In 2024 my work schedule did not allow me to engage with as many comp games as I would have liked. I’m certainly making up for it this year. When I recently finished playing “Wise Woman’s Dog”, I thought of the “37 percent rule” and rushed to see if I had made it through 37% of the games. Alas, I had only made it through 33%. (If you’re unfamiliar with the 37 percent rule, also known as the secretary problem or optimal stopping theory, probably better for you to read about it somewhere else than to read my clumsy explanation)
Now that I’m at thirty seven percent, I decided to celebrate by picking a game by a known author which has been on my comp wish list since the beginning. I know this is an invalid interpretation of the 37 percent rule, since the order of the things being evaluated is supposed to be kept random. But I’ll take a break from the randomizer this time.
“Cart”, a dark short story written in Twine by Brett Witty. I have not read any other reviews before playing this, but I am familiar with the author’s other work.
Analysis and spoilers
“Cart” tells the story of someone without any resources struggling for survival under an authoritarian regime. The PC acquires a night-soil cart (euphemism for the cart used to port latrine waste out of the city) and with that he ekes out his living. The story does not indicate a specific place or time, leaving it open to interpretation whether this is an allegory for right now, or the human condition more generally.
The story is written very well, but told in a mostly linear way. There are a few choice points. I don’t think they make a difference to the long term arc of the narrative. They do have some impact on how the player forms their own relationship with the character: whether you would knock a gold tooth out of the face of a dead man (I did), whether to show compassion for an orphan boy (I also did).
The local villain is a character named Sir Harrington, someone who rallies the masses to anger and racist violence with his public harangues. No matter what choices the player makes, the PC ultimately becomes a target and then a victim of Sir Harrington. No matter what choices the player makes, Sir Harrington ultimately becomes a victim of himself. It is easy to make comparisons to the allegorical Sir Harringtons in my own country (USA), or other contemporary authoritarian figures throughout the world.
However the scene I played in my own mind while I read Cart was informed by a book I read last year called “The Blazing World” a history of the English Civil War of the 1600s. The royal title “sir” and the primitive methods of moving shit around the city reinforced this in my mind. I knew very little about this period of English history before picking up “Blazing World”, but I sensed it might resonate with current events, and that it might even be cathartic. It certainly was. For all the power that England had acquired by the 19th century, it was a hot mess in the 17th century. Decades of war and power struggles between the royal and middle classes, most of it tied to religious identities, none of it having any benefit for the peasant classes. Close to 200,000 dead during the conflicts. Oliver Cromwell (the leader of the anti-royalist faction) served only five years as Lord Protector, died of natural causes, later was post-humously hung AND beheaded.
I’m of the mind that “Cart” is not an allegory about right now, but the human condition more generally. Cathartic. Yes, cathartic.