Naughty in the library

I thought I might enjoy reviewing as-yet unreviewed games. It's hard to get one's game reviewed outside of a competition or jam context, if the news page on IFDB is any indicator. If you are familiar with my writing style, then you might reasonably expect this review to mostly consist of deadpan snark, but that isn't what this series of reviews is about. Here, I'd like to draw attention to previously undiscussed IF in a welcoming way.

I discovered this game, a free demo for H. H. Richards's "Lewd Mod," via Tabitha's "Games Seeking Reviews" poll.

Let's get this out of the way first: "Naughty in the Library" has implied nudity, at least one colorful slang term for female anatomy, and a lot of sexual innuendo. If you are troubled by that sort of thing, then skip this game. This game - this demo, at least - doesn't offer much beyond that. There are no rewards for pushing through that content; that content is the game.

How is that content? For starters, the artwork is highly stylized. The woman featured, Ellie B, has white teeth, red lips, arched eyebrows... and no eyes. Some thoughtful critic might make a lot of that aesthetic choice. Does it mean something? Is it a depersonalization? The effect is striking and seems to be a consistent feature of women's faces in H. H. Richards's work, as the women on their itch.io page all lack eyes. I do not know if the overall effect is erotic, but I did find these portrayals memorable. For what it's worth, Richards's depictions of cats have no eyes, either.

So far as the dialogue that links these images of Ellie in a narrative thread: I feel the demo suffers, in that we - an undefined self-insert - already seem to know her. That being so, we never get to know her. I wasn't sure what I might and might not suggest to her, in terms of her bra, her shoes, or what have you. I felt rather disconnected from our exchange. Was the protagonist being weird or pushy? It didn't seem so in-game, as Ellie seemed very open to their suggestions, but I never really found the dialogue options very relatable.

The full game might fare better due to better contextualization. For instance, in that work, you are a content moderator for a social media site. So there is more of a "game" there, potentially, than there is here.

TL;DR: A short, dramatized text chat in which the player talks to a woman named "Ellie" and asks for her to send erotic selfies to them.
+ The style of the art is distinctive. So distinctive, in fact, that it invites interpretation.
+ The interface is very polished.
+ Even if the demo lacks important context, potential buyers can get a feel for the presentation, art style, and messaging interface.

- The gameplay in this demo feels almost beside the point. Ellie seemed very happy to send pictures. It isn't clear if the full game involves challenge of any kind.
- This content is not for everyone, so potential players should pay attention to content advisories.
- The main game seems to have context and gameplay that is not contained in the demo, which makes it hard to say if the paid experience would be worthwhile.

Additional thoughts: the artwork does not aggressively reinforce unrealistic beauty standards, which I appreciate. The exchange with Ellie doesn't seem inherently exploitational, and there is no apparent power dynamic at work. While this demo is not necessarily my thing, it seems to be honest about what it is and has, I am sure, an audience.

(I wrote two reviews for this one, here are both)

Naughty in the Library, like its companion piece Hot in the Office, is largely an exercise in satisfying expectations: once again we’ve got a pornographic Twine game presenting a specific-yet-generic sexy scenario. The latter game, per my review, managed to delight with a completely loopy take on the premise, including a partner hell-bent on sending you sexy pictures no matter how discouraging the dialogue options you pick and an inexplicable eroticization of office chairs (alert J.D. Vance). Naughty in the Library plays out almost beat-for-beat the same – a woman you barely know starts texting you emoji-filled updates about her daily activities, then her exhibitionist tendencies start coming out once she finds herself alone – so much so that I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some kind of formula the author uses to Mad-Libs out the different sequences. But there’s nothing as deranged here as in Hot in the Office, save for the fact that the scene kicks off with your interlocutor firing off flirty texts while sprinting across campus to avoid being late for class (my ears pricked up upon learning the subject is ancient history, but alas no details were forthcoming no matter how much I pried) – other than that, things proceed exactly as you’d think they would, down to wet-blanket dialogue options succeeding in killing the mood this time out.

On the plus side, the art style is still the same, so if you like MS Paint and dislike eyes, boy howdy do I have a game for you.

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A library is an alchemical machine: fittingly, it was Sumerian priests who first took the quicksilver knowledge coursing through their minds and transformed it into dull clay, a Philosopher’s Stone in reverse. Perhaps that’s an overly romantic view of what at first were merely storehouses of commercial transactions, allowing proto-bureaucracies to ensure that taxes were paid and contracts satisfied – but information is information, and transformation transformation: despite all Gilgamesh’s literary striving for immortality, Ea-nāṣir has precisely the same share of it. And we can run the metaphor in reverse if we like – after his death, Ashurbanipal’s capital of Nineveh was razed as his empire crumbled, but the fires baked the tablets in his great library, preserving them for millennia to kindle the scholarship of those who came after. That’s a miraculous exception, though, we all know the library at Alexandria only burned to ash; it was well past its prime, so who can say what was lost.

A library is a mirage of justice. Late in his life, Andrew Carnegie endowed thousands of libraries to enable young people, starting out in life as impoverished as he had bit, to educate and better themselves; if any of these eager students were able to similarly catapult themselves to the apex of plutocracy, I’m unaware of it, just as I’m unaware of any sums he donated to trust-busters. A hundred years later, public libraries in Los Angeles are a refuge of last resort for the homeless, with librarians struggling to provide them the services they need while still making the space safe and accessible for other patrons who need a place to study, or get online to submit a job application or benefits paperwork (California’s pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps crowd succeeded in slashing our property taxes in 1978 – library staffing levels dropped by a third overnight and have never recovered).

A library is a pivot point. If you asked me what I wanted to be when I was 7, I would have said paleontologist, and at 17 I would have said cosmologist. Bush v. Gore and the War on Terror made me wonder whether there were more pressing problems in the here and now, but my first taste of real activism was trying to save my university’s library: my senior year, we caught wind of a plan to turn the central library building into offices for fund-raising and administration (if there’s an apter found-metaphor for the ways American higher education has gone astray in the past quarter-century, I haven’t seen it), leaving each department to cram a few books into whatever rooms they could spare and archive the rest off-site. The building was an unlovely steel tower, and named after a former professor infamous at the time for dry-labbing the results that won him the Nobel Prize and infamous later for his support of eugenics; still, a library’s a library. I organized a petition that a tenth of the student body signed, conducted a notably hostile interview with the dean who’d masterminded the plan, and wrote fiery editorials in the school paper. I graduated that summer, eventually to wend my way to law school; the books lasted on campus only a few months longer.

A library is an act of hubris. Borges connects the universal library with the upward-yearning tower of Babel, Eco’s labyrinth of books conceals a truth that might make us laugh at the divine. Why do the thoughts of particularly metafictional authors incline towards the library when they want to overthrow the heavens? Because it’s possible to imagine a library unfettered by constraints of time and space, freed to pursue its telos of bringing together all knowledge that exists, all knowledge that could exist – more than anything else human-made, libraries gesture towards omniscience, that divine perquisite. Or are we to think it a coincidence that Diderot, first among the Encyclopédistes, ruminated about strangling the last king with the entrails of the last priest?

A library is a place of honor. Forget the vexed, restrictive arguments about the cultural canon, which are all about exclusion; what’s important here is the way the collection of a public library signals inclusion, asserting that at least some people will find at least some value in everything on its shelves. No wonder then that right-wingers have turned our libraries into warzones: the defining characteristic of the reactionary mind is the psychic harm it suffers at the idea that people different from them are equal in dignity, and so what greater insult is there than seeing literature of, for, and by those you hate given a place? You can enforce hierarchy on bodies, exalt some spaces at the expense of others, and you can try to do the same with books – there’s that pesky canon again. But books are stubborn things, and short of burning them (oh, do the reactionaries dream of burning them) there’s no way of shutting them up.

A library is also a place where you can bone; if that thought occurred to you before any of the ones above, and ideally you like MS Paint and dislike eyes, boy howdy do I have a game for you.