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Manlandia

by Rob Chateau

Utopian
2016

(based on 11 ratings)
3 reviews

About the Story

Manlandia is a utopian interactive fiction that describes an isolated society composed entirely of men, who reproduce via parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction). The result is an ideal social order: free of war, conflict, and domination – but the result is also a thrilling interactive story involving an aeroplane, a bold trio of explorers, daring encounters and escapes, and other amazing adventures.

Cover art image CC BY-SA 3.0 (C) Gert Germeraad 2011, Portret van een man005.jpg


Game Details


Awards

57th Place - 22nd Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2016)

Editorial Reviews

The Breakfast Review
I don't know if I can say anything about the writing. I don't know how much of it was straight adaptation of someone else's work. I will say that the rearrangement into Interactive Fiction seemed very well done, so much so that I was unsure, on my first playthrough, if the choices were real or if I was merely hitting a "next page" button.
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Member Reviews

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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
A multi-stage rocket of disappointments, November 8, 2016

When I read the blurb, I thought this was going to be either a screed by some red-pill-popping MRA or else something in the vein of Ethan of Athos.

When I read the story, I was disappointed that it wasn't remotely 'interactive fiction' unless we're including multi-part blog posts and ebooks in that now. It's just a story that you click to advance the pages. But as a story, I really liked it. It did a fantastic job capturing the voice of a early 20th-C adventure novel. Really authentic sounding!

When I found out that the reason it sounded like an adventure story from a century ago is that it was plagiarized in its entirely from an actual adventure story from a century ago, I was disappointed again. Disappointed because someone took someone else's work, Rule 63'ed it, and released it under their own name, and disappointed because a pitch-perfect '1916 adventure voice' is a lot less impressive coming from an actual 1916ian.

In short, it was...disappointing.

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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
Deliberate misrepresentation and plagiarism as art, October 26, 2016
by Owlor (Sweden)

The text of this game is copied wholesale from "Herland" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and it, by all accounts intentionally, does a poor job communicating this fact. There is a hint towards its origin, but it's not anything that could be called disclosure: you have to a) be well-versed in obscure concept art AND read between the lines to get it. All it really does is establish that yes, the author misrepresented their own game deliberately and they are prolly feeling very smug about it.

This is not something I can judge by the standards of fiction, interactive or otherwise. This is a ploy, if it's not deliberate trolling and all I can really do is inform people of this fact.

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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A gender-swapped static story implemented in Twine, May 10, 2017

(Warning: This review might contain spoilers. Click to show the full review.)There's not much to say about this game; it's just an old short story/novella, with all the genders swapped, and implemented in big linear chunks in Twine.

Why not just read the original book? Not much to see here.

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Manlandia on IFDB

Polls

The following polls include votes for Manlandia:

Games that are adaptations of conventional (not CYOA) books by ChrisM
I'm interested in games that are straightforward adaptations of conventional books (probably novels, but I'd be interested to know if there are any non-fiction book adaptations). The ones that I know of are The Famous Five and The...




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