The Copyright of Silence

The interface for this game is really cool. Not sure if other authors have already experimented with this kind of setup before, but I’ve never seen anything like it–never even thought of anything like it. The main display is a map of a house with four rooms with prose/dialogue appearing inside the rooms themselves. Easiest way to understand what that looks like is to boot up the game and take a look. You’ll understand what’s going on immediately. Very clear. Probably a huge pain to have setup in Twine.

The main objective of the game, as revealed after your first failure, is (Spoiler - click to show)to create a silence of a set number of minutes. I played a couple times and did not manage it. Puzzle games of this nature that require repeated attempts are not really my jam, but the writing was and choices were really funny and the interface was super neat. I’d love to see more people try making games like this (without just stealing this game, obviously).

The only thing that bugged me about this game was that the scene refreshes every time you click a link. Part of this is probably because of how it was made in Twine: each passage having the same house image and they’re just transitioning between in each other. Not sure what you could do to improve that... There’s probably a way to add some CSS to disable the opacity transition between passages. I mention this only because it made it a bit of a pain to try it over and over again and click through content really quickly.

Anyway, if you’re into the “constrained space, many actions, only one clever route leads to victory” kind of IFs, this one should be in your shortlist!

The Copyright of Silence has what’s probably the most genius premise of all 103 games in the Comp. It’s an optimization puzzle where you need to manage pet allergies, kitchen mishaps, and social dynamics in order to maximize the amount of time you can stay quiet while sitting opposite mid-20th-century avant-garde composer John Cage. This works as an amazingly silly joke about Cage’s most famous piece, 4’33”, which is popularly though inaccurately summarized as “four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence”, but it also helps prove one of the deeper themes of the piece: turns out there’s a lot going on beneath the surface of silence!

The presentation is top-notch, with one niggle: the game is presented as a view of Cage’s four-room apartment, with always-on text blurbs listing which characters are in each room, and then longer text with dialogue, actions, and options in the location where your character is. The floor-plan art is clean and fits the mid-century aesthetic, and it’s helpful to always be able to monitor what’s happening everywhere in the apartment at a glance. The fly in the ointment is that to fit the whole apartment on one screen, each room’s sub-window is fairly small, meaning I had to do a little more squinting than I liked.

Gameplay-wise, TCoS appears to all be one big, heavily timing-based puzzle hinging on managing your conversation with Cage – there are various intervening events that might interrupt your silence, and being quiet too long in the wrong circumstances will anger him and dock your score. There are several more discrete puzzles to solve, like what to do about an irritating dog-and-parrot pair (shades of Jay Schilling’s Edge of Chaos!), and tasks to accomplish, but they all require specific steps to be taken at specific times, so they’re incorporated into the overall structure. And here’s where the game started to break down for me, as the steps required to make progress can feel pretty tedious.

Quick autobiographical side-note that will come back to TCoS, I promise: when I was doing math and physics problem sets in my college days, there was a particular point in many problems where you’d have figured out the overall approach to take, sussed out how to set up the relevant equations, determined the angle of attack by identifying any needed substitutions or assumptions, and now just needed to spend half an hour wrestling some god-awful, notebook-wide integral or 7 by 7 matrix multiplication into submission through theoretically simple, but fiddly and irritating, application of basic math. We called this “grunge”, and unfortunately once I got over the initial hump of figuring out the basics, I found TCoS pretty grungy.

This takes several forms. First off, a major gameplay element is a piano which somehow conceals helpful objects on particular notes, but you have to select the right octave and note to get what you’re looking for, rather than being able to see everything at once. In each playthrough, a postcard arrives during a brief window that might point you towards one of the useful notes to search, but it would require a lot of repetition to find them all, and I think intercepting the mail is fatal to your progress – or I suppose you could just try looking at each piano-note one by one, but either way you’re in for a lot of grunge.

Second, the conversation with Cage proceeds in a very scripted fashion, with some critical dialogue options available only at certain blink-and-you-missed-it opportunities. The conversation pauses when you’re not in the same room, but the game has a hard deadline at 7 pm, meaning that any fiddling around you do reduces your ability to experiment with the later stages of the conversation.

Exacerbating the previous two problems, there’s no quick way to reset or restart the loop that I could find, and since each playthrough steps through 7 minutes in 7 second intervals, that’s a lot of clicking to have to go through once you realize you’ve fluffed something up, or have an idea you want to try. As a result, while I was able to solve several of the puzzles and get a bit over halfway to the goal, after about 45 minutes of play my enthusiasm wore out. With that said, I’ll probably try to pick this one up again when there’s less time pressure, since there are fun hints of hidden bonus puzzles and alternate endings, and I do really love the setup – and I suppose it’s in keeping with the theme that TCoS isn’t over-concerned with player friendliness.

This work is laid out like a board game, taking place in a four-room apartment where you interact with the composer John Cage, his dog, and his parrot. Text tracks the four of you moving from room to room, and different actions become available depending on who is where.

I appreciate the effort involved in implementing these characters. Their behavior is governed by logical rules that can be deduced through observation — you are expected to understand and apply those rules to engineer a specific result.

The blurb for this entry hints that it's like Elsinore or Varicella, where you are expected to fail many times and learn from your mistakes. However, those games immediately establish that a catastrophe is imminent and encourage the player to start working towards victory from the beginning.

If Copyright of Silence explained what it wanted during my first visit with Cage, I was too dumb to notice. There's a stopwatch in the kitchen that suggested a course of action, but the how and why only became clear after my visit ended and I endured the triumph of Cage and the failure of my own character.

The success of this entry relies on an accretive player character who can play through the scenario quickly and have fun learning new things each time. That's where I stumbled.

I might have spent too much time thinking through each of my character's moves, or I might have missed substantial parts of the environment and the characters' interactions, but I felt burned out and frustrated from failure long before I had accumulated enough knowledge to reach the best possible ending.

So this game is something pretty rare for IFComp. It's laid out like a board game, with four different rooms and three independent characters who move around.

Discovering what this game was and what it's rules are was a great difficulty in and of itself. When the game begins, the only options you have are to wander around and insult John Cage. The only things you can do in other rooms is to turn the stove off or on or take a watch (which puts a timer up on the screen).

John Cage starts walking around, and sometimes you can ask him about events that happened. I learned that he got a message from a lawyer, and that was about it.

After dying, I read that I could get hints by clicking a book in the bookcase. But I didn't see any bookcase!

I finally turned to the hints, and discovered that the game requires very precise sequences of events and conversation to unlock more things. Many of those things involve a large group of identical objects, and you have to pick the right one, but the info on which one to pick is randomly given in different playthroughs and most playthroughs won't give you that knowledge.

The writing is sparse and terse, suiting the board game setup. The main goal of the game is antagonizing John Cage, which isn't motivated. Before IFComp, I was playing through all the Choice of Games published titles, and I noticed that games where you could be evil were popular, but only if motivated. Being a jerk without motivation is something very few people find appealing in a game.

This is heavily-modified Twine, and the visual presentation is the best part of the game in my opinion.

+Polish: The game is very polished visually.
-Descriptiveness: This game is terse and sparse.
-Interactivity: I had great difficulty in discovering how to engage with this game.
+Emotional impact: I felt annoyance during the game, but a lot of it was intentional by the author, so it succeeded in its goal!
-Would I play it again? I peeked at the possible endings, and I'm not sure I'd like to keep playing.