Restitution by Dorian Passer and Charles Henkle
This game is a Stateful Narration game. Other such games by this author have consisted of a classic short story with modern additions by the author where people comment on the story, including a text box where the reader can type something which the game then interprets using sentiment analysis to change some subsequent text.
This game is no exception, although it is smaller than the others. It is also different from the others, in that its ‘meta-commentary’ is no longer a separate, modern story; instead, it’s an addition in-universe, still with the sentiment-analysis text box. However, due to this being a speed-IF, only one text box is included.
The short story chosen this time is obscure; I only found one ‘hit’ when searching, on an internet archive of an old magazine.
My view on these games has certainly changed over time. I went from believing they had no interaction to believing that they are excellent at hiding all the interactivity.
A game that makes you think its responding to your actions, even if it doesn’t, is a game that is very fun to play, if only for one time. (For instance, see Attack of the Yeti Robot Zombies). But the converse is true; a game that does extensive work, but leads the player to think it does none, is not fun to play. Simply putting a message next to the box that is, as the author once said, metaleptic (or maybe extra-diegetic???) saying ‘positive sentiment detected’ in green and then highlighting the subsequent changed text in green or using red for negative sentiment would instantly improve reaction; this is just one idea, there are many ways to make it look like the game is really thinking.
Like a character says the movie The Prestige:
“The trick was too good, it was too simple. The audience hardly had time to see it[…]he’s a wonderful magician; he’s a dreadful showman. He doesn’t know how to dress it up, how to sell this,” and I think that applies to this whole series of games.
