IFComp 2017 reviews, first batch

Measureless to man is a fair but somewhat bitter critique on the hollowness of social media.

Already in the opening sequence, the protagonist shows signs of anxiety and narcissism. We are made complicit in his vanity by being urged to sneak away from the prying eyes of “all these people”, in order to adjust his makeup and cover up a slight blemish on the forehead. But, significantly, doing so has no effect on the behaviour of the people around him; They couldn't care less, really.

We learn that the downfall of the protagonist began when he first laid his hands on “the book” (a thinly disguised allegory for Facebook). Like so many, he was led astray by an innocent desire to stay in touch with geographically distant relatives. But maintaining an online presence has started to affect him negatively. He believes that his appearance deteriorates, although we understand that this is in fact his anxiety getting stronger.

As the story unfolds, he is increasingly using Facebook as a means for escaping from reality. His ordinary life crashes, and the people around him are hurt, while he is spending time logged in to “the book”. From his own point of view, however, the book is what helps him become illuminated and unlock new abilities in himself. Although he is aware of the bad effects it has on him—he even refers to it as a curse—he can't imagine how he would have survived without it.

The integrity of the protagonist gradually crumbles throughout the game, as he becomes increasingly absorbed by Facebook. Little remains of the healthy young man who visited his grandparents on that fateful day. The one thing that does remain, however, is his vanity: Even though he is convinced that he is flailing about in dark waters, hideously deformed, he still hesitates to eat an apple for fear of getting his suit sticky.

In the final scene, we watch helplessly as Facebook beckons him to log in once more, physically dragging him down into a cold, dark place, on a one-way journey until he finally comes eye-to-eye with his online persona, who scornfully laughs at him while wearing that old youthful profile picture for a face. There is no turning back now; the enslavement is complete.

Superficially, Salt appears to be an exploration of themes such as life, death, perseverance, conflict, depression, the unbreakable threads that bind us to our past, and the unstoppable forces deep within our hearts, filling us with hope and a tireless, restless yearning for freedom. The silent struggle of the fragile individual, torn between the merciless demands of society and the unforgiving elements of nature.

But first impressions can be deceptive, and if we look a little bit closer, we find that there is more to this story than meets the eye. There is a quite different symbolism hidden beneath the surface. It is the tale of a person—nameless, faceless, genderless—who goes for a swim in the sea. They swim for a very long time. They encounter a large fish. Then, they swim back.

We follow two poverty-stricken young girls as they struggle with substance abuse while living in a garbage dump.

The allure of drugs is personified in the form of an older man, Tristan, who promises to “activate (the girls') power”. In the words of Raleigh, the older of the two kids, “He made me go really high up in the air, and the world flickered—then I passed out and woke up here.” The girls are taken to a place called Trobania (an anagram of “into a bar”), which turns out to be a filthy watering hole frequented by junkies and drunkards who are “content with the swamp water without knowing exactly where it comes from, thank you”.

Both girls experience delirium, but the intoxication affects them differently. Polly, the yonger kid, finds herself in a surreal dreamscape of make-believe, where the sky is yellow, briar bushes talk, and blind people are considered incapable of spying. In contrast, Raleigh has a bad trip, and is chased by terrifying axe-wielding creatures. The narrative takes a somewhat heavy-handed turn as we learn that the delirious realm of Trobania was created, not by Tristan alone, but also (through neglect, presumably) by the girls' parents.

While the story is focused mainly on the two protagonists and their imaginary friends, we learn that there are other unfortunate souls sharing their fate. Some of them struggle to break free from the vicious circle of drug abuse and “get back to their world right away; others want to delay opening the portal to stay longer”. But the girls do resolve to leave Trobania, and in a final climactic battle, they face the anthropomorphic opiate Tristan himself, by now characterised as a cold and manipulative despot with murderous tendencies.

I played to what must be considered an unhappy ending, in which the two kids choose not to denounce Tristan. They hesitate, rationalising that the creator of such a marvellous world could not be all bad, especially since he has such kindly eyes. Through their actions, Trobania is saved from destruction, and the children accept Tristan into their lives, already yearning for the next trip to their imaginary paradise.

When online communication became accessible to a wide range of people some twenty or thirty years ago, it was mostly text based. Human beings from every corner of the planet would exchange ideas using e-mail, newsgroups and chat services such as IRC.

Gradually, with increasing Internet bandwidth and the rise of ubiquitous video streaming, this has changed. As television once banished recreational reading into a fringe activity, the recent popularity of services such as Instagram and Snapchat indicates that many computer users have come to reject verbal modes of discourse in favour of putting on makeup, posing with their lunch, and making duck faces. In short, humanity has passed Peak Text.

10 PM is a eulogy for that verbal Paradise Lost. It paints a bleak picture of human communication reduced to an illiterate jumble of selfies, stock pleasantries, memespeak and emoticons.

Playing as Bird, the protagonist, you are physically capable of speaking, but “You don't, because—you don't anymore”. The game does a good job of simulating a kind of lingual straitjacket, reminding you again and again that the only way to cope is to lower your communicative ambitions.

It is gradually revealed that, at least to some extent, Bird is also thinking in pictograms rather than words. This is problematic, because “'Sorry' is hard. All the thought-words are.” By choosing a medium where the concrete is simple enough, but where abstract concepts are difficult to express, Bird is effectively crippling his mind, and we can only watch, horrified.

What makes this allegory especially poignant is the fact that the relationship between Bird and Ty, while not unproblematic, is nevertheless one of love and warmth. It seems that non-verbal communication is quite sufficient for purposes of social bonding. And perhaps many people think of that as the primary function of language.

But what remains of thought when all the thought-words are gone? As Bird, “You don't really mind”. But as a human being in the 21st century, perhaps you ought to be worried.

After a late tea party, the March Hare and the Mad Hatter lingered on a deconstruction of Wittgensteinian Twine-games, conjecturing a comp entry with so many far-fetched interpretations that multiple judges, while traversing an identical sequence of nodes, would reach completely different endings.

Their imaginary pièce de résistance was a work of interactive fiction that would invite the reader to change individual syllables of certain words in the text, with absolutely no observable effects on the development of the story as a whole.

The Dormouse, who was hosting the party, inquired politely whether such a piece of fiction could rightfully be referred to as interactive, given that its central conceit was that the actions of the player had no influence on the plot.

“Without a doubt!” exclaimed the Hatter. “Since words can demonstrably be shifted around at leisure without affecting the meaning of the story, it follows that the semantics of the text are entirely independent of its syntactical details. The essence of the story is thereby unconstrained by the very words from which it has been constructed.”

“Consequently,” volunteered the March Hare, “with the evanescence of the written word laid bare, the reader is at liberty to reinterpret even the static words quite radically. By applying this technique systematically, the reader may completely reshape the meaning of the story without touching any of the words at all.”

“Inevitably,” railed the Hatter triumphantly, his voice rising into a frenzied whine, “such a comp game would, in the most literal sense, contain every possible story ever conceived, as well as every possible story not yet conceived. And just as in Jorge Luis Borges' 'The Library of Babel', the impossibility of navigating such a vast trove of information would render it completely useless, and eventually drive the reader into a state of suicidal despair!”

“A strange game!” thundered the March Hare into the deaf ears of the Dormouse, who had fallen asleep quite some time earlier from all the exasperating humanobabble. There was a slight sense of hesitation in the air now, but the follow-up was inevitable. “The only winning move”, concluded the Hatter with an acumen that could rival that of Wittgenstein himself, “is not to play.”

Posted Wednesday 11-Oct-2017 19:08

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