29 | VERSES
29 | VERSES
by: Kit Riemer
Progress:
- After just over an hour, the game returned me to the title screen, which I interpret as the end of the game.
Things I Appreciated:
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This game features poetry heavily, but is also written in a poetic manner. Many individual lines and turns of phrase invite pause as you might consider how they challenge you to think. I’ll give you one morsel of an example: clicking through to “cell like-clouds.” You expect it to be “cell-like clouds,” which draws to mind a thunderstorm cell, a metaphor whose familiarity has perhaps dulled it: you are not often invited to think in a visceral way about why a storm might be compared to cells, in particular. But the unexpected displacement of the hyphen creates a new image from that. What is a “cell like-cloud”? It makes the cell the forefront of the image, as though something alive is posing as a storm, as opposed to a storm posing as something alive. And is a storm un-alive? It’s certainly dynamic, and often storms are described using a kind of stages-of-development-life-cycle. I go into this detail to illustrate the poetics of this IF piece: you might be drawn to engage with many lines in such a way.
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Related to the point about poetics: as a non-poet (or rather, someone who does not seek out the challenges of poetry in particular), advice I’ve received and found helpful at times is to listen to challenging poems read aloud. Throughout the piece, I would sometimes pause to read sentences out loud to myself to see what hearing them did for me. So I thought it was an interesting aspect of the piece that I was drawn to interact with it by speaking, something I haven’t done before in this response process (except perhaps to sigh or moan or curse during a parser puzzle or what have you).
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The interactive element I found most interesting was the gamification of the labor of translation. Unless one works as a translator, (or do that kind of academic reading practice where you hyperfixate on the thing you are doing until it feels in some way alien—like I’m sure there are reams of academic literature about how all acts of communication are in some sense translation), you most often interface with the already-translated poem, story, or what have you. This allows you to focus on “higher order” units of meaning, rather than at this subgrammatical level. Yet, this piece forces you to become more conscious of the labor of translation. You click the words, noting how they reform, rearrange, and recontextualize as the translation occurs. You’re left at the end with a “static” translated work that feels like it could have morphed, or could still morph, into something else, yet this is what Eca saw. So what I’m saying is: the gamification of translation here undercuts the finality of the text. What is the “canon” of a translation? What even is the canon of a “non-translated” text? It’s amorphous and unsettled.
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There are a few engaging, pervasive themes in this text. The first is that of food/eating/consumption, to make both alien and inviting the act of eating. Consider this description of a biscuit: “After a tentative bite, you eagerly demolish the rest of the biscuit. It’s unlike anything you’ve ever eaten: dense and satisfying, but bright, with the funk of fermentation.” What an odd way to describe a biscuit, yet, accurate. It reminds me of the first time I did an at-home fermentation project to make some mead (I really wanted to know what it tastes like since it is in so many fantasy novels). When I tasted it, I came to a startling realization that should’ve been obvious in hindsight: wine doesn’t taste like grapes, wine tastes like yeast. How interesting, here, to actually credit the flavor of the biscuit to the microbiome whose collective lives and deaths produced it. That brings me to the second pervasive theme: this work is preoccupied with social scale, by which I mean, what is the relationship between an individual “cell” in a collective and the whole that it unknowingly or semi-knowingly produces? This plays out in all kinds of ways: Eca doing analysis without the context that would give the results of that analysis meaning; motes of dust making visible a beam of light; the moisture of a cloud being reconstituted from the skulls of the dead; atoms of various elements structuring a sample; individual word within a line within a whole of a poem within an anthology. There are many such images. And running alongside that, the threat of a cell that corrupts the whole: imagery of teratomas, growing tissue where it shouldn’t, the apostate resisting the call to analyze. I am left feeling conscious of a whole body or person as a permeable collective, not only in a physical sense (millions of cells, microbiome, etc) but in a social sense (influenced and influencing social forces beyond an ability to fully comprehend them). I am not able to condense what I have seen into something easily digestible. I’m sure when I re-read this paragraph looking for and failing to find all the typos, I’ll still be disappointed with how it fails to really express what is happening here, but I’ll leave that to the experts.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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I know this is a matter of personal preference, but I loathe light mode, and in particular, this light mode. Let me make my case for why: the white background completely washes out the text. In the dark mode sections, the clickable word links really popped out in color. But in the light mode, I thought it completely washed out the distinctions between the brown/maroon and dark blue text. I spent much of the first few minutes of the game adjusting the browser window, zoom, computer brightness, etc., trying to settle into reading it, and as a result not focusing on the text itself as much. Given the themes of this work, this may be intentional. But given that there are plenty of people who feel as annoyed about dark mode as I do about the light mode experiences, I wonder if it would be worth making the light mode text colors more distinct from one another if this element of the user experience was unintended.
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I experienced a significant issue in Analysis #2. When I got to that screen, clicking on the four links didn’t do anything, so I thought I had glitched or softlocked the game somehow and backtracked for a bit to see if I could get around that screen. Eventually, my solution was just to spam-click on the links because they would occasionally let me through. Having glanced at a few other reviews searching for technical help, my conclusion is that this is another Chrome error and perhaps the text was meant to display as flickering. However, I’m describing the issue here in case a technical fix is possible, in the event that this wasn’t the intended interface.
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This is probably the most inconclusive critique that I have, as it’s so personal, but while I found the piece stimulating to analyze, I did not often find it emotionally engaging. I find I have a hard time connecting emotionally with text that is so self-dissociative. And it makes me a bit resentful in a way: if text seems not to want to be known, should I really open myself up to it? Why? I won’t be able to know if I’ve reached it; and I’m not always… I guess, mature enough to accept the notknowingness as itself the experience. It was hard to find footing in the story or the characters because of how abstract and amorphous they are, despite the vivid imagery in many of the sentences. I’m not sure what to make of that. It was still an engaging and interesting experience to read this, but I’m left with a sense that I’ve missed more than I’ve felt.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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Simply put, the effect of writing interactive fiction with a deeply engaged sense of poetics. The poetics of the piece’s interactivity are something unique to this particular medium, enhancing and exceeding how this might have come across in a more static presentation.
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A note about agency: as the game went, I chose to eat two biscuits (it appeared that I had the option to eat or not eat them, but I didn’t try to not eat them). At a later point, the apostate says, “What have I done? I have not collated the memories she brought to me. I have not kept eating and eating and eating what she has given me. I have not been her dutiful oblate.” Taking note of this, I thought, oh, maybe I shouldn’t just be eating all these damn biscuits. The next biscuit was eaten by default without offering a choice. I thought this was a great example of anticipating reader behavior to make a point. It’s more likely than not that players will eat the first biscuits, making the revocation of choice later more impactful.
Quote:
- “And the sun came down to sterilize with fire the words we’d left rotting on the pavement. The sun mistaking the words for us while we mistook the word for its meaning.”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- When the protagonist loses their eye, raising the stakes of analysis considerably.