Tag: chris mudd

Jump by Chris Mudd [Comp01]

IFDB page: Jump
Final placement: 41st place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

Jump puts me in mind of something Orson Scott Card said in a 1997 interview. In talking about how he started as a playwright before becoming a novelist, Card says, “By the time I turned to fiction, I had already cleared many of the first hurdles (I had written my suicide story, my perversion story, etc., and had moved beyond them, as every good writer eventually must).” What we don’t know from this quote is just what happened to that suicide story. Given that he was writing plays for BYU at the time, it’s not such a stretch to imagine that Card’s suicide story was enacted onstage for whatever audience might show up to student productions. After playing this game, I have a notion of how that audience might have felt.

Jump is a suicide story. To me, this was clear just from the title and blurb in Comp01, but no matter who you are, you’ll know it’s a suicide story before game’s first prompt, given that it opens with a suicide scene. Suicide stories in IF are an even trickier proposition than in static fiction (a term I dislike, by the way, but can’t think of a better alternative at the moment), because it’s one thing to watch someone kill themselves, and quite another to direct their actions towards that goal. Jump stops just short of In The End, since it doesn’t actually demand that the player type KILL MYSELF at the prompt, but it’s just as obvious that’s what’s going to happen, and the inevitable is just as… inevitable.

There’s a bit of window dressing that attempts to explain the suicide, but really, it’s just that: window dressing. They’re all the sort of movie-of-the-week elements you’d expect: adolescent protagonist; a suicide pact at school; dialogue that’s waaay over the top; alcoholism, battering, and probably child molestation in the protagonist’s home. These things feel pasted on — I never had the sense at any point that any of the characters were anything but cardboard cutouts. Details, characterization, and plot are so sparsely provided that it’s very difficult to really care about who these people are and what happens to them. It’s all overwith rather quickly anyway, so we barely get a chance to meet the characters, much less identify with them.

There are also religious overtones that ring false. Part of this is because of the general shallowness of the piece — it’s hard to get into the protagonist’s mindset when we get so little insight into her. Reading Christian scripture as advocating suicide is so far from typical that it really demands some explanation, and the game provides very little. The other part of the problem is implementation, as seen here:

>x picture
His eyes look skyward. His arms are spread. His legs are together.
Blood oozes from his feet and hands.

>x jesus
You can't see any such thing.

Well now, wait a sec. If that isn’t Jesus, then just who is it in the picture with the bloody hands and feet? I’m reminded of another quote, this time from Homer Simpson, after being called “wicked” for skipping church:

Kids, let me tell you about another so-called [makes quotation marks with fingers] “wicked” guy. He had long hair and some wild ideas. He didn’t always do what other people thought was right. And that man’s name was… I forget. But the point is… I forget that, too. Marge, you know what I’m talking about. He used to drive that blue car?

Anyway, my point is… wait, what was my point? Oh, right: the story begins, there’s a suicide, the story ends. Doesn’t take too long. Doesn’t accomplish too much. But if, as Card implies, the suicide story is a hurdle, consider it cleared.

Rating: 3.1

1-2-3… by Chris Mudd [Comp00]

IFDB page: 1-2-3…
Final placement: 42nd place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

For the past few years, each competition has had one game that I found unremittingly unpleasant, a horrible experience from start to finish. Last year, it was Chicks Dig Jerks, with its pounding misogyny and seething nests of bugs. The year before that, it was Cattus Atrox, whose relentless but shallow horror and totally logic-free plot I found impossible to stomach. I was beginning to think that I’d make it through 2000 without such an experience, but no such luck: 1-2-3… wins the prize for Most Repellent Comp Game, hands down.

It doesn’t suffer from bugs, though — it doesn’t really get the chance, because it is as linear as a short story. Basically, the game is one long string of guess-the-noun or guess-the-verb puzzles. In fact, for most of the game, each move is in itself one of these types of puzzles, since the game will allow no other action than the one it’s waiting for you to guess. The most freedom it ever allows you is when it spreads seven or eight guess-the-noun puzzles in front of you, which you can do in any order, but all of which must be done before the story can proceed.

Actually, I use the word “puzzle” but that’s being rather generous. Really, the situation I mention above is that you have a couple of NPCs, both of whom must be ASKed ABOUT three magic topics each before the game will continue. These NPCs are so minimally implemented (as is pretty much everything in the game) that they only answer to those three topics — all others will provoke one of three random default responses. As if this extremely minimalist implementation didn’t make guessing the noun difficult enough, the topics you’re expected to type in sometimes verge on the ridiculous. If a character doesn’t respond to ASK HIM ABOUT ADVICE, why would I expect him to respond to ASK HIM ABOUT WHAT HE WOULD DO?

Of course, the game gives me an unsubtle shove in the right direction by having the character say, “Do you want to know what I would do?” But this is a pretty desultory form of interactivity. The game may as well just tell you what your next command should be, since it has no plans to respond to anything else anyway. If you think that’s interactivity, you probably also think ventriloquists’ dummies come up with their own punch lines.

Non-interactivity is annoying enough, but consider the context: 1-2-3… is about a serial killer. It puts you in the role of this serial killer. It won’t let the game continue until a murder is committed, then another, then another, and these murders can be triggered by rather innocuous (if unintuitive) commands. Now how much does it suck to have no choices?

The killings are horrific, misogynist gorefests, with nauseating specifics lovingly enshrined in detailed descriptions, capped by attempts at psychological pathos that would be laughable if they didn’t follow such revolting excesses. The first murder scene made me feel literally sick to my stomach, and I seriously considered quitting the game there and then, abstaining from rating and reviewing it. I’m still not sure why I didn’t do that — perhaps some overactive sense of fair play among the comp entries, perhaps a misplaced hope that the game would produce some artistic justification for its ultraviolence. In the end, I had such a horrible experience playing 1-2-3… that I almost wish I hadn’t played it, but since I did, I want at least to give others the warning I didn’t get.

Thankfully, the game doesn’t keep you in the serial killer’s role throughout. You are privy to a couple of other viewpoints, most prominently the police detective whose mission is to find and apprehend the killer. Unfortunately, the scenes from the detective’s POV are no more interactive than those from the killer’s. You must follow, more or less lockstep, exactly what the game has in mind for you, if you want to finish the story.

Is 1-2-3… a psych experiment of its own, a kind of test to see how much gag-inducing content a player can take before switching off the computer and (to steal a line from Robb Sherwin) switching her hobby to “Scattergories”? Is it the IF version of Lisa Simpson testing to see how many times Bart will grab for the electrified cupcake? Maybe it is, and if so I certainly seem to have failed the test, because I played through to the end. But my emotional engagement with the game had ended long before that, having suffered multiple stab wounds from the vicious, senseless violence that permeates the game. I was taking every one of the game’s cues, typing in what it told me to and letting the text scroll by in the vain hopes of some Rameses-like epiphany. None was forthcoming. Now excuse me — I have to go take a shower.

Rating: 2.5