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If you aren’t going to do the work, somebody else might., October 21, 2023This choice-based community organizing simulator uses a second-person perspective to burden you with the task of going out on a Friday night and collecting £5 in dues for a community union.
It's well written and smoothly implemented, combining large themes and small details to wrap the entire story in an overwhelming sense of futility. You are clearly not part of the community that you visit, located “in a ward the other side of the city from your own home,” and the union keeps itself at a distance, working through an authority figure that keeps encouraging you to collect money.
There are 32 houses that you can visit, and each one is experiencing its own problems. Even if you take notes and focus on the houses that are most likely to pay dues, the text continually questions your choices and doubts your impact. (Are you willing to encourage a bigot's prejudiced rant if it helps you meet your quota?)
You also have to manage your own needs, because the shift ends early if you get too cold or ignore the fact that you need a bathroom break. You can goof off by reading news headlines and texting your colleagues, but their lack of commitment makes your own dedication seem even more pointless.
I particularly appreciated the “glossary” in No One Else Is Doing This. It felt like the basic information that this faceless organization would provide to new volunteers, telling them just enough to get them started.
Eventually, it ended so abruptly that I restarted without noticing, and that appears to be an intentional design choice that drives home the futility of your efforts.
If you aren’t going to do the work, somebody else might. And if nobody does it, will anyone notice?
- Bell Cyborg (Canada), July 21, 2023
- Jaded Pangolin, February 5, 2023
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
A bottom-up view of political activism, January 9, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
I spend a lot of time in my reviews pontificating about prose style and engagement and puzzle difficulty and all sorts of stuff as though I were some sort of expert, but of course the truth is that’s all just based on having read a bunch of books, played a fair number of games, and written a couple myself – hardly specialized knowledge, since that describes like everyone who writes IF reviews. And subject matter wise I have to confess I’ve never been stuck in an abandoned spaceship, transported to a surreal otherworld that’s a reflection of my undigested trauma, or gone on any sort of fantastical quest at all, so all that’s a strikeout too.
All of which is to say that I was very excited to come across a game where I actually do have relevant experience that most players probably wouldn’t! No One Else is Doing This is all about canvassing – the fine art of knocking on doors (or shooting people an aggressively cheerful wave and “hi!” in a busy public place) to talk to folks about issues, encouraging them to sign a petition, support a candidate or ballot measure, and/or (preferably and) donate to keep a nonprofit afloat. I’ve never been a full-time canvasser, but for many years I worked for an organization that ran outreach operations like the ones depicted in NOEDT across the U.S. (admittedly, the game is set in the U.K.), and besides spending a lot of time talking to colleagues about how they were run, I headed out to turf myself a fair few times to see what canvassing was like. So in addition to assessing the game qua game, I’ll also review how accurately it portrays the experience of canvassing – on its Comp page, NOEDT twice brands itself a “simulator”, so I think this is a fair exercise.
With all that introductory rigmarole out of the way, what’s the game actually like? It’s a short, minimally-but-attractively designed Twine game that briefly introduces you to the situation – you’re employed as a door-knocker by a community union, which I think translates into Americanese as a community-based organization, trying to recruit more dues-paying members to increase your union’s ability to pay its staff and make change (reading between the lines, it appears it works primarily on local issues, primarily housing). After an initial sequence that sees you bundle way, way up – it’s set on a Friday night in early December – you head out on your shift, needing to raise one more five-pound contribution to hit your weekly quota.
Once you hit turf, you’re presented with a dashboard of sorts where you can plan your work. There’s a status indicator up top letting you know how much time’s left in the shift and how much you’ve raised so far, plus warnings if you’re getting too cold or need to use the bathroom. There’s a short glossary explaining some of the (honestly not that technical) specialized vocabulary the game uses. There’s the option to take a break to see to some of the aforementioned needs. And then there’s the list of doors, authentically arranged into two rows of first the odd numbers, then the evens (because of course the most efficient way to work your way down a block is to knock all the doors on one side, then cross and do the other side – this is how pretty much all walk lists are printed).
The meat of the game comes when you select a door. Much of the time nobody will be home (or nobody will answer – not necessarily the same thing!) and you’ll just drop some lit, leaving a pamphlet for the resident in the forlorn hope that they’ll read it instead of chucking it in the bin, and maybe decide to donate to you sua sponte (mostly they wind up in the bin). When somebody answers, you’re given a choice of two dialogue options as you move through your rap (the canned speech you use to tell folks who you are and what you’re doing) and try to make enough of a connection for them to join the union (or just throw money at you so you’ll go away).
Sometimes you’re doomed no matter what you do, of course – the dad in the middle of making dinner for screaming kids doesn’t have time to listen to your schpiel, and the chav in the middle of watching a football game just wants to get back to the telly. And some folks will want to talk to you, but either conclude that organizing isn’t the answer to society’s problems – it’s the fault of bad education/laziness/those Muslims – or that while they’re totally with you, they’re just completely tapped out of time and money. There are a few, though, who will donate if you do a good enough job of figuring out what would motivate them, or at least just get lucky.
This all seems super accurate, as do some of the constraints. It’s cold and miserable out on turf when you canvass in the middle of the winter. There are way, way more doors that don’t open than those that do, and pretty much nobody you talk to has any idea of what your kind of organization is so you need to keep the conversations really basic. There’s not enough time to get through all your turf, and while canvassing skill definitely has an impact over time, it’s totally possible to have a night go totally south because you hit a run of bad doors all in a row (the game is kind of sneaky about this, in fact – most players will probably start out hitting the odd doors in increasing order, since they’re presented on the first row. But the early odd-numbered doors are all pretty terrible, with almost all the donors found on the evens side of the street – it’s sufficiently disproportionate that I assume the intent is for a first playthrough to be miserable).
Breaking from questions of verisimilitude for a minute, all of this is presented in unadorned but solid prose that I think does a good job of capturing the experience, and especially the time and place (it’s set in 2020). Here’s a bit from the bus ride to turf:
"You just about manage to jump on the bus before it leaves. The schools have finished for the day and it’s over capacity, teenagers sitting in the seats marked out for social distancing. The elderly man behind you is wearing his mask underneath his nose. You put your headphones in and try to psych yourself up for the next four hours."
This approach extends to the actual door-knocking, where the conversations are compact and to the point, but do a good job of quickly sketching out the rich pageant of characters you’d expect to come across if you met everyone who lived on a street.
The writing is also where the protagonist’s growing disillusionment with the work comes through. They’re getting burned out, it’s clear:
"He shuts the door. You post a leaflet, impotently, through the letter box."
But this isn’t just a matter of worry that you’re behind on your quota (quotas are totally a real thing, FYI) – the protagonist is also questioning whether this work is actually adding up to social change:
"You don’t have the time to go back and see them again, and most of them will never come to a meeting or an action without support. They’ll just cancel their memberships, probably, and then you’re back where you started."
This is where my suspension of disbelief started to take a bit of a hit. Organizations that do this work don’t typically expect door-knockers to also try to get members to take further actions – or if they do, it’s not during the same shifts where they’re working through a walk list. There’ll typically be called a ladder of engagement, with other staff calling folks who’ve signed up as members to talk to them in more depth about issues and campaigns, invite them to events, and move them into doing more and more. If this community union’s organizing model is just “sign ‘em up and hope they do something,” it’s no wonder their staff are unsure what the point of all their work is!
The other reason the protagonist’s burnout is understandable is that the author’s put their thumb on the scales. As I mentioned above, if you run through the doors in the intuitively correct order you’ll struggle with a lot of empty homes and uninterested residents, and probably fail to raise a single pound, prompting a downbeat ending. But even if you, for some obsessive reason, decide to play the game five or six times and systematically mark down which doors are the best ones – then have to play it one more time because your planned-out “perfect run” got derailed when you forgot to stop for a pee break – and run up the scoreboard such that you raise almost your entirely weekly quota in one night, you’re told as you’re checking in with your supervisor that members you’d signed up on previous nights have cancelled their donations, so you wind up below quota after all.
It’s dumb to feel put out by this kind of authorial manipulation, I suppose – spoiler, everything in every game is authorial manipulation – but still, I think it weakens the work. As I mentioned above, it’s definitely possible to be good at canvassing, or just lucky, and have a good night. And I don’t think it’s critical to the protagonist’s gradual embitterment that they fail – after coming in below quota I was expecting the supervisor to fire me, but she was actually quite chill and philosophical about it. Canvassing is hard, grinding work; many of the organizations that employ canvassers think giving people an opportunity to work on issues they care about means they don’t need to be too punctilious about labor rights and practices; and it is the case that while, at least in my experience, community organizing is one of the few things that can create the power needed to win systems change, much if not most of the time systems succeed at sustaining an unjust status quo even in the face of top-notch campaigning. To my mind, grappling with these issues more directly would have made NOEDT’s critiques more incisive (for that matter, what exactly is the title referring to? I wonder whether it’s an indirect indication that the protagonist’s friends and relations think she’s crazy to be doing this work).
Modulo that one niggle, though, I think NOEDT works quite well both as a look into this important but infrequently-depicted vocation, as well as a portrait of a community, lumps and all – as much as I enjoyed seeing the impedimenta of canvassing show up in a piece of IF, similarly to how I’ve felt when knocking doors in real life I also enjoyed the surprise of seeing who was behind each door, and knowing that while most of them would be dismissive or busy or otherwise disagreeable, there’s a chance of meeting at least a few willing – indeed, excited – to have a quick chat about how to make the world better, if only a little.
I’ll wrap up this way-too-long-by-any-objective-measure review with two last PSAs for those who’ve played NOEDT: first, in the US we’re a month out from Election Day, and that means that if you live here you may soon be getting calls or door-knocks from canvassers for one cause or candidate or another. You definitely don’t have to agree with them or give them money by any means, but hopefully this game can be a reminder to treat them like they’re human beings – the difference between a sincere “I’m sorry, I can’t tonight” and slamming a door in one’s face is really really significant! And second, if you ever are doing any canvassing yourself, the bit here where the protagonist goes out on turf alone, with only a rape whistle for protection, is a very bad idea – always buddy up!
- Jim Nelson (San Francisco), January 7, 2023
- Wanderlust, December 17, 2022
- inte (USA), December 14, 2022
- Cerfeuil (*Teleports Behind You* Nothing Personnel, Kid), November 30, 2022
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
Best Futility Simulator Ever, November 28, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
There is no real graphical flourish to this work, little interactivity, and the few puzzles you need to solve there are no clues to decode to succeed, making it effectively random. I think I have complained about all of these things in other reviews. But here, my reaction was exactly opposed – I unreservedly loved it. The intro text probably is the key to this. It sets the stage with the fruitless grind of the work, the dieing optimism, the modest yet still out of reach goals, and does so unsentimentally and resignedly. Before you know it, you are knocking on doors, really just clicking house numbers, one after another until the time runs out.
And oh my god the neighbors. Many are just not home, and sometimes the text makes it clear that’s a good thing. When they are home, each is uniquely and specifically unhappy to see you, but you still have to engage. Sometimes you inadvertently say the right thing, sometimes you say exactly the wrong thing and they slam the door. It's not that you don’t have control (it seems), it's that you have no way of knowing what motivates or sets people off so you take your best shot. And it's thrilling when it works, and self-recriminations and if-onlys when it doesn’t. But, still gotta get to the next door and do it all over again.
I am kind of in awe at how finely calibrated the game is. Its individual interactions are either disappointingly abrupt, or whirwind verbal fencing matches, but every encounter is exactly the length it needs to be. Neither victory nor defeat is dwelled on, because on to the next. A quick click washes the previous encounter away and is charged with promise of the next one. A pee break if you’re lucky, then your shift ends at what feels like the narratively perfect point, leaving you with regret over the houses you didn’t get to. Text and screen organization within and between encounters pace every step of this experience just so. Until its unceremonious ending, you simultaneously feel “this shift just keeps going” and “I need more time.”
“A Community Organizing Simulator” is its subtitle. Before you start, you would probably be thinking "it's funny because it's too small a game to be a simulator." After you’ve played, including that chef’s kiss of a denouement, you’re definitely thinking, "OMG IT IS THE MOST ACCURATE SIMULATOR EVER MADE." I am saying that this work marries IF interactivity to its subject matter so thoroughly and precisely it is what most aspire to when they talk about form-function synergy.
Frankly, I am only resisting calling this Transcendent due to my suspicion that my recent grass-roots volunteer experiences may be coloring my reaction. Thanks Lauren?
Played: 10/10/22
Playtime: 15min, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaged/Seamless
Would Play Again? Sadly, living it
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
- EJ, November 21, 2022
- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), November 20, 2022
- OverThinking, November 16, 2022
- Karl Ove Hufthammer (Bergen, Norway), November 15, 2022
- Vivienne Dunstan (Dundee, Scotland), November 11, 2022
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
Knock on those doors…you can do it, October 29, 2022In this short Twine game, you play as a volunteer collecting dues for a community organization group. It is time for your shift, where you go from door to door, trying to get people interested in signing up as members. You have a quota to meet, but lately your success rate with recruiting members has declined and your faith in the organization's ability to create change is wavering. Think about that later. Pull on your winter clothes, steel your nerves, and start your shift.
Gameplay
Collect £5 in dues within four hours. All right. There are 32 houses on your list. It is not possible to visit them all, nor is that the goal. Well, the goal is to knock on as many doors as possible, but your success is based on the dues you collect, not on how many houses you reach. Going to a house costs five minutes, and at some point, you also need to take at least one break, either to use the restroom or warm up from the cold, or you will have to end your shift early. So, it is definitely not possible to cover everything. But that is also a good reason for replays.
You can also take breaks for other things such as texting a coworker or checking the news. The game is set during the COVID lockdown restrictions in 2020, and checking the news gives some light background context which was a nice touch. Plus, there is an in-game glossary explaining the process of community organization.
The catch is that success is not really possible. Few people showed interest in my pitch. I made a simple list of which houses had people who answered the door, and then narrowed that down to people who would earnestly engage in conversation. Next, I replayed to find the dialog options that successfully convinced them to join. And it worked! I was so pleased with myself. My target was £5. I came back with (Spoiler - click to show) £8. Only to learn that (Spoiler - click to show) some people cancelled their memberships, resulting in me failing to meet my target after all. An exercise in futility, and that is where the main idea comes in.
Story + Characters
The protagonist is coming to terms with the fact that their work is no longer as meaningful as they once thought it was. They joined to make a difference, and now they have a hard time envisioning people enthusiastically signing up for something pitched to them by a stranger on their doorstep. Early on in their job, the protagonist reached their targets with recruiting people but now not so much. They wonder if the time spent going from door to door to keep their numbers up could be better spent elsewhere. But the only thing they are told by their manager is to knock on more doors. The game ultimately shares some interesting perspectives.
There is a strong human element in this game. It captures the task of preparing to weather all sorts of people. When you first play the game there is a sense of anticipation of wondering who will open the door. Someone edgy? Someone friendly? No one at all? At the same time, you also see the other side of the story. There is a lockdown, everyone is cooped up inside, it is the dead of winter, and now here is someone knocking on your door asking you to sign up for something. Still, I wonder if the author has done community organization work themselves, and if so, whether the characters in the game are based on actual experiences.
Visuals
On a brief side note, I really like the game’s appearance which combines a purple background with white text and colourful links. It is organized and crisp looking.
Final thoughts
No One Else Is Doing This was one of the earlier games I played for the IFComp and it immediately pulled me into the story. It is not particularly long, but its gameplay structure encourages multiple playthroughs. While generally lighthearted it does touch on topics about daily concerns such as upkeep of parks or cost of public transportation. It gives you some interesting things to think about, and I appreciated its relevance to the COVID related lockdown without it dominating the gameplay. The game is ultimately a mix of humor, determination, and frustration that puts the player in the protagonist’s shoes.
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
Twine game about community organization, October 28, 2022This is a Twine game that has a brief intro followed by a large open segment where you can choose between 30 or 40 houses to knock on, each with their own mini-story.
You work for a community organization group and your goal is to collect a certain amount of subscriptions before the night is over. You have to monitor both the funds, your bathroom needs, and your body warmth. Each action takes some time to complete.
Out of all the 'simulator' games this year in IFComp, this one works pretty well mechanically, with clearly understandable variables and some ability to strategize how to use your time.
Storywise, I could partially identify with it. I spent 2 years as a missionary, and quite a bit of our daily time was spent knocking on doors, handing out fliers on street corners, or doing service work like English teaching or soup kitchen volunteering. I guess the difference is that I wasn't looking for money donations, but trying to share a religious message. I would say that the results in this game are much more positive than the ones I experienced on average!
It was well known even then that door-to-door is one of the lowest-productivity ways of making contacts. Referrals were much more effective, since you could find people who were already interested instead of bothering people who don't care. Door-to-door knocking for anything can be extremely wearing.
I'd be interested to see how community organizing plays out in real life. It almost sounds like a HOA in this game (give us money and we'll make decisions for the neighborhood). It's interesting seeing different problems people care about in the game and how the protagonist evaluates their importance.
- reyryan, October 20, 2022
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
You're just not feeling it anymore, October 14, 2022No One Else Is Doing This by Lauren O’Donoghue
This was something different. It is a timed text adventure in which you are going around a neighborhood asking for donations. You have to pick which houses to approach, and then make choices about what to say. You also have to manage restroom breaks, and warm up from the chilly weather occasionally. Can you raise your target goal of funds?
SPOILER: (Spoiler - click to show)The description suggests that the experience is meant to feel like someone losing their passion for something they believed in, but it felt to me like a metaphor for any experience that was once enjoyable, but for whatever reason, it begins to sour. Kind of like how Disney World used to be fun, and now you have to pay for fastpass. It’s really hard to get someone to answer the door in this story, let alone hear you out long enough to convince them to take any action. Maybe the author has had bad experiences with community service projects, but it seems like the game was made to discourage you from getting involved.
- Ola (Sweden), October 12, 2022
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