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

Note: This review was written during IFComp 2024, and originally posted in the authors' section of the intfiction forum on 15 Sep 2024.

This is a charming game where you take a short walk around a park, immersing yourself in the countryside, while looking out for birds and learning about them.

I really like the textual descriptions for the images of the birds and locations. Even with images turned off in the browser (which i tried as a check) it makes the game playable for people who can’t see pictures.

I also liked the in game links to external resources about where you are exploring. All real places, and by following the links you can learn more about them.

Best of all for me was encountering lots of different birds. Extremely different birds from those I’m used to in Scotland. For example an American Robin looks dramatically different from a British Robin. The game teaches you about the birds in the game in a fun yet educational way, while also giving you a relaxing virtual experience out in the countryside.

On the downside the game has issues on smaller screens. I was playing on my laptop, using the downloaded version in my Mac Safari browser, which was fine. My husband - an extremely enthusiastic birder - had tried the game earlier on his iPad mini, but the very large resolution images blew up massively on the screen, meaning that the rest of the user interface was unusable. Another reviewer has mentioned this problem. But it did mean that I knew to use a computer.

That aside I found it a charming and educational experience. I felt as though I had been exploring a new area and spotting and learning about birds. Which was fun.

Sometimes a game’s title tells you exactly what you’re going to get. And so it is in this choice-based nature simulator, as you take a gentle stroll through nature to look for noteworthy avians while your tongue gently caresses Leo the Great.

If I wasn’t out of the Church before, that gag would earn an excommunication – sorry not sorry, as the kids say. No, as best I can tell from a bit of wiki-diving, the place got its name because some guy in Louisville named Pope had some salt licks on his riverside property. What the park loses in nominative exoticism it gains in natural beauty, at least according to the copious pictures (the author’s own) illustrating the game. It’s nothing fancy – there’s a bridge, some water, soccer fields, paths, grass, and trees – but I found it a pleasant place to make a virtual visit, especially since I’ve been living under a 105-degree heat dome for the past week. Oh, and there are birds, which are the whole point of the exercise!

The protagonist isn’t characterized by anything other than their love of birdwatching, which means the game presupposes that when you wander the park, you won’t want to spend time striking up conversations or kicking a ball around or getting exercise, and instead will have eyes and ears alert for feathered friends. I confess that this isn’t a hobby that’s ever appealed to me, but the author does a good job articulating why one might enjoy it. In each location you visit, you’ll get a sprinkling of flavor text setting the scene, an attractive photo (with thoughtfully-provided alt text), and a prompt to look closer and possibly spot a new bird. If you do, you’re rewarded with another nice pic of the avian in question, and a compact description of what’s uniquely interesting about this one in particular. Here’s one I liked:

"Looking through your binoculars, maybe 50 feet away you spot a bird walking head-first down a tree trunk…. A White-breasted Nuthatch. You love these goofy birds. You listen closely and hear the quiet “ha ha” sound it makes as it searches for bugs living in the bark. It flies from tree to tree, sometimes going up, sometimes upside down on the bottom of a horizontal branch."

And that’s it, that’s the game. You’re using a birding app – the game provides an external link to it if you’d like to download it yourself – which allows you to track what you’ve seen, and the game provides a quick summary once you decide you’ve had enough and leave the park, but there’s no checklist, no goals beyond the intrinsic ones of enjoying a walk and looking at as many different birds as you can find. There are a whole lot of them, from swallows to hawks to cardinals to vultures, and even as a layman I was impressed by the variety. The game’s also designed to be non-deterministic; sometimes you’ll revisit an area you’d been to previously and see that some new birds have taken up residence, which makes things feel less like an exercise in lawn-mowering. The often-confusing layout of the park also reduces any perceived gaminess – I found it hard to keep track of where I’d already been, and how different paths connected, which was frustrating at first but eventually I unclenched my jaw and just went with the flow.

So yeah, there’s nothing here that isn’t said on the tin. And unfortunately this isn’t a game that plays nicely on mobile – the bird pictures displayed for me at a super high resolution that drastically reduced the zoom and somehow blanked out most of the links. But if you’re at all interested in what birders see in their objects of obsession, you could do a lot worse than spending a few minutes with this grounded, low-key experience.

In real life I don’t have any hobbies that require me to be outdoors, because I’m very allergic to most plants. Sometimes I go to see an outdoor theatre production or concert, and then half an hour in I have a sinus headache and/or my asthma is acting up and I start wondering why I thought this would be fun. So I appreciate the opportunity to experience birding vicariously within my own air-filtered home.

Birding in Pope Lick Park is a low-key trip to the park, clearly written with a lot of love for both the setting and the activity, and supplemented with lovely photos of the park and the birds. I was pretty engaged in the activity of finding all the out-of-the-way corners of the park and felt a bit of excitement whenever I came across a new bird to record. There’s a wide variety of birds to be found; it seemed like quite a lot for one trip, but I don’t know how much of a break from reality this is or isn’t.

At the end, I was a little disappointed that the game didn’t give me any indication of how many of the available birds I had found, but of course that wouldn’t be realistic, so from a simulation perspective I see why it doesn’t, even if it does have the effect of discouraging replays.

My only serious complaint is that the image file sizes are huge, making it somewhat irritating to play the game online as they’re slow to load. I think the image quality could be reduced somewhat without the difference being particularly noticeable to most people, and since to the best of my knowledge the majority of people prefer to play online, especially for Twine games, I feel the tradeoff would be worth it. But otherwise, this was a nice, relaxing medium-length game.

This is a pretty eye-catching game that has a really nice visual design.

The first thing I noticed is that it clearly uses icons to differentiate observable things, in-game locations, and external websites. This approach goes a long way in making the game navigable.

It feels more like navigating a website than a real place, but it’s helpful anyway — navigation is something I often have trouble with in Twine games.

Despite a good basic design, there’s also a lot content on-screen at any given time. You have the core story text, photographs of each location, and non-toggleable image descriptions for accessibility. So it can feel like information overload at times.

How much you enjoy the game probably depends on how much you enjoy collecting things in games. It’s not really my thing. (Outside of IF, I thought that the highly-praised Alba: A Wildlife Adventure was very overrated, and I’ve never tried to remotely complete a Pokedex in Pokemon. Collecting and cataloguing is something I’m prone to in real life, and I don’t want to do it in games.)

So, in the end, I didn’t try to see every single bird in Pope Lick Park, and I don’t know if there’s a reward for completing your list of birds or any secrets to find. That’s for someone else to find out.

As for length: the story description says it’s half an hour long, but you can spend as little or as much time in the game as you like. To end the story, you just need to go back to your car.

Similar to “Turn Right,” this seems to be based on a real life experience. Unlike “Turn Right,” “Birding” presents things as they are without much criticism or commentary, and the author describes a lot of things that you might notice incidentally in a walk through the park. However, the author of “Birding” mentions a storywriting workshop in the credits, so maybe there is more fiction here than I’m giving credit for.

As an elementary birder, this game was an unexpected delight. The writing and presentation is like a virtual tour, so the experience almost felt like going on a birdwalk with the author, who included photos, image descriptions, relevant links, and the thought process behind bird identification. It's edu-tainment, and a nice introduction for anyone who's interested in the hobby. My only suggestion is that it would've been cool to include a link to all the species observed at the end of the game, and to include audio files for the observations that were heard, but not seen.

My favorite part was how well the author captured the peaceful, exploratory nature of birding. The player is invited to meander along whatever paths they choose while life flows around them--- brief interactions with other strangers enjoying their day, passing observations of the people around them. It's a perfectly relaxing Saturday morning out in nature.

This was a pleasant game. It has a goal it sets out to achieve and does it in a descriptive, polished, and entertaining way.

This game is a simulated bird-watching expedition in Pope Lick Park in Kentucky. It looks quite a bit like the parks near me in Dallas.

The highlight of the game for me is the high-quality photography of birds and other parts of nature. The framing of the photos, the resolution, and the colors were all really appealing to me. The description of the trails and woods occasionally felt a bit repetitive but had enough variety to keep my attention for a while.

Overall, a great game for encouraging people to get into birding. Makes me want to rememeber to take pictures when I see something cool in nature!