23 Minutes

A stream-of-consciousness narrative of a teacher walking to work. You click the mouse or press the space bar to prompt the next line; the background is a constantly shifting reel of out-of-focus photos from the London streets. As a Londoner I found myself wondering where the photos were taken!

The narrator’s thoughts are a jumble of his present reality as he walks down the street, his plans for the day ahead, song lyrics, broccoli, introspection, worries about his baby daughter and his sleeplessness, slogans, his relationship with his partner, Tesco, and his relationship with his own father. Out of this comes a story about something more serious underlying the fights he has had with his partner.

The interactive part is that the reader needs to click for each line of the story: in general I felt that this was well fitted to it, but maybe the story was a little too long and meandering for this reading mode. But the use of more than one column of text was used effectively to allow two things to run through the narrator’s mind.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/8/26
Playtime: 21min, finished

It seemed like for a while, elaborate one-take shots were somehow a Holy Grail in cinema, discussed in reverent tones reserved for the nearly unattainable limits of human achievement. The most famous early one-take is the long opening shot of Orson Welles Touch of Evil (an astonishingly modern film if you can get past Charlton Heston’s dated acting stylings and brown face). These shots seem to achieve two things: a verisimilitude usually sacrificed to the visual and temporal language of film, and a real-time immediacy of experience. Since Welles’ revelatory accomplishment, the mere PRESENCE of such a technique in film was noteworthy on its own, kind of independent of the art it was in service of. (The Master, Hitch, actually got there first a decade earlier with Rope, but he was deliberately evoking a more stage-y experience and is not as lauded by history.)

Over time, this technical conceit has been revisited often enough, that while still noteworthy, it can now play against a body of such work rather than as a unicorn-like individual achievement. It is hard to imagine an implementation more accomplished than Timecode, a 2000 movie of FOUR realtime, unbroken takes, presented simultaneously in four quadrants of the screen, telling an interweaving story across all four. While I know I have seen the movie, I could tell you boo about its plot or characters at this point, only the thrilling execution of it. This exposes a pitfall: its employment is SO noteworthy, it can dominate the narrative itself.

Spiritually, the cinematic one-take feels of a piece with stream-of-consciousness literature, a famous example being Ulysses by James Joyce. That book (which I have started three times but never finished, so…) puts the reader in the protagonist’s mind as he goes about his mundane, mundane day. Notwithstanding the temporal difference between READING ABOUT something and DOING it, it attempts to present a ‘realtime’ experience to the reader.

Y’know what I’ve never seen? A realtime, stream-of-consciousness work of IF. Never seen UNTIL NOW. (Ok, that SOUNDS dramatic, but given my relatively short span of IF engagement, it amounts to “have not seen in the last three years.”)

Don’t let that lawyer-mandated parenthetical dilute that statement. This is a visual novel called “23 Minutes” that it took me 21 MINUTES TO PLAY. It presented an internal monologue of a troubled protagonist during his walk to work. Holy crap was it stunningly effective. The FORM of it was deeply accomplished. It married deliberate text positioning to less-than-full-sentence thoughts, to a wandering attention grappling with spiraling self-recrimination, all positioned over a blurry background of a constantly changing city stroll.

Its cumulative effect, most especially its pacing, was such a considered, precisely choreographed sum of its parts. The text formatting conveyed thoughts trampling over each other, one spurring another, often tangentially connected and circling back on itself. The poetry of the text, rather than pushing me away, optimized and abstracted the protagonist’s thoughts in a perfectly effective way that served both the conveyance of ideas, and the tight timeline of the piece. The blurry, ever shifting background conveyed a protagonist only incidentally concerned with his environment. A protagonist whose internal preoccupations left his environment indistinct and peripheral but not completely dismissable. The fact that this technical achievement does not completely eclipse the story it is telling is something one-take cinema doesn’t always succeed at.

The story here is manifest in the internal reflections of (Spoiler - click to show)an early-middle aged man whose new-parent and job dissatisfactions are gradually shown to be products of slow poisoning by his own character failures. The precise pacing of this reveal is emotionally crushing and dramatically devastating. The mechanism of this disappointment (Spoiler - click to show)(a family member descending into the conservative hate-sphere) is simultaneously depressingly relateable, while also piling OUR judgement on top of the protagonist’s self-recriminations. So many synchronicities stitched into this work, all of it so precisely engineered.

23M uses the graphical power of multimedia, textual formatting and presentation timing to shape how the words are consumed in an exercise that twists our brain to the pace and goals of the work. The interactivity is not so much our will modifying the work, as the work modifying our will to travel the story’s journey. It feels like a backwards interactivity? The alchemy is, whether the work is steering us, or we are steering the work, the outcome is the same. It is our mind taking the journey, more immediately and immersively than reading a book. What I just described is quite clearly (and more succinctly) a ‘visual novel.’ But that label technically applies to comic books and Ren’Py-esque quasi-power-point narratives as well. The amazing technical rendering of its real-time pacing seems to elevate this creation in the same way one-cuts have been determined to elevate cinema.

The trap of course is that a technical accomplishment this magnificent can outshine the work that it serves. Given what I’ve chosen to gush about in this review, I’m not sure 23M completely escapes this shadow. But neither does the narrative disappear. It manages to hold its own. This was an early highlight of the Thing for me. The pressure is really on the rest of the field to deliver a meta-moment as triumphant as the one that occurred when I checked my timer at the end of this story.

Spaceship: Discovery
Vibe: Stream of Consciousness
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my work, I dunno… I’d eke out another two minutes somehow? Who am I kidding, should I reshoot Welles’ Touch of Evil next? Instead, let me use this space for a recommendation. If you are enamored of, curious about, or annoyed with the cinephile’s reverence of this technique, I strongly recommend One Cut of the Dead, 2017. A wonderfully witty horror-comedy that almost by-the-way gives a nuts and bolts masterclass on why one-cuts are so remarkable.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Originally written on the intfiction forums.

A 23 minute walk and you think on being a father, a mental grocery list, career woes, angst, breathe in and out, traffic, loss of control, your child, (Spoiler - click to show)snapping at your wife, distraction, politics, change your path, (Spoiler - click to show)your dad spiraling into xenophobic conspiracy theories, traffic, your students, the baby, don’t forget those groceries, will you really change?

I liked the background being a video advancing frame-by-frame as each line is revealed, it added immersion. I appreciated the pacing and variation between lines, moreso in the early parts of the poem compared to the end. I did brace myself when (Spoiler - click to show)the narrator’s thoughts turned to his father, because I wasn’t in the mood for “talking to my parent(s) is difficult because they turned into conspiracy-believing bigot(s).” That is relatable (though more applicable to my grandparents) but something broke, a connection fractured, we can no longer pretend the broccoli, your wife and baby, and your job have no relation to your father. Yes, nurture can determine behavior and all that, but is it that simple to attribute everything to him? How he treated you and how he turned out recently? That’s like saying eye and hair color only comes down to a 4x4 Punnett square when there are about a hundred or so genes that determine those traits. Genes can be weird.

Still, a good twenty-ish minute walk being stuck in well-expressed and communicated thoughts. That's the perfect length for me.

An okay poem, but the "interactivity" (i.e. the simulated page turning) made the enjambment less effective. I typed it in notepad and read it normally and it was more affecting that way. This is not the first poem I've encountered in an IF contest that tied the enjambment to page turning and made the poem a worse experience. But it is notable here because the presentation feels fitting, even though the experience of reading it feels worse. I certainly felt like a tired new father walking to work and thinking of leaving my family while reading it.

I still think it's gimmicky to make a poem interactive though. It's a weak poet's crutch.

This game essentially takes a video of someone walking to school for 23 minutes and slows it down to one frame at a time, with each tap of the mouse or keyboard advancing the image and the accompanying text.

The poem felt very realistic. The person it depicts seems like he's going through a crisis in their life and are very negative; he uses strong profanity to describe many things in his life, and talks about his hatred for school and his complicated relationship with his father.

The way that text from passersby that you can overhear pops up is really cool, and I felt like overall we got a great glimpse into this person's mind. I saw others complain about the interaction mechanism and at first I thought, 'no, this is just fine!' but then I saw that after dozens of clicks I had only gotten to the first 10 minutes of the 23 minute interaction I got worn out.

Reading this does make me wonder about students at school. I'm a teacher at a private school (and formerly taught college) and I thrive around crowds (I talked to a psychologist about it once, I grew up in a crowded house and like being on the edges of sociable groups) so being around the kids and interacting with them revitalizes me and summer vacation (like I have now) is way more boring. I've heard that public school is less rewarding due to large class sizes and the lack of private school's filtering mechanisms (like just dropping students who are dangerous or problematic). This game made me wonder what public school teaching would be like.

Overall, cool concept. I agree with others that a pared-down version would be better received (just to avoid the massive clicks). Or (this is a tongue-in-cheek suggestion) making it like clicker games where every 10 clicks you can buy an auto-clicker and then upgrade.