Month: September 2013

IF Comp 2013 is now on

Screen Shot 2013-09-30 at 12.29.55 PM

As usual this time of year, the annual IF competition (the 19th!) is now in progress, featuring both parser-based and choice-based works in a range of systems, including games in Inform, TADS, Twine, Quest, Undum, StoryNexus, and some other hand-rolled systems.

Games can be downloaded or played online here, and most do have some sort of online option. As usual, anyone who didn’t submit a game can judge as long as they rate at least five games. (Some of the games are pretty short, so this is unlikely to be a very onerous task.)

I will review as I have time. My usual rule is try to review every game that a) either has beta-testers or has a reasonable cause not to list them and b) can be played on my machine with reasonable efforts. I make no guarantees this year that I can actually do that: there are 35 games, and I have a lot of work and travel in the next month or two. But we’ll see. If you’d like to check out what other people are writing about the same games, this thread on the intfiction forum is meant to list some of the other bloggers who are also reviewing.

You may also like to review the games yourself; people who don’t have blogs or sites of their own often do this by posting comments to the intfiction forum.

My Father’s Long, Long Legs (Michael Lutz)

My Father’s Long, Long Legs is a deeply creepy Twine game, a horror story centered on an unusual and startling premise. The structure seems linear at first: often in the early stages there is only one link forward, or there are multiple links but they control only the order in which you will read the same text. Later, things branch more, but in a way that still never gives the player a sense of strong agency. The experience is instead always of being drawn onward to explore even though there’s the strongest sense that you won’t like what you’re going to find. There’s no chance that you’re going to be able to control what that something is.

Sometimes text appears only after a delay — sometimes after so long a delay that you just start to feel that the story might be broken. Sometimes it becomes invisible except in a small, flashlight-illuminated circle around the mouse, forcing the player to move the cursor just to read what’s there. I tend to consider this kind of effect a gimmick, but in this particular case it works, keeping the reader constantly off balance. The text is brief enough, and comes in small enough snippets, that the need to scan past it doesn’t dramatically slow things up.

All this technical variety and aesthetic finesse is in service of a narrative that I found genuinely horrific. I am not, as a rule, a great fan of horror. But the horror of this particular story does not depend on exaggerated gore and never descends into a pornography of disgust.

It reads to me as a story of mental illness, of what mental illness is like to observe in one’s own family, of the effects it has on oneself and those one loves. The story is carefully observed and occasionally funny, and most of the really terrible things in it could actually happen, or be understood as a metaphor for things that actually happen.

Which is much, much creepier than zombies.