8 | THE LOST ARTIST: PROLOGUE
8 | THE LOST ARTIST: PROLOGUE
by: Alejandro Ruiz del Sol
co-written by: Martina Oyhenard
Progress:
- The first playthrough of this game took me around 10 minutes. However, I found that it was important to re-read multiple times to make more attempts to make sense of what I was reading, so I estimate that I did spend around 40 minutes off and on, cycling through different options and revisiting the same scenes.
What I Appreciated:
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Even though I had a difficult time cohering what I was reading into something that I felt enough of a grasp of to meaningfully comment on, what I appreciated was that there were a lot of cleverly written and engaging individual sentences with a satisfying turn of phrase. Because of the interesting and unexpected writing, it made me feel like it was worth my time to keep re-engaging with it as opposed to just letting the work slide off of me.
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The work has a somewhat surrealist quality to it. Admittedly I haven’t read much work like this, but I think there’s merit to work that is challenging in this way—readable, yet reticent to be neatly consumed. I suspect that if someone reads it with a significant lit/poetry background, they would have an enjoyable time piecing together the narrative.
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The strongest theme that I pulled from this is a kind of commentary on the (self-)exploitation of artists trying to cope with the emotional baggage of limiting their work in economic conditions where a truer version of their work would be unprofitable. The central image of the text is the raven and how it transits shattered/opened windows. For instance, in Leben’s scenes, she has been writing soulless business documents. She seems to have made an attempt to partition and isolate her artistic self away from the version of herself that is capable of pretending that it is satisfying to write business documents. By using company time to design a non-standard logo, Leben opens the window and unknowingly lets the raven (representing a kind of unfettered or at least, less-fettered muse) in. This is an “unmanageable” raven that tramples over Leben’s business work, spilling the mate for a second time the moment she tries to “manage” it with the RMG software after experiencing the impulse to add drama to her bureaucratic writing. After reading these scenes, returning to the beginning (the prologue of the prologue) suggests that maybe the bank heist occurred after Leben’s scenes chronologically, and that opening the window to her artistic desire, even unintentionally, led to the containment shattering. That’s what I think this piece is getting at, at least how I read it: artists and their art cannot be neatly contained and managed forever, as this is an unnatural state of things imposed onto them. Even self-denying attempts to maintain the terms of that containment yourself will ultimately fail and lead to a chain reaction of artist-chaos defying the oppressively ordinary.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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The biggest question I have about this piece is a question of audience, I guess? Like I wonder if I would have had a more successful time analyzing this piece with deeper familiarity with works being referenced (such as: “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe, which is specifically called upon here). If there were other literary references being directly made, they evaded my notice. The feelings this piece leaves me with are mainly curiosity about what I read, but also an unsettling sense that I was inadequate to the task of reading it. The tension of a piece that invites an audience but also holds them at a distance is interesting to me, I’m not sure how to resolve it. Perhaps I shouldn’t resolve it?
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I wonder what the significance of the interactivity of the piece is? Having gone through it a few times, the main choices that the player can make are: (1) requesting more information during the heist, or not; (2) deciding which of the three logos Leben draws; (3) choosing which of the three unsolved cases Balding looks at; (4) choosing to clarify that the “you” in the letter is Detective Balding, or not. How would this piece be different with either less, or more interactivity? Is it truly an essential element of the piece’s construction? Each choice that the player makes reveals a bit of unique text, so it’s worthwhile in the sense that you have more tiles to consider in the mosaic that you are piecing together if you choose to search for the meaning. Moreover, the interactivity I think helps encourage the reader to take a more active role in the piece.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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Something that intrigued me about the construction of the game is how the links to the next scene are written to have their own voice. By that I mean, for instance, at the beginning of the piece, the main text is one of the people involved in the heist telling you what happened, and the hyperlink to the next scene is you responding by asking a question. I thought the call-and-response format of the hyperlink is worth taking note of because of how it shifts the tone of the work to make the reader more involved in what they are seeing.
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I also want to highlight an aspect of the narrative structure that has come up in previous pieces that feels more apparent here; you are sometimes choosing between different competing alternative scenes, and you are sometimes choosing whether or not to learn new information. The placement and meaning embedded in these different types of choices is something that a writer should consider. How does it impact your reader/player to forego the opportunity to learn certain information?
Quote:
- “The raven was shocked at this response, but bowed out gracefully, somersaulting out the window, flipping the bird with their exit.”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- When Leben, in the midst of trying to return to routine, gets spooked by the raven and spills a second mate on her documents.