Tag: misogyny

Mortality by David Whyld [Comp05]

IFDB page: Mortality
Final placement: 12th place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

At its outset, Mortality makes a really big deal of how it isn’t for kids, indicating perhaps what its author expects the default IF game and audience to be, even in 2005. We are fairly warned that there won’t be “singing elves, saving the world and maybe a treasure hunt or two”. The help text describes it instead as “essentially an adult game”, and “more adult than not”. This feels like a strange bit of equivocation, as if it’s not confident in just outright labeling itself a game for adults, but as I played through, I found that the hedging was appropriate. While Mortality certainly has more than its share of (in the game’s words) “violence, bad language and scenes of a ‘questionable’ nature”, it’s not exactly aimed at adults either.

Rather, I’d associate it with the attitudes of a stereotypical teen boy, and kind of a gross one at that. There’s the protagonist who drives a Corvette, who “has slept with women of all colours, all nationalities, all races, from one side of the globe to the other”, who’s great with his fists and isn’t afraid to kill. There’s the love interest, who is always described as “ravishing”, or “the most stunning creature”, or “a truly radiant creature”, and so on. There’s rampant racism, misogyny, and homophobia. Every major character is thoroughly unlikeable, and the story itself is basically “noir with magic”, but minus any subtlety to the themes or development of the characters. There are numerous moments which adults (or at least this adult) would find eyerolling or outright offensive.

On top of this, the game is barely IF. There are bunches of cutscenes, or scenes where the interaction boils down to “press a key” or “do the only action we’ll let you do.” In the parts that are interactive, the implementation can be kind of screwy. For instance, you’re startled by a noise in the night, and jump up from bed to investigate. “X me” in this scene results in, “I am Steven Rogers, forty years of age. Ex-policeman, ex-SAS, ex-army. I am dressed in my usual clothes.” First, yeah, the PC inexplicably has the same name as Captain America, which I found pretty distracting. But also, he apparently sleeps in his “usual clothes”? There is a moment where the PC switches bodies with someone else, but “X me” spits back that same exact description. Come on.

My favorite wacky implementation moment was when the PC was hidden in a corner, waiting to ambush somebody. I took inventory and experienced this:

I am carrying a accident item and a blib.

X ACCIDENT ITEM
I see nothing special about the accident item.

X BLIB
I see nothing special about the blib.

An accident item (sorry, “A accident item”) and a blib? The scene is brief, those items never come into play (that I could tell), and they’re never mentioned again. Perhaps they were some kind of internal tracking mechanism that the game didn’t mean to reveal, but for some reason put into the PC’s inventory? My thought was, “This game has gone round the bend.”

My least favorite wacky implementation moment? The fact that the PC kept finding himself in chairs or beds, but Adrift cannot understand the command “get up”. I kept needing to stand, and the game and I kept doing this dance:

GET UP
Take what?

Grrrrr.

Finally, there is the ending. My playthrough ended with me in a dark void, the game repeating over and over again, “All about me is the endless darkness of death. I have failed. I am undone.” Mind you, it still offers a prompt and pretends to be interactive at that point, but unless I was missing something clever, this was just “*** You have died ***”, but without the resolution. I hit this ending after a loooong non-interactive “dialogue” scene in which there kept being only one dialogue choice at each “branch”. How could I have avoided the “endless darkness” ending? I had no idea, so I turned to the walkthrough.

Except, the walkthrough is just a game transcript from a particular playthrough, not all that different from my own. (Really, the game is so minimally interactive that it couldn’t be all that different from my own.) What actions make the difference between one ending and another? It was a mystery. So I turned to the PDF which comes with the game. It suggests, “if you’re not adverse to some serious spoilers that might otherwise ruin the game for you, type the word cheat and see what happens.” I think you mean “averse”, not “adverse”, but okay!

CHEAT
Try something else. That command is not one needed for this adventure.

Hey, thanks for that spoiler warning. It really preserved the surprise of that response. Later on, the PDF explains that Stephanie (the love interest NPC) is the key, and that there’s a hidden variable that tracks her state — keep that variable high enough for the better endings. Also, by default this variable is hidden, “but typing in the reveal command will display its current value.” Interesting!

So I typed “reveal”. I was not given the value of the variable! Instead, the game spit out the entire walkthrough, which, you’ll remember, is a full playthrough transcript. Or rather, it tried to do that, but seemingly ran out of gas about 90% of the way through. Until it did that, I thought I might mess around with different conversational choices and such to see what they did to the Stephanie state, but after that “hint” also failed, I decided I was done.

Mortality has some redeeming qualities. It’s an attempt at very story-heavy IF, and in some moments finds the balance between keeping the story on track and allowing the feeling of interactivity. The idea of choosing an ending based on how well you’ve kept a character happy is kind of cool (if a bit reminiscent of Galatea). The writing is, as the game might aver, “more error-free than not”, and does a good job of involving the senses, although a “smell” or “listen” command might not line up with what a description has said.

But overall, this is an unpleasant story populated with despicable characters, not really interactive enough to be interesting as a game, and burdened with an implementation that is not only shaky throughout, but doesn’t even fulfill the basic promises of its documentation. My experience with it went from annoying to puzzling to very annoying, and I’m glad to have it behind me.

Rating: 3.7

Chicks Dig Jerks by Robb Sherwin [Comp99]

IFDB page: Chicks Dig Jerks
Final placement: 31st place (of 37) in the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition

[NOTE: There are some obscenities in this review.]

Yecch. After an hour of playing Chicks Dig Jerks, I feel like I’ve been swimming in sewage. The PC and his friends are some of the most repulsive human beings I’ve ever seen described, and spending time looking through their eyes was pretty sickening. Now, it’s clear that the author is aware of this fact. The game begins with a big banner reading, in part, “There are absolutely no role models in this game.” Fine. But if it was intended to be some sort of satire, it didn’t work, at least not for me. Perhaps some reader smarter than I am will explain how in fact the whole game brilliantly skewers the emptiness and horror of its protagonist’s life, but for me, that didn’t come across. Instead, it just felt like living some stereotyped nightmare for no particular reason. Remember those fratboys at the beginning of Photopia? This is basically an entire game from their viewpoint, with some off-the-wall supernatural stuff thrown in for no readily apparent reason. The fact that the game was loaded with bugs and writing errors didn’t give me much confidence that it had some sharp, intelligent viewpoint behind its ugly veneer, but I don’t think that’s the main reason why I found Chicks Dig Jerks so unpleasant. That reason can be summed up in one word: misogyny. The game’s fear and hatred of women starts at the title and just snowballs from there.

The game’s basic notion is that women come in two varieties. There’s the Dumb Chick, who is prey to the PC’s predator. She has no illusions about her status, and apparently likes it, because she’s attracted to men who will treat her like dirt. Then there’s the Evil Bitch, who hates all men and is out to kill them and/or drain them of their vitality, at least until she can find one strong enough to dominate her and turn her back into a Dumb Chick. The male characters wandering through this world have two basic goals: score with (i.e. fuck) the Dumb Chicks and avoid or kill the Evil Bitches. We see the former in the game’s first sequence, in which the goal is to get two phone numbers from a group of women at a bar. The PC does this by approaching them with the dumbest lines imaginable, and guess what? Because they’re even dumber then the lines, they think he’s cool and give him their numbers. Here’s what the PC has to say after accomplishing this goal: “Word up.”

Then one of the Dumb Chicks takes the PC home and they have “animal sex for the better part of the night.” Then the PC bolts, leaving “a little note” and his number. What a guy. Thus ends the Dumb Chicks portion of our show. Moving on, the PC then invades a graveyard (did I mention he makes his living as a grave robber?) where an Evil Bitch tries to kill him. He ends up killing her, which is too bad, because I was really rooting for her. Then he gets real sentimental because his best friend (male, of course) was killed in the battle. Damn those Evil Bitches and their short male accomplices! (The game also seems to have a problem with short men.) Damn them to hell!

There are two dreams described in the narrative which illustrate this dichotomy perfectly. In the first, the PC is lured into an unoccupied room by a seductive woman, and in the room he sees the dried, dead husks of all his male friends. Then the succubus drains him too, and sticks his skin to the wall with thumbtacks. You can probably guess which side of the coin she represents. Then, in the second dream, the PC is having a fight with his old girlfriend, who apparently was the one person with whom he didn’t act like total scum. She breaks up with him, and in remembering the breakup, he wishes he had given into his impulse to “rock the bitch’s world and leave her reeling and bleeding.” He also regrets all the time he didn’t spend “being an exciting, unavailable, uncontrollable asshole.” Hey Avandre, here’s a hint: if your girlfriend left you because you weren’t enough of a jerk, the answer isn’t to be more of a jerk. The answer is to FIND A SMARTER GIRLFRIEND! But that might be too much to ask of this character — a woman who he sees as a human and who is as smart as or smarter than him would just be way, way too scary.

Speaking of scary, let’s talk about this game’s code. At one point a character playing a video game exclaims in frustration, “This fucking thing has more bugs than a tropical swamp!” I had to smile at this, since the sentence (with the exception of the expletive) is lifted almost verbatim from a SPAG review of the author’s last game, Saied. The description is also apt for Chicks Dig Jerks. Unless you go through the game exactly as described in the walkthrough, you will find bugs. At one point, I was talking to a character, and one of my conversation options actually put me back in a previous scene. That scene went differently, and then I had to sit through the whole “animal sex” thing again. At another point, two characters are described as being disintegrated, then proceed to take some actions in the following paragraphs, then get re-disintegrated. There’s an item you can pick up, and no matter where in the game you pick it up, the description always indicates that you find something else under it, even if the thing you supposedly find is already in your inventory. You get the idea — examples abound. Chicks Dig Jerks is the Cattus Atrox of the 99 competition — I had a strong reaction to it, and that reaction was: I never want to see this game again.

Rating: 1.9

[Postscript from 2020: Adam Cadre wrote a contrarian review of this game in which he asserted it has “the best writing of any game in the comp.” Since then, Sherwin has proved to be one of the stalwarts of modern IF, releasing several full-sized games and even packaging them commercially. I wrote a long, appreciative review of his game Cryptozookeeper, which no doubt I’ll post here at some point. In it, I described the friendship Robb and I have developed: “Belying the outrageousness of his writing, the man himself is a gentle, witty, soft-spoken presence, a real mensch who’s done me many a good turn over the years.” Funny old thing, life.]