Cicatrix

I remember being a teenager and bearing witness to the strange psychological war inflicted on art kids like me. In it, we were told that our sensitivity amounts to nothing and that the future belongs to code, which is in itself a cold, uncaring, and most importantly, lucrative thing. Coding and computer science were put in a strange position opposite of poetry and literature at large. Poetry is this nebulous thing while code does always precisely what it's asked for, so coders have sharp minds and laser focus while poets simply think all day about some abstract concepts nobody cares about. The mere existence of Cicatrix, of course, makes this dichotomy crumble and turn to dust.

I don't want to talk about the story itself because I think this is something that needs to be experienced on individual basis and I'm not entirely sure how to even begin to summarize. What I can say is things on the technical side. I feel like you can read it without knowing Inform but knowing even a little bit of it (like me) will probably make the experience way richer. I absolutely love the contrast of short, matter-of-fact Inform sentences with the emotional depth of what's happening — the code is the mask for the story, in a way. There's such a wonderful rhythm in the definitions, in the "instead of... say..."s, in the strings of "understand X as...", in the "now"s, in "if... otherwise..."s.

The first time I read it, I stared at the last sentence for a while, and then I reread the whole thing. I reread it whenever I get reminded of it. It's probably one of my favorite poems ever. I'm not entirely sure if I can ever properly word why that's a thing. At least I tried.

Cicatrix is not a game, but a poem written in Inform 7 code. I’m reminded of some of the work from Event One in The Second Quadrennial Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction, especially Caduceus. However, I think Cicatrix achieves its goal more deftly, especially with the more varied ways it utilizes the Inform 7 syntax to tell its story.

There is a bar to entry here, as you have to understand how standard Inform 7 syntax works to really pick up on all the clever tricks and subtleties Amanda has worked into the prose. Especially in the final section, where everything really comes together, the “At the time when things change” rule may be difficult to parse if you aren’t used to staring at long stacks of if/otherwise nested statements. Once you puzzle it out, though, it makes for a serious gut punch.

The story it tells, about the things we carry with us, is I think to some degree a universal experience. Amanda has captured it beautifully and hauntingly.