Deep Dive: Repeat the Ending

Playing
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I disagree here that this is an invitation to question “reality” inside the narrative? Rather, it’s pretty clear to me as someone who is also mentally ill (with a different and less severe diagnosis) that this is an invitation to view the world through the eyes of D, a mentally ill man. Because this is a fictional narrative in universe, what D sees and feels is what is important here.

As far as I’m concerned, the real meat of RtE is in the difference between the “1996” version and “2023” version and what they say about the in-universe Drew Cook of both eras. Both Drew’s are just as important to the overall narrative as D, but they are shaped more by what they created than their on-screen presence.

Basically, I don’t think that as a work this is interested in any kind of literal telling of events. Whether or not D really has superpowers in-universe is entirely besides the point, because they’re a metaphor for how D’s mental illness shapes his life. There is no reality to suss out here, only meaning. And because this work is operating on a mostly metaphorical level the meaning can be difficult to find if you’re not used to dealing in symbolism, but the annotations frequently cut to the heart of it – not what they say (because they frequently disagree with each other!) but what they’re commenting on.

If my cake recipe tells me to start by adding flour, does that make it more important than the sugar or the butter? They’re all necessary to make a whole.

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I think there are a couple of ways to interpret meta-fictional narratives and people may have different expectations about which one applies to a work. Sometimes a “frame story” can be an add-on to a work that might increase enjoyment but wouldn’t harm the inner narrative for being removed. As an example, the inner story of The Princess Bride could stand alone even if you remove all of the exchanges between the grandfather and his grandson.

For other works I think the nature of the inner story as a fiction in the context of the outer narrative is the whole point. I don’t think any critic of The Canterbury Tales would argue that one should focus primarily on examining the individual tales in isolation.

Which category is Repeat the Ending in? The inner fiction might stand alone, although I think the ending and the system of accumulating points towards unlocking more of it through “fighting the narrative” would feel oddly out of place if dropped into a game without any other indication that such meta-fictional conceits were important to it. But I think the stronger evidence that the author intended it as the second type is that many elements of the framing story don’t seem to be there to enhance the player’s enjoyment of the inner story - indeed, many of them disturb its flow, distract from it and sometimes even verge on demeaning or attacking its author. If (the real) Drew Cook had just wanted us to focus on experiencing the life of a bipolar wizard, I think it would have been a very odd choice to put so much effort into adding on all those meta-fictional elements - so the intended experience of RTE surely revolves around engaging more deeply with that framing narrative.

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agree, and pointing to kastel’s piece on it again:

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If I may get a little personal here, I tested this game in a final round of testing, and that was during a time when I was dealing with someone who had completely lost touch with reality due to dementia. And we were all dismissing nearly everything she said and felt all the time, because so much of it was, well, crazy. And I had a really trippy time of trying very hard to see the world through her eyes, and feeling guilty because we never believed anything she experienced, even though not all of it could have been false. So I very much engaged with the game on these terms because it was so aligned with a seismic shift in my world. I certainly don’t mean that to be hurtful to anyone, but viewing the game from this binary and extrapolating to my experience with my mother, and to my own struggles with reality during that time, was helpful to me.

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Since my article on interactive fiction and trauma was shared by Aster, I’ll just say that I considered Repeat the Ending as one of the games I was going to write about before realizing it was too big to take on.

The approach I would have taken would be something similar to what I have written about LAKE ADVENTURE where I comment how the constant footnote spamming mentioned by jwalrus creates friction and forces people to think about what the game is doing – a far cry from modern parser games which are evaluated positively for having little friction.

I imagined I would have written something like how the footnotes create an “academic gaze” onto the game, similar to the medical gaze Michel Foucault has written about. If we seriously take Cormier’s claim that “this is an invitation to view the world through the eyes of D, a mentally ill man”, we are also “feeling” what it means to be experienced and gazed by the academics and critics of the interactive fiction world.

This double consciousness is perhaps the underlying substance of the game that resonated with me the most. Here I am playing a game made by the in-game Drew Cook that seems deeply personal, but I’m also reading different takes on the game and I feel weird about them. They don’t just match up with how I’m reading the game, but it feels awkward to see such a small game get so many different eyes on it. It turns his personal experiences into something sensational, something voyeuristic. And I am also aware of my position as reader and reviewer contributing to the problem in obscuring these personal experiences in the name of art.

As one can imagine, I had a lot of things to say about the game when I was writing the article. The scope creep was too much for what is already a big article, so I took it out (same reason with SPY INTRIGUE). Now that I’ve read books like Micha Frazer-Carroll’s Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health, I know I have even more to say about the way we talk about mental health and so-called outsider art. I doubt I would have completed the article knowing what I know now. Maybe this will make for an interesting conversation at some later date, but I wanted to get the article out.

Just like Amanda, I was profoundly moved by the title and began to understand people like D. There’s much I can write about with RtE, and I love to hear more conversations about this game. It’s such an interesting game.

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@EJoyce: I won’t take it as a copout, but I’d be sorry to see you go.

I’ll try to explain my thoughts better: It’s a conventional fiction trope that a mentally ill protagonist is to be treated as an unreliable narrator, and it’s also conventionally important to notice where the unreliability is found, so my default assumptions going in is that these conventions apply. Because that’s the convention – the convention being something established by neither interactor nor author – the burden is on the author (in the context of “this specific story”) to signal divergence from such expectations, i.e. to signal to the interactor that the conventions don’t apply here.

Unreliable narration is certainly not the only thing you can do with the subject matter of mental illness. It’s not an ironbound requirement that these conventional tropes be front and center, but I’ve provided some examples I consider to be evidence for the presence of them in the base story. It’s not even a requirement that a mentally ill narrator be unreliable, but there seems to be plentiful evidence to suggest that the protagonist of Repeat the Ending’s base story is, and I haven’t spotted (or been pointed to) anything that looks like signalling to the contrary. The items I’m citing are just the things I thought up in response to jwalrus’s “prove me wrong” challenge; I’m not trying to put a box around the work with that lens, I’m trying to understand the author’s choices in constructing the base story apparently featuring these conventional tropes.

That’s a good point about the cake recipe. I do understand that the base story is not the whole, but analysis requires segmentation into parts and looking at those parts individually. If the argument is that the base story doesn’t have primacy for suspension of disbelief and that the proper focus is on the meta-narrative, then what’s the summary version of that meta-narrative? Could that same meta-narrative have been told while replacing the base story in various particulars or even in its entirety? If the mental illness is just a metaphor in the base story (and is it?), then what, specifically, is the metaphor? [EDIT: I seriously misread what EJoyce said above!] (Those aren’t rhetorical questions.)

I had not read Kastel’s essay before. Is Repeat the Ending to be considered a “trauma machine” as defined in that essay? Are the protagonist’s moments of delusion/hallucination in the base story serving the functional purpose of elliptical writing by “[forcing] the player to speculate about what is unwritten”?

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The essay, in some ways, is me theorizing and generalizing what Taylor McCue means by a “trauma machine”. McCue is trying to explain to people what their trauma is. But I want to go beyond that conception and discuss how people generally try to talk about traumatic incidents and get players to “experience” it.

That way, I don’t have to necessarily assume the game developer has a mental illness nor argue against how people might view XYZ as having themes on trauma while I do not. It’s supposed to be a more descriptive account of how people explore trauma, not a prescriptivist “beat-by-beat account of the trauma” if that makes sense. I wanted some vocabulary to describe the techniques that keep appearing in these kinds of games.

I don’t know how Cook thinks about his game and whether he thinks it’s a trauma machine. I get the feeling it isn’t though; most people don’t share the extreme views McCue has. I just find their description so interesting because it helped me understand beyond the usual notions of so-called empathy games. It gets right to the point of why some people might try to make games about trauma. I just wanted to appropriate this idea into a more robust, theoretical, and general concept that IF people and other critics can use.

I won’t comment too much on the delusion/hallucination because I don’t have much of a strong opinion on the “reality”. It isn’t that interesting to dissect (and this thread hasn’t really suggested it is a productive avenue). But I am open to some convincing.

However, I want to push back against what I think is a misleading quotation: I am not asking the player to simply speculate on what is omitted. If that was the case, I would just say so. Rather, I am interested in how simulationist and elliptical techniques allow players to get into these characters’ head and why developers like to do this.

I wrote this in the introduction:

Rather than passively watching trauma unfold, players can become more intimate with trauma through gameplay. Their interaction brings the unseen aspects of trauma into something more legible. Legibility is therefore an ideal for trauma-informed interactive fiction: it clarifies, explains, and depicts trauma in such a way that players cannot pretend the trauma isn’t there. In order to play the game properly, they must confront the traumas explored in the game, whether they want to or not.

Later, in the relevant section about elliptical writing:

This is elliptical writing, a method of skipping over a portion of the narrative to heighten its significance. When used in interactive fiction, the transitions (or lack thereof) force the player to make sense of what the story is trying to evoke through that absence.8 Its interactive elements suggest that there must be something relevant in them.9 The player is forced to speculate about what is unwritten.

To put it simply, elliptical writing is one of the techniques that makes the player think about what they’re doing. Why is this missing? What are we actually doing? etc. And this contemplation on the interactivity allows players to sketch an idea of what this hazy thing we call trauma is in their own words and language. I don’t think it necessarily invites people to “interrogate” whether something is real or not. If anything, I feel such an attempt would be counterproductive to what I am trying to write. I am not asking for Mythbusters, I’m asking for players to recognize the strategies developers are using to reach out to them.

To reiterate, everything ties back to legibility of the trauma. I am going to assume that many of these titles want to communicate something, perhaps something difficult to explain just by words, to the player. Interactivity, visuals, sounds, and other elements can help explain a little bit of this “trauma” that the game is trying to deal with. They are trying to render this legible and concrete. That’s why I find analyzing strategies to be quite productive.

It’s why I focused not on the reality stuff but more on the way the metatextuality works. I personally don’t think the “is this real” stuff to be interesting. At best, it’s just magical realism. But magical realism by itself says little. It’s the friction caused by the metatextuality, the way the game unfolds its plot, and how we reach the true ending that evoke what I think is the main theme of the game: we really don’t know how deep the trauma is, but that’s fine — we should let the artist process their feelings and not force them to conform to our own aesthetic ideals.

And this is achieved both by simulating a scholarly edition of an IF game and utilizing elliptical techniques to create a strong sense of something more than just what the text has offered. You get the rich history of IF and its critical scholarship while you get the feeling there’s more to the in-game Repeat the Ending than what the critics and even text itself suggest. This bigger truth is not something most people can grasp, I think only the real Drew Cook knows. All we can do is marvel at it.

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Ah, OK.

TIL that the paratext includes “… Cook has frequently asserted his right to speak about mental illness as he has experienced it …”, and that this is something backstopped in reality, not just another facet of the fiction.

In my defense, I like to first experience works without reference to knowledge of their authors or other writings about them, and this passage is pretty deep in there. It’s not inherently obvious as non-fiction in its context, and a more accessible passage notes only “Cook’s interest in themes pertaining to mental illness”. Still, apologies to @kamineko (or others) if any offense was given by the incorrect understanding that the choice of this aspect of the subject matter was a purely stylistic authorial decision.

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Thanks for making the thread. In my critical paradigm, I know my intent, but I only know what a work means when people respond to it. I’ve really enjoyed seeing people respond. It’s flattering to write something people find worthy of discussion!

In my other IF gig as a critic, I say repeatedly that authorial biography and/or statements of intent don’t necessarily mean a lot. I’d never expect anyone to look into my real life story before interpreting my work. In fact, in “Drew Cook’s” introduction, he writes

In those days, I treated both D and players alike badly. I made it hard for anyone to make progress. It was nearly impossible for players to get to know D, even though, at some level, I think he wanted to be known, either to some or to many.

I say, “I think.” Shouldn’t I, of all people, know?

I have done all that I can for D. I have carried him in my heart these twenty-five years, but he is rid of me at last. I have set him free. He belongs more to Dr. Searcy and to her peers than to me, more to players than to me, more to even the most casual onlooker than to me. I cannot dictate your impressions of him and would not dare to try.

So, it’s quite the opposite, if we are to believe that rascal “Cook”. I don’t think unreliable narrator is off the table. Ultimately, a reader owns their experience with art.

My only request would be that, for the benefit of the players who identify with D, care be taken with general statements about either mentally ill persons or mental illness.

I’m grateful to everyone who participated in this thread. Every time I see people engaging with my work, it’s a gift (praising it, no less). It just blows me away.

(edited for clarity)

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I thought it might be fruitful here to share that otistdog has released a review for this game on IFDB that covers many of the topics in this thread:

(I should note that on otis’s scale a 3 is pretty good, only 17% of his reviews are 4 stars or higher and 45% are a 2 or less.)

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I will freely admit that my earlier posts on this thread were radically underinformed. Thanks to all who stressed that engaging with the paratext is essential to gaining any insight into the work, and for suggesting alternate lenses with which to view it.

In response to the various challenges to make a case out of my early thoughts above, I present the following, which it seems fitting to render in the style of some of the work’s own paratext.

[PLEASE NOTE: It’s the nature of this work that I can’t claim that the following represents anything true about Repeat the Ending, let alone anything true about the real world. It’s just my good faith response to the questions implicitly asked above.]

Excerpt from the Audience-Supplied “Invisiclues” for Repeat the Ending’s 33rd Anniversary edition

Q: What is the nature of D’s illness?
H: The diagnosis given is bipolar disorder.
H: Lithium was approved by the FDA as a treatment for bipolar disorder in the 1970s. This is the only use approved by the FDA.
H: The mid-December 2024 version of the Wikipedia article on schizophrenia notes that, as an off-label usage, lithium is sometimes prescribed for schizophrenia (among other conditions) when other treatments are not effective.
H: How effective does D’s medication seem to be?
H: The Wikipedia article on schizophrenia notes under the section on its positive symptoms: “Distortions of self-experience such as feeling that others can hear one’s thoughts or that thoughts are being inserted into one’s mind, sometimes termed passivity phenomena, are also common.”
H: Can the interactor “hear” D’s thoughts?
H: Is D having thoughts inserted into his mind?
H: The Wikipedia article on schizophrenia notes under the section on its negative symptoms: “The five recognized domains of negative symptoms are: blunted affect – showing flat expressions (monotone) or little emotion; alogia – a poverty of speech; anhedonia – an inability to feel pleasure; asociality – the lack of desire to form relationships, and avolition – a lack of motivation and apathy.”
H: How many of those apply to D?
H: This space intentionally left blank.

Q: What is the difference between bipolar disorder and schizophrenia?
H: 4 out of 5 dictionaries define bipolar disorder as: “A mood disorder characterized by alternating periods of mania and depression, interspersed by periods of normal mood.”
H: That sounds rather less severe than the symptoms reported by D.
H: 4 out of 5 dictionaries define schizophrenia as: “A severe mental disorder diagnosable by some or all of the following symptoms: blunted emotionality, decay of rational faculties, social isolation, disorganized speech and behavior, delusions and hallucinations.”
H: D seems to be socially isolated.
H: D seems to experience blunted emotionality.
H: D seems to be undergoing a delusion involving possession of supernatural powers.
H: D suggests that failure to take lithium is likely to lead to hallucinatory conversations with inanimate objects.
H: D indicates that in the past he has undergone periods of disorganized behavior.
H: Four and a half out of six isn’t bad, is it?
H: One might call that “the preponderance of the evidence.”
H: Dictionaries are not clinical tools or medical reference works; they provide expressions of the commonly-understood meanings of words, meanings which can be uninformed from a medical or scientific perspective.

Q: How much does scientific accuracy matter in this work?
H: Probably not very much.
H: Consider the work’s treatment of the concept of entropy; it reflects a weakly-informed but popular understanding.
H: It’s weakly-informed because most people lack the technical training in mathematics and hard sciences to understand its true meaning.
H: This work does not attempt to instruct the interactor in either mathematics or physics.
H: This work does not attempt to instruct the interactor in the clinical distinction of types of mental illness.
H: Neither do these hints.

Q: Why would Drew Cook mislead the interactor about the nature of D’s illness?
H: Which “Drew Cook”? The work is explicit that this term applies to multiple entities.
H: The paratext consistently signals that various aspects of the base story are not to be taken solely at face value.
H: 4 out of 5 people find a diagnosis of bipolar disorder to be less stigmatizing than a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
H: 4 out of 5 fans of the work say that the real value of Repeat the Ending comes from looking beneath the surface, so to speak.
H: Whether you are part of that four is for you to decide.
H: The paratext does note, in the fictional voice of “Pauline Searcy”: “… [A]rtists are as capable of lying as [are] anyone else. Why would an artist be, a priori, assumed honest about what is often profoundly personal?” (emphasis in original)
H: Just because he could be lying doesn’t mean he is.
H: The paratext also notes, again in the fictional voice of “Pauline Searcy”: “To this day, he vigorously resists any and all attempts to characterize either version of [bold type]Repeat the Ending[italic type] as confessional.”
H: The supplemental paratext “Some Final Thoughts on Repeat the Ending”, also features a comment by “Pauline Searcy” on “Drew Cook’s” objection to the term “confessional”, which raises a specific point about the implications of the term’s metaphor.
H: This space intentionally left blank.

Q: Can the subjective experience of mental illness ever be fully described by language alone?
H: Perhaps not.
H: Perhaps the best that can be done is to make the attempt.
H: Perhaps some language can only really carry meaning to those who have had the experience that it signifies.
H: Perhaps the best way to communicate, then, is to try to recreate the experience.
H: Or a translation of that experience that preserves its key features.
H: Does the game translate any features of the experience of mental illness?
H: Which kind of illness?
H: What features?
H: How?

Q: Does the game’s artwork have any special significance?
H: The work’s included artwork has a distinctive visual style.
H: Have you ever looked at drawings produced by schizophrenics?
H: If you have, did you notice anything?
H: If you haven’t, perhaps you should.

Q: Why does the base story involve a magic system?
H: In real life, the work’s author has expressed admiration for the Enchanter series by Infocom.
H: There are numerous enabled interactions using spells from that series.
H: Does an author need a particular reason to make an homage?
H: Admittedly, the “entropic” magic in the base story is of a distinctly different nature.
H: It derives its power from consequences of the real world’s functioning that promote decay and destruction over time in the absence of active intervention.
H: The protagonist initially uses this magic to achieve a very mundane goal: organizing laundry.
H: 4 out of 5 people would say that no magic at all is required to accomplish this task.
H: It seems that D considers it to be necessary to destroy his dishes to obtain the power needed to organize his laundry.
H: One might decide that this behavior doesn’t, on balance, improve his situation.
H: One might decide that this behavior is self-destructive.
H: One might notice that the uses of magic enabled by the work frequently result in self-harm and/or harm to other people or property.
H: One might notice that, canonically speaking as defined in the paratext, the interactor must use the magic in destructive ways in order to reach the “best” ending.
H: One might notice that the “best” ending is the one most divorced from everyday reality.
H: One might notice the paratext passage in which “Drew Cook” says: “…I think there’s something magical about mental illness. Not good magic, and not in a way I can describe, but it’s transformational, it transforms the whole world. It’s very potent magic, in that sense.”
H: Not good magic but potent magic?
H: Is power without control a good thing?
H: What does the word “chaos” mean?
H: What exactly does the phrase “chaos wizard” signify?
H: This space intentionally left blank.

Q: Why does the game have a scoring system?
H: Imaginary commentary from “C. A. Smythe” observes: “The so-called ‘scoring system’ is, if not unique, certainly unusual. It has no relationship to the narrative throughline…”
H: The same imaginary commentary goes on to note: “The ‘score,’ such as it is, is a tally of what would typically be considered losing, game over-type outcomes.”
H: The same imaginary commentary further adds: “In other words, the score is a measurement of the player’s intentional efforts to sabotage or otherwise end the game.”
H: Does it feel like trying to “sabotage or otherwise end the game” when trying to increase the score?
H: Doesn’t the story work hard to convince the interactor to increase the score?
H: Imaginary commentary from “A. H. Montague” refers to the scoring system as “incentivized torture”.
H: 4 out of 5 people believe that the perspective of “A. H. Montague” is categorically incorrect.
H: “A. H. Montague” is an invention of the author of the work.
H: In a work this complex and this intentionally self-contradictory, is it safe to assume that we are meant to reject or ignore everything “A. H. Montague” has to say?
H: What’s that parable about blind men and elephants?
H: See “Why does the base story involve a magic system?” in this section.
H: See “Can the subjective experience of mental illness ever be fully described by language alone?” in this section.

Q: Does the work’s overall design have special significance?
H: Have you ever heard of the “double bind” phenomenon?
H: The Wikipedia article on it summarizes the phenomenon as follows: “A double bind is a dilemma in communication in which an individual (or group) receives two or more mutually conflicting messages. In some scenarios (e.g. within families or romantic relationships) this can be emotionally distressing, creating a situation in which a successful response to one message results in a failed response to the other (and vice versa), such that the person responding will automatically be perceived as in the wrong, no matter how they respond.”
H: The article goes on to state: “Double bind theory was first stated by Gregory Bateson and his colleagues in the 1950s, in a theory on the origins of schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder.”
H: The article further adds: “A double bind generally includes different levels of abstraction in the order of messages and these messages can either be stated explicitly or implicitly within the context of the situation, or they can be conveyed by tone of voice or body language.”
H: Does the scoring system of the base story create a double bind for the player?
H: Does the work feature a conflict between different messages at different levels of abstraction?
H: See “Can the subjective experience of mental illness ever be fully described by language alone?”

Q: Are there any other aspects of the work that prompt a clinical lens in the interactor?
H: It’s interesting that the protagonist of the base story is called only by the initial “D” in the paratext.
H: This handling of identity is a convention of psychiatric case studies, designed to preserve the anonymity of the patient.
H: The base story handles some non-standard verbs.
H: One of them is >DIAGNOSE.
H: Why do you suppose this particular verb was chosen?
H: It’s of note that many old-school games used it as a way for the player to get a report of the health status of the PC.
H: The Infocom game Enchanter uses the verb in this way.
H: Repeat the Ending does not use the verb in this way.
H: The player will need to use this verb very frequently while interacting.
H: There is a well-known psychological phenomenon called “priming.”
H: The mid-December 2024 Wikipedia article on the subject summarizes it as follows: “Priming is a concept in psychology to describe how exposure to one stimulus may influence a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention.”
H: Could another verb have been used?
H: Was homage the author’s only purpose in choosing this verb?
H: This space intentionally left blank.

Q: What’s D’s relationship to his illness?
H: He hates it.
H: It’s implied that in the past he has fought against the tyranny of genetics and neurochemistry. And lost.
H: It seems that his current medication does not restore him to full function as a member of society.
H: It’s implied that the rest of society doesn’t really care whether D participates as a fully-functional member of itself.
H: It’s also implied that D doesn’t really care about being a fully-functional member of society.
H: What’s that saying about being well-adjusted to a sick society?
H: It’s implied that D has decided his family causes him more harm than good.
H: Who’s left?
H: See “Are you sure he hates it?” below.

Q: Are you sure he hates it?
H: It seems that, in the work’s fictional history, D preferred to avoid treatment.
H: One could argue that, in the work’s fictional present, D cooperates with his treatment primarily to avoid trouble with the rest of society.
H: One could argue that D’s situation is an equilibrium of many competing forces.
H: Some of those forces would be internal.
H: One could argue that, in the work’s fictional present, the entity designated as “you” by the narration is the most significant “other” in D’s life.
H: See “What’s D’s relationship to his illness?” above.

Q: Which ending is really the best?
H: How can anyone decide that for someone else?
H: It’s interesting to examine the way that the source code splits up the ending text.
H: There’s a numbered range of pieces of the ending, E2 through E5. The “bad ending” text is not labeled this way, but the game’s fictional internal chronology suggests that it would correspond to E1.
H: E2 is the final text of the “basic ending”; it features no hint of the supernatural and suggests D’s intent to rejoin society.
H: The triple-asterisk “end the story” text for this low-scoring ending is “That Was June, 1996”.
H: The serial number of the transcript output indicates a story compiled in 1995.
H: This ending can be reached with very little destructive use of magic.
H: In the paratext “Drew Cook” states: “My own mother is alive. I never visited her in any hospital. This is a made up story. I’m not D. He is just a way for me to talk about things that interest me as a writer.”
H: Does the paratext have anything to say about magic?
H: Again: How can anyone decide that for someone else?
H: This space intentionally left blank.

Q: Don’t these hints treat certain small details as overly significant?
H: Aren’t puzzles often solved by in part by noticing certain small and significant details?
H: Is Repeat the Ending a puzzle game?
H: Are the puzzles of the game portion (i.e. necessary discoveries to achieve points) fair and proper by modern standards?
H: Is it reasonable to believe that the real Drew Cook is not aware of modern puzzle design conventions?
H: Are those the only puzzles in this work?
H: This space intentionally left blank.

Q: Does the work attempt to convey something significant about mental illness?
H: I don’t know. Does it?

Q: What does the work attempt to convey about mental illness?
H: I don’t know. Do you?

Q: What is the point of these fake Invisiclues?
H: Some might assume that they’re a veiled attack on the work, its author, or its proponents.
H: Assuming that would be unkind.
H: After all, the person who produced these put significant effort into constructing this paratext.
H: Maybe the work doesn’t have a well-settled conventional interpretation?
H: Maybe these are an attempt to convey a reasoned understanding of an important part of the work in an artful manner?
H: 4 out of 5 people agree that this work both encourages and rewards constant questioning of assumptions.
H: 4 out of 5 people agree that examining questions about the reliability of the work’s narration is unproductive.
H: This space intentionally left blank.

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I don’t know how much research you did into bipolar disorder in constructing your theory, so I’m sorry if I’m telling you something you already know, but you may be interested to know that bipolar disorder can also involve psychosis, including both delusions and hallucinations. I actually had a friend in college with bipolar disorder who was initially misdiagnosed with schizophrenia for this reason—the extent to which psychosis could be present in BPD was less well understood at the time.

Which is not to say that I think there’s anything wrong with questioning whether D’s diagnosis as given in the game is correct. Mental illness diagnoses are somewhat of a nebulous thing; there’s no way to empirically test for one, so it’s all based on reported or observed symptoms. The set of discrete mental illnesses that we consider to exist today isn’t so much an objective reality as a clinically useful (one hopes) construct, and the details of the construct change over time as diagnoses are redefined, reclassified, or combined. It’s just that I would hope that an exploration of this topic as it relates to Repeat the Ending (or anything else, really) would be based on a very thorough understanding of the subject.

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yeah, bipolar 1 and 2 are differentiated cuz bipolar 1 mania comes with delusions and psychosis. bipolar 2 hypomania does not.

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I’ve really enjoyed reading the invisiclues!

I don’t like talking about what the work means (I did have something in mind, but I don’t want to get in the way), but since I have some players who have expressed appreciation for D and how relatable he is to them…

Don’t read if you don’t want autobiographical information about me, the real me, the author (I’ve said this publicly, but just in case):

My diagnosis is Bipolar I with Psychotic Features. I tried to be true to my experience, a process that involved some vulnerability.

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I guess that makes for at most a B grade on my English paper, then! I didn’t know the exact nature of your personal experience, and, since D is not “Drew Cook” is not you, it seemed a decent chance that your authorial choices might have diverged from the real no matter what it was, anyway – especially given the (fictional) quote about authors lying. (Would have made a good centerpiece for a Rosebush article, though.)

Just doing the best I can from the outside looking in.

Surely someone else, emboldened by kamineko’s gracious forbearance toward setting boundaries on the discussion, is willing to take the floor? I didn’t start this thread in order to push any particular viewpoint or pick fights with fans; I started it to try to get a better understanding of what’s behind this work’s popularity.

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I only commented so that people who care about characterizations of mental illness in Repeat the Ending don’t wonder if I’m putting them on (about that). Authors really do lie, but I wouldn’t want anyone to feel lied to about this one specific thing. Especially if the stakes are high to them.

I don’t want to discourage you or anyone else from engaging with the text, and I don’t look at this thread or the review in terms of grades. There are always exceptions, but I usually assess criticism (not just of my work own but in general) in terms of effort and engagement. Less so whether something is “correct” or not. Readers are almost always right. I really did enjoy the invisiclues!

I’ll bow out now unless summoned, I don’t want to influence anyone further. Thanks again to everyone.

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Nobody wants to take the floor?

I’m afraid that this failed attempt to create an in-depth discussion about the work (one of several I’ve tried) is leaving me with the distinct impression that the work’s biggest proponents just aren’t interested in anyone but themselves getting anything specific from it.

I’m not criticizing. That’s fine. Perhaps the meaning generated from engaging with it is too intensely personal for everyone to want to risk sharing their own detailed interpretation; the work definitely seems designed (well-designed!) to invite a personal epiphany of one kind or another, much like a zen koan. But the flip side is that, functionally speaking, it’s an emotional kaleidoscope that works like a Rorschach test. It may be prompt or provoke, but it’s not designed to communicate, especially when the reader is implicitly asked to play a game of knights and knaves with anything that looks like guidance from the work itself. (As Draconis recently laid out, at least a knights and knaves puzzle has a definite solution!)

I hope I’ve at least shown why my intuition was screaming “D is schizophrenic” (note: the character D) by the time I was done “playing,” to the point that I had completely forgotten the fictional information about diagnosis. (Either that or subconsciously assumed that I was supposed to count that information as unreliable because the heart of this work as I see it boldly and repeatedly proclaims “This is a lie.” It seemed like too many coincidences of “support” to be just luck.) Surely it’s safe to say that the presence of D’s delusions and hallucinations – if that is indeed what the magic represents – is as ambiguous as the nature of the medication, and also plain to see that the changing clinical definitions of bipolar disorder between the time period of the game’s fictional setting and today don’t help to resolve that ambiguity. EJoyce’s anecdote suggests that even mental health professionals of the era, faced with real patients, could make the wrong distinction.

Ambiguity and clarity are opposites; alternative interpretations of a highly ambiguous work are predictable, even inevitable. I don’t comprehend ambiguity’s purpose in this work (except as part of a phantom framework supporting an imagined subtle experiential simulation) when it’s obvious from kamineko’s other writing that he is more than capable of being very clear. It’s his authorial license and artistic purview to deploy ambiguity as he sees fit; I’m just pointing out some consequences of that choice. How can love follow knowledge when knowledge is so thoroughly obstructed and undermined?

I admire kamineko’s handling of this thread, most especially in the way he explicitly (and by all indications sincerely) extends permission – and more importantly grace – to those who might see his work differently than he does. I especially admire his resisting any temptation to say “Yes! How perceptive!” in response to my apparently incorrect attempt to situate the work in the broader critical context as informed by suggestions above. It’s a great example to set, and one that I’ll remember.

No hard feelings on this side.

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I don’t really think this is true. I think that it’s just a difficult work to discuss, both for the reasons you’ve laid out (many of the endings hit me pretty personally, for one) and because it’s just a very complicated work. The layers of meaning and reality here are not only beyond what you see in most IF, but in most fiction period unless one deliberately seeks it out. (For a more commercial example I’d compare it to Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron – not because of any similarity in subject matter, but because it was a very metaphorical work that got exposed to an audience not used to such things, and a lot of people had trouble parsing it when they saw it.)

I played RtE when it came out in Spring Thing 2023. I greatly enjoyed the experience and had a lot of feelings and thoughts about it, but it’s complicated enough that to discuss it properly I’d want to play it again first. This would be both to refresh my memory and to be able to look at it with a more analytical eye the second time around, instead of just being along for the ride as I was the first time. I think it’s a game that in general benefits from replays! But it’s the holidays and I’m juggling all that stuff, my day job, the short games showcase, etc, etc… So replaying RtE and sharing my in depth thoughts on it isn’t really in the cards right now. Perhaps other people are in the same boat.

I think these initial discussion questions you gave may have been overly limiting, so if you don’t mind I’m going to issue some new, broader ones that might be more conducive to discussion for those who feel up to it:

  1. What did you take away from Repeat the Ending?
  2. What’s your opinion of the unique narrative structure?
  3. What did you like or dislike about the game?
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I’ve just finished replaying RtE. To me, what always sticks out (this is my third and most thorough play-through) is the ambiguity about what is the “original” game, its value, and the meaning of the changes in the 2021 edition.

The 1996 game was said to be too buggy to play, but Fiona in the 2003 interview talks about its technical flaws as part of its appeal, as a “low-fi” game and “intimate” as a result. On the other hand, a critical edition made to look as if actual, real-world resources were spent on it is more than basically any IF game has ever received - a genre, I’d add, that as a whole is often associated with “low-fi” and “intimate” sensibilities - and, like Kastel points out, jars with the personal subject matter of the game itself. Another fictional 1996 reviewer (I forget who) seems the game’s failure to communicate its message, latent in its code, as an apt and poignant metaphor, and wishes the author will “one day be able to say what he meant to say”.

The in-game “Drew Cook” sees this new edition as an “upgrade” that finally fulfils his vision for his 25-year-old game. It’s a remaster, not a remake - and, in that sense, could be seen as closer to the “original” intent of the author? No, because as Pauline Searcy points out (she’s my favourite, by the way, I really like her), sometimes authors are wrong about their own intent.

The transcript is the closest we get to the initial game, but it, too, is an altered version of it. It doesn’t match up with the code, and bugs and fail states seem to have been edited out. Also, it seems to be implied that some think the transcript was written by Cook himself, maybe as a first (second) attempt to tell his story as he wanted to tell it. He couldn’t code, but he could write. So he wrote the game he wishes people could have played.

The game, paratexts, and transcript are three “equally important parts” because it is in combination that they tell the full story of an author, an artwork, and the medium of IF itself as it ages over 25 years. When I see it like this, it seems most meaningful that there is no “original” RtE: there is, in reality, only one RtE, and this is the story it tells. What time does RtE belong to? It is “old, forward-looking, and entirely current”. This is my own extrapolation, but this kind of out-of-joint temporality seems common in works that deal with trauma: things that recur, that spell out futures that we try to change in the present (now I’m thinking of the kid in the pharmacy), and that repeat the past. Maybe exploring and pushing against the limits of an otherwise railroaded - by one’s past, by who they’ve been - narrative is what can set us free?

I love this game a lot, I’m grateful for it and I’m glad whenever I see discussion about it.

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I would be deeply interested in what people have to say about how the game handles its history of interactive fiction and the essays it inspires. Like, I’ve read the original essays of Porpentine that it may have been inspired by, but I’m still a new member in the grand scheme of things. It would be interesting to see how longstanding members see the work.

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