Uninteractive Fiction (Leah Thargic)
Played on: 2nd Sept
How I played it: Online via the IFComp ballot
How long I spent: 10 seconds, one losing ending
There’s usually one game that captures the attention of the IFComp judges right out of the gate, for better or worse, and this time it’s Uninteractive Fiction. I always miss out on these, so this time I ignored the personal shuffle and went for it. The blurb says “the only winning move is not to play.” There’s a PLAY link; you click it and it says “You lose” and plays a sad trombone effect. I downloaded Twine to check the source code, and yeah, that’s it – no hidden links or timed text.
I don’t get the impression that the game is very impressed with itself or thinks it’s doing something artful. It’s (probably) just a goofy joke based on that one line from Dr Strangelove. But the punny pseudonym and the confidence with Twine (evidenced by the non-default styling and the embedded audio) suggest that this is an author who knows what they’re doing. Games have been resigned to last place for more interactivity than this (see poor old Lucerne from the 2019 comp), so this must be a troll game, right?
As with most troll games, the fun is in people’s bemused reactions and little shitpost reviews. This was a good year to do it too. An anonymous author has let the community know that there’s a meta-puzzle hidden in this year’s entries, and a couple of people marked this entry as clearly suspicious. I certainly did. I opened the cover art in Paint to see if there was any hidden almost-black lettering, and I tried to compile the audio from the text dump in the Twine source code to see if there was any spectrogram stuff going on but I couldn’t figure out how to do it so I gave up.
I did have a paragraph here musing on what it, like, means to be interactive fiction, but if that’s the point, then both Uninteractive Fiction and I are about 25 years behind the curve. I realised I’m absolutely not interested in reheating the discussion. I’ve had a lot going on, man.
Anyway, I enjoyed the sad trombone sound effect, but I believe Uninteractive Fiction is throwing itself in front of the last-place bullet for the benefit of the other authors, and who am I to deny it?