The Swormville Sweep

My reaction when I stumbled upon this game was, essentially, “What do you mean Tabitha wrote a game in Google freaking Maps?!” Then I clicked on it. Then I played it. Then I, for some reason, felt the need to write this 1900-word review about it. Goodness.

First, I would like to speak a bit on the gameplay. The game is structured as a scavenger hunt puzzle using a Google Maps interface. Attached to each location are a name, description, photograph, and corresponding marker on the satellite view of the town. Each location is also attached to a letter or number, and a clue to the next location. The object of the game is to follow the clues in order, spelling out a 15-character address which you can then enter into the search bar and reach the end.

I found the difficulty to be well-tuned. There weren’t so many locations that I felt overwhelmed, but not so few as to make the game trivially easy. Similarly, the clues were reasonable enough to solve, and though a few were tricky, the game has a built-in way to show you that you are off track. As much as I tried to convince myself that “ROFTE” was eventually going to spell out the name of a road (I don’t know, maybe there’s some family called the Roftenworths—who’s to say?) I had to admit that I was deluding myself when the next clue clearly pointed to a location that I had already visited! I went back through my notes and found the mistake and was able to get right back on track to finish it. Even if you are initially wrong, you don’t lose all the work that you’ve done since the mistake, as eventually it will link back up. As a result, this puzzle was engaging, and never felt tedious. I felt motivated to solve it, and I did in about 40 minutes!

Continuing this discussion of the gameplay, I think The Swormville Sweep makes great use of the features of the medium. I found that I didn’t need to do any external Google searches—all the information I needed was already available without leaving the page I was on. The game subtly teaches you to think like a researcher, and consider how to apply the types of information you have been presented with. For instance, some clues are best solved by taking a closer look at the photographs; others ask you to think about the relative locations of buildings on the map; others still ask you to consider if what you are seeing in the present matches with the description of what once was there, to realize that the building has been replaced with something else. Information that you might reflexively skim over (the date of someone’s birth, for instance) is suddenly the key to answering your questions. You get the idea, I hope?

There were some real frissons of satisfaction I experienced while playing. Notably, the bizarre masonry of the Leising House. When skimming over the thumbnail of the image, I was left with the impression that it was a photo of an unremarkable house that had been taken through a chain-link fence. However, when the game prompted me to take a closer look, I was surprised by how the image resolved into something totally different. I can imagine walking or driving past such a building and doing a double take because of how distinctive the masonry is. Or, take the revelation that one of these buildings housed the inventors of new musical instruments, the one highlighted by the game being, whimsically, the “Jazzboline.” And finally, getting the overall puzzle solution correct and typing it in is delightful.

I have some other things I wanted to talk about related to my experiences here. This work does not present with a strong sense of narrative purpose, which is interesting! The author-as-historian doesn’t get in your way. While you can glean some intent from the types of things ey focus on—architecture, for instance—there is a kind of detachment in the tone of the materials. A thought that haunted my playthrough was, essentially, why make a game about Swormville, New York? What am I meant to learn? And then I thought about it more and was like, okay, apart from just DM’ing the author to ask em—which is valid, if a bit of a cop-out—I am the person here who is playing a game about Swormville, now, in this moment. No one asked me to do this. I chose this. And the game is mechanically guiding me to think like a researcher. So what do I think about what I’m seeing in Swormville? I can form my own opinions—I don’t need to be told what to think, right? Still, as satisfying as it was to just solve the puzzle on my own, I felt the absence of someone to talk to about it, and I thought, well, I can just write what I think and post it on ifdb.org, and then a few people might see it before it sinks beneath “See the full list...” in the new reviews tab.

The starting point for the game includes an image of a plaque constructed in 1973, which reads, “Swormville was settled by people of Bavarian and French Canadian descent. The Rev. John N. Neumann, a secular priest, held services here as early as 1839. The town’s first Catholic church was built in 1849, serving 80 families in the so-called Parish of the Transit. The community was named after a prominent citizen and developer, Adam Schworm.” I find it noteworthy, I guess, that these 1973 narrators of the town’s history (apparently, the Clarence Chamber of Commerce?) have constructed a history that begins the moment a Christian church service occurred, as if that land sprang into existence unoccupied just then. Said more plainly, Indigenous absence looms large around this plaque.

Zooming out, Swormville is not far from present-day Tuscarora and Tonawanda reservations, nor from ancestral homelands of the Haudenosaunee nations (Seneca seems to be closest). The authors of the plaque were perhaps not so invested in revealing what sequence of politics, treaties, violence, and/or dispossession made possible this historical “starting point” for the town. I was reminded of historian Jean M. O’Brien’s book Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England, where she observes, “Southern New England is the ideal place to locate this study because it was there that people made the boldest claims to ‘firsting,’ a central thematic of this book that in essence asserts that non-Indians were the first people to erect the proper institutions of a social order worthy of notice” (p. xii). And I’m like... wow. There it is, right there on a plaque. Firsting. A formulation of public-civic memory that obscures any Indigenous presence here. To be clear, my point is not to pick on Swormville in particular. I have never been to the northeast U.S. and am unfamiliar with the region. I’m so unfamiliar that I didn’t initially think to ask myself if the Buffalo area even counts as “Southern New England.” Apparently, it doesn’t. But I think O’Brien’s point applies well here, regardless. As I said, the game primes you to think like a researcher as you solve its puzzle, so in that vein, this is one of the things that I personally would be drawn to interrogate: how the town’s self-mythologizing wraps into U.S. colonial mythos more broadly. How does Swormville’s version of this compare to other places in the U.S., like where I live?

...I realize that I’ve kind of derailed this review. I mean, literally what is happening that I felt obligated to include a works (or really... work) cited section in an IFDB review? It’s not that serious.

But if you’ll stay with me as I huff some more academia fumes, I couldn’t help but think about the town as a kind of architectural palimpsest. If you’re a person not so succumbed to academic jargon as I apparently still am, you might reasonably wonder, what the actual f*ck is a “palimpsest”? To explain it in a way that will fall short for people who already know what it means better than I do, it’s a parchment (or paper) that has been reused or written over many times, leaving behind traces of all the ways it has been used. Apparently, these types of records are of particular interest to historians/archivists intrigued by the way that a single object like this represents historical trends or values in a material way.

Anyway, I bring this up because of how the game draws your attention to buildings that have been destroyed, relocated, and repurposed. When I clicked on the photo of the Swormville Fire Company location, and saw the engraved firehouse sign sitting above a window declaring “Holistic Bodywork Spa & Massage” in gaslight gatekeep girlboss calligraphy, I couldn’t help but think of the idea of the palimpsest and how this town—and perhaps most towns—contain these unsettling moments of anachronism.

I feel such a strange set of emotions when trying to wrap my head around Swormville, a town I have no personal attachment to. There’s something beautiful in this reuse of a historical building. Instead of wastefully being torn down or destroyed, it has a new life and a new purpose. At the same time, I feel... I don’t know, something sinister and empty about the modernity of it? (And not to pick on the local business here! According to the Google reviews, Holistic Bodywork Spa & Massage has a 4.1 out of 5 stars, so I’m sure it’s very lovely. Way cooler than if it were in some boilerplate building, at any rate!) But I still can’t help but feel that creeping cultural emptiness—like the urge to stripmallify is trying to take over this town and make it less specific from the inside out. Among the whimsy of the town, under an overcast sky in the photos, is this slight quality of feeling run-down, like we’re one or two lighthouses away from finding ourselves on a modern Lovecraftian horror set. And I guess there’s something emotionally engaging about that? It’s kind of melancholy, to both embrace and yet fear such changes? It’s something that I don’t notice in my day-to-day life, because I’ve mostly only lived in cities with much younger buildings. (I’m sure the effect is even more extreme elsewhere in the world, of course, where some buildings have hundreds if not thousands of years of history). But personally, I haven’t had much of an opportunity to observe the palimpsest effect of buildings being reused. Or at least, I haven’t noticed those opportunities when they presented themselves. Maybe I should!

So. Where does this ultimately leave me with this game, and this review? Well, the last thing I was thinking about was how this game could in theory be played as a scavenger hunt in real life, with a knowledgeable local tour guide. It’s only a few blocks, so you could spend a day doing this! But, I mean, the odds of me ever finding myself in Swormville, New York are vanishingly remote, so the adaptation of that experience to a virtual one is a great choice to make the experience of engaging with this town accessible to many more people than might otherwise be possible.

I think there are many ways to take this game: as a fun puzzle, an interesting use of the medium, an invitation to ask historical questions, or consider how it feels to wander through this particular place, or otherwise bring your own experiences and perspectives to bear upon it. I hope you can forgive me for doing so in a way that is potentially time-wasting for you to have read, if you indeed did so to arrive, finally, at the end of this review.

Work Cited:

O’Brien, Jean M. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.