How Dare You

How Dare You puts the player in a strange situation: they must find the verbs that will hopefully resolve a potential breakup between the player character and their partner.

It doesn't take long to realize that there's no way to move the conversation forward. The (ex-)partner is simply not interested in reconciliation, leaving the player to wonder what kind of transgression the player character has committed that makes them so beyond forgiveness.

I've always found parser games like this interesting because they suggest that communication is much more than language in action. There is, of course, the interpersonal communication as explored in the game, but there is also the relationship between the player and the parser.

Whenever I encountered errors or silence from the parser, the friction seemed to unfold a wordless story in my head. As I pondered what else to type, I began to imagine nice dates, arguments, and all the little things that couples tend to do. There is a sense of mystery, of something terribly wrong that has torn this couple apart.

The game gives no clues as to what this history might be, but the limited agency the player has in navigating the game provides more than enough clues. There is no need to observe the build-up of tension: I think the player can intuit the "solutions" to this puzzle by simply struggling with the parser a bit and wondering what the parser is trying to say about the relationship between the characters.

The parser in How Dare You is almost like a character in this standoff, an intermediary between the player and this unwritten history. Given life, it wants to write the friction between these characters into parser errors. While the prose uses second-person narration, it's more fruitful to see the implemented verbs and responses as a translator trying to get as much nuance (written and unwritten) into the small space the game has.

And I believe the parser has done a great job at it. When I finally entered one of the many correct solutions, I didn't feel a eureka moment -- it was more like a confirmation that I was on the right track, and I felt like the parser and I were on the same page. While I can imagine players being upset by the game, I wasn't surprised, and that's okay: the "translation" served its purpose because the clues to the tragedy are so well foreshadowed.

But there is something to be said about how opaque this same dynamic can be in real-life relationships. There are no parsers, no puzzles to indicate that something is wrong. People only realize they're in shitty relationships after the fact. We're all unreliable narrators, unaware of the genre we're in.

The fantasy (for lack of a better word) of How Dare You is that it can make such dynamics legible to the eyes of the parser player. I found temporary catharsis when I read the last lines of the game. But as I wrote my thoughts and reflected on life, I realized that this was a pyrrhic victory and the game seemed to ironically acknowledge this: if the player tries to undo an action, the response is

"If only you could undo whatever it was that led you here. But you can't."

I read this as the player character's inability to diagnose what actually went wrong. Instead of discovering a systemic problem that defined their abrasive personality, they searched for the one action, the one incident, the one verb that caused everything to spiral out of control.

The real world is full of scumbags like the player character. They'll never learn to read their transcripts and become someone better.