Kallisti by James Mitchelhill [Comp01]

IFDB page: Kallisti
Final placement: 31st place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

The universe has a hell of a sense of humor. How else to explain the fact that right after I finish IF’s broadest sex parody, Comp01 feeds me this game, the centerpiece of which is a serious attempt at explicit IF erotica? I can’t say what the experience would have been like had I not just played Stiffy Makane: The Undiscovered Country, but I’ve no doubt it would have felt at least a little different. Then again, the game’s own warning signals were enough to notify me that I wouldn’t necessarily be emotionally invested in the seduction it describes.

Kallisti introduces us to Katie, elaborately and repeatedly making the point that she’s a virgin — “the flower of her youth, her purity, remained unbroken.” Then we meet Gustav, who takes one look at Katie and decides “I will have you.” This charming fellow is the PC, and it doesn’t say much for Katie’s good sense that she’s (apparently) immediately attracted to him. I was creeped out before the first move, very scared that I was about to find myself in an interactive rape fantasy. It didn’t turn out to be that, not exactly, but I had a hard time swallowing the idea that any moderately intelligent woman could be seduced by lines like these:

"...I came to this gray city around a month ago. There really was
nowhere else to go. All roads lead here. All roads led to this
moment, here with you. I do not usually work as a printer, but there
was little else I could find at short notice and besides, my funds
are limited presently. I'm talking to you because you interest me."

Yet, we are told, Katie is interested… very interested. We know this not so much from observing her actions, but from being flat-out told by the narrative voice: “She had been ready to leave before she found Gustav here and now her heart beat faster than she would admit.”

The term I know for this type of writing is “head-hopping”, and it’s not generally spoken in complimentary tones. What happens is that the narrative voice appears, for the majority of the game, to be a tight third-person rendition of Gustav’s point-of-view. However, every so often, we find it disconcertingly reporting on something happening inside Katie’s head, yanking us out of the POV we thought we were inhabiting. This sort of problem is why the omniscient third-person voice is so hard to write.

In interactive fiction, the problem is seriously compounded by the fact that as readers, we can’t help but inhabit the viewpoint character. If Gustav is the PC, I expect the game’s voice, be it in first, second, or third person, to report on the information available to Gustav. When it steps outside Gustav’s experience, especially if it doesn’t signal in any way that a transition is occurring, I feel like the storytelling voice is cheating, feeding me information I have no legitimate way of knowing. It pulls me out of whatever character identification I might have been experiencing, and thereby distances me from the story.

I can accept this sort of thing in an introduction, before the story has really started, but once I start typing in commands, I am that character, more or less. Of course, in cases where the character is repugnant, I’ve already distanced myself anyway, and I found Gustav repugnant from the get-go. The head-hopping destroyed any remaining link between me and the PC.

Of course, as the game progressed, it became clear to me that I didn’t mind being unlinked from the PC. But when an interactive story reaches this point, it’s hard for me not to ask myself why I’m still playing. I don’t like the character, I don’t care about the story, so what’s keeping me here? Sometimes, really well-done writing, puzzles, or programming will do it. This game, unfortunately, had a number of bugs (though they weren’t of the catastrophic variety — mostly just input that the game failed to process in any way, even to give an error message), and I found myself unable to connect with its prose most of the time.

There were some fine images (I particularly liked the moment when Katie’s smile is described as “brittle as leaves”), but too much of it felt self-consciously poetic, reaching for profundity it didn’t quite grasp. What kept me in the game instead were glimpses. At times during the conversation scene, I felt a flash of really deep immersion, that feeling that the game will understand anything I type, where the interface melted away and it felt like a conversation. Even during the sex scene, there were a couple of points where the implementation was deep enough that even though I never lost awareness that I was just typing commands into a keyboard, I felt like the PC would understand most any instruction I gave him.

The feelings never lasted long, always shattering at the next error message (or even worse, absence of any message at all), but they were thrilling when they happened. There’s been a good start towards something here, and I hope to see it built upon in the future.

Rating: 6.7

Being Andrew Plotkin by J. Robinson Wheeler as Celie Paradis [Comp00]

IFDB page: Being Andrew Plotkin
Final placement: 3rd place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

I was the perfect audience for this game, or near-perfect anyway. I’ve seen and enjoyed Being John Malkovich, the film by Spike Jonze. I’ve hung around the IF scene for a long time. I’ve played every Plotkin game, even Inhumane. I’ve also played every Infocom game, which turns out to be helpful as well. Even with all that, I’m not sure I caught every reference (especially given the prodigious list of such references provided by the author in the endnotes), but I think I caught a lot of them. Consequently, I’m not sure how somebody who doesn’t fulfill some or all of the above criteria would react to BAP, but I can tell you this: I thought it was a delight.

In fact, even as I was reflecting on what a rockin’ great start to the competition this game gave me, I was also regretting how small its target audience surely must be. No doubt somebody familiar just with the IF newsgroups, or just with Zarf (that’s Andrew Plotkin’s nickname, for those of you not in the know), or just with Jonze’s movie would find some entertainment value here, but how much more they would derive if they were, well, me. And believe me, there is a lot here to be appreciated. The game is gleefully deft at playing with the identity themes so memorably plumbed in the movie, and it does so in ways that are wonderfully appropriate to the medium of IF and to the specific project of exploring Zarf’s head. On top of that, it throws in lots of nifty IF references and generally has a hell of a time exploring some dark and unmapped corners of the form. In short, it works as a riff on the movie, as a riff on Zarf, and as a riff on IF itself.

The writing is, at times, a bit wobbly. I admit to being a little worried when I saw the first sentence of the game: “At last, your troubled fortunes seemed to come to an end.” The use of the past tense rather than the more traditional IF present tense, as well as the awkward phrase “troubled fortunes”, confused me. It felt like there was an initial paragraph missing, or perhaps that the PC had just died (which is how most people’s fortunes, troubled or not, tend to come to an end.) I think if the game had started out with “At long last, your troubles seem to have come to an end,” I could have swung with it, but as it was, it took me about a hundred moves to turn off the little editor in my head (apparently we all have a cast of characters capering around inside our skulls) and go with the flow. Once the game got rolling, though, there were some fantastic bits of writing. Particularly evocative and exciting were the effects generated by the various shifts in perspective that the game executes.

Those perspective shifts are some of the most intriguing things that happen in this game, or in any comp game I’ve ever seen, for that matter. I don’t want to give away spoilers here, so I’ll just say that the game explores some more or less uncharted IF territory by doing quite a bit of “head-hopping”, in both the literal and figurative senses. And of course, the fact that it is both literal and figurative is just one of the many fun things about this game. I love it when I’m still thinking about a game long after I’ve played it, still having little “aha!” moments making connections and grokking references. Yes, it’s true that the text probably could have used another round or two of revision. It’s also true that there are a few bugs remaining here and there, though there were other moments when I was pleasantly startled by the depth of implementation in some areas. The author confesses at the end of the game that “He began coding it on 2 September 2000 at 7:04am, and raced like the wind to finish it in time,” and in places, the rush shows. On the whole, however, the game is a whole lot of fun, and very thought-provoking, too. Being Andrew Plotkin is an experience not to be missed.

Rating: 9.0