Quintessence by Andrea M. Pawley
Is community inherently preferable to a solitary existence? Do we have a duty to build towards a future rather than remain in an eternal sequence of presents? These are the questions asked by Andrea M. Pawley’s Quintessence. The game takes Big Bang / Big Crunch cosmology and uses it as a metaphor for a life that is both carefree and careless because it does not care for either past or future. This is a bold move, accentuated by the fact that the player gets to play an elementary particle and that every game turn takes one milliard years. And then the game adds dogs and cats as metaphors for two different ways of life, dogs and cats that appear, sometimes, as innerworldly creatures, but more prominently as metaphysical forces that determine the fate of universes. Can cats feel love? becomes here a question of transcendent importance.
The audacity of this artistic vision is stunning. But is it possible to make it work? And in the space of a very short piece of fiction? The evidence seems to be against it. Quintessence is often more confusing than enlightening. We have a hard time understanding what is happening or how we can steer the story one way or another; and we are at such a high level of abstraction that we readers may not particularly care about what happens anyway. So I came out of this more appreciative of the author’s intentions than of the piece itself.
(Side note: I wonder why the title of the game is a term from Aristotelian cosmology, which is clearly not the cosmology used by the game? Quintessence is the fifth essence, more perfect than Earth, Air, Fire and Water, of which the heavens are supposed to be made.)