Your World According to a Single Word

I really, really, like pieces taking human experiences and flipping it on its head by viewing it from an outsider perspective (aliens/other). It's always a bit strange and uncomfortable, to look at this from a non-human POV, but it also makes you think about the things we take for granted. You know... the little every day things that are actually pretty awesome.

Here, a word - Hypertext (harr, harr) - takes over your body for a month to experience what it's like to be human, and recounts its experiences with you through the medium of Hypertext Kinetic IF (though it reaaallly wanted to make a parser instead). I liked the attention to details, like what's in your bed room, especially the closet and the bookcase, or the ways different bits connect together (the colours and images especially). In trying to explain the wonders (and less wondrous aspects) of human life, Hypertext engages in the debate of how best to communicate things with others, pulling its "hair" at the backward way that is text.

The entry is very strange, but also quite endearing, and I enjoyed the meta/philosophical discussion about the use of words, their meaning, and whether we should turn to other, maybe better, ways to communicate with others.
I could have done maybe without the whole physical relationship passage. That made me a bit uncomfortable.

It was a very good entry!

One cool thing about the review-a-thon is that it seems like a lot of the games were entries in jams or events that passed me by, so it functions as an anthology of sorts, providing a little taste of a wide range of flavors. Your World is from 2023’s Bare Bones Jam, whose operating constraint was that entries had to stick to their system of choice’s default visual styling. This is obviously far more interesting for choice games than parser ones, so fortunately that’s what we’ve got here, a Twine game in that glorious black-background-white-text-blue-links palette we all know and love.

I’m not sure whether many other entries in the jam justified their minimalist presentation diegetically, but Your World does, and with a doozy of a concept: the game presents itself as written by a sentient word, who swapped places with the author for a month, in order to communicate its experiences and reflections after leaving its text-based world for our own. With the clock ticking on its sojourn, and after an abortive attempt to learn Inform, it makes sense that the word wouldn’t be wasting time with fripperies.

There’s a certain irony to that choice, however. You see, one of the central things the word wants to share is exactly how much better rich sensory experiences are than mere text. The early section of the game, where the word explores the author’s apartment, is dominated by an overwhelming intensity of sensation:

"The noise from the AC was blaring, the brown light coming from the bulbs in the room hurt me, and the smell of the carpet – god, it must smell normal to you, but I could smell the mustiness. I tried to breathe for the first time and the dust in the air choked me."

The word is eager for all of this: there’s an entertaining bit where it opens the author’s dresser and lists each and every garment there, focusing on the color and texture of every one (there’s also a fun running joke where it keeps expecting green things to smell like grass – capped off by a heck of a punchline when the word eventually does make it outside). But despite the clear pleasure it takes in all this, the word is no mere sybarite; no, it has philosophical and ideological reasons for rejecting its textual origins, riffing on Wittgenstein to critique the naïve idea that words have distinct meanings, and continually arguing that mere text is too imprecise and too abstract to full communicate the quiddity of experience. Images, especially moving images and moving images with sound, are the word’s beau ideal:

"I want to be free from words. I want to be the gestalt that captures all the sights and sounds of everything around me. I want to live up to my ideals, not just be a word association game."

I mentioned that the choice to present this ode to splendor in the ugliest imaginable format is an ironic choice, but to an extent the whole game undercuts itself. Look at its structure: it opens with an incredibly zoomed-in look at a single room, with hyper-realized, fractal detail, then skips over a whole romantic relationship in only a few sentences. And almost every single sequence features description that foregrounds smell, taste, and a subjectivity around color and sound that would be near-impossible to communicate in film, at least without near-constant, plodding narration. The bit where the word stumbles across the IF Top Fifty and is horrified is just the cherry on top – what better way to prompt an IF audience to view the word as an unreliable narrator?

It’d be easy to dismiss Your World as a self-satisfied joke about the superiority of text-only IF, in other words – all the more so because there really are some great bits here that only work in text, like the word feeling “like serifs [are] coming out of me” when it starts sweating from a fever, or accuses the color gray of being “like a half-assed word… something like ‘implicative’.” The final reveal of what the word actually is also earned a guffaw. But I think there’s more going on here. For one thing, the word is self-aware enough to anticipate the most obvious objections to its position:

"I know what you’re thinking: I’m just some word that’s in love with anything that isn’t text; anything that is reminds me of my own weaknesses."

And is capable of acknowledging the ways that words alone can be effective:

"I think there’s something to be gained by trying to communicate – even within this broken and flawed system.

"At the very least, it’s easy to write something in text."

This combination of sincerity and irony is very contemporary, of course, but I think it’s also apposite to what the game seems to me to be getting at: all the different media at our fingertips have their limitations and their glories, and though the specifics of our experience may make one more appealing than another – indeed, just as the word rejects the markers of the textstream where it came from, by negative inference perhaps many of us are so drawn to text precisely because we live in a culture so saturated with audiovisual noise! – the possibility of connection, however achieved, is the important thing. And a rejection of artifice can ultimately wind up being just as artificial as what it purports to oppose, if it departs from that goal.

I know there's a lot of grad school lit theory about the significance of words and images and signifiers and stuff, but I have no direct experience with that so I can only vaguely gesture at it from afar. Sad. But it's the first thing I thought of with this game.

The concept is pretty unique: it's a Twine game made by a sentient word that's taken over your body, written to you, the player. And word means word, as in a series of letters (or strokes, characters, etc? but this is in English so I'm assuming letters) representing an idea. We never find out what idea or what word the narrator actually is, so there's a layer of abstraction there. You could say the narrator is more the concept of a word than an actual word, I mean, obviously real words can't write Twine games and take over people's bodies and so on. But that's basic suspension of disbelief, so anyway.

A lot of the story is musing on meaning and the difference between words and images, the significance of both in interactive fiction, and stuff like that. There's some fun references to typography ("...I felt like serifs were coming out of me -- it's sweat. Sweating is a terrifying experience"), and emphasis placed on how limited and inadequate words are for communication, compared to actually living life and experiencing things directly. The word suffers from a bit of sensory overload over all the possibilities available to a human body and wonders how writers can just gloss over details like the glow of a lightbulb ("I can't believe writers don't talk about these magical devices forever"). Which is ironic, of course, because the game itself is entirely text with no images or extra stylings or anything of the sort. It was made for the Bare-Bones Jam, where the lack of extra formatting was a requirement. Pretty good use of the limitation, I think.

The in-story explanation for why the styling is so bare-bones is that the word didn't have time to learn about styling Twine. There's some nice details that come from the word being very honest about its newbie status, like the desk passage it just forgot to write about: "Oh shoot, I was so busy writing the game that I forgot to set up this node until I started to test it..." or the remark about how it'd be nicer if the Harlowe documentation was easier to read. The word's personality comes through pretty strong in this story, despite its relatively short wordcount. Our narrator is humble, awed at the richness of human existence, and endearing in an "aw shucks" way. I liked it.

The word expresses a strong belief in the superiority of images over text, and says an ideal world would contain no text, only images. Even the law would be expressed in images only. It's clearly a comedic kind of opinion you're meant to disagree with, and there's an especially funny part where the word discovers something called the "Top 50 Interactive Fiction" list and gets ticked off that all these games have so many words in them. "Unbelievable!"

But in the end there's still an acknowledgement that words are communiciation, and like any form of communication they can reach someone and affect them deeply. Sure, there are things you can do with images and multimedia that words could never manage, but the converse is also true. It's why we're here.

Some other stuff:

1 - The "you" in the story, i.e. the human whose body gets taken over, isn't a generic AFGNCAAP protagonist but a specific person with their own hobbies and so on. The bookshelf specifically made me wonder if the human is based on the author specifically, since it has the kind of books I feel like they'd own. You can look through each one and get commentary: there's manga, an international relations textbook, and also Pale Fire is in there. Which is really funny. Like finding a metafictional cherry hidden in your metafictional cake.

2 - I appreciate that we get to try out dozens of clothes articles from the dresser. Each one has detailed descriptions of how the word reacts, too. Pretty fun.

I would probably have more to say on this matter if I'd read all that stuff about signifiers. Unfortunately, I haven't.

Playtime: ~10 min