Fascism - Off Topic

You might expect a game about fascism to be angry and confrontational about why fascism is bad. This one is more indirect than that. I'm not even sure I ultimately got the point.

The title is certainly a reference to the Fascism - Off Topic thread that was created on intfiction.org in relation to the itch.io and Steam adult content bans, and the growing trend of internet censorship in the West. I caught that reference (and funnily enough, there's a movie poster featuring fictionalized versions of intfiction users that you can examine), but still felt too stupid to understand the game completely.

The game takes place in what seems to be a fascist US, in a subway in NYC. There are hints at a fascist takeover: the rundown subway, the ominous detail that there are "only a few people left riding".

The protagonist, from the x self response, seems to be onboard with the fascists: "Normal, unlike the clowns still left in this car. You know what I mean: white, male, patriotic." (Unless that was supposed to be irony, and I missed it, but the use of "clowns" feels too derogatory to be ironic. Or maybe that description is supposed to be from the narrator's perspective, and the protagonist is separate from the narrator, but the narrator seems to be an impartial spectator on every other occasion, so I doubt it.)

But the protagonist also has the option of interjecting in an argument between a couple on the subway to talk about how fascism works, indirectly accusing either the man or woman of fascism. The woman has cheated on the man; the man is confronting her not about that but about an Instagram post she made. Both are paranoid and controlling of the other. We don't know the content of the post, or the couple's political views.

If you interject (Spoiler - click to show)in a way that accuses the man, as I initially did, he fumes and asks "Is that what I am now? A fucking fascist?" This is the true ending; if you interject at other times, your interjection about fascism is off-topic and the two react with confusion or disdain. For me, the whole situation was ambiguous and hard to read. Possibly the entire game is a shaggy dog joke based on the title: (Spoiler - click to show)when I got the true ending, it told me "You made fascism on-topic. You lost!"

(Note: The version of the game I first played had the "true ending" notice appear for the wrong ending, while the actual, author-intended true ending was labeled a false ending. This contributed to my confusion, but it has now been fixed. I changed the above paragraph to reflect the fix.)

My major point of confusion: I'm not sure if the fascist protagonist is the right kind of person to talk about the evils of fascism to random people on the subway. I can't imagine the kind of person who would describe himself as "Normal, unlike the clowns still left in this car... white, male, patriotic", and then read a news article about fascism and tell two strangers on the subway that "the enemy ain't anyone. The enemy is uncertainty. Uncertainty and fear, that's fascism." (I'd sooner expect this kind of person to explain how leftists/islamists/illegal immigrants/etc are the enemy.) Maybe I'm missing the life experience required to comprehend this type of person. Is it supposed to be irony that the protagonist has read a news article about fascism and can spout eloquent talking points about it but can't comprehend that he currently lives under it? Is the point of the game that his words are empty and meaningless because he (presumably) supports the fascist government?

Another message of the game could be how life continues on as normal, no matter how awful the government becomes. The other people on the subway are browsing their phones or trying to get to Central Park, ignoring the argument, completely caught up in their own worlds. It speaks to the ability of humans to remain oblivious to what's going on around them, as long as their own lives can continue on unimpeded. No one can be bothered to get involved in strangers' problems. I did this the first time, too, hesitating to intervene until the man had left the subway car and the game informed me it was too late. --- But then, considering the lackluster response if you do intervene, and the protagonist's character in the first place, is intervention really a good thing? In this case, all you're really doing is getting involved in an argument between strangers. Are you actually helping people?

There's an element of helplessness in this game world, a world where awful things are happening far away and you can't see or prevent them. You can only deliver your off-topic monologue to strangers who are just as helpless as you. "maybe a bit something like... our own world currently, to be extremely heavy-handed about it."

No "fascism is bad" or "we must stop fascism"; just "fascism is off-topic".

I remember the Fascism: Off Topic intfiction thread from earlier this year and I had heard about this game cooking up for a long time so I somehow imagined that it would be a twine game with a fake model of intficiton where you participate in a thread but you have to argue with increasingly irrational people. I had such a strong imagination of what I thought this game was that I thought it was real.

Instead, I was shocked to open it and find a well-implemented (well, that part wasn't surprising) parser game set in a grungy subway with graffiti on the wall and an arguing couple. Where was the thread? What was the reference?

Playing around and examining things, seeing some well-written descriptions, I tried talking to people, and that's when I discovered the mechanic:

You can talk, but if you do, the game ends. You only have one thing to say, a one-note parrot's catchphrase. It might be relevant to the current conversation; it might not. It doesn't matter.

It reminds me of the Introcomp game Gallery Gal, where you have the superpower to turn into an art gallery, but only once, and permanently. You go through a normal game and choose to end it whenever you want to, crushing all those around you as you assume your true art gallery form.

Similarly, you can at any time interrupt the conversation of those around you with your irrelevant comment.

Because of my pre-conceived notions, it's taking me a bit to suss out the message. I had imagined (in my fake mental version) that the game was originally pro-discussion of fascism, and that we would be playing the role of someone who was pointing out the rise of nationalism in the world and that others would poo-poo our notions and shut us down. This game seems to be the opposite, where it paints out the discussion of fascism as an obnoxious interruption to others' conversation.

Whatever the true meaning of the game, it's well-put-together. My apologies to the author for fabricating a fake game from whole cloth and spending half of my review discussing it, and thanks for entering!

One of the vanishingly few advantages of the current political environment in the US is that it’s largely put to bed the tedious “is MAGA really fascism, or just sparkling authoritarianism?” debates. Scan the headlines – or hell, go outside, I live in LA and used to live in DC – and it’s clear that fascism is the air that we breathe, the water in which we swim. It’s everywhere around us, it’s totalizing in its ambition to reduce all of society to the coddled in-group, licensed to glut on violence and graft to try in vain to satisfy their sociopathy and daddy issues, and the abject out-group, stripped of rights and property and dignity. Fascism, sad to say, is pretty much always on-topic these days.

Except, famously, for that recent forum topic spun off a thread on the itch.io de-indexing of NSFW content, after some sea-lioning led to one more of those “but are they really fascists?” conversations I thought we were well quit of. Yes, pity the poor player coming to this one fresh, Fascism – Off-Topic is a forum in-joke come to life. But come back! It’s actually pretty fun!

Well, fun is maybe not le mot juste for a game that sticks you in a moving subway car opposite a couple having a yeah-they’re-definitely-breaking-up-after-this argument. Around this central conflict is arranged a well-realized suite of furniture, both plastic and human – there are some tourists, a guy playing chess on his phone, a lady listening to loud music on her headphones, but they’re all minding their own business, or at least pretending to do so while eavesdropping on the fight, just like you are. This is a parser game, so you’re free to check out the surroundings as things between the couple escalate, but since you’re in a subway car there’s no place you can go, and nothing you can do.

Well, actually, there’s one thing you can do. You see, you’ve just read an article about fascism (note the singular there), and you’re raring to share your opinions about it (well, again, it’s more like an opinion). As a result, my heart sank when I saw the response to X ME: “Normal, unlike the clowns still left in this car. You know what I mean: white, male, patriotic.” In fairness, I also more or less meet that description, and the protagonist’s thoughts about fascism are a bit in the weeds but not that bad, thankfully, but waiting to see what he’ll say adds an additional layer of anticipatory squirming as you watch the blowout escalate.

Once you intuit the command to talk about fascism, you can do so at any time – but the game’s central, nay only, mechanic is that most of the time, this comes off as a non-sequitur. So your challenge, if you are a bad enough dude to accept it, is to pick your moment so that you can make fascism on-topic. It’s a cleverer conceit than an in-joke game needs, as it forces the player to think about the ways that this couple are berating each other might mirror the larger patterns of abuse fascists inflict on subject populations. That’s of course a big, depressing topic, and this is a small, mostly-funny game, so I wouldn’t say the insight is life-changingly trenchant or anything. But it does get at some intersections of politics, gender, and control that are worth slowing down and examining.

I wouldn’t want to give the impression that Fascism – Off Topic is super serious, though. While the argument is downer, the rest of the cast are engaging in funny little bits of ambient business to lighten the mood, none more so than the unobtrusive old guy who (Spoiler - click to show)surreptitiously eats a raw onion – I completely lost it when, upon finishing, he pulled out a second . And it’s not just this patter that indicates a solid level of polish; the implementation is generally quite strong, with thoughtful synonyms helping avoid the multiple men and women in the car sending the player to disambiguation hell, and good cueing helping signal the verb you’ll use to trigger your fascistic monologue.

There are a few places where things are a bit rough – it might have been nice to have some alternatives to that custom verb for folks more familiar with Inform’s traditional ASK/TELL conversation system, and I think the timing on the ending banners is off by one, since I saw the “winning” version fire the turn before the one where the fascism-talk provokes a response from the couple. But these are minor niggles, and this isn’t exactly the kind of game where a months-long beta testing process is a reasonable expectation. And at the end of the day, I don’t think we actually need to worry about players who come to the game knowing nothing about forum spats and thread splits: Fascism – Off Topic stands well enough on its own, pushing us to consider the ways totalitarianism has its roots in everyday interpersonal relationships, and also to consider knowing more than one thing about it because again, fascism is unfortunately kind of a big deal right now.

• I should probably disclose that I believe a joke I made when discussing the forum contretemps is incorporated into the game. But as I barely remember the joke, and anyway ideas matter far less than implementation, I think I can rate and review in good faith