Do you mean where all the options are presented at once, or one after another as the character ‘deliberates’? The former is what you would normally see, is it not? But perhaps you could handle it the latter way by weighting each choice with a value that corresponds to a variable or set of variables on the character, so they are presented with choices in a sequence dictated by the actions they took up to that point where the conversation initiates. Or for certain values maybe they never see certain choices, based on prior actions.
Remember those episodes when Homer Simpson needs to decide on things, and each “decision” gets to parts of his head? This sounds like that. j/k 
I actually intended to always contact the authors of the games, but I missed it. Which is a shame, since it really would have been a great opportunity. My apologies to all participants, and especially to Victor Gijsbers.
And yes, the IF Comp seems to have subdued the game of the month. If anyone wants to carry on with it afterwards, please feel free. It’s unfortune, but I won’t/don’t have any time for it :-/
Well… this was a notable piece of IF… I personally didn’t find it very compelling or interesting AT FIRST, though it more or less redeemed itself in the end.
There’s a persistent theme of shock-value and a dependency on the novelty of the plot to the reader throughout the whole work that is really distracting and actually ends up making everything more shallow than it could be.
The thing about writing for the shock value is that you are guaranteed to get a strong response … out of readers who have never encountered the shocking theme in writing before. Certainly, the first time I read a piece about a little girl being abused I was rocked to my core. And the second. And even the third, a little bit; after that, not so much. As a reader who is familiar with the setup-followthrough in this type of story, I knew it the second I opened the album in the closet (on my first playthrough) and read the picture descriptions. My thoughts were along the line of, ‘Ok, there’s going to be some abuse on that girl going on … let’s see what he does with it’. But the game never actually does anything with it, it just keeps sort of waving it around in front of your face going ‘oooohhh child abuuusseee scaryy! aren’t you disturbed?? ooohh’ etc. I would have liked to see the theme incorporated intelligently into some story with some real meaning. As it is, the game is so fascinated with itself that it just kind of forgets to actually go anywhere.
I’m reminded of the IF game M.U.L.E., where at the beginning of the game, you end up thinking, ‘Oh cool, there’s going to be some dealing with the concepts of slavery through the game, let’s see what happens’, and later on you realize, nothing really happens, the game just keeps showing you slavery over and over in hopes of just shocking you senseless with it.
Another theme that struck me was the ‘What is evil really?’ theme. Again, another theme that compels people who have never come across it before, yet bores people who have already dealt with it. For example, a roleplayer who enjoys D&D from time to time will sooner or later, inevitably, end up asking themselves that question. ‘Dude, but what if I steal bread to feed my family, would that really be evil? But what if I’m insane and I think that people are really demons and I’m working for good by killing them is that evil? What if I’m under a spell or what if I can’t help myself from resisting the temptation and I’m just weak, is it really evil?’ etc. I found myself going through the dialogs thinking, yeah, I get it, people who do evil sometimes can’t help it, you can repent what you did, to know all is to forgive all, it’s all shades of gray… what else? Well… nothing else. That’s it.
Yet another theme I found trite was the ‘…and the villain is YOU’ theme. Man. If ever there was an overplayed theme in writing, that’s it. Just to show how overwritten it really is, I’ll quote a piece from someone else’s review of a completely different game, one in this year’s IFComp even, though obviously I won’t give away which one: “The ending is of a type seen in just about every creative writing class ever given since the dawn of time - with every author believing themselves the first to do it. Not since Agatha Christie wrote a first-person murder mystery where the narrator was also the villain has this sort of twist been original by any stretch of the word.” Yep.
So, the one theme which I found interesting was a more subtle question which the game poses, which is basically, what if nothing is resolved by the time you finish the game? Can a story really be a story without resolving the conflict that drives it? What about a story where the characters don’t learn, where they don’t grow, where they just keep going like they always have, will it work? That is a theme not commonly posed or dealt with, in what I’ve come across.
I’m reminded of a scene in the movie, Adaptation, where Nicholas Cage poses the exact same question to a writing coach, and the coach goes into a very passionate monologue where he answers that basically, yes you can have a story like that, and it can be compelling and interesting in your head, as a kind of intellectual excercise, BUT ultimately it has no bearing on the real world where people live and suffer and learn every single day of their lives, and how DARE he try to disconnect himself from the world like that in such an act of arrogance and selfishness, etc.
This is where the game actually does something interesting, I think. It uses interactive fiction’s very nature to give the player a choice in whether the conflict will have a resolution or not. Thus you can choose: will you have a story in which the character learns and grows, or a story in which there IS no learning, and where everything stays the same and everyone continues to suffer without overcoming it? In giving that choice, even though the choice may seem superficial and arbitrary on the part of the player (‘Yeap I conquered my lust, yessir…’) it still makes you think, ‘why am I choosing this? Is it because I believe it can happen or solely because I want a resolution? Am I cheating myself here?’ And in doing so, I think the game ultimately succeeds in what it set out to do, though it took a dry and trying road to get there.
Interesting point. I found the “what’s your motivation?” type questions to be most interesting when they affected the outcome that was described (as in the midgame decisions about why to kill the animal in the woods), and the ones at the end of the game a bit more disappointing. But your remarks are making me reconsider this. In our own lives, we never reach a point where we know for certain that we’ve reached a happy ending or resolved something permanently. Sometimes we think we’ve conquered a problem and later turn out to be wrong; that’s especially true when the problem is some kind of addiction or habitual behavior we’re trying to get rid of.
So perhaps this ending – where we’re allowed to determine what we think has happened, but the game doesn’t offer any feedback or affirmation that it definitely worked – is more appropriate than I originally thought.
Exactly. As game critics (and really, you can’t not turn into a critic after playing a few pieces of IF - there’s just something about the medium…) we want the player’s choices to have a consequence and ending D reached by making choices A, B and C. Even as in our own lives we stumble from day to day mostly repeating the same patterns and habits, we reach for that lacking finality in these stories and games… only in this particular one, the author holds up a hand, and goes, ‘Maybe not my friend… maybe not.’ Which I found a bit thought-provoking.
Also, even though it was not significant enough to include in my original review, I’d like to add that I found the Dragon-as-Lust analogy extremely apt, and the whole metaphor of its lair to be very well done.
Tropico, thanks for writing that extensively about my piece. I am sorry that it was only able to convince you to the rather limited extent that it did.
I would like to comment on some of your observations.
Shock value
The piece certainly has a shock potential which was always in my mind when I wrote it. Some people only understood what was going on near the end, and were greatly moved by that discovery. However, from the very start I considered The Baron to be a piece that should be played more than once, and I have everywhere (except in the final scene, back at your own house) tried to write both for those who had not yet discovered what was going on and for those who were already ‘in the know’. I fully considered the possibility that people would understand what was going on right from the start; from the gargoyle’s scene on, at the latest, many of the possible actions you can choose have a meaning only if you already know what is going on.
So I don’t think I really relied on shock potential. Could you perhaps elaborate on your dissatisfact in this respect?
What is evil?
The question was perhaps not What is evil?, but rather, Is evil the right concept to think about men?
I am somewhat concerned that you think the entire theme “bores people who have already dealt with it”. It seems to me as topical and alive as ever; particularly when we are talking about child abuse. I don’t know where you are from and how the situation is there, but here in the Netherlands, it has become quite fashionable to speak about child abusers as monsters that are no longer to be seen as truly human; who are to be excised from civilised society, rather than to be understood and helped. (Even pedophiles who have never had sex with a child are sometimes talked about in this way.)
As a part of my research for The Baron, I searched the internet for websites with the intent of helping abusive adults to stop their abuse. I could not find a single one. This, to me, is perplexing. Child abuse is very widespread, alarmingly so, and I simply cannot believe that the abusers do not struggle with their actions. They cannot be happy with them. Among other policies, getting abusers to seek help seems a necessary part of any effective strategy of dealing with child abuse. But this policy apperently does not exist, and this surely hangs together with the too excessive moral condemnation of the abuser: a monster cannot be helped. Only a human being can.
Is evil the right concept to think about men? Is a man who rapes his daughter a monster beyond help and redemption? This question is not only relevant because it will partly determine our whole way of dealing with criminals, but it is even pratically relevant in combatting child abuse, as the wrong answer will lead to less succesful policy.
I am not an expert, but I would say that such less succesful policy is a current reality all over the world.
I don’t think you have the right to be bored by it; but I mostly condemn myself for not having been able to make it interest you.
The villain is YOU!
I wouldn’t call that a theme, it’s a motif. The piece isn’t about it; it is (among other things) about self-deception. The identification of the protagonist and the villain is merely a way of presenting this theme; a theme which is wholly absent from Christie’s… which book was it, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd? With Christie, it is merely a cheap surprise; a gimmick; something which can startle once and becomes trite thereafter. You will not find the protagonist-murderer reviling the murderer, setting out to confront him, or having any thoughts whatever about him: he is lucid, and merely attempts to deceive the reader until the end.
In The Baron, on the other hand, the you-who-is-the-villain has a definite and hostile attitude towards the villain, and the whole story of the concerned father and the evil baron becomes an expressionist metaphor for the moral self-deception of the abusive parent. Now, I may have failed in presenting this theme with enough skill and strength - it is what I should be judged by; but I surely haven’t fallen into the trap of imitating Christie in order to get a cheap surprise!
Closure
It is very interesting to me that the one theme you did find convincing is one which remained largely unconscious in my mind. Reading your analysis of it actually gives me more insight the piece. Thanks! 
The question of closure is - important, I guess. In real life, a tragedy such as the one described in The Baron never has a clear ending.
Aha! Interesting. Because this was exactly my problem with the game itself. It talked at great length about the situation of child abuse, and had some speculation about what could be done about it, but nothing at all about what should be done about it. All I was left with was my own uninformed opinions of the matter, and I already know my own opinions. I wanted the game to tell me something I didn’t already know, or at least offer an opinion on something, but there was nothing there.
Game: Here is a horrible situation! What do you do?
Me: OK, I try this.
Game: OK.
Me: …
Game: …
Me: So… I did something. What happens?
Game: What do you think happens?
Me: Maybe this?
Game: OK.
Me: …
Game: …
Me: But what does it mean?
Game: What do you think it means?
Me: OK, I’m done playing with you if you’re going to be like that.
Game: No, it’s OK, I was done anyway.
Me: …
So I ended up fairly frustrated at the whole conclusion. The setup was, I felt, well done. But forcing me to write the ending just felt like a cop-out.
The question of the solution was not the one I wanted to address with The Baron. I wanted to make the reader/player think about the presuppositions dominant in our culture that ensure that no solution is even sought - namely, the presupposition that horrible acts like these are the acts of a ‘monster’, someone who is ‘evil’ or ‘beastly’, and who just has to be sought out and (metaphorically) killed.
The question of the psychological circumstances that lead to this behaviour is therefore never asked; and it is unsurprising that no effective way to combat it has been found. You will not find what you will not seek.
Now, if you are already among the enlightened, you may think this is a cop-out; but those who are fully enlightened in this way are extremely few. I know unenlightened thoughts tend to crop up in my own mind when I read about people committing (whatever kind of) horrible acts.
That sounds like a worthy goal, but I didn’t get that message at all. In fact, I didn’t really glean any of your opinions about child abuse from the game. There were no real consequences to any action in the game, so therefore they were all neutral from the game’s point of view. I had to imagine consequences myself, which isn’t a dialog, it’s just me musing to myself. And I already know what I think.
There wasn’t even anybody in the game representing the views of ‘the dominant culture’, to which I could compare and contrast my own. All opinions in the game were my own. There was nothing to weigh them against.
From reading reviews, not everybody had my reaction, which is good, but that’s the sort of thing that would have engaged me more with the story.