as the game's endscene: one in
which people are not people but manipulable objects; in which sex is
only a control device, conversation is for only showing off rather
than for building a communion between people, love is inconceivable,
and even the clean fire of intellect is diffused into pointless
pseudo-academic jargon.
It made me actively angry. If you're going to write a game about the
weary perishing of the world, at least write it in clean English.
Without, god help us, that pert mounds line.
-----
ES
Craxton
>cynicism and a few haphazard symbols strewn around. And this, I
>suppose, is why I really got impatient with the game: because it
>represents, and by implication defends, a view of the world that is
>ultimately as tawdry and degrading as the game's endscene: one in
>which people are not people but manipulable objects; in which sex is
>only a control device, conversation is for only showing off rather
>than for building a communion between people, love is inconceivable,
>and even the clean fire of intellect is diffused into pointless
>pseudo-academic jargon.
>
>It made me actively angry.
And well it should, but there's a reason for this, I think. This is Gustav's
worldview. This is how he sees the world around him. It's a view you're
suppossed to despise, but at the same time be perversely drawn to: a reality
that gives you ethical freedom to treat people like toys. God knows I deal
with enough people every day that I wish I could treat like little green
plastic Army Men.
In retrospect, perhaps that's the meaning behind the game's incongruous
final act. Perhaps something has finally gotten to Gustav, and he's finally
seeing his life for what it is: a petty, worthless, burning bed of his own
devising. Or something like that...
-Craxton
ems...@mindspring.com
>
> And well it should, but there's a reason for this, I think. This is Gustav's
> worldview. This is how he sees the world around him. It's a view you're
> suppossed to despise, but at the same time be perversely drawn to:
Hmm. Is it? I wasn't drawn to it; I was repelled, uniformly.
a reality
> that gives you ethical freedom to treat people like toys. God knows I deal
> with enough people every day that I wish I could treat like little green
> plastic Army Men.
>
> In retrospect, perhaps that's the meaning behind the game's incongruous
> final act. Perhaps something has finally gotten to Gustav, and he's finally
> seeing his life for what it is: a petty, worthless, burning bed of his own
> devising. Or something like that...
And you have just summarized my other major complaint. *If* this game
had some kind of well-expressed ideological point to put across, then
I might be able to excuse (or at least consider) it on the grounds of
that ideology. I find Objectivism repellent, but I admit Ayn Rand's
skill as an author, and I did find _The Fountainhead_ interesting
enough to read completely: it was a tract, a tract for an insidious
doctrine, but at least it *had* a doctrine and a point it was trying
to make, and as such possessed some kind of internal integrity. (No
I'm not trying to start a thread about Ayn Rand now. Thank you.)
Kallisti, on the other hand, had no such integrity. It *pretended* to
have ideology, and it attempted to Emperor's-New-Clothes the player
into believing it was profound. But unless this final reversal you
speak of is real, and comprehensible to the player, then I fail to see
how it redeems the preceding stuff.
The only excuse I've heard advanced for this game that would begin to
excuse it is that it is a devilishly subtle and accurate parody. The
proposer of this theory failed to mention *what* it might be a parody
of, however; and I remain unconvinced.
ES