Coke Is It!

In the glory days of the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup, from time to time someone (or a group of someones) would make a game as a demonstration of a rhetorical point. A famous example of this is +=3, which was written to demonstrate that an author needs to make the player aware of the relevant details of the game universe in order to be fair. As I understand it, this piece was also inspired by a discussion -- this time about possible models for the paid development of interactive fiction in the aftermath of the collapse of the commercial era. Given the scale of the effort, an echo of the Textfire collection of the previous year, it also seems to be inspired by the pure joy of practical jokery.

This is less a parody of the individual games involved than it is of our society as a whole -- specifically commercialism's influence on culture. The work posits that the manufacturer of Coca-Cola, infamous for never passing up a chance to expand the mindshare of its brand by slapping its logo on something new, has decided by spreadsheet that there's a theoretical payoff to funding new IF in order to achieve a little more brand awareness. It shows us a taste of a "what if" world in which some of the best-known works of the time were produced under a product placement model of monetary "support" for the art, a world in which presumably IF is plentiful... and it just won't shut up about the sponsor's carbonated beverage.

I suppose that whether this world is a utopia or dystopia is a matter of personal preference, but personally I'm pleased that, 25 years on, the art form has continued to grow organically in the absence of major commercial interests.

The rhetorical value of this work is lessened somewhat by the over-the-top nature of the jingoism, and as a game it suffers from a reliance on player knowledge of the games being simulated. David Welbourn's walkthrough can get you through any points where you become stuck, but there's no particular payoff to reaching the programmed end. It's still worth a quarter of an hour to be amused by the various one-liners and to consider the questions that the game implicitly prompts.