Number ten, The Goldilocks Principle
(cw: uncensored mentions of disordered eating below)
Plot Deconstruction: A short impression about an author’s experience with ED.
Positives/Thoughts: Wow! There was some really strong writing and emotion in this piece. I started with a trigger level of 5 because I felt that I could handle it and from there I scaled down all the way to 1. I found that the Goldilocks Principle was a raw and personal narrative that centered on the author who suffered with disordered eating.
The intensity of the experience and use of Twine to get the feeling across was well done. The panic, stress, and pain that the author wanted to get across was effectively translated by the available UI tools they had at their disposal and their prose.
I also enjoyed the constant symbolism that popped up as you explored each mini-story. The author mentions trying to find a midpoint between the extremes of only drinking water compared to eating copious amounts of food. (mentioned in Level 5) Except it was hard for them to find what their “normal” was supposed to look like after skipping meals had become a pseudo-normal for them. (mentioned in Level 2)
The entire game is set-up as trying to find which level is “just right” and each level contains mini-sections inside that also searches for a midpoint. The exception is 3 which remarks, “Unfortunately, the perfect medium has yet to be invented; No dice, sweetheart. No one’s managed to get it just right.” The game’s frame is like a nesting doll that has the potential to go deeper and deeper with no end.
This experience was very thoughtfully done and requires one to fade from one’s own preconceptions to experience the vignette of someone who’s lived through this personal struggle.
I also appreciated how the author manages to peer into the reader’s psyche with the way the game is set-up. It could have been a static work that leads the reader from 1 to 5 and that would have worked well-enough, but we the reader are in the perspective of the author until the very end of Level 5 and effectively make choices through them.
Considering that scale is set from 1 (least triggering) to 5 (most triggering) and not story chapters, after reading the first level they choose, the readers has a meta choice of just ending the game since there is no proper “ending screen" and no promise of a different experience. But the ending of the initial level that the reader chose to go through leaves one feeling “unsatisfied” and tempted to search for something that feels more like a “satisfactory” ending. (From the perspective of a casual first-time player)
This leads the reader to finishing the full game as they search through the different aspects of the author’s struggle until there is no more content left to consume and the reader is just left with the thoughts of what this game meant to them. No conventional conclusion. Nothing that ends up being “just right.”
I could go on about how the use of Twine’s default look adds to the experience or the content of the mini-sections themselves and how the vagueness evokes emotion, but I’d be going around in circles.
All I can say is that this was beautifully and bittersweetly executed.
My Questions/Notes:
Here are some random thoughts that arose during my playthrough
- Great use of visual twine
Overall Impression: Sad and raw, yet hopeful if only by the starting note mentioning that the author is in recovery.
