Tapestry

Released in the early days of the Amateur Era, this work achieved some notoriety by taking a definitive if hesitant step away from puzzle-focused interactive fiction. As the author states in the >AMUSING response at the end: "This game was an attempt to see if a serious and interesting story could be merged with traditional IF 'puzzle' elements without one overshadowing the other."

The work consistently presents itself as a morality tale, and the majority of contemporary and subsequent reviews categorize it as such, which presumably reflects most players' experiences. However, the author denies this description of the work in the associated walkthrough (emphasis mine): "...TAPESTRY may seem to be centered on morality and 'proper' choices. This was not my intention. There is a grander scheme going on (which the opening quote alludes to, and which, I hope, the epilogue makes clear)..."

The opening quote of the piece is from a book by Neil Gaiman: "Those who believe they must atone inflict this place and its tortures upon themselves... Until they realize that THEY, and only they -- not gods or demons -- create their hell; and by this they are freed, and take their leave... This place is evil, Timothy, but perhaps a necessary evil." The obvious reading is that hell is solely in the mind of the beholder, a self-inflicted torture that is ultimately unnecessary, serving only as a waystation for those on the path to enlightenment (or at least some other destination).

The author's use of the term "the epilogue" is interesting, however. This is program-mediated text, and although the final words of the game exhibit a dry, detached tone that is in stark contrast with the melodrama of the rest of the text -- a tone which on first reading implies that this is the "real story" of the PC's life -- the final text does, in fact, change depending on the course taken by the PC. The single identity referenced by the noun "epilogue" is therefore all three versions of the text. In two versions, the objective facts are consistent but what changes is the subjective narrative weaving them together. In the third (the one in which the PC successfully changes his past), the objective facts themselves differ.

I think it is fair to take the author at his word that this is not a game about morality. The ostensible moral dilemmas presented are almost parody in their contrived framing, and the story is not very subtle in its feedback that doing the "right" thing by changing the past to accord with commonly-held standards is in fact wrong. The encouragement you get in this path is from an "angelic being" who is (as the work will confirm if prompted) not a good guy. It soon becomes clear that the PC's attempts to do the "right" thing are at root just attempts to escape guilty feelings. What is not clear is whether that the guilt is even genuine -- the more closely one inspects the PC's thoughts, feelings and actions, the more he comes off as immature, narcissistic, and even sociopathic.

The most "winning" path (as implied by the tone taken in the text) is the path of (Spoiler - click to show)Clotho. In this path, the facts of the PC's life don't change -- only his attitude about them does. Though the work describes the transformative change as the PC "facing" his pain and guilt, in practice the change comes about via the PC simply denying all agency in his decisions as well as their negative consequences. (Spoiler - click to show)Regarding his absence from his mother's deathbed: "...you tell the Wraith ... how you wished you could have been in two places at once... only to find out it was too late." It is made unambiguously clear during that vignette that the PC should have been doing this work much earlier, and that he chose to go to City Hall knowing that it would preclude making it to the hospital in time. Regarding his "mercy killing" of his wife: "You tell [the Wraith] of Sarah's sickness, of her suffering. You explain that you wished to free her from all of it, that she herself found living impossible. You tell the Spectre that your act was one of love." In the vignette, the player must decide to kill Sarah before finding her note, and, as another reviewer notes, there does not seem to have been any discussion between them about this drastic decision beforehand. Moreover, on the path in which the PC ensures that she is given a new experimental treatment, she is cured! No matter how the PC prefers to tell it, a jury privy to the same evidence we are would have grounds to convict. Regarding the fatal car crash that ends his life as well as an innocent bystander: The PC makes no attempt to put a spin on this matter, but driving around late at night for no reason in a sleep-deprived and emotionally-unstable state is in no way responsible behavior. One might also note that his sole concern seems to be that he killed a woman, since he exhibits no dissatisfaction if the outcome is revised such that his victim is male.

Additional support for the author's claim comes from the design of the player interaction. The player gets, in effect, only two choices: whether to attempt to change all three "crisis" points in the PC's life as a group and whether to contest the accusation that he has done wrong. The former requires active effort on the player's part to search out the combination of events that will result in a changed history, while the latter is forced upon even the passive player since the game will interpret inaction as a choice. Very strangely, this second choice can be imposed even before the player makes any move that looks or feels like an intentional selection. (Spoiler - click to show)It is possible to leave the first and second scenes without resolving either. After being railroaded through the third, the player will be taken to a fourth location, where the Wraith will accuse the PC with three simultaneous questions: "Will you face me? Have you hubris enough to commit the breaking of your Moira? Are you fool enough to face your crimes?" (Apparently, in the author's mind, all three of these questions should be served by the same answer.) Simply saying "no" at the first prompt (the essence of denial) results in a choice being recorded -- from that point onward the player is only allowed to follow the script. Crucially, when the Wraith accuses the PC of being "a fool and a coward," an attempt to agree is rejected by the game: "You are about to concede defeat, when you realize that you cannot. You MUST fight this creature ... to the bitter end." To the PC, admission of any responsibility for his actions is tantamount to defeat.

The best support for the author's claim that this is not a morality tale is the endgame. (Spoiler - click to show)No matter which path is taken, the final result is oblivion for the PC; the choice truly does not matter for him. In the end, it seems to be a game about Nothing.

[A final note: This observation didn't fit well in the above review, but one item of interest about this game from an historical perspective is the surprising similarity between the climax of the third panel's vignette and that of Adam Cadre's Photopia (i.e. (Spoiler - click to show)being the driver in a fatal car accident that the player is powerless to stop despite being forewarned). This work predates Photopia by two years. As Paul O'Brien observes about the efficacy of the device: "[T]he feeling of not being able to (Spoiler - click to show)control the car despite what you order the character to do is an extremely chilling one, and it is an effect that would not pack the same potency were it attempted in static fiction." Cadre and other authors would experiment with limiting player agency more directly in later years, even to the point of replacing entered keystrokes with others to enforce pre-set commands in some cases, but the notability of the device in this work suggests that it may be the first time any author tried to limit player agency in a story-relevant way.]