Deep Dive: Repeat the Ending

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I have taken a great interest in the success of Repeat the Ending, which per my recent analysis was the game best positioned (in theory) to beat Counterfeit Monkey in the Free IF Playoffs.

It is widely hailed in reviews as having great literary qualities. Literature is for discussion, so let’s dicuss.

If you haven’t played the game, then be advised that there are likely to be SPOILERS in this discussion. Proceed at your own risk.

Despite having studied this game at some length, there are some fundamental questions that I haven’t been able to answer to my own satisfaction:

  1. Is the game’s “magical” dimension (entropy-related powers and supernatural entities) intended to be taken as real, or are they delusions of the protagonist?

  2. If they are not intended to be taken as real, are we intended to read the report of events by this unreliable narrator as corresponding to reality at all?

  3. If we are intended to read it as an unreliable narration, at which specific points does narration diverge from the fictional reality, and what are we to presume is “really” happening in the fictional universe at such points?

Any comments from fans (or even critics) of the game would be welcome.

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Ok, I’ll bite.

I think that the inner layer of the meta-fictional narrative (i.e. in the game written by “Drew Cook” in 1996 and remastered in 2023) is intended as a straightforward depiction of a magical-realist world in which a handful of people have entropy-based magical powers. Change my mind!

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I think it’s intended to to make you ask yourself these questions. I love the fact that there isn’t any resolution to this question in the game. Most stories with unreliable narrators give you the answer at some point through some other means, and I’m pleased that this game resists those easy answers. It’s something that wouldn’t work as well in any other written medium. All the weight of the history of parser games with magic and special powers and trippy experiences gives D credibility. He’s only crazier than the PC in Curses because he says he’s nuts. But none of us spend time wondering whether other PCs who go through these strange things are unreliable.

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Agree. This is like the “is it a dream after all?” ending of Inception. You can analyze it to death and fall on either side of that question, and I doubt Drew is going to give a Real Confirmed Answer if there even is one in the first place. Thinking about the answer matters, the answer itself does not.

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@jwalrus: Are you asking me specifically to try to demonstrate that or just in general?

@AmandaB: If the work gives no guidance then we can assume one of the following to be the case:

  1. The magic is “real,” so the protagonist leaves his miserable existence behind to pursue some fantastic and unimaginable future.

  2. The magic is not real, so the protagonist is undergoing periodic delusions of various intensities, presumably culminating in a psychotic break in response to his mother’s death.

And given option 2, there are variants:

  • 2a. The protagonist will in all likelihood be hospitalized, hopefully (but not certainly) to recover in the future.

  • 2b. In his delusional state, the protagonist does something to end his life, such as jump from the roof of the hospital (a possibility that seems significantly foreshadowed).

Perhaps there are other possible interpretations.

Are you really claiming that the underyling “reality” of the story doesn’t matter? Doesn’t the meaning of the work as a whole shift radically depending on the answer?

@pieartsy: I’ve heard that defense of Inception. Surely, the ending of the film is intended to prompt the question of whether or not it’s a dream – that is the only possible interpretation of the final shot. Nolan claims that the answer doesn’t matter… if so, then what is the purpose of prompting the question?

For a typical “puzzle movie,” the intent would be to encourage a scrutinization of the content to find the answer, as suggested by AmandaB. (Providing enough clues to determine an answer is “playing fair” in any medium.) As far as I know, Inception offers various suggestions one way or the other but is not self-consistent enough to come to a proper conclusion. Is that also the case with Repeat the Ending?

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Not that it doesn’t matter, but that it’s unknowable by design. I think it matters that we wrestle with the question and apply it to life outside of the game.

Yes. You get to have both meanings and think about each one. My hypothesis is that Drew wants us to turn that prism around and around and see a different thing with each facet.

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I would really love to hear you expand on these answers.

What, specifically, is the question as you see it, and how would the interactor apply it to life in general? (I’m assuming that what you are referring to as “the question” is not any of the ones that I listed, which are focused on the work’s fictional world and seem to have no applicability to actual reality for the average interactor.)

What do you count as the multiple meanings of the work, and what segments these? (You said “both,” implying some binary decider, even if not a simple one. Is the deciding factor whether or not the magic is real?)

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In terms of the game, the question is “Is D crazy?” He certainly has been told he is, and believes it to some degree. It’s of note here that PCs in many games believe they have Special Powers, and do have them, and you can use them on the game world, and nobody wonders whether or not they’re real powers. This is why I think the parser game format works so well for giving the reader a scenario where they can’t know the truth.

How do we know we’re sane? I assume we all have experiences that make us question the nature of reality as we see it, and of our “powers.” We live in such a divided world, where we can’t agree on the basic nature of nearly anything. How do we know that what we think about ourselves is true? If something seems very real, how do we know it’s not? Just because other people say so? If I woke up feeling that I could explode things with my mind, and exploded something with my mind and watched the fire burn, I’d go see a shrink for sure because that’s outside what I know to be true of human abilities. But there are much more insidious ways to view this. How do I know I’m right-thinking about how I view Big Things like human rights, or war, or the nature of love? What about good and evil, or religious personifications of those? Can I know that I’m right? How can we live among people who think we’re crazy for the conclusions we’ve drawn about those things? Some people have the special power of money, and change the world with that. Others have charisma or fervent belief or rage or tireless passion, and act on the world with those. And change it. There are superpowers out there that we don’t all possess.

They are much like your options. Option 1: D is crazy, and we’re going along with him for the ride. This reading gives the game a layer of tragedy and pathos that the other reading doesn’t have. Option 2: D isn’t crazy, and he really does have these powers, and it’s a parser game like many others in which you play as Someone Special. He’s a superhero having a really bad day, for sure. Going back to your predictions, he might still be hospitalized even if he can do these things, because D has a lot going wrong in his life and is having an especially shitty time. Even if his magic is real, his problems are still pretty terrible. Or he might still commit suicide, for the same reasons. It’s been a over a year since I played the game, so these are general impressions from my memories of it.

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Anyone who disagrees that the magical aspects of the inner level of the game are meant to be literally true and wants to try to justify their claim to the contrary! You said you’re uncertain about the answers to the questions in your OP, so I don’t know whether that includes you or not.

(Should I be trying to justify my claim that the magical aspects are real? I would argue that, absent any indication to the contrary, elements which appear in the text of a story are intended to be taken literally. If I claim that See Spot Run is a book about a dog, no-one is (seriously) going to challenge me to prove that it’s not a metaphor for humanity’s bestial nature.)

I think there are a lot of unstated assumptions in that claim. Firstly, D has already had magic powers for most of his life, yet he lives in a trailer beset by crippling depression. I don’t think you can automatically conclude that as a result of the events of the story, all of the barriers preventing him from living the life he might otherwise have chosen to live are instantly removed.

Secondly, in the true and fastidious endings (I think), the story ends with D discovering that he is a fictional character through meeting his author. In fact, you could take the Sad Man’s parting offer of “I could leave you alone” to imply that he’s going to stop writing D’s story - in which case there’s literally nothing in his future, magic or not.

(I’d forgotten that aspect of the ending until this thread, which is significant because it means there are actually three layers of narrative in RTE - D’s original story, the author - the Sad Man - who wrote D into existence and who meets him at the end, and the surrounding fiction that this is an updated critical edition of a broken game from 1996. The barriers between the second and third seem clearly defined, but those between the first and second are rather more blurred, as evidenced by D meeting the author at the end.)

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Yeah, part of what makes the game work is how it makes you wonder about the meaning of criticism and what it means to write it. There are many elements inside the game, including a very good parody of interactive fiction history and reviewers, which show that we can’t really get what the in-universe Drew Cook is thinking when he made the game.

In a way, the game is contemplating on how we contemplate on interactive fiction. I’ve always found it fascinating that the “personal games” critic is the one who should be most sympathetic to Cook’s game, but they remain too steadfast in their ideals of making everything a Twine game. It made me aware how people can fall into this kind of thinking, even when they advocate for self-expression in the interactive fiction engines we use. In our pursuit of full knowledge of the artwork, we readers might also be forcing the creator to say something that compromises their vision. Is it really Cook’s Repeat the Ending if it’s shaped like a Twine game? I think the critic needs to be aware that what they want is usually not what the artist wants.

And I think this is important to understand how the ending functions. Whether this is actually magic or not, the function of the ending is to suggest even after all that digging and reading, we still don’t know what the game fully means. I think most of us have maybe a 75% understanding of the game. Only the in-universe Drew Cook knows what every symbol, word, and idea means. Much like Amanda, I was happy to see the game commit to this ethos. There is no need to explain an “unreliable narrator” in this game: it is part of the author’s mystery, and it should be kept that way.

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@AmandaB: So the essential question posed by the work, as you see it, is more or less: What is the nature of insanity (and therefore of sanity)? Or deeper: What is the nature of reality, and how can we know anything of it? Which (if either) of those formulations is correct, and what do you see as the work’s essential message about the question?

I’m not sure I see what you’re driving at by pointing out that in other works (specifically, other games) the interactor is not prompted to question any depicted abnormal capabilities. Such games typically bill themselves as games and as fantasy – it’s part of the base layer of assumption. I think the question would be naturally prompted by any work in which the protagonist is described as schizophrenic.

@jwalrus: I should have been clearer that I meant “fantastic” as in “of fantasy,” not “extra good,” when describing the “magic is real” interpretation.

Regarding whether or not the magic is real (within the fiction): The work seems to be crafted to strongly support a framing that the PC is simply severely mentally ill, and that all of the supernatural events are delusions of one degree or another. Until September this year, it was billed as being in the “slice of life” genre and described as a “game about mental illness, magic, and the second law of thermodynamics.” It is now billed as “superhero” genre as well, and the protagonist officially described as a “psychiatrically disabled chaos wizard.”

There is no indication in-world that there is any acknowledgement of magic as an operative force in the universe. Everything about the setting suggests it is mundane reality, present day (or at least a relatively contemporary time period). There are no other people in the fictional world with similar “powers.”

Certain supernatural events are easy to explain as an imaginative overlay to something normal, e.g. folding laundry is not an act that actually requires magic, nor is saving the cat, and reaching the hospital roof could be accomplished by climbing something such as a fire escape. Others require an assumption of unlikely coincidences if we are to take them as having mundane causes, such as the woman at the pharmacy’s broken purse strap, or the branch collapsing on the car. Still others are not easily explained via any real-world-like causation and strain disbelief less to consider them as mere hallucination.

Feedback from the work casually acknowledges extreme delusion as a fact of the PC’s past. Example: “You’ve only just run out of lithium and aren’t yet interested in conversing with inanimate objects.” (Not yet.) The highly elevated stress of the situation after the call from the hospital is the prelude to rather more dramatic demonstrations of the protagonist’s ostensible magical powers.

There are endings that simply transport the protagonist into a fictional world wholesale, e.g. investing something not the PC and not the truck with the demonic squeal in the pharmacy parking lot responds with the ending of Enchanter. That world is fictional even in the context of the work’s fictional world; there is no doubt that this is pure fantasy on the protagonist’s part.

Unlike the presence of the “demoness,” the interlude with the (psuedo?-)author-insert character is not something that lines up consistently with anything else about the protagonist’s ostensible powers or history – it’s a reality violation of a qualitatively different type. It does line up well with typical schizophrenic delusion.

I went through version 4; it seemed pretty clear to me that the important parts of this story only occur in the protagonist’s head. The “indication to the contrary” (which I think is a strong indication) is that the protagonist is a diagnosed schizophrenic who is out of medication and undergoing a major life stressor. I’m here to learn, though, so if you want (or anyone wants) to try to make a case that the magic is supposed to be taken as “real” in the fictional world, I’m listening.

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I missed wherever D is described as schizophrenic. I did finish the game fast. Can you point me to that?

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Yeah, I don’t think there’s a single point where he’s described as schizophrenic in any way. That would be a big claim to make.

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Not to be a wet blanket, but I’m struggling to see how this question engages with the game? Like, I can see how trying to distinguish between what’s “real” and what’s a subjective delusion could be important to understanding many pieces of writing about mental illness, but this doesn’t seem like an especially rich vein to mine for Repeat the Ending. Like, the game does not invite us to consider D as a real person living in a cinema verité world - to the contrary, it does everything it can to foreground that he’s a literary construct, an autobiographical avatar of an author who’s himself a character within the game. The main suspension of belief the game asks for isn’t to consider D as a person to whom the events of the game’s story happened, but that what we’re playing is a critical edition of an ahead-of-its-time 90s game that crashed and burned on its original release and has since been revised by its older author and discussed by a polyvocal chorus of critics.

This is definitely not to say we can or should only ask questions an author licenses us to! But given that so much of this game in particular is focused on getting the player to engage with it as a literary work, I don’t see how creating a stark “it’s real” / “it’s all in his head” dichotomy for the core narrative would engage with the 75% or so of the game that isn’t just D’s “main plot” (the paratext, the prologue, the “endings” and how they impact the “main” ending).

Is it interpretively rich to note that many of D’s supernatural experiences resonate with some experiences of some mental illnesses, and that therefore his author is working out different ways of understanding himself, his behavior, and his history? Yeah, I definitely think so! But is it interpretively rich to create a reading of the game focusing on where and whether the supernatural elements are merely delusive? I’m skeptical, though I’m open to being convinced if anyone wanted to attempt it (and, especially, link this approach to an interesting analysis of what the paratext, prologue, etc., are doing)!

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So, cards on the table, I’m glad that a conversation is happening about this game, it deserves it, but I’m irritated by the way it’s being gone about.

The way you’re talking about schizophrenia and delusions, hallucinations, and “the nature of insanity” feels really insensitive. The way you’re reducing the portrayal of the world, magic, and even the literary elements (such as the endings with the author-insert interceding) as “mere hallucination” and “typical schizophrenic delusion” on D’s part is upsetting to read because it comes across as severely dismissive of the idea that mentally disabled people could be perceiving reality as accurate in any way at all.

Linking “the nature of insanity” with “the nature of reality” and how our perceptions of it may be “correct” or not, and dismissing the idea that the protagonist is describing things in a way that is accurate or reflective of reality at all in lieu of him being “simply severely mentally ill” is tiring. It’s reflective of the societal treatment of disabled people as inferior, as things to be dismissed and doubted and invalidated. “Are they right or are they crazy?” is a question that really, really hurts to hear over and over again across society, and this post as well.

I will also say a few more things to clear up some misconceptions you’ve stated:

  • D describes himself as someone with bipolar, not with schizophrenia
  • schizophrenia is not the same as bipolar
  • schizophrenia is not typically treated with lithium (it can be, but it’s typically a bipolar medicine)
  • hallucinations are different from delusions and are not interchangeable

I also heavily agree with Mike that the conversation framing so far is not a very rich engagement with the game. In the end, not only do we know D is a fictional person, but the game knows that D is fictional, and there are a lot of narrative and literary elements that are completely lost and flattened when you just ask “is D right or is he crazy?”

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There’s definitely a perception some people have (not just here, I’ve seen it in discussions of books as well) that the only thing you can do narratively with mental illness is have a character have hallucinations, delusions, or other warped perceptions of reality that they’re 100% not aware aren’t real and thus prompt the reader to question which events in the story actually happened and which didn’t, and any narrative involving mental illness that isn’t satisfying to engage with on that level must be trying to do that and doing it badly. Which is a pretty limiting view of the stories that can be told about mental illness. (And yeah, I agree that “what actually happened?” is a particularly odd fit as a lens through which to look at a narrative that’s treated as fictional in-game.)

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Yes, it is bipolar disorder, not schizophrenia – my mistake. (As noted, lithium can be used for both.) However, it seems clear from the context that the protagonist is capable of both delusion (e.g. that he is a “chaos wizard” with supernatural powers) and hallucination (e.g. that he has in the past conducted conversations with inanimate objects).

The question of what’s actually happening seems fundamental to me. It is the literal foundation of the paratext. Additionally, the paratext takes the form of perceptions that deliberately differ regarding the base story, to the point where it looks to me as though it all cancels out in terms of definitive guidance about the base story.

It’s not dismissive of the protagonist’s experience to identify it as purely subjective. I get that it is the protagonist’s reality, even if at least in part only subjective. The point is that, since it is the base story, that’s the starting point for understanding the whole work – including the paratext, which is ostensibly about the base story. (Or are you suggesting the paratext is the “core” of the work? Could it stand on its own without an interactive story?)

Many parts of the work seem to strenuously object to the identification of D as autobiographical for the author. And I do think the fictional world of the base story is very much presented as a “cinema verité world” – excepting the suspect “magical” parts.

It was the author’s choice to make the protagonist mentally ill. This seems a clear invitation to view the base story through the lens of what is and isn’t “real” – so that’s where I’m starting.

DeusIrae’s argument that the base story isn’t the core fiction (i.e. the focus of suspension of disbelief) is one that I will ponder, and it works in conjunction with Kastel’s argument that the work contemplates the contemplation of interactive fiction. There is also the opening announcement that there are “three equally important parts” – but the starting point for the interactor (in terms of the first non-configuation input) is at a command prompt for the fiction of the base story, which suggests primacy. Also, to repeat, the current author-supplied billing of the game focuses the framing on the base story: the protagonist’s disability and his ostensible magical powers.

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This assumption is what I was objecting to.

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And your objection is what I was responding to. I would ask: Where do you see the signal that this is not an important lens for the base story?

I should also add that I think the dividing line between what’s “real” (i.e. the “objective” reality in-world) and only hallucinatory/delusional is important because it informs us about the protagonist in a semi-reliable way. Any unreal parts would be generated from the PC’s subconscious, would be the some of the most honest communication from the character (as supplied by the author) by virtue of evading conscious filters and by informing the projected false reality.

For example, in the climax scene at the dying mother’s bedside, the nature of her comments – delivered after she is restored to consciousness via the suspect supernatural means – seems like a wish fulfillment fantasy to me. Is it irrelevant whether or not she really says those things? In a way, no, not from the perspective of the protagonist… but it does inform our opinion of the mother, who seems to be the second most-important character in the base story (though perhaps it could be argued that she’s the first).

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I mean, if I say “it bothers me that a character being mentally ill is treated as a signal that we must be meant to question if anything in the story actually happened or not” and you say “well, the author chose to make the character mentally ill, so clearly that’s a signal that we’re meant to question whether anything in the story actually happened or not,” it doesn’t really feel like a response. If you want to argue that this specific story cues you to ask that question, that’s fair enough, I just don’t like seeing that treated as the interpretive lens for any story about a mentally ill character.

All that aside, since you’re not interested in the metatext and I’m not interested in analyzing D’s story without reference to the metatext, I don’t think we can have a discussion about this work that will be satisfying to either of us. I know that sounds like a copout, and you can take it as one if you like, I just don’t want to get into an extended discussion of analysis of a work if I don’t think I’m likely to enjoy that discussion.

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