Civil Service by Helen L Liston
I’m tempted to give a very brief and very misleading joke review. Something like:
One star. This game did not work.
One star. This was not a game.
One star. Would not recommend.
And then I’ll add:
“But who cares for reviews?!!?!!!”
Look, I’m not a native speaker of English, but I do wonder whether that last phrase is idiomatic. To care for something is to give it the care that it needs; surely, the current context requires the word ‘about’? Or not? I’m not sure. And then again, it would not be beyond the capabilities of Helen L. Liston to actually ask who is caring for reviews; those sad, lonely reviews, left to die in a cold ravine on the internet, abandoned and forgotten… Who cares for them? Maybe you? Maybe a soul sent down from limbo, morally corrupt, but in a low key way, and eager to regain being and a semblance of life by learning to care not just about but also for something. Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again, and yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel… I mean, no, I’ll give him the paper clips he needs to organise his angry letters to Agamemnon.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: Victor, this is one of the most chaotic and least coherent reviews you’ve ever written. But look. Civil Service starts out as one of the most chaotic and least coherent pieces of interactive fiction I’ve ever played. In fact, I was mightily annoyed by it. There was just fragments, making little sense. The choices were opaque: you have no idea what it even means to click one thing rather than another. And the frequent changes of background were disorienting and annoying, even without the moving texts and weird font colour changes. I was not enjoying myself.
And then things started to click. I mean, they didn’t fully click. I still have a hard time imagining three people who abandon their co-worker in a ravine and don’t even notice her absence. But this is to some extent a metaphor. Let me quote Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, the chapter “Nabokov on Cruelty”:
Helen L. Liston is our Nabokov. She (I’ll assume that that’s the right pronoun, but correct me if I’m wrong) worries most about the particular form of cruelty that is incuriosity. That is people just walking past each other. That is people looking at each other, but not seeing. That is people talking to each other, but not hearing. That is people never getting the name of their colleague right. That is, in the ultimate and bizarre case, people forgetting about their team mate while they’re in a ravine, and then forgetting to wonder about her when she doesn’t show up for work day after day after day.
So here we are, a ghost, ourselves assigned to limbo because of a egotism that killed, trying with all our might to manipulate physical reality just enough to make these people remember. To save a woman by giving others the thought: “What happened to her?” We have to stop seeing everything only in terms of how we experience it. We have to stop rating everything, as if our experience of an object is what is most real about it. Instead, we must accept our own irrelevance, FOCUS, and do the job – the job of compassion. We have to live up to the words that Falstaff never said: “I am not only compassionate in myself, but the cause that compassion is in other men.”
And so, in the end, I started enjoying and appreciating Civil Service. It is a little rough, it takes some time to click, but it has something to say. Something that is worth saying.
So let’s not give it a rating. Let’s not say how many stars it is worth. Let’s just say:
Five star potential.