Chinese Family Dinner Moment

I mentioned in my review of Remembrance that a straightforward structure for Single Choice Jam games is to reserve the choice for the final bit of the game, using the opening and middle to establish stakes and build up to the drama of the one place where there’s player agency, and then ramify the endings according to the path the player opts to take. There’s nothing wrong with that approach at all, but it’s also interesting to see another entry in the jam subvert that structure and call into question whatever this “agency” thing it is we think we’re talking about. Chinese Family Dinner Moment also stands out from its peers in the jam by being a parser game; the very concept of “choices” fits awkwardly into the standard parser game format, inasmuch as typically they offer quite a large range of potential inputs (you can type anything you want, and might get a customized response) but also often constrain the player to a stultifyingly-linear plot. So what, exactly, counts as a choice and what doesn’t?

Let’s put in a pin in that; don’t worry, we’ll be circling back soon enough.

Shifting from structure to themes, CFDM makes no bones about the fact that it’s about alienation. The protagonist is a young Chinese person who’s recently come back from studying abroad in the U.S., which their parents have used as an occasion to throw a bigger Lunar New Year party than usual. And on every level they feel disconnected: from the casually racist attitudes of their family and family friends, from their narrowly-materialist view of what matters, from their choice of food to serve (they’ve gone vegan), even from the plausibly-deniable sexual assault they endure and from their own physical reality:

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"You don’t like your body."

Make no mistake, this is a downbeat game; there’s some humor, but it’s almost all dark and derives from how unselfconsciously awful the other characters are. Here’s some dating advice from an aunt:

“You better not get a white woman since white women can’t cook. And you definitely don’t want to get a black woman because they’re criminals … or an Indian because their cooking smells.

“Between you and me,” she continues, whispering in your ear, “Chinese women are a bit better, but have you read the news? That lady tricked her husband into giving up his cash. That’s why you shouldn’t trust us devious Chinese women. Get a Japanese woman. They are polite and deferential to their husbands — unlike me!”

The picture being painted here is very specific to a particular socioeconomic cultural stratum, of course, but I have a friend who was subject to almost this same tirade, word for word, except he got it from a Persian woman warning him off of other Iranian-Americans. So while the details are all well-chosen to root the game in its milieu, I think it also succeeds in creating resonance with anyone who’s ever chafed at the chauvinistic, greedy, blinkered principles of friends and family after starting to be exposed to a broader understanding of the world, and questioning what received wisdom tells them is their place in it (Chinese people, of course, don’t have a monopoly on either side of this equation).

I use “picture” advisedly here, since the player’s role in CFDM is largely a passive one, but one that requires the player’s active complicity. There are conversations that play out, uncomfortable situations that occur, and an unsuccessful attempt to take refuge by retreating to social media (if you thought your relatives were shallow and transactional…), but while you might expect these to be implemented as events that occur according to a timer system that ticks onward regardless of what you do, in fact by default scenes are mostly static. Instead, time generally advances only when you type LISTEN; this is a canny design decision, because of course your silence means that your interlocutors feel free to fill the air with their discriminatory nonsense or otherwise play out their anti-human pathologies. But since you’re allowing them, if not inviting them, to do so, can you say that you’re so much better? There’s even a late-game sequence that makes this explicit, as LISTEN leads to you actually speaking up, though not for yourself, as it leads you to repeat your relatives’ prejudices about poor people and black folks and trans people right back to them, validating and reifying their biases.

This is of course deeply unpleasant, but as I said above, I played through the game expecting that it was building to a point where I’d finally have a choice to rebel. As it came close to the end, I thought I’d spotted the moment: there’s a family picture to wrap up the evening, and as everyone prompted me to say cheese, I saw the opportunity for a gesture of quiet dissent, at least FROWNing to create some visible distance. But no, I was surprised to see, that wasn’t an option: again, all there was to do was LISTEN, and go along with the crowd.

Is CFDM a zero-choice game instead of a single-choice one, then? Well, no; after finishing I checked out the source code and saw that there’s one other option that’s always available: the out-of-world command QUIT is altered to have diegetic effect here, and you can invoke it at any time. It doesn’t exactly let you achieve catharsis, though – instead of a self-righteous denunciation of your family’s reactionary values that validates your identity and maybe starts to change their minds, you get a response indicating that running out of the restaurant caused a small scandal that impacts both you and the rest of your family. No matter what, you’re in this together.

What are we to make of the moral universe thus established? Per the implementation of LISTEN, allowing yourself to be a victim makes you culpable in the small-minded bigotries of your family; per the implementation of QUIT, refusing to be culpable makes you a victim and tars your family with guilt by association. Some might say this is no choice at all, since both ends are so bad, but are choices just about outcomes? And does the possibility of even an unguessable choice that doesn’t wind up changing anything somehow still bestow freedom? For all that Chinese Family Dinner Moment is studiously anchored to its context, it’s nonetheless one of the most Existentialist pieces of IF I’ve encountered – we can hope that material circumstances will change and liberate the protagonist from their subaltern status, but even that won’t blunt the horns of the dilemma that’s depicted here.