The Lottery Ticket by Dorian Passer and Anton Chekhov
The reviews that I’m most happy with are the ones where I believe I really got what the author was doing. This is not one of those reviews. To be honest, I have no idea what Dorian Passer is trying to do with The Lottery Ticket; and that in spite of the fact that this game tries to explain up front and explicitly what it is trying to do:
I suppose that the difference between story-based agency and narration-based agency is that the first is agency that determines what happens, and the second is agency that determines how what happens gets narrated. So the claim is that The Lottery Ticket doesn’t allow us to steer the story in different directions (this is true), but that it does allow us to direct how the story is told. That latter claim, however, seems to be false. The player gets exactly four choice points where we have to either fill in a happy or a sad adjective; which is then used to change maybe a single sentence of the text, after which the narration goes on regardless of our choice. This hardly counts as having control over the narration. Since the piece doesn’t give us any reasons for preferring one kind of adjective to another, the notion of agency seems out of place anyway. In a choice game, being allowed to choose between going left and going right with no idea where those choices will lead doesn’t count as agency even if the two paths are entirely different. The happy/sad choices in The Lottery Ticket seem to fall in the same category.
The purported aim of the technique is ‘to avoid breaking a reader’s suspension of disbelief’. Now even assuming that there is a such a thing as suspension of disbelief (which I doubt), it is unclear why it would be especially threatened by story-based agency; or why it would be safeguarded by narration-based agency. I just don’t get what the idea here is, and nothing that I’ve seen in The Lottery Ticket has clarified things for me.
On to the story itself. Our protagonist is anxiously waiting for the results of a lottery draw, and as she is waiting she reads a Chekhov story about a lottery draw. The Chekhov story is very short and not, I believe, among his most famous ones; but it is interesting and as deftly pulled off as one would expect from one of the world’s most famous short story writers. Clearly, Passer is taking a huge risk by inviting direct comparison with Chekhov! Despite some nice details – I liked the concreteness of the recipe for tomato sauce, the way the characters joked about it, and how it also pointed at poverty – the new part of the story doesn’t reach the same level of intensity and psychological insight. The prose also wasn’t quite up to standards.
The first signal of a swell is a rush ahead of a calmness that is ebbing away from a face… you’ve definitely lost me there. And how do you distract yourself ‘back’ from a swell? I also don’t like the repetition of ‘swell of anxiety’, but that might be a more subjective aesthetic judgement.
So, yeah. This is a disappointing review, both for the author (whom I did not understand) and for the other readers (whom I’m not helping to understand the piece). But I just didn’t get much out of The Lottery Ticket, and I think that as a manifesto for an apparently new way of approaching IF, it leaves something to be desired.