Thousand Lives

I like history as a subject, but for a long time I thought I didn’t, because it’s often taught as a zoomed out, big-picture overview with few points of connection to individual human lives. This work illustrates a perfect way to counter that remove, presenting decades of Poland’s history through the lens of how it impacts, and is impacted by, one particular woman.

Thousand Lives has an unusual format for IF, each of its six chapters delivered by email 24 hours after you make the preceding chapter’s choice. A decade can pass in a few hundred words, with events both large- and small-scale described in brief summaries. Every chapter ends with a life-changing choice, establishing the path the PC will take through the next few years.

The story is in second-person, but because of the broad strokes, I didn’t feel immersed in the character; I was picking choices for her rather than as her. I thus found it easy to choose the more noble actions—for instance, when (Spoiler - click to show)I the character was told I was tempted to sleep with my imprisoned friend’s partner (“One warm evening, after a few drinks of moonshine, he kisses you and asks you to stay at his apartment. Your body wants this. Your heart wants this”), I as the player was not actually tempted, because I didn’t want to play out the narrative arc of her betraying her friend.

But while at first that remove led me to easily pick the choices that seemed like “the right thing to do”, on my final choice, in chapter five, I wavered. Here, I had to choose between (Spoiler - click to show)exposing files revealing political corruption that also implicated the PC’s brother, or covering up the story. I hadn’t gotten to know the brother at all; I didn’t particularly care about him as a character. But that didn’t matter, because once again I didn’t want to play out an arc of personal betrayal—even though it probably would have more sense for my heretofore politically-minded PC to make that sacrifice in service of the greater good.

Typically, after finishing a branching work like this, I’d immediately restart and play through again in order to see different outcomes. But Thousand Lives explicitly does not want you to do this—the description says “you have to live with your choices. There’s no do-overs or restarts.” If you return to an email and try clicking the other choice, you’ll get a message saying “You’ve already made your choice for this chapter. Sorry, no do-overs!” The title is "Thousand Lives", but while many different lives are possible, the format impresses on you that everyone only gets one life; that we can wonder about the roads not traveled, but never know where they would have led. This is a work where each reader collaborates with the author to tell a story, and seeing other versions of that story isn’t the point. But, while that's my conclusion about the intention behind this choice of format, I do have to admit that a big part of me would still appreciate the ability to easily replay after doing an initial "six days of emails" round.

Clearly, this work gave me a lot of thoughts about form, point-of-view, branching narratives, and the player’s relationship to the player character. I appreciate all of that, just as I appreciate the look at late-twentieth-century Poland, and the focus on one woman’s life there.