Admiration Point (Rachel Helps)
Played on: 25th October
How I played it: Downloaded and ran on Opera
How long I spent: 1 hour to find 3/5 endings
Admiration Point is a choice-based described on the ballot as an “anti-romance”. The player character Maria, who works as a digital museum curator developing experiences for VR, develops an attraction to her co-worker Sean. The player decides how Maria explores her desire in relation to her career and family. The stated run-time of 90 minutes seems to be based on finding all five endings; each ending will take 10-30 minutes to find.
The idea of an anti-dating sim is an immediate winner. This isn’t a romance, and you’re primed by the blurb and the author’s comments not to expect an ending where you get the guy. This is a story about feeding a guilty obsession and about being pulled apart by lust, family and religion. But it keeps its stakes, its characters and its setting mundane – not mundane as in boring, but as in everyday. (Well, apart from being set 100 years in the future – more on that later.)
Admiration Point plays on the expectations of a dating sim with its visual design. At first the styling is fairly straightforward (I wasn’t sure about the lime green accent colouring at first, but after playing for a while, I’ve been won over), but after a certain point, status indicators appear in the sidebar to track your relationship with Sean. An ever-tightening spiral represents Maria’s obsession with Sean, which I think is a clever bit of visual design. There are also icons for Sean’s attitude to you and his awareness of your crush.
Interestingly, although I saw that spiral tightening, I never noticed the Sean-related indicators changing. It’s possible that these could change if you make choices that I didn’t make, but it occurs to me that the game still works if they don’t change. Part of Maria’s agony is that she’s not sure how Sean feels about her, and she’s not sure how to feel him out without coming on too strong. Keeping Sean’s feelings as opaque as possible really emphasises the intentional dissatisfaction of the anti-romance angle.
The writing is pretty decent throughout. It can be dry and a little dull when it’s just describing events that get you to the next scene, but it’s at its best when Maria monologues to herself about her obsession – it does a great job of characterising the self-loathing that comes with thinking thoughts you don’t want to think. Maria’s crush is written carefully, tempered by little bursts of silent outrage against Sean and other characters helping to temper her obsession and making her feel real. Helps also has a real talent for working the setting into the writing. I always felt like I had enough details to go on when making choices, without feeling like the game had stopped dead to exposit.
There are five main endings, and a lot of little variations between those endings based on certain choices throughout the game. I’ve seen three of them: two you can get relatively early, and one which concludes the dalliance with Sean. The remaining two endings will require me to replay the whole game going for specific playstyles. I’m not sure I know what choices to make to get those endings, and I’m not sure I have the patience to work it out. I’m not sure what the intended way to experience this game is, if there is one. The multiple numbered endings, the hints at the end and the status bar suggest you’re supposed to be figuring out how to see all the content and planning your approach to Sean, but the deliberately dissatisfying limits of your romance with Sean and the obtuseness of the status bar (allowing for the possibility that I didn’t make the right choices to see the status bar change) make me think it’s better experienced as a one-shot game.
There seem to be three thematic strands to Admiration Point. One is, obviously, the exploration of a dangerous and probably unrequited crush. Another is the intersection of feminism and Mormon culture. The game’s two lead characters are Mormons and the game is embedded in a semi-speculative Mormon culture which had me doing a lot of research. (I’m pretty sure “Deseret State University” is fictional, but I’ve now learned that the LDS Church does sponsor universities.) The worldbuilding seems to imply that the Church grows its sphere of influence in the future (I will get around to that “100 years in the future” thing, I promise). This is presented pretty neutrally in the game – I don’t think Admiration Point is interested in swaying you in a religious debate. Instead, I think the setting is being used to immerse you in the religion so you can see things from the player character’s perspective (and the author’s, presumably - the FAQ at the end of the game heavily implies that Maria is based on Rachel Helps).
The intersection between feminism and religion surfaces in many interesting and unexpected ways. I noticed and appreciated a moment where God is pointedly referred to as “They” rather than the traditional “He”, for instance. The personal politics of motherhood are especially underlined, as one of the stresses underpinning Maria’s family life is that her husband wants to try for another child even though her first pregnancy took a huge toll on her; Maria, in turn, expresses a desire to resist the cultural expectations of motherhood when she designs exhibitions which feature mothers as key historical figures. To an extent, the game isn’t really about Sean; it feels like Admiration Point wants to explore how feminism is negotiated against a traditional conservative American background (i.e. the Christian nuclear family), and Sean’s presence is just the spark that lights the gunpowder.
Okay, that 100 years thing. A few dates given in this game imply it takes place at about the turn of the 22nd century, but you can’t really call this a sci-fi game. The furthest it goes with hard sci-fi is depicting VR headsets and gloves as having improved haptic feedback. But Admiration Point does spend time establishing what happens to web technology politically and economically in the next 100 years. Gripes from co-workers suggest that anonymity on the internet is long gone, and an in-game book you can read describes a gamification of crowdsourced data harvesting which feels very plausible. The VR museum of Admiration Point presents a digital world that is contemporary (if threatened) to us but historical to the characters, who only know the internet after it seems to have wholly succumbed to corporatisation.
So the third theme of Admiration Point is digital culture: how we might archive and exhibit our current digital culture, and what the interests of capital and surveillance might do to future digital culture. At first blush this theme feels a little divorced from the other themes, like it doesn’t really belong alongside the interplay of feminism and religion and lust. And yeah, I’m not sure it intertwines with the themes of desire and family life as tightly as they intertwine with each other, although it is used as an effective tool to provoke interactions between those other themes (for example, during a lot of the game Maria works on an exhibition of mommy-blogging artefacts, which leads to reflections on her own pregnancy).
However, if I’m honest, this stuff about digital culture was the most fascinating part of the game to me. I used to work with archives, so I was really interested to read how the author has worked through the implications of digital archives. In fact, quite a lot of my notes are copy-pasted excerpts from the game when Maria reads a book about digital culture. Helps is sensitive to the politics of the archive and fictionalises the debates effectively; I enjoyed the little scene where Maria is asked to create the display for a Handmaid’s Tale-themed game which seems to have missed the point of the franchise, weighing up her feminist values with the responsibility of her job to present artefacts and exhibits as they are. I know that I in turn have missed the point of Admiration Point, focusing on scenes like this instead of the core anti-romance, but I could quite happily play a game all about this kind of thing.
I appreciated Admiration Point a lot, and it achieves what I think it sets out to do: it uses the dating sim as a springboard for much more nuanced conversations about feminism and sexual desire. As with The Archivist and the Revolution, this isn’t really the kind of game I play for pleasure, so I don’t feel a strong desire to go see the other endings. But this feels like a very personal and empathetic game and it was well worth playing.