Protocol, by 30x30
As I write this, there’s a forum thread bandying about the question of what counts as “literature”. There are a lot of answers to that question – with the only correct one being the unsatisfying Potter Stewart “I know it when I see it” line – but wherever you choose to draw your boundary around capital-L literature, Protocol sits comfortably inside its confines. Sure, the scenario is a pulp sci-fi standby: you wake up, with a shaky memory, on a space station on the verge of disaster, and need to push yourself to the utmost to fix things and (hopefully) survive. But the method of the telling, not to mention the issues the game’s actually concerned about, are more Stanislaw Lem than Prey.
First style, then substance. Protocol is far afield from the default Twine visuals, with a dark, cybernetic style that oozes cool without being overdone. This is of a piece with the prose, which is dense, inward-tangled, chilly:
Observatory Station Calypso-54414d, an orbital stellar observatory under the command of the UIPSC, housing an astronomical infrared survey telescope pointed at some distant patch of stars. It measured distortions in light and heat, peering back along the curve of time to the very start, when the universe was confused and aflame. It was looking for
No. That’s not right.
You were looking for
You were looking down at your hands. You were looking down at the lines in your palms and the gently swaying shadows from the gently swaying lightbar that hangs half-detached from the ceiling.
You were looking for the words.
When I read this, I cooed in delight; this is how I like my sci-fi, closely-observed and scientifically grounded with literary verve making the hard technical detail going down smooth. Protocol is generally written to this high standard, getting even more pleasantly rich and heady when it delves into the protagonist’s subjectivity, with disoriented perceptions of the catastrophic present juxtaposed with clear but low-context memories of their life before. With that said, there are some moments of overreach, like this one:
It looks the part, cramped ceilings and a narrow catwalk suspended above the most fundamental construction of the station, metal and carbon composite, arterial pipes and venous branches of sheathed wires, a pseudo-neural pneumatic network, a beating heart whose cancerous ambition has escaped the confines of the slatted floors.
There are some good images here, but it’s too busy – all of these organic metaphors point in a
consistent direction, sure, but the various tube-systems surrounding the heart, the lungs, and the brain are reasonably different, with quite different associations, so throwing them all in muddies what could have been a more striking metaphor.
There’s a little too much repetition, too. There are whole paragraphs that are repeated verbatim, which is clearly an intentional choice to convey the cyclical nature of the protagonist’s experience (more on that later), but I found sometimes broke the game’s spell as it led me to skim forward to look for next new piece of writing. There are also a few stylistic tics that Protocol employs a few too many times, like the trick above of longer, denser paragraphs alternating with paragraphs consisting of a single short sentence fragment; the first few times, it’s very effective, but after that the law of diminishing returns kicks in. It also sometimes gets a little too flowery for its own good (I couldn’t figure out how the New Game+ mode was supposed to work, because when I clicked it I was given the option to either start anew or return, either of which seem like they could apply to starting a NG+ playthrough; I suspect I clicked the wrong one, but I’m not fully sure!) Let me emphasize, this is the kind of writing that I like, and it’s executed quite well – but some tightening could make it really great.
As for what the game’s about and how it plays, I similarly have praise for what Protocol accomplishes leavened by some execution criticisms that made it land a little less strongly than I wanted to. The basic structure is well-defined, with the protagonist’s desperate attempts to save the space station by attempting increasingly-heroic repairs juxtaposed with her scattered memories of her life before the crisis, and her stream-of-consciousness doubts and reflections about who she is and what she’s trying to do. While the opening segments of the game are perhaps a bit too straightforward, with barely any choices and rather quotidian tasks, it quickly hits its stride, and does a good job creating exciting sci-fi challenges with cool visuals, plausible danger, and significant choices, while the more psychological segments are sufficiently pacy and high-stakes that they don’t bleed off too much narrative momentum. This is an impressive balancing act, unifying the literary and genre aspects of the piece in a clear, satisfying way.
Here’s the but, though: for all that, my experience of Protocol was much more intellectual than emotional, admiring the craft with which it was put together while not finding the questions it posed emotionally engaging. This is mostly, I think, down to a series of authorial decisions that are reasonable on their own terms but combine to reduce the impact of the game. Chief among these are the related decisions to start in medias res and make the flashbacks pointing to the protagonist’s backstory fragmented and opaque. This approach makes for an exciting opening and ongoing puzzle-box engagement through the middle, but for me it weakened my investment in the protagonist. There were occasional bits of flashback that I found quite compelling, but it was often hard to connect them to each other, or to the present-day action of the game. In particular, the flashbacks posit the protagonist as someone who’s sacrificed personal relationships for their scientific ambitions, but with those relationships only receiving fleeting, vague gestures – and the scientific ambitions not even getting that, for the most part – the dilemma felt rather inert to me.
Again, I can see the reasons for doing things this way (and beyond what I’ve mentioned above, the questions around the protagonist’s identity given what appears to be repeated cloning might feel less compelling if we were given a more complete look at the arc of their experiences). But as a result, when I got to the ending, while I recognized it as a satisfying way to resolve the issues the game had put into play, with some real moments of beauty, I felt like I was held at something of a distance; tellingly, while you are offered a significant final choice that should imply radically different things about the protagonist’s journey, I didn’t find any of the three options worked any better or worse for me than the others. This bespeaks a pleasant openness of interpretation, but it also feels like a slight hollowness at the core of an otherwise satisfying, intelligently put-together game. I think the author deliberately chose to prioritize thematic and structural considerations over character and narrative ones, which, while risky, is a gamble many literary authors make; I admire the risk and think a lot about Protocol works very well, but here I’m not sure the gamble fully paid off.
