Music: RIBS - LORDE 1 HOUR (re-upload) - YouTube
Part 2: This dream isn't feeling sweet - Criticism, responses to criticism
Before the game was published, I wrote a long list of potential flaws that reviewers would discover. Here is that list:
- not enough freedom in the fanfiction, feels too on-rails, unlike the freedom that is typical of fanfic as a medium.
- “I have no idea what [fandom term] means. I don’t understand any of this.”
- people don’t know how to interact with the systems. they don’t reblog or like posts so they don’t end up getting into the deeper character routes and thus won’t really understand what’s going on.
- the plot is a meandering mess. There is no coherent plot thread, just a bunch of stuff that happens. It is very easy to miss important plot events. It is very easy to ignore everything interesting that’s going on. The least interesting parts of the game are the only parts that are mandatory.
- The characters feel indistinct and too similar. Can’t remember who is who. Can’t match names to URLs. All the names and URLs feel too similar.
- character building at the beginning is too long, too much of a slog. Don’t know what to pick.
- couldn’t care about the Universe/Nebulaverse at all.
- bad ending; the story just stops without any kind of afterword or epilogue.
- character development feels interrupted and abbreviated.
- fandom discourse and drama feels unrealistic. Dialogue does not feel real.
- fandom drama and discourse feels too real, as if it were ripped from the headlines. Too ripped off harry potter drama.
- main character feels invisible, doesn’t really have a distinct voice or personality.
- elements and roles didn’t mean anything in the end.
- couldn’t be brought to care about any of the characters.
- blog posts are boring and uninteresting.
- too easy to gain relationship points.
- too simple mechanics for gaining relationships, not enough interactions between users.
- too short, not enough time to really know or understand the characters.
- fanfic sections are too long.
- emotionally manipulative in trying to get us to care about Luna.
- overly focused on trans issues, soapboxing, anvilicious in tvtropes terms
- “meta” elements don’t really make sense
This list was pretty pessimistic, but I think it covered most of the existing criticisms.
One major problem a bunch of people pointed out was the lack of interactivity in the Online sections, and overall. You can like and reblog, but you can only rarely talk to people or reply to posts. Part of this was intentional, part of this wasn’t. I started this game building off the Choice of Games house style, with a protagonist intended to be a self-insert character. Thus, I was worried that any lines said by the protagonist would be seen as “out of character” for some set of players, as something the player would never say. In addition, I saw the protagonist as someone shy and awkward, for whom liking, reblogging, and writing fanfiction are ways of getting attention from people because they’re too scared of talking to people. But that didn’t come through; the protagonist was far too generic and poorly characterized to really show any of this.
At least one reviewer saw the bulk of the content as generic, full of unnecessary details but without a sense that it’s a lived-in world. This was especially true in the long, user-hostile, boring stretches in the early parts of the game. And I agree, in part. The fandom isn’t as vibrant as I would have liked. There isn’t enough diversity in the posts; too much of the content is either fanart or fanfic, and they don’t talk to each other as much as they should. Part of the reason for this is realism (most tumblr blogs are just full of reblogs). And I don’t know if this is an excuse, but I tried to make the characterization as subtle as possible. The metadata say at least as much as the posts themselves. What times are people reblogging at. Who are they reblogging from. How many notes they receive on their posts, and what kinds of posts they receive notes on. But is this all “lived-in”? I don’t know.
Another flaw in APBW is that it fails to guide the player to the most interesting parts of the story. Karla’s investigation arc and the imposter, Claire and Sofia’s falling out, even Luna’s rescue all require a certain level of stats, levels that most players might not reach. Only 30% of randomtests end with the Luna ending; 70% end with the Neutral ending, which is basically a bad ending, and almost none encounter the Claire or Sofia routes. Players play much more like randomtesters than I expected. A reviewer said that the starting objective is getting followers; it’s not. The game is about building relationships with people online, and I probably failed to show that. Almost no one who wasn’t following the walkthrough is going to reach Sofia or Claire’s endings; those endings shed new light on the story that you wouldn’t see on the main path. The silver lining to this is that Luna’s route is probably the most engaging and well-developed route. I’m glad it was the route that most people saw.
Emily Short once wrote an article called Plot-shaped level design. I never thought about how to incorporate the lessons from that article into APBW, but I think those lessons are what I needed in order to make the game better.
I think the nonlinearity of the game failed it. Presented with a list of blog urls, the game becomes a database dump; there’s nothing guiding you to look at the most interesting posts. It’s too vague, too unguided. The player is always going to experience the story linearly, and I don’t give the player a good way of getting through the story. Another thing that I don’t think I did well enough in APBW is giving the player a motivation. Why do you want to read these blog posts? What are you supposed to get out of it? Why should the player care? Then again, maybe the very long character building process is enough to give you some attachment to the world, to allow a player to immerse themself in the nebulaverse fandom?
Maybe in general, APBW was too hostile to the player. It was a failure of empathy on my part; I was too absorbed in my view of the story, the eagle’s eye view that saw everything at once, and never gave enough consideration to the fact that the player has to slog through everything linearly. I wrote too much filler to pad the content out according to my imagined rules of symmetry, not thinking about the player’s slog level. More content is often worse, especially if it is thoughtless, poorly made content.
On the other hand, the confusing, user-hostile parts of the game serve a purpose, or at least they served a purpose in my head. They were supposed to be a narrative puzzle: you were to untangle the plot by reading through vagueposts, and untangle the complex relationships between the various characters. The story is about the visceral experience of being Extremely Online; the internet, social media, and tumblr in particular is often an incomprehensibly hostile place. The design of social media itself, in Real Life, is often hostile to real human relationships, while at the same time it is often the only place some marginalized people have to connect with each other, and often “real life” is just as bad. Like Luna says when someone suggests that she take a break from social media, “Take a break and go where?” That contradiction is one of the central pieces of APBW.
Almost every reviewer seemed to like the Online sections better than the Universe sections (Canon and Noncanon). The Nebulaverse failed to capture people’s attention. People commented that the universe was very tropey (true, deliberate). But I think people read too much into the surface level similarities to HP when that wasn’t even the primary inspiration behind the nebulaverse (again, it’s much more homestuck-like). But that’s my fault; I failed to highlight the most interesting parts of the nebulaverse in the chosen excerpts. The first couple were almost deliberately generic, to lull the reader into a sense of complacency, but that just meant that readers will skip over the more interesting excerpts later on. It gave a misleading impression of what the Chronicles of the Shadow Nebula were like.
The nebulaverse characters didn’t really work. Many reviewers described them as archetypes, and they were. They were poorly characterized and generic, I admit. The relationships between the characters felt boring. This lead to people not really caring about the fanfiction portions of the game. The fanfiction was too generic, and poorly motivated, and didn’t give the player freedom to do interesting things. They didn’t even let the player pursue their ships most of the time! In my experience the best fanfics are about either exploring characters’ emotional landscapes by placing them in different situations, or about worldbuilding in the gaps left within canon. The fanfic in APBW does neither. It’s just… kind of there, for the sake of being there.
I think the humor of this game didn’t land for anyone who wasn’t already extremely online. It relied too much on references and memes and juxtapositions, which only works when the player has some outside context into obscure parts of tumblr history. How many people picked up on the Obama Administration post? APBW’s style of humor might as well be Ready Player One for millennials (see: Rejected Theme Song from READY PLAYER ONE - YouTube - imagine which APBW references could be substituted in here - “Remember queue tags? Remember frick-frack? Remember MsScribe? Remember the colours of the sky?” okay that sounds terrible but you get the gist).
A number of people commented that the ending of the game just stops, without wrapping up many of the plot threads. Honestly, I had no idea how to end the game. The central issue of GTM is ongoing. Y/n’s life is ongoing. This is a slice of life story. Life goes on. That’s why I did that meta thing at the end. On the other hand, most of the major characters’ plot issues do get resolved, I feel like?
Finally, one of the sticking points of the game was the length. APBW was on the long end for an IFComp game, at almost 2 hours, and most reviewers called it a large or hefty game. But by Choice of Games standards, it wasn’t long at all. On the CoG forums, where I discussed the game and asked for early testers, any game shorter than 100k words is considered very short (the comp release for APBW was at 76k). In fact some users consider hosted games shorter than 100k words to be a red flag. There are games where 100k words is barely a single chapter.
Part 3: How all the thoughts (moved 'round our heads) - allusions, intentions, "what you might have missed", random stuff
Names
There was a lot of on-the-nose theme naming going on. In the Nebulaverse, all of the characters have astronomy-themed names. The planets were all named after ancient eastern Mediterranean sites or places important to ancient Christianity. A lot of the minor character names were literally generated using my random character generator, linked in the game.
All the IRL/Online names are also meaningful. The astronomical theme naming still applies: Luna, Lux, Claire, Stella. From an in-universe standpoint, it’s interesting to note which names are chosen names (Luna, Lux, Karla) and how they might have been chosen. Luna was probably based on a nebulaverse OC she had (it’s also a pretty common trans girl name, I feel like). Lux just sounds cool, plus “light” for the nebulaverse astronomical connection (it may also be a nebulaverse OC). Karla semi-ironically named herself after Karl Marx on some internet forum (no, her deadname is not Karl), and it somehow stuck.
From an out-of-universe/narrative standpoint, I picked all the names for a reason. For example, Sofia (do you get it??? did you do the sofia route??? yes, it’s a gnostic connection). Luna and Claire were partly inspired by Clair de Lune, which is just a nice piece and was used as one of the chapter titles. Lux also comes from “light” (“Moonlight Sonata” could be the name of the Luna/Lux ship). Claire’s name was also partly inspired by [REDACTED] (REMINDER THAT THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION AND ANY SIMILARITY TO ACTUAL PERSONS LIVING OR DEAD IS PURELY COINCIDENTAL).
Chapter titles, music
It was kind of pretentious of me to title the chapters like classical musical movements. I don’t remember at all what made me do that (well, I was in orchestra once and I play violin). I guess I thought of the whole game as a coherent musical sonata or something like that, with different patterns and motifs and stuff. I have no idea if it worked.
Also, the chapter opening quotes were pretty pretentious, too.
Online
There are some parallels between the Nebulaverse characters and the Online characters, how some people take on some aspects of the characters (Karla’s appearance is described in the exact same terms as Capella’s appearance).
APBW might be one of the first games ever to have diegetic content warnings, as part of the tumblr-esque interface. But, I should have had more content warnings outside of the game.
A lot of the reviews talked about how the cast was mostly queer teens. Actually, there were only a few teens in the main cast; 3 of the 6 bloggers you interact with at the start are adults! Claire isn’t even a young adult! And a lot of this game is about how adults interact with teens in fandom spaces. All of the adults in this story are fallible and have their own personal problems to deal with; none of them can be totally responsible towards the teens who look up to them (some are more irresponsible than others). Many of the adults were parents; I wanted to explore the nexus between “fandom moms” and actual parenting, and I really want more media about LGBT parenthood. How do Claire and Sofia’s fandom experiences relate to their actual experiences with their families? I don’t know; I want to explore those ideas more in the future.
I haven’t seen anyone talk about Claire’s route or Sofia’s route or the investigation arc, or just talk about the other characters besides Luna. Karla is the closest thing this story has to a self-insert, by the way. Did anyone find the imposter? If you add content that no one sees, does it still make a sound? (sorry for the mixed metaphor)
The good thing is, Luna’s route is by far the strongest route; the other routes are not exclusive, and act best as complements to Luna’s route.
Speaking of the other routes… (massive spoilers) I don’t think the reveal of Stella as the imposter and Sofia as the puppetmaster really works. We don’t get to know the characters much beforehand; we don’t care enough to be surprised. Stella just gets a few lines in the chats; same for Sofia. And when the reveal comes, it seems to come out of nowhere. Sofia just kind of blurts it out for no reason.
Fanfic meanings
The process of y/n writing the story is a direct analogy to my process of writing APBW. My favorite scene in the fanfic, besides the brunova moment, was in the fourth chapter, when you’re tired of it all and don’t want to write any more, and that’s reflected in either Gali going to bed or you just stopping. That was reflective of my own thoughts about the fanfiction segment and APBW as a whole even; I wanted it to be done already. The self-criticism about the fanfic is all stuff that I thought about APBW as a whole.
The fanfiction that y/n writes is basically a metaphor for alienation and loneliness. I want to say that some of the failings in the fanfic were intentional to prove a point, but that’s not entirely true; I ran out of ideas and inspiration, and honestly I just wanted to get it over with (see again: ch4). But I did want it to come across as, what kind of person would start out writing this epic multi-world fanfic and then have it collapse to a sad story of one person sitting alone in a white void trading depressing stories with their creator? What is the kind of person who would write “this isn’t your story” in every chapter of their own story?
“This isn’t your story.”
Much of the user disempowerment was deliberate. “This isn’t your story” is constantly repeated in the fanfiction for a reason. The player isn’t the main player; they’re at best a side character in the greater online drama. But even the “main characters”, Luna and co, aren’t really “main characters” in the grander scheme of things. One of the thematic load-bearing blog posts is Karla’s post in mv4, which is one of the few Online posts that explicitly recalls the motif from the fanfiction: “Sometimes we have to remember that we aren’t the protagonists of life’s story. People like GTM are the protagonists. We’re just a rotating ensemble cast of side characters. Maybe not even that. Just the unnamed extras.”
One of APBW’s major themes is about the tension between two meanings of “This isn’t your story”. On one hand, it is against the concept of protagonism, of understanding your life through the narrative lens of being the heroic protagonist of your own story. For the player, this story in particular might not be yours to own, just as Gali travels to worlds that are not theirs. But it’s also about the idea that certain types of people are systematically deprived of the ability to control their own stories, and have the narrative about their own lives stolen from them. Luna’s arc is about the balance between the two ideas (partially expressed through the tension between fame and anonymity; you can be the hero, but you can’t control your own story), and maybe she reaches a synthesis in the end. Claire titles their vent fanfic, written when they’re under attack by all sides, “are you the hero of this story?” I thought I was way too on-the-nose with this theme, hammering it in without any subtlety (see also, the opening and closing epigraphs). This theme was also a part of NYE2019, the other game I would’ve submitted to the comp. It would’ve been interesting to see how the two stories interacted, as very different games with similar themes. Alas.
The opening epigraph might be the most important part of the story, because the entirety of APBW can be viewed as an explication of the linked essay: https://medium.com/@MammonMachine/the-story-is-a-spell-the-story-is-a-curse-8c5a12dfa8bb. If you’ve read that essay as well as listened to Pure Heroine, you might as well not read APBW because you’ve gotten all the themes already. APBW won’t have anything new to teach you.