Fascism - Off Topic

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