External Links


Game archive (official website) *
Contains story file (version 6), cover art, feelies, sample transcript, and walkthrough.
Requires a Glulx interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links.
Game archive (IF Archive) *
Contains Release/DoctorM.gblorb
Contains story file (version 6), cover art, feelies, sample transcript, and walkthrough.
Requires a Glulx interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links.
README
Note from the author
Sample transcript
To view this file, you need an Acrobat Reader for your system.
Walkthrough and maps
by David Welbourn
* Compressed with ZIP. Free Unzip tools are available for most systems at www.info-zip.org.

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The Life (and Deaths) of Doctor M

by Michael D. Hilborn profile

Surreal
2011

Web Site

(based on 29 ratings)
2 reviews

About the Story

Your vision clears as you gently land in an endless landscape. There is the wind, a bleak and chill thing. And there is your sense of uncertainty: You don't know which way to go. Or, maybe, which way you went.


Game Details


Awards

6th Place overall; 3rd Place, Miss Congeniality Award - 17th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2011)

Nominee, Best Story; Winner, Best Individual Puzzle - 2011 XYZZY Awards

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Member Reviews

5 star:
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Number of Reviews: 2
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
A review-your-life-from-the-afterlife game about mercy deaths, February 3, 2016

Doctor M is perhaps most famous for being part of the 4-game 'hat puzzle' (involving 3 other games from the IFComp). However, it stands well on its own.

There is a subgenre of IF consisting of games where you reflect on a life through flashbacks, and have to decide if you did the right thing or not. Tapestry, Photograph, and Map are examples.

Doctor M takes this on with panache. You have to revisit the death of three victims of you, a mercy-killing doctor. You then can choose your interpretation of the events.

There are some mild puzzles, including hunt-the-scenery and read-the -descriptions-carefully puzzles. There is one or two problems requiring a leap of intuition.

The writing was good. I believe some people said they didn't like the heavy-handedness of the moral dilemma presented in the game, but it's what's needed for this type of work.

The game has a literal angel and devil, and has 3 endings.

I enjoyed this game. I recommend it for fans of the afterlife genre.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Love or hate your protagonist, there's a lot in here, January 27, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

LDDM was, strictly speaking, too long for IFComp. But I'm glad it was in there. It was immensely demanding and rewarding, and it gave me much more to think about than the average work that assures you it is Making You Think. It managed to both place high and win the Golden Banana. Sixth is the highest place for an IFComp Banana winner, though A Paradox Between World achieved a higher percentile in 2021, being #10 of 71, versus #6 of 39.

LDDM deals with the concept of assisted suicide. You, Doctor M, are a purveyor of it, to the famous and anonymous, to the rich and poor. But the question is: are you a good person or a bad one? Throughout LDDM, you see evidence for and against it. There are awful people you please and annoy and good people you please and annoy. People argue it's done for fame, and others argue it was not. Some of your patients seemed to give full consent, and some didn't, and in some cases it may not have been so humane. Then there is the mystery of your death. I felt like LDDM did a good job of keeping things neutral while still being exciting to play through. It reminded me of the one chapter in Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot where the narrator alternately blocked out events from Flaubert's life so as to make a work like Madame Bovary seem inevitable or impossible. Flaubert had all the privilege in the world, or he had all the bad luck. And, less universally, we've all had times where we felt we were obviously hard done by, but others assured us we weren't, or we've seen people balanced on the knife-edge.

So what must you, as the spirit of the recently deceased Dr. M., do? In a surreal afterlife, you need to look for closure in your own life. It's a long way off. You wind up revisiting the scene of your first euthanasia, your most famous one, and your last appointment. Along the way you meet an angel and devil. Each suggests you need to go with them. They're at a bar, and you need to fix the taps, so they each get a drink. Then there's a library, which amused me greatly--you've forgotten your own life, and in some cases, you need to look up information on people who died after you, because apparently you spent a lot of time sleeping in the afterlife. I wound up searching these people after climbing up and down a ladder to access their biographies, and the end result was a puddle of books on the floor.

This all feels like research, meaningful research, especially when paired with how you have to ask NPCs about all sorts of things, and while I hate full-blown amnesia games, the act of recovering your mortal past was quite fulfilling. I think this was also my first real exposure to abbreviated parser commands, where you could A (SUBJECT) instead of ASK ABOUT. As the years went by, I think I felt smarter and smarter that I'd figured it for myself. Oops!

When I finally visited my former patients, I actually messed up a few times. One has dementia, and I found the randomness of their response (you had to gain assent) favorably unsettling. I don't want to spoil the final one beyond saying it seems both tragic and logical, and once fame is part of the social calculus, it really sinks its teeth in and clouds moral clarity.

This isn't to say LDDM is a big long sermon. I love the surreal world it's in, with a door leading different places when unlocked with a different key. There are certain rules you find out in the afterlife, too. And there are swift dabs of humor, such as repeatedly ringing a bell to summon Death when Death's there. I love the denouements as a reward, too. It's not hard at all to figure the good, bad or neutral endings, which are effective. And in an odd way, it mirrors Cana According to Micah in that both can let you decide how good a person you feel you were.

LDDM is a long game, and I don't blame you if you pull out a walkthrough. When I replayed it, I went straight through and still slipped up, which led to some interesting sidelines. I can't even begin to discuss the morality of euthanasia, but I enjoyed the shades of grey this anything-but-grey game elicited, both when I played it in 2011 and now, when I revisited it. It was my favorite game I could vote on in IFComp 2011 (I tested Six) and I think its length may have turned some people off. But it gave a lot to think about, not just about life and death, but all those times you hoped you were doing things for the right reasons, or you wondered if someone else was, whether you liked or disliked them.

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