Ratings and Reviews by Sam Kabo Ashwell

A school-project-feeling piece about an important topic; incomplete. At least in the early game, the writing has a tone of terse, bored diligence about it:

You step off the bus and are greeted with a sign: “Central Utah War Relocation Center.” There’s barbed wire everywhere, and a bunch of barracks. This is it. You’re now a prisoner in an internment camp.

However, once you get past the relatively weighty decisions during the war itself, the experience shifts somewhat; you develop a host of connections to family and friends that were never mentioned before, and the writing takes on a more descriptive (sometimes over-wordy) quality.

It occupies that uncomfortable space in between first-hand personal account and impersonal factual account. I found myself uncertain about lots of details of accuracy; I think it would have been stronger with inline quotes from primary sources, or at least a bibliography. The author suggests that they’re aiming to expand the work with (among other things) a parser-based section of the camps themselves, which may go some way to explaining why this section is so minimal.

A familiar tack of Twine advocacy pieces: take some problematic social issue, particularly as expressed through games, and make it grotesque and unsettling. In this case, it’s a satire/re-appropriation of beauty-oriented games targeted at young girls: beauty products are presented as uncanny magic, and have actually-transformational results with strange consequences. There is a judgy magic mirror.

Mechanically, it’s a Sorting Hat kind of game: your choices of beauty product determine which of several branches you find yourself going down, most of which are pure-choiceless. Although the results are weird and are at least informed by Twine’s strong taste for body-horror, they don’t get so visceral as to make the piece unsuitable for its ostensive audience; and the story progresses away from its beauty-myth opening into fantasy adventure that’s only tangentially related. The on-the-nose theme and long linear sections could easily have rendered the piece tedious, but it’s buoyed up by a pleasant Diana Wynne Jones-ish ordinariness-of-the-fantastic charm.

This does (almost) precisely what it says on the tin: it is a linkified version of a sex and gender-related subset of Johnson's dictionary, plus some marginalia-like notations representing the thoughts of a reader, which suggest other cross-references.

Poking around in dictionary-like things can be fun; Diana Wynne Jones’ Tough Guide to Fantasyland could probably be considered as a CYOA (if so, it’d be one of the better ones). There, however, a lot of the enjoyment is of the discovery kind. This is more of a twinebound (adj. used of any work of choice-based interactive fiction in which the player’s experience of constrained or denied agency is a central rhetorical point) piece, the dictionary looping back heavily on itself in circular definitions and elision, relying on cultural assumptions which it avoids explaining.

I enjoy digging through old books dealing with sexuality – one of my most prized books is W.J. Truitt’s Nature’s Secrets Revealed: Scientific Knowledge of the Laws of Sex Life and Heredity, a Christian eugenics health-manual published in Ohio in 1916. The fun, in that kind of thing, lies in discovery: you know in general the variety of awfulness that it’s going to express, but the pleasure lies in finding strange extended metaphors, over-the-top illustrations, turns of phrase, weird theoretical deviations from the expected script. The much more constrained forms of dictionary entries means that DWitD doesn’t really provide any of that. So, a neat idea, but not as interesting as that idea promised to be.