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Harmless, February 16, 2011Well-polished low-difficulty puzzlers with little artistic ambition: that might well be the new "standard" for interactive fiction. Although they do little to move the medium forward, and don't exactly give you food for thought, such games are certainly pleasant. "Entertainment not frustration" is the guiding idea. And it's good entertainment. With only slight reservations I would say that the two highest ranking games from this years' IF Competition (Aotearoa and Rogue of the Multiverse) fall into this category.
The People's Glorious Revolutionary Text Adventure Game, which placed a very respectable 7th, certainly does. In this piece, a man called Karl has the task to start a communist revolution in a fictitious American city. You are provided with a list of revolutionary goals, which you can set out to achieve in any order. Each of them will require you to solve a puzzle, which is generally not very hard. If you do get stuck, there is an in-game hint system and a single-use device which allows you to bypass any puzzle in the game. In keeping with the tone of the story, the logic of the game slightly absurd; this is generally not a problem, but one or two puzzle solutions do not make a lot of sense. All in all, this is a game that even someone new to IF could successfully complete.
But let's get back to the tone of the game. It is very light-hearted, so light-hearted in fact that it has become lighter than air and now floats far above all real political problems. In this game, being a communist equals having a name like "Jetski" and feeling pride when you see the hammer-and-sickle; while being a capitalist means that you worship Reagan and believe that life is a book by Horatio Alger. Now you don't have to be serious about political issues: from at least the time of Aristophanes, authors have known that comedy is a great genre for taking on big problems. But The People's Glorious Revolutionary Text Adventure Game is not even satire. Its jokes have no bite. It is harmless.
There are so many ways in which interesting political commentary could have been inserted into this game! But the farthest the author goes is to make fun of one particularly unlikely the rags-to-richness story. Not even Glenn Beck would be offended by that. (Alger, Beck: this is the point where I want to be praised for my encyclopedic knowledge of US culture! :D Though perhaps I should have been spending my time with Faulkner or Melville or some other good stuff.) This is a missed opportunity. Because The People's Glorious Revolutionary Text Adventure Game mentions but does not engage serious issues, its shallowness becomes bothersome.
One could go as far as to argue that any work which reduces political disagreement to harmless humour is thereby strengthening the status quo -- in this case, neo-liberal capitalism -- and thus not harmless. But the extremely slight satire of capitalism that can be found in The People's Glorious Revolutionary Text Adventure Game is probably enough to counterbalance this. Even from this perspective, then, this game is completely harmless.
In conclusion: this game is a fun diversion. It is also nothing more.