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brave new author's minimalist horror nightmare, June 28, 2012Warning: spoilers, because this game is so short. But a lot of blathering to go on.
(Spoiler - click to show)I must admit I have to feel a bit of a soft spot for a game which accepts as its first moves >GET KNIFE, >KILL ME... and then continues. In that beginning, the whole world is winnowed down to one room with a nothing outside and four things: a bed, me, a knife, a throat. And one must do something... or else one could wander the world forever finding only a nothing “Outside” and rooms with beds, knives, and your throat.
Constrained implementation makes the suicidal restlessness of the PC signify strongly, controlling and consuming the viewpoint protagonist's entire umwelt to represent its intention. In this way, the text of “baby tree” is not sparse, but dense. This is not the faux minimalism of NoM3rcy, but a crafted and toned torture machine shrunk to miniature scale. Minimalist perspective sharply delineates, but actively obfuscates existences in a world of nightmare.
The space of the game is odd, but odd in a way that tells us about the world inhabited by its characters. When moving, rooms simply cycle from “Room” to “Outside.” One can move in any cardinal direction from “Room,” and up or down and in, but not out-- to “Outside.” It makes normal sense to not be able to move out from Outside, but to go from Room to Outside by going in instead of out does not make sense in world of normal physical laws. That retreating inward can bring one to an outside space suggests not only a retreat from a world of logical forces, but that entropy in the inward retreat is constant and irreversible to the protagonist, who cannot return from her inner state. In this way, the world of “baby tree” is a reflection of the incoherent non-logic of nightmare.
Even this initial room might not be the protagonist's own. The geography of “baby tree” exceeds the bounds of a personalized domestic territory-- for how have we returned to the same “Room” by continuing in a direction away from it? Geographical connections in this world must be senseless, as we can move at half-cardinal directions like northeast or southwest and end up “Outside” in a spot that once was a “Room.” It is because of these diagonals that-- rather than a constrained, simple world of two rooms or an infinite, static checkerboard of rooms and outsides-- the layout of “baby tree” suggests madness, a conspiracy of death stretching across an endlessly networked map, a tainted carrier of disease killing dogs and babies whose wanderings haunt the uninhabited rooms of a nightmare nowhere, affecting only each other with no ecology beyond ghost children, unpeopled rooms of beds and knives, dogs for dying, a sickness inside to be cut out, the cries of the baby tree, an inescapable trap of infinite death and guilt with an unreachable history.
I can think of one way in which this nightmare could maintain diagonals and sense, but I do not want to consider for the moment the implications of “baby tree” spanning a scale of eternities in which civilizations rise and fall, their outsides becoming rooms, their rooms becoming outsides. Although the game has no explicit relation to time, to me the measure of 1 turn per command (the game's only relation to time) seems to indicate a more local scale: one second, maybe, or one minute, not one millenium.
This horror is not without controversy. The identification of the protagonist as female in the ending has led some to interpret this story as punishment for the evils of abortion, an interpretation the author has said was not intentional. It also means that the player's description and second-person narration are misleading to a male audience in a way that-- violated so abruptly at the end-- breaks suspension of disbelief. Clearly the second-person has been dealt with wrongly in this IF; if the protagonist is to be distinctly gendered it should be made clear the identity of “you” is separate from the player. Instead, the author used the most basic one-word AFGNCAAP description: explicitly “you.” This invites the reader to imagine themselves. If the author had not intended gender association between male players and the PC, he should not have invited it with second person. On the other hand, Mr. Galin might just as easily change one word at the end of the game to more fully embrace his use of the second person perspective, perhaps changing it to “person” or “human.” This would also preserve controversy, if the author finds that a valuable element of his storyworld.
For what it's worth, I did not interpret the story as being about abortion-- partially because I didn't interpret the second-person PC as a female until the very end. The baby tree initially suggested to me the guilt of a person (perhaps a doctor) who wants to save everyone, but can't. In my first reading of it, these were the faces of all of “all the babies you killed” through inaction or inability, of babies dying across the country or in other parts of the world, the nightmare guilt of which traps the PC in this inescapable nightmare. As a self-proclaimed experiment in madness, I think this space for personal interpretation works in its favor.
Even in the minimal presentation, there are some misfires in implementation.
(Spoiler - click to show)>LIE ON BED
can't
>GET ON BED
ok
This isn't entirely without precedent in an experimental work. There are shades of Rybread's Symetry here... darker, better-formed shades that thankfully don't abuse another author's work as a crutch.
In the end, although I found it horrific, I do have to wonder how the story would be different had the author used ghost puppies or kittens or even just plain ol' corpses instead of babies. Would a “corpse tree” with the screams of adult ghosts be as effective?