Obscura wrote:This was pretty cool. You've got a very distinctive voice that goes well with black comedy.
I didn't really have any issues in this game aside from the line at the end about
interactivity excluding the player. I could not comprehend the actual meaning of the sentence. Perhaps I've been so brainwashed by the dating sim genre I couldn't compute it.
The worst I could say about this VN is that it was meandered a bit. There were some tangents in the conversation that made me wonder why they were put there--her mother, for example. Or what the purpose of the whole exchange was.
Overall, nice job!
Yeah, the ending... I couldn't quite figure out how to get my message across. Let me try again, then: people always make the distinction that in static media, such as books, music, film, the audience does not get to participate, whereas in games they do; for that reason, games are supposed to be this new, exciting medium of communication or art form that is greater than everything that came before it. I think that's a very pre-post-structuralist view of art. Post-structuralists like Derrida, Barthes and Foucault suggested that there is no one meaning to a text that is given to it by the author. To try to reconstruct the author's message is a waste of time; a work of art is about the meaning that you, as the reader, derive from it. It also means that you can formulate different, contradictory meanings to a work of art. While I think they went entirely too far by abolishing the author altogether, the movement did have an impact on the way we read things. To say that static media are merely conveying the message of the author is a way of thinking that is outdated by half a century at least.
Games then! Because video games are interactive structures on the computer, they require that you speak the computer's language in order to communicate with it; in this case, it's a little menu with a handful of clickable options. The objective is no longer interpretation, it is manipulation, because it's a game and you want to win (The Chief: "Keep that in mind: you don't understand a robot, for their patterns of thought — if you can call them that — are alien to us. Instead, you analyze, recognize and {i}exploit{/i} them.") Rather than having the whole of your mind to forms answers and questions about a work, you get the questions handed and given a range of options that might be your answers. They're never your answers, of course, they're the writer's. You can disagree with a book all the way through, but a game won't allow you to disagree with any of the options; you either have to pick one or leave the game altogether. That's the irony behind that very last line of Jones: the only option you have to pick from is one that says that you can't express your own thoughts in games. If you disagree with that option, that very fact is its proof right there!
There was harsher stuff in the original ending, which I cut. It included a quotation from Joseph Weizenbaum's 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason, which is about the ethics of delegating tasks that concern the human condition to AIs: "One would expect that large numbers of individuals, living in a society in which anonymous, hence irresponsible, forces formulate the large questions of the day and circumscribe the range of possible answers, would experience a kind of impotence and fall victim to a mindless rage. And surely we see that expectation fulfilled all around us, on university campuses and in factories, in homes and offices. Its manifestations are workers' sabotage of the products of their labor, unrest and aimlessness among students, street crime, escape into drug-induced dream worlds, and so on. Yet an alternative response is also very pervasive; as seen from one perspective, it appears to be resignation, but from another perspective it is what Erich Fromm long ago called "escape from freedom."" Weizenbaum goes on to compare the modern reliance on technology to formulate our questions and possible answers to Nazism. While I wouldn't quite like to go so far as to call people who play dating sims crypto-fascists, the very idea of a medium that encourages you to think in the author's thoughts rather than form your own interpretation is a bit scary to me.
Oh, right! I'm sorry, my familiarity with music goes to about the year 1800 and it's a fog after that
.
SundownKid wrote:I finished the true ending - here are my comments:
I thought it was quirky. I would say that my opinion of it is average - I think the romancing dialog was the best part (well, minus the bad-ends, which felt kinda cheap), while the tangents were a bit weak, though it did make me doubt whether she was a robot. Here are my criticisms of it, though:
1) The true ending basically insults your own story, in essence saying that it would be better off non-interactive (or that interactivity is a ruse). While this may be true, it cheapens the previous experience a lot. Obviously you're aware that games are not real life, but you still downloaded this visual novel. It's just too anvilicious a message.
2) The fact that Eve was created for Jones is canon, but the story never explains why, instead saying that everyone is fake, which also cheapens the experience. It would have been far better if there was an in-universe reason that reflected off of the player rather than speaking to the player outright.
Basically, it could have been an interesting plot twist, but the 4th wall breaking got in the way. Put some faith in the reader that they would "get it" rather than saying it outright. Once you break the fourth wall, all the tension built up in the plot is completely and utterly destroyed.
Hey, I really appreciate your honesty there!
You might be surprised to find out that the original ending I had written was much worse; the characters commented on how the fourth wall was broken and then I, personally, would give a little monologue with the moral of the story. It was a bit, just a bit, on the silly side.
You're absolutely right in that the ending insults the whole thing, though, to be honest, it isn't just supposed to be the ending that does that. It wasn't just a plot twist that was tacked on, but the very core idea that I wanted to demonstrate. Even before NaNoRenO started I toyed with
ideas about demonstrating how meaningless the whole decision system can be (see the reply to Obscura above for that). It isn't just that this story would be better if it were non-interactive, it's that I don't think game systems ought to be used in stories about love at all (or vice versa), because they can't simulate a thing like that.
Jones was an attempt to show how wrong a game view on love is by making the creepiness terribly explicit. Eve is a robot in game canon, but every game love interest works as robotically as she does. You don't love the other, you're not making an emotional connection, instead you are pursuing a goal and you're making decisions based on how best to reach that. That's how
every game works, just by the nature of games. Select from a range of options until someone declares his or her love to you. Every game that says it's about love is actually about manipulation; I think that that's a
perversion of the human condition. Of course, the intended effect of Jones relied on the idea that you found it all to be very discomfortable, hence the not-so-subtle sexist undertones ("Mankind will prevail over the gynoids!" etc.). The idea was computers as a metaphor for sexism as a metaphor for computers. It's not a game about the plot, or Jones, or robots, or sexism, but (to me at least) about how much I get creeped out by dating games.
As well as Weizenbaum, quoted in the response above to Obscura, this was inspired by the thought of Theodor Adorno, who wrote: "
The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness. The order that springs from it is never confronted with what it claims to be or with the real interests of human beings. Order, however, is not good in itself. It would be so only as a good order. The fact that the culture industry is oblivious to this and extols order in abstracto, bears witness to the impotence and untruth of the messages it conveys. While it claims to lead the perplexed, it deludes them with false conflicts which they are to exchange for their own. It solves conflicts for them only in appearance, in a way that they can hardly be solved in their real lives. (Culture Industry Reconsidered, 1963)" Which I think applies to games only all too well. Adorno hated the shallowness of popular music and wanted it to admit "really and truly to be what it is, without the ideological pretense of being something else." Similarly, perhaps, I think that games ought to admit that they, being rule based interactions, if-then statements, pure computer logic, cannot simulate the human condition and cannot do it justice, just as Eve, being a robot, can't. Better, then, not to try or it'll end up being a thoroughly distorted and creepy version of love.
As for the canon thing... Yeah, it's a bit problematic, because I ended up going for two ideas: the one outlined to you here, which is when the Chief and the Doctor turn out to be metaphors for game designers who don't know what love is and can't see the difference between it and manipulation; and the point I tried to explain to Obscura, that games are limited in their allowance of interpretation, which is when the fourth wall is broken. You may have noticed that I have read entirely too much philosophy in preparation for this game, and I think I wanted to put too much of my thought into too short a span of game time, which is why it required a far too lengthy forum post in elaboration :/ .
