Violent Delight
One of the defining characteristics of IFComp is the seriousness and tenacity of the judges. There are people who make a good faith attempt to play every single game in the competition. More importantly, many of the judges really try to take every game seriously. Typos, programming bugs, bad writing, incomprehensible ideas, technical problems, obscure file formats, prodigious length – whatever the game may suffer from, there will always be at least a few judges who are willing to push through in order to do full justice to the game and report on what was good among the badness.
This is the perfect territory for trolling.
Imagine a game where you start by ordering a video game cartridge. Then the game tells you that this video game cartridge will arrive in about an hour. ‘That’s fast!’ you think. Until you realise that the game meant a real time hour. Your real time. So for one hour, you as player have nothing to do but watch a small progress bar fill (or empty). Of course, 99% of player will simply close this game. They’ve got better things to do!
But now imagine that such a game had been entered into IFComp. There our imagined game would find tenacious judges who do not give up, and who are therefore the perfect people to troll. How much fun would it be to imagine them sitting there for an hour, until they can finally play the game… and to then troll them further with more and more waits, interspersed with increasingly frenetic gameplay as the stretches of the game you get to play become shorter and shorter (in real time!) while the waits between them stay the same! Ah, what a delightful act of trolling, infuriating, yes, but also smart and funny; those judges themselves might grudgingly have to appreciate the idea even while they were its intended and actual victims.
Of course, dear reader, this game is not imagined at all. It is Violent Delight, subtitled ‘an experiment in withholding’. And withhold it does. It withholds game time, most obviously. But it also withholds meaning and resolution. We start out in a park. But then we uncover a hidden reality – it’s actually a school! But then we discover a further layer, a prison; and then a further layer, Hell; and perhaps we thought that that was were meaning was to be found (we are really in Hell, that sounds appropriate to the kind of game this is), but no, the layers keep coming. Real meaning is always withheld.
It helps that the game is pretty unique – you keep playing because you’re wondering whether these strange graphics, bizarre locales, and piece of prose (that are evocative and sometimes even really good (I was at one time reminded of The Unnamable by Beckett (which is high praise indeed (and I too am withholding something (as you can see (but I have far less stamina than the author of Violent Delight (so the end of the sentence will come in much less than an hour) although it would be pretty cool to write this review in ultra-slow timed text and send that to the author (pay back time!!!)))), the second part of the Trilogy)) will ever congeal into a coherent experience. They don’t. But that is of course the point exactly.
At the end of the game, you enter a basement, and you’re told to pick up a spade and dig. At that point the game turns into a black screen with a little white bar that looks very much like the timers you saw earlier. I am almost certain that it is indeed another timer, but not set at an hour, but at a much longer time period. Days perhaps. Months. Who knows? (Remember this game where the timer is set to three thousand years?) I did not wait to find out.
But I am one of those tenacious judges. So I tried to use the faketime Linux command to start an instance of Firefox looking at a system timer that ran 100 times faster than normal, but it seems that Violent Delight does not use the system timer. I installed Tampermonkey and tried out some scripts that supposedly speed up certain javascript timers. That didn’t work either. My technical knowledge here is pretty much non-existent, and so I gave up. But perhaps others will come, with 1337er skills, and finish what I left undone.
We’re IFComp judges. When somebody trolls us, we turn the other cheek, and even say thank you.