Birding in Pope Lick Park

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

There are classes of activities that do not need to justify themselves. Solo board gaming. Herb gardening. Geocaching. Live scoring baseball games. I’m not going to provide an exhaustive list, there probably isn’t one. These are activities that provide ineffable joy to the participant, and earn outsider responses that range from baffled to humoring to (hopefully) indulgent mocking. That latter response is wholly and completely unwarranted and will not be discussed further. Gatekeeping others’ joy is a distasteful and unworthy human response. It is enough that the PARTICIPANT enjoys it, no?

Obviously I mean to include Bird Watching in this club. The thing about this class of activity is that others’ approval or enjoyment of the work is completely tangential to its successes. In a game of kickball, it is crucial that everyone is invested, or unearned runs will undermine the activity for everyone (or at least HALF of everyone). Here, others’ derision or approval has NO IMPACT on the activity at hand. It is wholly successful on its own terms.

There is an old saw “Write what you know.” The wisdom of this saw is not ONLY that having a full command of the details lends an authority to your writing, but also that your engagement with the topic is almost certain to be deeper than cold retelling. Writing that tells a story is of course great. Writing that tells a story, WITH A POINT OF VIEW is transformational, connecting readers to the writer in a deeply intimate way. This is a work, possibly a first time work?, that connects the player to the author’s passions in a personal, winning way. It does not attempt to belabor the JOY of the activity, that might not find purchase in an unsympathetic player. It presents a probably optimistic portrayal of that activity, tied to a location the author seems to have intimate familiarity with, and lets the detailed engagement convey that joy.

Technically, I wish it had paid a little more attention to screen layout. I found the link paradigm of adding inline content (including large pictures) to continually require page-down tabbing. I think I paged more than I clicked links here. A more deliberate photo-pane/nav text pane paradigm might make for a smoother gameplay experience. At least, that’s what I kept thinking as I continually paged down. Whatever theoretical-alternate interface might or might not exist, it absolutely needs to accommodate the photographs though. Their inclusion was the beating heart of this thing. More than anything else, the crisp, evocative photographs carried the author’s love for the subject matter. And not for nothing, were very well executed in their own right.

So, as a game rating? The nature of this class of activity is that external ratings are kind of immaterial, so understand I am serving the COMP here, not the work itself by conferring one. For me, this raw activity is outside my sphere of engagement, and was always going to be a mechanical experience. I rate the UI as notably page-down forward. But for sure, the author’s obvious underlying love for this activity and its wonderful photographic inserts earn a bonus point.

Played: 10/7/24
Playtime: 20m, 23 species/56 birds
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Notable formatting, bonus point for loving use of photography
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless