meminerimus

I beta tested this entry, and it was the only one I did for spring thing, and it left me feeling, well, how much would I have gotten out of looking over another entry like this?

Well, I guess I can find out by trying to review the entries I didn't test. I think meminerimus has a lot of impact for its very small size. My initial pass through it with testing was, okay, this works, and I see how the pieces fit in. Then I was surprised how much time I took to sit and think about it, and about some loose ends of things way in the past about my own life. Nothing earth-shattering, but there's something to be said for remembering something you thought wasn't right at the time, and you didn't have proof of that, and people made you feel bad you were upset. And realizing you had a point.

Certainly when I was younger I'd imagine, what would certain adults say once I was out of their life? Or if I managed to get out of the life? I was told I was conscientious, or I could be, and as a result I often focused on the adults more like, well, the narrator in this work, instead of the adults who just wanted what was good for me and were willing to do something without expecting repayment. Maybe part of it was the cliche "You have to give yourself a challenge. If anything comes too easy in life it's not worth it."

The adult narrator here seems quite good at actual-factualing us into agreeing that their way was the Correct Way. But it falls apart if you step back and think about it. They talk about how they gave something and then took it away, because the recipient no longer appreciated it, or maybe didn't appreciate it the right way. Think about, say, a parent who buys their kid weights and exercise equipment to help get good in one sport, but the kid wears them out getting good in another.

I had adults say, well, we'll do this for you if you make a promise to work hard, and I'm grateful to adults who did that. That's part of helping kids grow, but when it's warped into "trust me, do this thing I want, it's good for you," it can misfire.

I don't want to spoil things too much, but this work reminded me of magazine subscriptions my parents got me that I didn't really want, and I felt guilty about it, and I didn't use them and maybe wasted my parents' money and figured I didn't deserve to ask for others. Ones that would have really been more my thing, or my focus, and I was surprised other kids at school had subscriptions, and their parents might have even enjoyed looking at the magazines too or hearing what their kids learned.

I remember trips to the library, too, where it was understood I would try to find smart kid books, but my parents also pushed me away from things that might have been interesting to me. I had some friends who learned chess in 7th grade, and I was well ahead of them and stayed well ahead of them, but I was surprised how much they talked about going to get chess books at the library. My parents took me to the library, but they would have expected better than that. After all, they'd bought me a few chess books, right? And a chess computer program!

I still remember learning Inform 7 and trying to shake off that teacher who was very, very passionate about heap sorts and data structures because that's fundamentals and what's on the AP exam, and I had minor arguments in my head about why I didn't deserve to be locked out of I7's convenience, with not excuse why I didn't really enjoy the CS curriculum.

These are personal revelations tangentially related to the subject matter. I don't want to spoil it, because I think you might find something in there too, if you need to, and if you don't, I'm happy for you and not jealous. (Or I hope I am! It's best for me it I am.) I think it's safe to say that the narrator is transactional, and I realized that they were preventing their target's growth while saying "Well, it'd be nice if you could grow as I'd like you to."

I don't know if I mentioned that I'm a big fan of Robert Cormier and the writing has a Cormier feel about it to me, without really cribbing from him. It deals with unfairness, the sort you may not see it the first time, but if you re-read and see it, it puts some of your own ruminations of what might or might not be unfair in perspective, even giving you the courage to say, well, that thing back then I couldn't prove was unfair? Well, the people involved sure didn't try to make it fair. That can help me bury any worries I didn't do what I should or could have. Perhaps other works may do it better, but this did so very well.

Whether or not the narrator's target is fortunate enough to have had any insight resembling this, or if they had an insight about the narrator's bad faith without finding a way out, I won't spoil. But I found this work surprisingly motivational. Not in the rah rah sense, of course. But I was reminded of times I was told I wasn't motivated for what REALLY mattered, and I'd know what was important some day. Sometimes I'd feel bad enough I wouldn't chase something I found interesting for my own sake, and other times I did chase that and saved feeling guilt for later. That's lessened a lot over the years, but it's still there, and thankfully I can blow it off quickly. But each reminder like this reminds me of another unpleasant episode I can not just get over but push far past.

can’t fully decode the wordplay that gives rise to meminerimus’s title, but I think “minimum” or “minimus” has to be somewhere in the blender, because this parser game seems an exercise in creating the smallest possible unit of story: the critical-path transcript barely cracks 500 words. So as a result it’s hard to discuss the game without getting into the ending, and since there is a plot here to be spoiled, fair warning that the rest of this review does so.

To pad out the text a bit so readers deciding to nope out after that warning aren’t immediately confronted by unwanted story details in the following line, before they have a change to hit the back button, let me do some throat-clearing and note that the brevity of the text doesn’t indicate that the game is a low-effort production by any means; there are a bunch of testers listed, and there’s a nicely-styled online version of the game that features intuitive hyperlinks for potential actions.

So the restraint here certainly feels intentional, which makes for an interesting contrast with the density of the premise. See, what’s going on here is that the player-character is a digital simulacrum, reconstituted and placed into a virtual shrine featuring the effects of a real-world person who, we learn through examining each of the four items in turn – and examining is all you can do, this is a limited-parser game – has died of suicide. The person who commissioned the replica is the dead person’s parent, who, through misguided attempts to change them “for their own good”, wound up hounding them into their desperate act of self-harm. That parent acts as the game’s narrator, providing commentary as you look at a gift the dead child received from a boyfriend, an award they won at school, and so on, providing a small anecdote for each before eventually triggering the endgame text which spells out the above summary.

This is a fine story, albeit a sadly familiar one, so what I found notable were the ways the game deviated from my expectations. The main divergence is that while the parent is clearly a terrible person who did terrible things, the game’s presentation is nonetheless at least a bit ambivalent. At a micro level, this is done by having one of the four items represent what appears to a wholly positive memory, a board game the two of them enjoyed playing together, which serves to indicate that the relationship wasn’t completely one-dimensionally negative. But zooming out, the reason the parent’s gone to the trouble of creating this “virtual resurrection” is that they’re baffled by what they did wrong – they’re aware that the things they did exacted a toll upon their child, and from the questions they ask in the finale (“Why did you have to do that to yourself? Why did you have to go so soon? Where I did I go wrong? Am I to blame for this?”) it’s clear at least part of them understands their guilt. But for all that the game makes the parent’s passive-aggression, low expectations, and abusive behavior pellucidly clear, this incomprehension seems to be sincere.

This is an intriguing dynamic! An AI looking at the detritus of the person it’s aping, looked at by the person who knows that they caused their death but due to some flaw in their humanity unable to grasp exactly how or why – it’s an existential hall of mirrors that caused me some vertigo when I thought it through. But it’s also one would probably be more impactful if the game had spent more time elaborating upon it. The AI, for one thing, has no subjectivity beyond providing a vector for the player to make the arbitrary choice of which object to examine, and with the dead child provided no real character traits beyond a few generalities adverted to by the obviously-biased narrator, their suicide lacks some impact.

Sure, there would be challenges to expanding this piece of micro-fiction too much: more robust gameplay systems would probably be required, which can be tricky in a character-first game like this, and it might be hard to sustain the narrator’s lack of understanding across a more worked-out plot without things feeling absurd. Still, I think it would have been worth the attempt; meminerimus raises some interesting questions, but doesn’t do much to elaborate upon them. That’s not a bad position for what appears to be a debut work of IF to leave the player, though, as that means I’m game to see what the author does next.