Excalibur

Excalibur takes the form of a fan wiki for a fictional ’70s science fiction TV show. The show itself is now completely lost to the BBC’s tape-erasing practices, but the fans have come together to assemble what information they can from their own memories and whatever ancillary materials they can get their hands on, documenting the content of the show and the behind-the-scenes dramas of the cast and crew.

I found this premise intriguing, given my own experiences with fandom. The relationship of a fandom to its source material is often less straightforward than one might think (especially if that fandom has been going for decades). Theories about a show or interpretations of ambiguous elements can become widely agreed upon as fact even though the actual contents of the show support multiple possibilities, and the popular theory/interpretation may not even be the best supported. Small details are given disproportionate importance—a joke that appeared two or three times becomes, in the minds of the fans, a running joke in practically every episode; something a character does or mentions once becomes a prominent character trait. Popular fan writers invent characterization and worldbuilding details that other fan writers adopt, and eventually everyone forgets those details weren’t in the show. In a very real sense, a fandom is not so much about the actual source material as it is about a version of it that lives in the collective imagination of the fans.

The concept of a fandom whose source material doesn’t exist anymore provides a great opportunity to explore this phenomenon: the fans are trying to reconstruct the show as accurately as possible, but does it really matter what was or wasn’t actually in there? Are these fans sticking around due to love of the show, as they profess, or is it more that they’re getting something out of the social aspects of the fandom? If Excalibur had been more focused on the dynamics between a work of fiction, its creators, and its audience (and among that audience), I would have loved it. Instead, however, it was trying for some grander themes (Do we place undue importance on memorializing things—or people—that are gone? At what point does “remembering” turn into “being stuck in the past”?), which didn’t quite work for me.

This may be a matter of taste; in general, I prefer exploring themes like this through characters rather than as philosophical abstracts. In this case, I would have liked to see either different characters grappling with the comforts of memory versus the benefits of moving on, with different results, or one particularly richly textured, well-drawn character’s personal journey. Instead, Excalibur mostly offers philosophical musings alongside characters who are caricatures of common fan types—including the central character, Ian, who is that guy who loves being a big fish in a small pond, and is perhaps so high on his own self-importance that he’s forgotten how small the pond actually is. The caricatures are well-done, and in a game that was more parodic in tone I would have no faults to find with them, but they sit somewhat oddly alongside the game's high-minded thematic concerns.

One section of the story that did work for me was the portion of the game focusing on VerdantKnight and HandOfBedivere, who, having met through Excalibur fandom, are working together to make a fan documentary and are also in a long-distance relationship. Then, after a visit to the main filming location, Bedi disappears from the internet. Did he fall victim to the show’s supposed curse, or has VK just been ghosted? Either way, it’s a tale of an obsession with the past that is at best relationship-destroying and at worst deadly, and VK, in his grief, reacts by clinging even harder to that obsession, insisting that he will finish the documentary on his own. And in that moment, I cared about how destructive that obsession was, because VK felt like a real person, not A Certain Type of Fan.

But then, “felt like a real person” is a slightly ironic thing to say here. On several occasions, Excalibur brings up the idea that the show never existed and no one involved in creating it ever existed. That’s all very well and good, but then it suggests that (Spoiler - click to show)the fans never existed, or at least that many/most of them are sockpuppets (that is, fake accounts) made by Ian. So if the show isn’t real, and the people making the show aren’t real, and their on-set drama and the mysteries surrounding the making of the show aren’t real, and the fans aren’t real, and their interpersonal dramas aren’t real… what’s the point of any of this? (You might, if you were being a smart aleck, point out that this game is fiction, so of course none of it is real. But emotional investment in a work of fiction requires some amount of suspension of disbelief, so it’s hard to make that investment in a work that doesn’t believe in many aspects of its own created world and doesn’t want the player to get too comfortable doing so either.)

The point, in fact, seems to largely be Ian’s personal psychodrama—can he bring himself to let go of this fandom, or will he be stuck in a spiral of unhealthy obsession forever?—(Spoiler - click to show)but then, that actually makes less sense to me under the “sockpuppeting” interpretation, too. If the other fans are real, then the reasons for his attachment to the fandom are obvious, but if this is all a one-man puppet show, then he’s not actually getting any attention or respect, so what is he getting? But perhaps the bigger problem here is that I don’t quite care enough to come up with interpretations of his motivations, because for most of the game he’s presented as an exaggerated, two-dimensional stereotype, which was funny, but didn’t really prime me to be interested in dissecting his psychology.

Despite this wall of text, I really did like Excalibur overall; the reason I’ve written this whole long review of it is that I almost loved it, but the “is this fake? Is that fake? Is it all fake?” kept distracting me from (what I felt was) the good stuff.

The visual design of the game is fantastic, and it does a mostly good job of wrangling Twine into the shape of a wiki despite Twine’s protests (although I did feel the lack of a proper back button). And I did think that the first two layers of the narrative, the descriptions of the show and the mysterious goings-on behind the scenes, were well-executed, with a nicely unsettling atmosphere, when leaving aside the repeated suggestions that they might never have existed. But with those suggestions in place, these two layers rely on the third layer, the goings-on in the fandom, to give them meaning, and Ian’s story didn’t do that for me.