rendition

Play This Thing!
Quit This Thing
Rendition leverages the power of complicity, but not to any very effective end. I found it possible both to downplay the goal, since the piece never convinced me that there was anything important to gain by breaking Abdul, and to discount the methods, since the interaction didn't permit such tactics as conversation, persuasion, or alternative forms of espionage. I was free to QUIT, my moral disapproval unchallenged.
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SPAG
The implementation is pretty awful. While most body parts are present, the game gives no consideration to whether the action you are attempting actually makes sense with that part. Thus you can happily pull Abdul's eyes and twist his belly. But then, everything about this game is lazy, most of all the thought behind it. You are a psychopath, taking gleeful pleasure in your work. If you were hoping for a consideration of what it means to be a scared kid who joined the military to get money for college and is now thrown into a strange, hostile land where most of the people want to kill you, and how that situation might lead you into doing things that would be unthinkable back home, you won't find it here. If you were hoping to understand what could lead a man to hate so much in the name of religion that he is willing to strap dynamite to his chest and detonate himself in the midst of a crowd, this game won't help with that either.
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SPAG
Even as an experiment, then, Rendition must be judged a failure. Does that mean it is worthless? Not quite. There is one aspect of the game I have not yet commented on, its most interesting aspect, the one thing about this game that is truly worth remembering. If you have not seen it in action, I will inevitably spoil it for you (as Adam Thornton spoiled half of it, but only half of it, for me). On the other hand, it is so easy to miss that not reading my comments will very likely deprive you of the experience as well. [...] This is indeed a brilliant touch. Only by not being satisfied with the information supplied to you by the game, only by stepping outside of its boundaries and trying to find the truth yourself, are you able to discover something about Abdul and the character you are playing. This, at last, is a real point that the game is making, a point not only about our relation to the media and how they function in political situations, but a point also about our relation as readers to works of literature. [...] The paucity of meaning within Rendition turns out to be at least partly a result of the paucity of our attempts to understand.
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