Tag: james mitchelhill

The Granite Book by James Mitchelhill [Comp02]

IFDB page: The Granite Book
Final placement: 16th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

Sometimes, rarely, I’ll read something, or see something, or hear something that is so foreign to me, so alien, that it’s hard to say whether I like it or not. It’s almost as if the question doesn’t pertain; the piece seems to come from another dimension altogether, and I’m hard-pressed to apply human rules of quality to it. However, if I have to form an opinion, that opinion will be a negative one — when I can’t relate to something in the slightest, that thing fails to appeal to me.

Case in point: The Granite Book. At no time during this game did I have any clear conception of what was supposed to be going on. At various points, I thought that the PC might be a king, a transient, a guy on a date, a psychopath, a spirit, or a troll. Perhaps he’s the itinerant ghost of an insane troll king, looking for love. I really have no idea.

Some of this confusion and dislocation comes from the game’s choice of voice: the entire thing is written in the first person plural, like so:

We weren’t sure, but jagged rocks emerging, staring into our face,
alone as we were in that obscure and emptied world, looked familiar,
greeted us again with laughter and the scrape of gravel inside
fissure.

I’ve only seen this verb tense used successfully in one place: the “royal we”, where kings and queens speak of themselves in the plural, because they are the living embodiments of their countries — hence my guess that perhaps the PC of this game is a king. It was the royal we that was used (although not in any simple way) in last year’s game The Isolato Incident, and in my review of that game I mentioned how I found it similar to Comp99’s For A Change, because both took ordinary descriptions and substituted out words, requiring the player to filter through strange language in order to make sense of the action.

The Granite Book, though, takes things one step further: not only are strange words in place of ordinary ones, but even the concepts those words represent seem to have no analogue in the real world, or even any fantasy world I’ve ever encountered. It’s not the royal we that’s at work in this game, but rather something much stranger.

For me, this was one remove too far. If nothing ever makes any sense, than I really don’t care about any of it — it just seems like a bunch of gibberish to me. As is probably apparent from the passage I quote above, verb tense is only the beginning of what makes this game opaque. From its tangled sentence structure to its nonsensical landscape and its thoroughly baffling end, the game’s perfect impenetrability never seems to crack. This sort of thing is bad enough in other kinds of art, but in IF the frustration it triggers is even more intense, because we’re supposed to take these frictionless descriptions and actually grasp them, put them to use.

I found I could make a little progress by examining second and third level nouns, but even then it was just a parroting trick, spitting back the words used by the game whenever they seemed important, not because I understood what they meant. I can imagine solving the game without the hints, if I was lucky enough to guess at the right interpretation of its descriptions, but I can’t imagine understanding it. I can’t exactly say that’s a defect in the game — who knows, maybe I’m just not bright enough to get it? But I can authoritatively say that I didn’t enjoy it.

Rating: 4.8

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