8 | LPM | AN ADMIRER
8 | LPM | AN ADMIRER
by: Amanda Walker
Progress:
- I decided to play for about 14 minutes, before—as the game instructs—making my own ending by quitting.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
- I’d describe this as gender horror, or perhaps, intimate relationship horror. Everything is stripped back except the dynamic between the player and the admirer, and as a result the two are drawn uncomfortably close together. The horror is in seeing a taste of real-life abuser manipulation tactics; and more so if you recognize any from personal experience. There is also a meta horror aspect, where the admirer tries to break the fourth wall to make the player feel more vulnerable. And body horror too, with the descriptions of how the admirer essentially wants to consume you from the inside out.
Things I Appreciated:
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This was a fascinating parser game experience. I was so thrown off by being greeted with “hello” and the indication to take a conversational approach. This scrambled the default way I might engage with a parser game and forced me to develop a way of interacting with the game that was unique to this game. It’s probably the slowest that I’ve entered commands, taking a lot of time to really think about what I should do and why. At first, I tried asking questions to the admirer, but then I switched over to trying to use a parser style approach (e.g., things like, “bring admirer closer” or “talk about space”), and then switched back to the conversational approach when prompted to do that. I think it’s really interesting to see a parser game developed in 4 hours, I’m impressed that it works as well as it does.
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So the game feels straightforwardly about leaving an abusive relationship. I don’t really think I have to explain why? It’s not really a metaphor (except in the sense of like, a ghost or spirit possessing you like a possessive partner or stalker might), it’s just the actual text of what’s happening here. The role of player agency is especially important, I think. The game instructs you that you can quit at any time. But the admirer to some extent (with the game mechanics as a proxy for their power), is able to keep you from leaving for a while with their responses. (At least for me. I stayed in the game for 14 minutes). So it plays with that—the game emulating the kind of abuse tactic where you are made to feel guilty for staying when you could leave at any time, which turns around to be a reason you “deserve” further abuse.
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I really liked the verbal tic of repetition that is used here to characterize the admirer’s voice. (For instance: “Who, who, who. I don’t know.” or “I try try try to be close”) This specificity makes the voice feel slightly alien, but also dynamic, and rhythmic. I thought it was impressive to tease that kind of characterization out given the 4 hour time limit.
Miscellaneous Comments/Recommendations:
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An element that I want to discuss is the meta aspect: for instance, the admirer mentioning that their words are on my screen, or the end text saying “See you tonight. And tomorrow. Everywhere. Always.” I feel like this is a gesture to spook the player by reaching through the fourth wall, so to speak. That element didn’t really feel threatening to me, necessarily. The reason I think it didn’t fully work for me is a bit difficult to describe, but I will do my best. So, as I started, the experience this felt most similar to was, a few years ago (2020 or 2021, maybe?) when I first spoke to a relatively responsive chatbot. Mainly, I was curious about it and wanted to see what the experience was like. It felt particularly uncanny to me because of the power dynamic between the human user and the bot. I could not help but impose a kind of emotional agency onto the bot, even when it stumbled and made errors in conversation that a human respondent is not likely to make. But it does not have the true ability to decide what it can process and say as a consciousness. So the beginning of the piece put me in that mindset—I felt very conscious that I held the power in the relationship with the game. The reason I quit when I did is that I felt like I was toying with the admirer—like, I worried about how it would feel to be essentially trying to torment all possible text responses out of this entity, who has no agency to say anything except what the author of the game has dictated that they are able to say, as prompted by me. Weird, right? So all in all, this isn’t like a big criticism or something, I just wanted to describe this. It gave me a particularly melancholy feeling, I guess, to notice in myself a desire to connect with or at least understand even an entity that in-universe, is objectively abusive and terrible, but whose lack of consciousness/awareness (being a scripted program) made me feel like I was the one propagating a toxic power dynamic by hoping to extract meaning from it. It’s not exactly atypical to have mixed feelings about an abuser, but this feels like an unusual iteration of that. (Sorry, it just seems like I keep having Big Weird Feelings™ throughout all of EctoComp
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It can’t be helped due to the time limit for implementation, but basically, when the responses hit, they really hit. But when you get a repeated message that doesn’t quite make sense for what you asked (or something that feels explicitly like gameplay instructions in an out-of-character voice), it does mildly disrupt the immersion of the piece. But I am still super impressed by how much is there that the game was able to signal to me to talk about!
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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I have never seen this kind of chatbot-esque conversational format in a parser game before. I had no idea something like this was even possible. It was so disruptive to the approach I took to playing it because of how unique it was! Though I have not tried writing anything close to a parser game, I really love the experimental aspect of it and pushing the limits of what the software and dialogue response can be used to do mechanically and narratively.
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As I discussed above, in this case where things are tightly focused on a single character relationship, specificity of voice is very important, and I feel like that was honed in on in a powerful way. There is a familiarity and realism to the abuse tactics on display, at the same time that the alienness of the entity cuts across it with a different layer of monstrosity to build something unique/distinctive.
Memorable Moment:
- The moments where the admirer “slips up” and reveals, then tries to distract or obscure, their intentions. For instance: “I want to speak like you. Speak for you. I want to be you.”
DemonApologist_AnAdmirer.txt (5.6 KB)