23 Minutes (George Larklight)
A different version of me tried to become a professor. I spent two years in a doctoral program, paid for by teaching sections of intro to college writing courses (the ones they make engineering and athletics majors take). I’m an anxious person, especially socially; this has been true since I was old enough to have a personality. I loved the work, my cohort, the place I lived, but the combined stress of the academics (I was adequate) and teaching (I was a mess) meant I was barely keeping it together. Anxiety eats your memories, but something I vividly remember: there was a turn the bus took on the route to/from campus that gave me a perfect view of the mountains across the strait, always snow-capped and dramatic and unbelievably beautiful. I looked forward to that turn; hard to be anxious when you’re so lucky, living in the most beautiful place on earth.
Except it isn’t hard. Anxiety saturates you; it lingers, it accumulates, emotional heavy metal. Anxiety makes me forgetful (short- and long-term), brain-fogged, hesitant, avoidant, constantly tense. It makes me a weaker person, unkind to myself and, at a certain point, to others. I passed my written and oral comprehensive exams, thought about doing this forever, and a few weeks later notified the school I was leaving, thanks and sorry.[1] We had to move as soon as the term ended: no student status, no legal permission to be present in that country. A full demolition of my life. I think you’re supposed to end these sorts of stories with something like “this was the right call and ten years later I’m thriving,” but that time weakened the structural integrity of my self. A decade later I’ve still got panic attack triggers I didn’t have before, a heavy failure I still carry, chunks of my life that I can’t remember.
After a minute with this game, I could feel my heart beat faster, my body reacting to familiar situations and emotions. I’ve never had a kid, never will (see above), but I’ve lived a version of this commute. I recognized the gnawing, distracted, frenetic change of topics, the attempts (ultimately ineffective) to stave off a Very Bad Memory. The knowledge that you’re too brittle to be good. 23 Minutes effectively captures a specific experience of the world that I recognize. I don’t know if this game effectively communicates that experience to people who don’t already know what this feels like, just based on other reviews I’ve seen. It was so immediately familiar to me that I’m inclined to think that you get it or you don’t. I got it, though; my body felt this one. Didn’t expect that.
So much for the Fiction. The Interaction… Hm. On one level, I liked the procedural argument made by the only I in this F being a repetitive, monotonous action, not so different from the way anxious thoughts loop back to the same things, the intense emotion you can feel while you make your dull daily commute, the way anxiety can sap your agency and lessen the ways you can interact with the world around you. On another level, it was a lot of clicking.
I liked the use of images that almost but don’t quite line up. I read it as a way to visualize not just distraction, but the way an anxious life is just blurred fragments and not a whole, the way being consumed by your thoughts makes you miss most of what’s around you. I went back to read Drew’s review of the visuals. They say it much better than I could: this is really well designed for the ideas it presents.
I like that in this one festival we’ve got this, which is, per its own subtitle, a poem and not really a game, and Social Democracy, which is 100% game and has very little poetry (probably not none, that stuff gets everywhere). It’s made me think about how wildly different creations can share the same IF label. Entirely different species sharing the same ecosystem. What’s here that causes these to coexist?
Maybe it’s just our attention and care: organizers, creators, reviewers, players, all swapping kinds of time and attention and energy and vulnerability that brings these works into existence, gather the together, bring them to life with different kinds of engagement. The label isn’t about the content of a work, it’s about the attention that’s given to them. We’re the link!
What a nice, community-focused thought. This is going to be my last review, I think, and I need a nice button to add at the end here, so let’s say that’s it and not think much more about it for now. Regardless of the answer, I’m really grateful that this experience exists. So much generosity went into it all. What a gift this has all been.
[1] It’s funny, actually, because I told them I was leaving, and a trusted and very kind professor told me that they’d start by putting me on personal leave to make it easier to come back if I changed my mind. I didn’t care at that point, and I never changed my mind, and a procedural quirk means that I think I’m still down as absent without leave. On the lam from the academic elite. What a rebel!