Reviews by Andrew Schultz

Full disclosure: I tested The Vaults after IFComp was over, so I've been able to see a lot that wouldn't be accessible in two hours. I think I've worked well with the author, and he's been attentive about bug fixes--he even responded positively to a one-star review! I've enjoyed my time through it, and again. So this review will be a combination of my IFComp experiences and why it placed where it did, as well as a look forward, and things that are fixed if you want to check out The Vaults now. TLDR: there's a lot more player help and balance.

Within the two-hour judging limit (I think,) I got my keepers to level 2 in The Vaults. I saw basically what was going on: you have little three mini-ghost keepers, replete with hoods, who go about a terrain and fight adorably grouchy little knocker goblins. They're bluish and keel over and grimace further when they die, which is quite frequently. I even managed to gain my keepers armor and gauntlets. The armor cost one maximum hip point, which shows the author has put effort into balancing things in addition to, well, getting such a massive effort to work.

From a gaming perspective, I enjoyed The Vaults very much, but as a text adventure or perhaps freeware, it's wanting. It's in Unity and takes a while to load--longer than Cygnet Committee, Silicon and Cells or Mermaids of Ganymede. There are in-game purchases, which is just fine for a game that is going to Steam, but other people found it iffy. The ethical considerations here are tricky: you won't see all of the game in two hours, especially with all the special effects, but if you buy a pricey item, you can move forward quickly and thus be able to judge more! I think The Vaults unintentionally found a loophole that should be closed. I doubt this was through malice. The author probably saw, hey, there's a contest for unreleased games that starts just as my game is scheduled to release! So I think IFComp needs to re-evaluate its stance on in-game purchases. Competitors shouldn't feel pushed to make them in the name of fairness. This is far less black-and-white than releasing a game before comp start or actually charging, but I think now we've seen it, we need a future rule.

However, the main reason this game didn't work for IFComp is that it wasn't really text-based at the time. The big text gulps are before you go exploring, and then the screen times out before your next fight. It's possible to take a screenshot, but it shouldn't be. A few tutorial dialogues popped up but not enough to help you understand what was going on. Often text would disappear after some time out, or I'd just want to get through the splash-screen before the next fight and suddenly realized that text might be valuable! So having an information, umm, vault full of these screenshots would be nice. There are starting tutorials, but I wasn't in a position to really understand what they mean until you play a few fights. The game precluded you from doing certain things, too, such as attacking when attack power is zero and now I've gotten through it a bit, it's obvious to me, but not newer players. I almost gave up, and I maybe would've, too, if those poor cute knocker goblins hadn't shown terrible strategic reasoning by attacking me. I eventually decided to see what would happen if I just sat around and let them kill me, and at that point I realized what some of the numbers around the combatants meant.

All this is done much better now, though it's still light on text. Having said that, the graphics are good enough to figure what the red, blue, green and purple are for without text. I did it myself! Thankfully, you won't need to any more.

As it was, I assembled a deck by trial and error (it's now automated--your default cards go to a default deck), and I got bopped pretty badly as I pushed forward outside the first area. So I stuck with knocking around (ha!) the poor knockers goblins, deal with summons, and attack only when it's useful. I was overwhelmed by who did what at first, and again, there are helpful popup boxes now. The author's done a lot of this--allowed for more detailed graphics or animations, or just "hey! Here's the treasure from those twenty chests!"

The Vaults is an impressive piece of programming. I get a sense of strategy that interested me, even though I'm not big on card games. But I definitely wasn't in the right frame of mind for it, and given how I wound up grinding in the first area, the story was almost non-existent. It only unfolds with each new area and tougher monsters. That said, I did get to the end of the second map with a clear idea of what was going on. Even then, I hadn't explored duel mode or really used the Forge, which combines items (you get experience, and it costs gold) into more powerful ones. You also get to choose a specialization class later.

So The Vaults is a bit heavy on the technical effects, and thus it put itself at a severe disadvantage in a text-based contest such as IFComp. I feel like a goon playing gatekeeper and saying "IFComp isn't the right place for this game" because, after all, I did enjoy it. But all the same, given that the author has ambitions to put the game on Steam, I suspect the game's placing will be outweighed by the utility of any bugs judges find and report. I've learned a lot about the whole RPG creation process. And at any rate, it's really cool to be able to say I sincerely enjoyed my time testing both the first- and last-placed games in IFComp 2021, albeit for different reasons.

Recon has maybe the coolest stand-alone puzzle in the whole comp: the bookcases that clue you to a computer's password. It's a funny moment for me, and yet, it doesn't feel quite right in something with the plot of Recon--how you're a rebel leader who plans to meet up with his girlfriend at a bar in a dystopian Baltimore, but she is missing. Cue warnings that the police, or rather the restrictors under the control of a large conglomerate called Faro, know about the meeting followed by a chase through the city and up to an earthscraper, in order to find allies and information to see where and, eventually, why your mate disappeared. Along the way you-the-player also learn why you are so motivated to take down Faro.

There are plenty of ways to die, and quite frankly, they're interesting and fill in a part of the plot that playing through can't. There's a real choice between disguising yourself fully and getting a bionic arm. Each gives different puzzles, which feel a bit like the author showing off technical prowess, but they're also effective, and many give a sense that you need to hurry. While a torture scene felt a bit clumsy and was thankfully not explicit, there was certainly the expectation you had to abuse your captive just right, balancing threats and violence, which was a bit unpalatable but certainly created tension.

We don't get to see a whole lot of dystopian Baltimore, but there's certainly enough: checkpoints, smuggling and the like. The main reveal is inside a biological/cyborg-ish research facility. While it explained why your girlfriend X was missing, I really didn't grasp the whole story until I played through a few times and did some proofreading for the author. Meeting X, your girlfriend, felt a bit flat, too. People's reactions to traumatic and irreversible incidents don't feel right. But the thing is: there is, in fact, a happiest ending, with a surprise at the end if you survive. Check that: two surprise endings. One is about your pet/friend Blanco, and it always shows up. The other can be happy or sad.

And I think one thing originally off-putting about the game was that I shoehorned myself into final choice where neither really made me happy. It does have a save feature, but all the same, I thought this was The Ending. Some of this may be since things get lost in translation ("thanks for your time" after a dramatic ending is polite, but Recon is not a polite game) and the blurb and game mention too much about the "social and economic gap," which isn't the way to keep things fast-paced. Recon does better when it shows this, via a flare-up at a city border checkpoint. There might be a bit too much "Hey, here's where we go next" dialogue as well. And in some cases, the tries at quick "let's hurry" dialogue fell flat to me, like when you leave a tied-up captive behind. But we have pretty clear cases of betrayal among family and friends, and that's a good foundation for a story. And there are a lot of ways to die, which feels appropriate, given the high stakes and the dystopian feel I assume the author wants to give. These ways added color to the Baltimore the author envisioned, and so if some felt a bit out of the blue, I was glad for the detour (you get bumped back to the chapter's beginning) and the explanation that, yes, Faro's power is pretty stifling! The part where you contact another rebel leader, Olga, felt very good too. There's a third character that adds drama and tension.

I have to admit I wasn't clear on if Blanco, your companion, was an actual cat, or more like Red Dwarf's cat, or something in-between. I may have missed it. In fact, I did miss something critical about Blanco the first time through. But Blanco is a trusty sidekick in fights and makes for an interesting character I'd have liked to see more of. Perhaps Recon's too-puzzly puzzles made me miss out on a few details, or perhaps I was tired when I played it. I needed a re-read to understand things, but on the other hand, it was fast-paced enough that it was no problem, and if you enjoyed either disguising yourself or accepting a bionic arm, you have a ready-made path through with the other option. So that should work out well.

Every year in IFComp there are a couple games with great ambition and obvious promise that have techincal errors, so things never shine through. Unfortunate is such a game this year. Without the bugs, it would be neat and bold, but with them, unfortunately, there's an additional puzzle of working out the right order to do things in so the story isn't dead-ended. With more testing it could've been quite interesting, and I'd have been more eager to try different endings. It's sad the author wasn't able to find testers.

In Unfortunate, you're at a party with 7 other people you give fortunes to. Once you do, things start happening. Someone drops a salsa jar. People make romantic plays for each other. There's almost a breakup. Then things wind down with a short timed puzzle at the end. Sadly, this timed puzzle can be started at the beginning, which hosed the causality for everything else. But as Unfortunate isn't very long, it's not bad to restart and try again and make sure that people don't disappear before they have their resolution. As things turned out, I was exploring and experimenting so much that I forgot to do a few simple nice things for people. The party bombed, and all my predictions (I spammed 1's, which seemed the most dire) came true. I scored 7 of 7 points! So I both totally won and totally didn't. This charmed me. Unforunate had several different ways through, clearly.

I admit, though, I had to decompile the game to see some of the text. As-is, the game offers helpful advice for compass-direction exits but doesn't mention two places where you need to go IN. So this threw me off one trail. Then I found a record in a closet and played it, but it was meant to bring two people back together--two that had disappeared. However, once I knew what scenery was relevant, things made sense. There are a lot of details that are well-observed but may not work well for parser fiction, or they might even be better with twine, e.g. you could highlight important items or closets with a link. Some nooks are important and some, like the shower in the bathroom, aren't. There's a lot of meaningful care given to certain details, which leads me to believe the author didn't know quite what to look for or where to ask for guidance, and they did the best they could, and that's not a backhanded compliment. But it's not enough to make Unfortunate playable without serious aid.

You see, there are games where I shrug and say "oh I guess they wanted to do that, that makes sense" and others where I'm genuinely disappointed for the author they didn't make things smooth enough, yet. And this falls in the second category. I obviously stumbled on an odd way to do things, going out of order because I just poked around to make a map, and I finally got my bearings in the bedroom, which was meant for later in the game. But Murphy's Law is cruel that way.

There's a thread on the intfiction.org forums of what order you need to do stuff in so Unfortunate doesn't go belly-up. It's worthwhile. And most of what you need to do is something that feels natural--but there are so many things, you may wind up forgetting something, leaving you with nothing to do. Unfortunate could use an update then, even post-comp, and I'm sad the author may've looked at the placing and decided this sort of thing wasn't for them. But if you have the patience to tiptoe around a few game-breaking bugs or learn from where others fell, there's a good experience to be had.

I imagine a lot of us have heard of Cliff's Notes, those dreary little pamphlets that helpfully summarize plays and novels and poems assigned in English class. They seem to give you a good idea of what's going on in a tough piece of literature without any risk of actually feeling immersed.

"Don't read the Cliff's Notes! You're only ripping yourself off! Teachers will know if you do!" was the adults' battle cry. Oh, plagiarism was bad too. And yes, plagiarism is still bad, but these warnings didn't really teach us how to balance legitimate learning you can't do on your own with our own thoughts, and I think a sadly high percentage of kids knew what the teachers wanted. Stuff that would show the teachers they thought for themselves, because it worked last year for other students they knew.

But I wanted more. I wanted something that would illuminate. It felt greedy. I remember playing some not very good Narnia choice-games on the Apple. Some had minimal dice-rolling. One had an action game at the end that actually required effort to lose. I recognized, even at a young age, what a money-grab it was, but I still wanted more, and later when I found the Asimov archive, I still played the Narnia game I'd missed.

And we have them now. Some are interactive, but some aren't. I remember finding an Internet comic that summarized Ulysses. Obviously, it missed a few finer points, but it helped a lot. I needed the help.

And I think works like AKACF do that, and well. I've read Gawain and the Green Knight--Tolkien's version, at least--but it was so long ago I forgot most of it. And part of me felt uneasy that he was a bit too much of a Good Guy. AKACF gives him the option to behave poorly, replete with nagging noblemen and ladies who tempt him to. It doesn't drag on, but certainly it gives me a feel for the "why not just give in and get on with it" that we sometimes feel before making a bad choice, and yes, that is part of morality. Curiosity for the wrong things is universal, as is saying "Oh, I know what I'm supposed to do, but it seems so boring," and how do we resist that? Yet, even if you act terribly, Gawain never comes off too badly. That'd be too much authorial interpretation. However, when he strays from the path, different things happen than in the original poem, and I think the branches are both fair and interesting. The author is still pretty much faithful to what would've happened, but just asks "what if Gawain gives in a little?"

As for the story: a mysterious green knight appears on Christmas day. He tells King Arthur, hey, cut my head off, but Arthur can't bring himself to. Gawain offers to and does. The price is: within a year and a day, Gawain must find the knight and accept a similar blow. He has no clue where to look. But with time running out, he manages to find a castle where the lord takes him in. The lord's wife attempts to seduce Gawain, and here I'll draw a spoiler veil to mention the choice between behaving better or worse than Gawain is pretty clear. You can even utterly ignore the lady of the castle. The lord knows where the Green Knight is, and yes, Gawain finds him and faces his fate.

Being able to do walk through Gawain's choices leaves me with much more of a feeling than "good guys gonna good-guy," so it was a success on that alone. I largely glossed over the bits that the author put in a content warning for. That's my style in general. At least, the first time. But once I'd gotten through, I appreciated being able to look through things by chapter, again, and even change the critical choices you made in, say, chapter 5 before trying chapter 6. It's nice to be able to lawnmower alternate story lines or pick them off a la carte, and while AKACF is worth re-reading, I'm glad it's very not-thirsty about it all. I've left so many games I meant to look at again because the effort to start up would be too much. While it's obviously nontrivial to draw this up as an author, it gives accessibility without ruining any surprises, so I encourage it. Here, you will probably want to tweak how well Gawain behaves without having to re-pay your dues.

I really wish I'd had this sort of thing for tougher literary works when I was a kid, and I hope other people follow the author's example and make something interactive like this. While gutenberg.org is all well and good for the latest classical work I want to read but never got around to, it seems like there's a lot of fertile ground for other works. In addition, ChoiceScript seems well-suited to changing these options--this is dryly stated, but in a nutshell, this is what happens. And it sounds trivial to write until you sit down and do it and have familiarity with the source text. Still, providing these what-if options seems like an achievable goal for many potentially tricky classical works, and I hope to see more works interpreted in this way, whether for IFComp or general consumption.

wtr establishes the whole oppression angle early on: you start as one of four sisters in a decrepit apartment, one you're not encouraged to leave, even though your Momma doesn't seem to be anywhere around. And once you leave, you're in a gated community anyway. A decrepit one: dogs in the street, lack of food, and so forth. So the mystery is: what are you doing here? And, of course, can you get out? Well, there's a hunger puzzle to begin, and if you strictly explore and map things out, you'll die of hunger. But fortunately it's not hard to find food that'll sustain you for a while, before you find food that works indefinitely. This "find something good then something better" contrasts with the general tone, where you'll find something bad and, yes, it's even worse.

Exploring your enclosed town, you find clues of what life is like, with a schoolhouse, a pavilion, and many reminders of What Happens to Sinners. In particular, nosing around places that'd be off-limits with adults around give you painful memories, where the screen turns red, if you search enough. It becomes clear what your life situation is like, and the only big question is if this is a full dystopia or this community is unique. Of course, this is one you-the-character don't want to think of right away.

As you explore the town, you learn about the Prophet Hunter and his influence on the community. He said everyone would be taken to heaven and, well, they sort of were. You find the key to his house, which is better stocked than his followers'. You find a way past rabid dogs. There's also a woman whom you feel guilty gazing at, and it introduces a strain of legitimate supernatural interference if you keep annoying her. This made wtr more than just a smackdown of cults because none of this could happen--some of it, it wtr's world, could.

The game's feel is parser-like even though it's in twine. You have compass directions, and you'll see text on the left edge if there's a path west, and so forth, which makes a map easy to visualize, and it also gives a perception of distance. You have to move the mouse a good deal to actually go west. The occasional item use similarly just needs clicks, though it's kept in the center, and with all wtr threw at me, I was grateful not to have verb- or noun-guessing to wrestle with as well. I found the background color changes are quite effective as well. There's green for the farm area, purple for the Prophet Hunter's house, and different colors for the streets. I don't think detailed graphics would work well here because the main character has been sheltered and thus pays attention to little beyond their own survival. I suspect even the ASCII map of the town you find early in the game clues you in to how backwards this commune is. The map by itself is pleasing, but then you have to ask, who would've created it, and why? While a time frame isn't given in the game, I can't picture any era where normal society would go with an ASCII map instead of something more graphical. Here it feels like the time I visited the DPRK government website and noticed a link to forms in Esperanto--not the nice or useful touch the creator (in-game, not the author) thinks it is!

While you can die of starvation or of sacrilege, the game's true ending is--well, a success, of sorts. There's a big gate. You need to go through it, for salvation, of a sort. The tool(s) you use for this relative freedom are, ironically, symbols of strength and unity, but in this case, they're just one more thing that makes it hard for people to pull away.

wtr also offers seven different places to find memories that break open that much more of how cult life really is. The walkthrough mentions them and avoids saying where they are, and I like this procedure, because I know I can have everything spoiled if I'm not too careful. And if you manage to escape without the memories, perhaps you're like the main character, just doing what you need to survive. There's some learned helplessness at work here for the player: you don't want to search for local flavor when looking for endless food, but once you find it, you forget about looking around until you've escaped and can't and don't want to go back. So this surviving vs actually noticing details really struck me once I looked back. How I could've been more observant, but I just wanted to get out. And going through again reminded me of times I'd replayed bad episodes in my life, looking for that memory of cruelty that would clinch things. Sometimes I found it and realized it wasn't necessary, but it was comforting.

This quick effort provides a few moral dilemmas a doctor faces but doesn't explore them as much as I had hoped, given the strong good introduction. You're a doctor in some sort of war-zone. You have a choice of how much to treat your current patient. Treat them properly, and you have no resources for the next patient. Don't treat them, and maybe you can treat more. But will it be satisfactory? The patient seems grateful either way.

The next day, the warlord responsible for the huge conflict comes in, with his posse. He's close to critical. You have the choice to treat him or not (he says he understands, since you're helping the rebels, and nobody will harm you even if he dies.) Either choice you make, he comes back later, offering you a position where you have more resources and can treat more people better. The dilemma, of course, is whether healing soldiers aligned with an oppressive system will, in fact, do more damage.

The themes are treated a bit lightly, as I see it. I don't know if I buy that the soldiers you treat aren't wounded quite as badly if you help the big boss. It reminds me of the flip side of Saki's The Storyteller where the kids say "but wouldn't people have helped her even if she weren't bad?" Perhaps the boss orders less flesh-cutting bullets, or even fewer head shots, but even so that doesn't stop the war. It feels a bit like bullies backing off when security guards are watching.

Without more details, it's impossible for the reader to divine the boss's intent fully, but on the other hand, you've been helping for a long while, according to the story. So you should know something about what the boss does, how he does it, and maybe even how much fault people on your side have for the whole mess.

So trying for a fable- or thought-experiment-like effect ("help 5 mean people or 4 nice ones?") really doesn't quite work for me, here. It feels like there should have been more, and I expected it, from the first interactions with the patient. But it felt like maybe the author ran up against a time deadline and wanted to send in something complete. And it is, but it feels a bit workmanlike after the first patient.

After-Words is the sort of sharply designed and presented game that takes a while to get used to. It's almost too slick to adjust to at once. I was clueless how to do that first thing, but then, everything clicked. There's a tidy map with lock icons by passages you need to open. There are two buttons on the main page: look and interact. You build an inventory and use it on people or items you find--dry goods stuff, perhaps, but not dry writing. And the writing is largely in two-word phrases. And it all works.

Because the wordlessness is part of the quest: you, the Resolver, need to bring words back to Skycity, where there's plenty of activity but little spoken. What words there are create a vivid world. There are all sorts of flies, as well as other surreal things like gunflowers (they are rusty and need oil to defend the city properly, and once they do, security stops blocking you from going elsewhere) or robogulls or hammerspiders, or glowdoves who give you eggs you need to hatch. This all sounds like it could be a mess I had to use a bit of trial and error, but the cool thing was: there weren't a ton of errors to make! And After-Words tersely lets you know when you can't use something. "USE ELSEWHERE." Though some items, like a hammer, give amusing variants (VIOLENCE UNNECESSARY) or location-based text (I was almost sad to give the prismheart up!)

The map itself is nifty, with arrows protruding from your current location. You can click on them to get around or hover over a location to see its name, though most of the time, the location's icon should remind you what it is. This is a big help once you've explored the whole city and have a lot to remember, and all the locks that indicate a temporarily blocked passage have fallen away. Since there is some fetching to do, I was mildly disappointed I couldn't click on the location and move there, or maybe use arrows to get around and L/I for LOOK and INTERACT, because there were so many other conveniences. But it was pretty slick, all told. And I appreciated the "hint" command at the top that told you where to go next. I used it a few times the first time through, but revisiting it for this review, I remembered bits and pieces of the logic and was able to piece things together. My main problem was forgetting to INTERACT fully after solving a quest or helping someone. They'd often offer you an item, but it wouldn't go right in your inventory.

You don't need many words to figure what to do in the big picture. There are three gates near corners of the city that need Big Items (Moon, Blood and Summer,) and they're in the corner, behind a few locked doors, of course.

The only problem I had was that once After-Words got clicking, it was pretty much over. I was almost sad to see my exploits had cost the city its brief charm! But maybe there'll be a sequel. I think I really appreciated the lack of forced logic or received wisdom in the puzzles, though, because on my second play-through, I only had a vague idea of what was where. This felt about right. I enjoyed winning a trophy at the football stadium, counting fractalseeds to acquire another prize, recharging a judge with the right battery, and helping dancers down from being too happy (the relaxed discoball on doing so made me laugh, too.) It's a good-enough sized game at six-by-six, but not so much that too many possible alternative uses for an item pop up and frustrate you.

An aside about myself: the 2015 game The Problems Compound suffered, according to one tester, from AGI-itis, where you "just take one item and use it on someone else, and so forth." While I'm proud of what I wrote, I was glad to see a different strain of AGI-ish game pop up and be done so effectively. It sort of justifies my decisions to make such a "USE X ON Y" game. But I see the clear and obvious appeal of a game like After-Words. It was the sort of thing I was aiming for, and if you aren't doing anything tricky with the parser, I think it works better in a graphical interface than a textual one.

I got a bit confused by this one, and from other reviews, it seems like I'm not the only person. A very promising premise fizzles out quickly. While staying young's been done in Brave New World, and I remember a short story by Martin Amis where homosexuality became the norm and reproduction was an arduous process, The Daughter combines these concepts and throws immortality on top. Not only that, everyone's been immortal for a while, and there's no age when people grow old and die, to be replaced by others. This brings up a lot of different, interesting issues. For instance, nobody remembers how to bring a child up.

So how do people react to stuff that's totally new to them, but we take it for granted? This applies to both the issues of murder and the childbirth. I suppose someone had to see a child some time, but it was 2500 years ago, and immortality without infinite memory means you forget a lot. And won't the world get overcrowded if nobody dies?

But The Daughter never really explores these issues. The main incident also seemed a bit foggy and didn't have the emotional impact it should have, too. Why did it happen? I have my guesses, but it's unresolved. There are parts which could be very funny indeed even if they don't fit the tone established e.g. "There seems to be a weird obsession on true crime stories in pre-immortal society." This sort of thing seems to reinforce that, even though English is not the writer's first language ("hot 30 year olds" seems unintentional, though,) they have an eye for the important, but maybe they just got a bit glib here or rushed it. But when the story describes everyone as looking like "hot 30 year olds," I expect the translation may be off-base.

And The ending seemed abrupt. I read back to see why it should be. I didn't get the significance of the hotel--was the main character accepting his own mortality?

I checked off with other reviews on this, because it felt like it should have been more than it was. Joey Acrimonious's review in particular articulated some concerns I had. It feels like the author had a relatively strong vision and the ability to get it across, but they didn't. I'd be interested to hear more from the author, because despite my criticisms, this doesn't feel close to a total throwaway. Just be prepared to be let down by a sudden end.

I was glad I wasn't the only person worried this was a troll entry along the lines of the "clever people" who write "gender: attack helicopter" in their twitter profiles (thanks to PopeHat for this specific examples) and I'm also glad it's clearly not. I suppose to a certain extent, categorizing gender is tricky. It shouldn't be black and white. Yet making an involved taxonomy for its own sake is just exhausting all at once. Yet at the same time, people who criticize it the loudest have no problem discussing the difference between Alpha, Beta, Omega and Sigma males.

Abstractly, the game tracks your gender. It starts with boy or girl. Then it asks eagle or fish. Then a pebble or sun. Then a bit of a false choice before the final one, with an explanation. This all feels pretty simple. There's no overboard mysticism, and I appreciate MGiaF giving me a new way to think instead of telling me to.

I also think MGiaF shows a certain evolution from some of the more confrontational earlier twines that just flat out tell you you're not considering gender hard enough, you privileged cis white male, you. I mean, this is just heckling as opposed to outright abuse by cis white males, but if we're trying to make art, let's make it accessible even to those who might not be our target audience. And I appreciate feeling included, as someone who's heard I didn't try to be masculine enough, or why the hell was I trying to be macho, I wasn't fooling anyone.

I wanted a new way to look at things. MGiaF provided that. It's not the only way, but it helps reaffirm wishes I had long ago. Wishes that people who classified me as Not Masculine Enough (but don't try being as masculine as us!) would just clam up, or that there was indeed a third way, and there was far more to seeing yourself than being ranked by masculinity or desirability.

And it also provides a good contrast to the usual dialogue we hear in general. One particularly bad passage from a Reality TV show sticks in my head. I was only watching it because it was on the screens at my local athletic club. A bunch of guys were competing for one woman (the very worst kind of Reality TV, because shocker of shocker, relationships built on competition and the excitement of the chase don't last,) and the narrator asked "can the sensitive guys do man's man things like get a high score at the rifle shooting range?" Maybe this wasn't exact, but it was bad enough and obviously a very shallow exploration of our roles and who we are. We obviously can do better, and that MGiaF did so much better in under 15 minutes pleases me greatly. I can't speak precisely to how good the symbolism is, but it seems to me that we respect (or find wonderfully mystifying) the concept of spirit animals or objects or even corny tattoos in languages we can't speak, and it shouldn't be something to make people ooh and ahh, but something we can internalize and share as we wish. And MGiaF having nothing too exotic helped it feel accessible to me.

So I walked away wishing there was more but not feeling there had to be, despite my earlier-mentioned aversion to taxonomy. The old saw about how there are 2 times to walk away, too early and too late, apply here, and MGiaF walked away well before drowning you in pointless possibilities. I've certainly had that feeling of "I think I'm X, wait, no, that doesn't fit, more like Y" and so forth, and realizing that no labels fit, but reasonable ones helped me find who I was. And I appreciate having that experience sped up with little to no risk.

I can't offer any detailed literary analysis. This is out of my realm in many ways. There's a nonzero (but low) chance MGiaF is just random mysticism or parts are way off-base and I glossed over them and it successfully BSed me. But in that very unlikely case, I got a lot out of it. It left me writing and remembering a good chunk for something that took 15 minutes to get through. And I have a feeling I missed something, too, but these are blanks I'll fill in later.

Smart Theory is a great title, from my view. I guessed what the game was about, and I was right. It's very slippery. You see, if you're an advocate of Smart Theory, you get to show how smart you are, but you don't actually have to put it into practice. And if you're wrong, well, it's a theory and You Can Evolve. Of course, the antagonist in this game, Paul Bother, who invented Smart Theory, doesn't state things so directly. He strongly invites you to his lecture on Smart Theory, and you have no way to wiggle out (smart of him to know all the angles, eh?) You find Smart Theory is simple and accessible and has also changed people's lives. Everything about it works, and if it doesn't work for you, well, you don't understand it well enough.

This seems very much like a cult but also of times people just needed to hear themselves talk and I was a convenient alibi. I wanted to tell them they were full of nonsense but just couldn't. Sometimes they rattled on for a half-hour, which was longer than I spent with Smart Theory, both when I tried to reject Paul Bother's "philosophy" completely and accept it.

Now this isn't the first game to railroad you and try to do so amusingly, but I think it's quite effective, and I'm glad it's only 15 minutes, because too much would be too heavy for me. The author probably knew this, too. Paul Bother, to me, is every sort of person who informs you how lucky you are they are sharing their opinion at, I mean with, you. When he gets up there to make that lecture, he gives you a lot of things to think about but, of course, no time to. It's impossible to leave. And of course you get the inevitable "How was it?" question at the end. There are no right answers. Fortunately, unlike Paul Bother, the game (via Paul) exhorts you to think about what he said, and then it actually leaves you to think about what he said.

ST certainly pulls the usual psychological tricks to keep someone roped into a conversation. It pulls a lot of psychological tricks on the protagonist that can hurt in real life. You have the sense no matter what you do, Paul Bother will show you why you just weren't being very smart. Around Paul, you need to kiss up, but you also need to expect to be ignored. More advanced Smart Theorists will understand. At some points the game lampshades Paul's "rules for thee but not for me" approach. He is more advanced than you, you see, and his secrets are worth $10000 because, well, they just are. Paul's a philanthropist with stuff everyone should know, but only the people willing to make a commitment deserve to know the good stuff. He knows how to shift from soft repression to hard repression of actual ideas. And sadly, learning these tricks from someone like Paul would, indeed, be worth $10000 or more to some people.

All these thoughts are serious, but ST never got too serious. I see a lot of self-important humbugs from my past in Paul. Some had good concrete information and some didn't. But in either case, their personalities overshadowed any good advice. All needed to be looked up to, or fawned on in different ways, but nothing too obvious. They gave me a sort of ceiling I felt I couldn't break through, and if I wasn't able to overwhelm them with praise, I did look back feeling guilty I didn't praise them enough.

So I was quite happy to see this sort of polemicism dealt with. It didn't need anything deep. I've long had an axe to grind with "if you believe it, you can achieve it" motivational speakers (note: there's a place for developing your intuition and faith, but it's not with the Paul Bothers of the world). And people who need to tell you how smart they are (or common-sensical, because all YOUR book knowledge, well,i it's not practical.) It certainly brought back memories of very awful conversations with very overbearing and self-assured people, both smarter than me or not. Ones where no matter how much I contributed, I was sure I was doing it wrong, even if someone said "chime in if you want to."

So I think Smart Theory captures the basics of Internet arguing and grandstanding quite well. I know I spent years wondering why I didn't fully agree with people who I should agree with. This seems teleological, but over the years, I've realized there are attention-grabbing tricks and methods, or even just flat out assuming people would rather hear you than listen to your own thoughts. Confidence and taking constant steps towards your goals ... works. We need to develop that, despite our fears. And we need to trap ourselves into taking action, too. We need people to push us with Morton's-Fork style arguments. But doing it the wrong way can make you into a Paul Bother type. Some people actually want that. And, of course, bad people can use all these skills to seem like they have something to offer.

So I'm glad I was exposed to Smart Theory in a context that showed it was nonsense. Perhaps sometimes it's occasionally too on-the-nose, that's okay. What was on the nose for me was probably an insight for others, and vice versa.

And yet in a way, maybe ST fooled me. I suppose it told me what I already knew, and I agreed with it, and I was intrigued to learn more. Or I saw what I wanted to, for better or for worse. Which left me worried how weighty the game actually was. But one thing's for sure: I enjoyed seeing Paul Button flipping from "just listen" to "you said you'd give me a chance but you didn't REALLY" all too quickly.

Other people saw something different. Perhaps we all see what we want, or what we expect, in ST's generalities. After further reflection, I'm inclined to believe it was meant to be ambiguous. And I think clearly it's not the sort of thing you say "ALL THE FEELS" or "SO MUCH YES" to. But if you're in the right mood, it will help you deal positively with the next person who "just wants a bit of your time" about "something you need to know." Maybe it will pinpoint something from your past to bury. For a fifteen-minute investment, that's worth it.