No One Else Is Doing This by Lauren O’Donoghue
What are the purposes of writing interactive fiction? I gave a short talk about the medium today to a group of librarians, and I had chosen five possible purposes to briefly discuss: allowing the player control over where the story is going; merging the power of prose fiction with the power of games; increasing the attentiveness with which the text is read; allowing the player to co-perform a pre-written script; and using choices as a mode of communication, for instance, communicating what is or is not a possibility for the protagonist by presenting and not presenting certain options. Now when I was preparing this talk, the most recent game I had played was No One Else Is Doing This, and I was very much aware that it doesn’t fit any of those five categories. Instead, this game uses interactivity to make us present in an activity that we otherwise wouldn’t be able to experience from the inside.
In No One Else Is Doing This, you are trying to recruit paying member for a ‘community union’. The early game threw some unfamiliar terminology at me, such as the aforesaid community union, which was explained in the game’s glossary as being like a trade union but for local communities. Since the main business of a trade union is to negotiate collective labour agreements, it wasn’t very clear to me how this would carry over to a non-labour context. Perhaps that is part of the point; the game suggests very strongly that there is nothing the community union is for. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Another unfamiliar term from the early game was ‘rape alarm’, which was strange enough that it set me off on a google search with somewhat inconclusive results. It is possibly a key chain that can make a lot of noise when you press a button? If that is in fact what it is, then the game was trying to communicate to me that the protagonist was going to a very unsafe place, but there would have been less confusing ways to communicate this which might have the added advantage of not suggesting that sexual violence would be a major theme of the piece. (It is not.)
The core gameplay of No One Else Is Doing This is choosing a door to knock on. You don’t have any reason to choose one door rather than another, so in effect what you are given is a string of vignettes. Many of them come to an immediate close, because people are absent or don’t want to talk to you. But you sometimes get into conversations with people, and then you have to decide how to best talk them into becoming due-paying members of the union. The entire set-up of the game, with the time limit, the hostile physical circumstances, and the infrequent chances of success, push you towards being as utilitarian as possible: these people are there to be manipulated; they are the instruments for achieving your goal. It’s very easy to understand that this is how this job might feel when you’ve been doing it for a while, and therefore why an idealistic person might become disenchanted with it! And that’s the experience that the game wants to give us. All in all, I think it’s quite effective at that.
However, it could have been even more effective if we had been allowed to understand a little bit of the idealism. We never learn about anything that this community union is actually doing. It doesn’t seem to have any ideas of its own that it wants to share with the neighbourhood. Instead, you’re always fishing for grievances, and then promising that the union will deal with them. This feels empty. Which is fine if the point is satire; but I think the point is disenchantment. And to feel disenchantment, we must first have a taste of the enchanted. The vision of a better world is conspicuously absent here.