10 | A QUIET SCURRY
10 | A QUIET SCURRY
by: Moss & Quill Studios
This is a Main Festival entry.
Progress:
- About 10 minutes total, encompassing a few playthroughs to explore the branches of the narrative.
Things I Appreciated:
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I thought this piece was successful in its small-scale depiction of a harvest mouse’s night life. From exploring the game in Twine, it seems like in the three main encounters (fox, owl, road), there is one choice that guarantees survival, one choice that guarantees death, and one choice that causes a 50% chance of survival or death. I thought that random element was an elegant way to, in the small scope of the game, illustrate the arbitrariness of survival in some situations.
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Related to this, I thought the game was effective in managing the player’s agency. The sudden appearance of a predator, or Instinctual responses like hunger and thirst force the player to take some kind of action rather than responding passively to everything. Personally, I tend to make more passive choices in games, especially if there is a threat of game overs or deaths, so I think it was good that the game forced my hand to make active decisions, even if I still had flexibility to decide which approach seemed the best given the information provided.
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I liked the inclusion of human-related benefits and threats to the harvest mouse. Rather than portraying an environment devoid of human influence, the story illustrates that human influence is an essential facet of the world of this mouse. I feel like as a result of this, the story gently invites the reader to consider their own relationship to mice. I think it’s fair to say that many humans view mice as a pest animal, but are simultaneously creating and reinforcing the conditions that instigate “pest” behavior. I’m not from the UK, but the presence of the fox in the story made me think of the history of fox hunting and how killing the predators of mice probably resulted in there being more mice. Actually, okay, you know what, I wasn’t going to go on this tangent, but whatever, anyone reading this far into an obscure forum post about interactive fiction is here for the tangents anyway. When I was a kid, there was a poetry contest at the local library, where the people who submitted poems would read them for the group. And this one older lady, I guess she was from a rural part of the state, recited what I now look back on as a dramatic polemic piece about how unfair it was that her dad was arrested for shooting and killing a gray wolf in defense of the farm because it was on the federal endangered species list. I remember her performance having this vivid intensity, like the absolute malice and hatred of the evil, slobbering wolf that steamed off every word, not to mention the baleful presence of the state with its city-dweller ideology swooping in to tell Real Americans™ which animals they can and cannot kill. I guess this ultimately is why you should fund libraries—because ten-year-olds absolutely need to be exposed to this level of camp at the hands of amateur local poets to have any real shot at surviving into adulthood. At any rate, the game invited me to recall this incident because to me it illustrates how dysfunctional relationships between humans and animals can have these downstream effects, like everyone complaining about how there are way too many deer eating their plants at the same time as they actively are trying to kill the wolves that would’ve hunted those deer. So I think there is value in stories that invite readers to reflect on and recontextualize their relationships to animals that they have categorized as pests, or threats, or food, or pets, or whatever else.
Miscellaneous Comments/Recommendations:
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In general, I dislike having text over a photograph background because of the legibility issues it can create. However, I didn’t have as much of an issue with it here, because the image was a dark enough tint that the text popped out fine. Still, I would recommend having some kind of designated reading area that has a more static background. It could be a semi-translucent box, for instance, that keeps the reading area darker while still allowing some of the backdrop behind the box to seep through.
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Because this is interactive fiction and quick/easy to replay due to the short length of the game, I didn’t really feel that emotionally invested in the outcome, knowing that if I chose wrong, it’s trivial to get back to the point I was at to choose differently. I definitely wanted the little mouse to survive, don’t get me wrong! But I did get a sense of distance between the player and the mouse, because the stakes are very different for the mouse (life and death) vs. the player (trying again and clicking back for a few seconds to return to where I was). Perhaps there was a mechanical way to subtly bring the stakes closer in alignment? I think if the game had been longer with a longer build up of decisions, and/or a writing style that was more focused on emotions, I would’ve felt the weight of my choices more intensely, and felt a stronger sense of risk knowing it might be difficult to get back to where I was at if I messed up. The tone of the game suggests that maybe the intent was to keep the game lighter and more educational, which is fine! I think I was craving for it to dig a little deeper and elicit a stronger emotional response, though. I went on a longer tangent related to point of view below, but an example here is in the owl encounter, where the author writes, “Your eyes look up, reflecting the silent barn owl, claws outstretched towards you.” Because the mouse cannot see their own eyes, this created a slight point-of-view disruption where I felt like I was seeing the mouse from the outside (looking at a reflection in their eyes) rather than seeing the owl directly through the mouse’s eyes. A moment like this where there is real danger to the mouse is when I want to be most immersed in the mouse’s perspective.
What I Learned About IF:
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One of the deceptively tricky aspects of a work like this is managing the competing factors for point of view. On one hand, the narration has a clear educational bent. The author (I assume) wants the reader/player to learn more information about the harvest mouse and come to better appreciate this tiny creature and its relationship to other animals, including humans. On the other hand, for the work to feel immersive in a second-person point of view embodying a non-human animal, the text has to use human linguistic tools while signaling non-humanness. I think this produces an interesting tension that the piece manages mostly well.
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For instance, a strategy that this piece uses to balance these factors is to defamiliarize something a human would recognize and understand, a road. The “coarse expanse,” through a tiny mouse’s senses, poses a nearly incomprehensible alien threat that human readers should be able to recognize through the description, even though “road” is not an available concept for the mouse to think of. But then, there are examples that strain this tension. I found myself wondering, when the narrator describes the mouse’s paws as “the size of sesame seeds” whether it was likely that this mouse living in a field had ever encountered a “sesame seed” before as a point of comparison. Similarly, when a plant called “False Brome” is mentioned, I thought that was an unnatural-sounding way for a mouse to think of a plant—it’s a very human style of classification to name a plant in a way that penalizes it for its similarity to another plant. Uh, at this point I should probably say, I realize this is getting very ticky-tack, I swear I am going somewhere with this. You have to believe me. Anyway, I view these examples as places where the educational goals of the game take precedence over immersion. It’s helpful for a human reader to understand the scale of the mouse with a familiar point of comparison, or for that human reader to learn about a real-life plant that could serve as a home for UK-based harvest mice.
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So the point of all that is to say, that I sometimes felt more immersed in the mouse’s point of view, and other times, I felt self-conscious that I was being educated in an immersion-straining way. I don’t think this is a good or bad thing, really. I mainly wanted to draw attention to this as an interesting case study in point of view, especially because it seems like there are a lot of cases where authors in IF write second-person animal point-of-view, for various reasons. If I were to do so, I would want to think about what degree of defamiliarization with human concepts is necessary to aid the simulation/immersion, and how to balance that with other competing concerns (clarity, tone, puzzle mechanics, etc).
Memorable Moment:
- I liked the amicable encounter with the hedgehog, it was nice to see another creature that didn’t specifically want to eat the mouse.