do not let your left hand know

Would you let someone else borrow your own body? Take it out for a spin, have a joyride with your physicality for a short period of time, see if the grass is really all that green on the other side.

Let's say that if you did, then... what if the joyrider decided to stick around longer than originally agreed upon? What if your body, your life, was much more enjoyable than whatever they had to go back to?

What if you were taken over?

do not let your left hand know not only explores this idea but savors it, twists it and weaves a narrative through it and around it that is emotional and confronting. It definitely got a reaction out of me, and it is incredibly well-written, not just in terms of the actual text but how it is positioned and arranged, something that is easy to miss at first glance but becomes very obvious by the end.

When time came for the single choice to be made, it was clear which option would lead to its corresponding outcome, and I was able to get the conclusion that satisfied me the most.

I only wish I was able to give more than four stars, but single-choice narratives like this don't really fulfil my criterion about interactivity. All others were satisfied, and I want to read more from this author.

Overall, a pleasant twenty minute reading experience. Four pairs of hearts out of five.

Note: Review contains spoilers throughout!

This one was intriguing from the get-go—we start in media res with our narrator, Monica, inhabiting someone else’s body, saying that she’s temporarily borrowed it, which immediately raised so many questions. What happened to Monica’s own body? Why did she need/want this? How did she come to this agreement with the body’s owner?

These questions are all answered eventually, but having my curiosity satisfied quickly paled in importance next to the emotional arcs of the two main characters. In that first scene, the “agreement” Monica has with her host quickly falls apart as she wants more time, time that the host does not want to give—and the host is the one with the power, able to wrest control and push her out. We then shift POVs to a woman named Lisa, who after blacking out at her desk for three days finds herself with two heartbeats and a left hand that’s taken on a mind of its own. Lisa is entirely incurious about this phenomenon, though, either simply ignoring it or rationalizing it away.

We switch between the two, Monica in the past in her borrowed body, Lisa in the present, losing control of hers. There’s plenty of horror simply in this, in your body not being fully your own, not being fully under your control, reminiscent of some real-life disabilities. But the horror is doubled here because this isn’t just a single person losing control. If you haven’t played the game and it isn’t clear already, Monica’s borrowed body and Lisa’s misbehaving body are one and the same, and in the present-day scenes they’re fighting for control, fighting for who gets to claim not just the body but the life that goes with it.

We learn why this is happening in one of the past, Monica-POV scenes, when the concept of changelings is introduced. In this story, a changeling is a detached soul who inhabits someone else’s body and slowly takes over. In one of her brief period’s at the body’s helm, Monica learns about this phenomenon and comes to the horrifying realization that she is in fact a changeling.

Instinctively wanting to take sides in the conflict, I found myself rooting for Lisa—it’s her body, after all; Monica is an invader! But Monica still remained a deeply sympathetic character. We see her meet and bond with a woman named Vivienne in the brief space of existence she has, and we see her longing for more time to be allowed to live. And when she has her terrible revelation, it’s clear she genuinely didn’t know what was going on; she wasn’t actively trying to take over someone else’s life. And once she knows that her continued existence would come at Lisa’s expense, she makes the choice to let go, letting herself fade away.

But. In the present, Lisa-POV scenes, Monica has returned after being dormant for seven years and is desperately trying to take back control. And it’s because she wasn’t the changeling after all; it was her body all along, and Lisa is the invader. She so successfully took control that Monica forgot it was her body to begin with.

When Monica finds out what she thinks is the truth, that she is the changeling, she wishes she hadn’t: “Not knowing is always the best option. No questions mean no answers that you don’t want to hear. The only way to avoid consequences is to do nothing - to be nothing. You can always forget. Let it dissolve. Let it fade away.” This is exactly what Lisa has done—she doesn’t think about the truth, won’t admit it to herself, pretends it isn’t real. Living in denial as the only way to live with herself.

By this point, my sympathies had fully flipped—I wanted Monica to get her body back and have the life she’d been denied for so long. The player gets to choose at the end who wins, and it was gratifying to be able to give that to Monica, and see an epilogue scene showing her getting to share a life with Vivienne. An incredibly compelling story.

(The following ramble mostly discusses the ending of this piece in a way that's not really worth tagging, so be aware if you're wary of spoilers.)

The other day, I stumbled across some stuff about metagaming: the idea that when we play a game, we are really playing a broader game of playing that game which is informed by our expectations and desires, and that maybe the object we think of as 'the game' isn't itself so important as how we use it as a tool or toy for the metagame in which we are actually engaged.

And the other day I came across the question of what it is that we want to get out of stories, and in my case the answer felt obvious: I want to understand, whether that's to understand myself or to understand others. For a while I've felt that the point of successful art should not be to deliver a message but to ask a question.

And I'm realising I haven't played too many single-choice games even though there's a whole jam of them, but I think there's something interesting about the format, how it might actually be the most direct or all-encompassing method of telling a story, or rather making an object to be used for a metagame. 'Would you rather fight a thousand horse-sized ducks or one duck-sized horse?' The interesting part isn't the story implied by either scenario but what your answer says about you. The real game isn't the experience of reading the text and making choices but the conversation about those things that happens in your head or elsewhere.

All this doesn't mean do not let your left hand know doesn't tell a good story (or two stories); it's just that both stories are built to serve this single choice. The medium is the question; the metagame is the answer. A review I always think about is Ian Danskin's analysis of Life Is Strange, which suggests that game simultaneously tells a version of its story in two different genres, then ultimately asks you to decide which genre you prefer. Your choice (or lack of choice—it is, of course, possible if not expected to choose both options, choose no option, or reject the binary and write your own ending) determines which ending you see, and probably makes you consider something about yourself. This requires that you are able to respond to something in the object—as Welcome to the Universe from a couple of months ago allowed us to explore, with its endless trivial choices and tension between the truly universal and the imagined universal—but then even bouncing or brushing off a question reveals something about your place in the world.

Often in this sort of scenario, the single choice—like many real choices, or the choices 'we' wish we could just make already—comes down to 'are you going to be good or honest?', with infinite variations, raising further questions about what constitutes 'goodness' and 'honesty'. Would you rather seek the love you desire, or stay safe and comfortable?

This piece does something interesting by splitting the two stories into two separate characters. To some extent it literalises the format; Monica and Lisa are both vying for ownership of a body, but really they are vying for control of the narrative: the body of the text. It makes what might have been an easy choice (or an easy fantasy) into something more complicated. We are not simply deciding whether Monica should live her authentic life or her expected life; both Monica's and Lisa's wishes are honest according to their stories.

And this is a story about reflection, so I find myself reflecting on my own interest in bodies and narratives and choices. The multicolumn format, with different voices told simultaneously by aligning them to different sides of the page, is familiar, even instinctive, to me. I've liked exploring its possible variations for a long time. At its core, it's a way of telling these multiple stories together, turning a text into a dialogue rather than a monologue. And I don't know if I've encountered anything which captures this feeling so well; the feeling of sharing a body with people who have conflicting desires; the feeling of being unable to make a decision because you truly want mutually-exclusive things and there just isn't enough space and time for both.

So it's funny that in this case I actually didn't think too hard before making my choice. I'm a changeling in real life; if I felt guilt about using a body that wasn't meant for me, there'd be no point in ever doing anything. And this game did help me understand myself a bit better; sometimes I have this experience that I've only been able to describe as my body trying to reject me. There's a reality to this for me, even beyond the metaphors for transness and imperialist indoctrination. Sometimes I really have looked down at my hands and my hands weren’t mine. Sometimes that’s nice. And I don't know to what extent this piece is supposed to be reflecting a true experience, but I don't think it matters. I think when you don't have the language to express your experiences, you have to start with fantasy. And it's hard to take that seriously until you hear somebody else's story.

Still, after I made my choice, I went back to see what happened in the other outcome, and I did feel a bit bad, even if I didn't regret my decision. (Spoiler - click to show)As much as Lisa's desire seemed obviously wrong—to prefer a culture that cares so little about you that you could be dead on your desk for days without anybody noticing—I was sad that I couldn't make her happy. These days, the choices I have to make don't feel like they're between authenticity and conformity; it's just whether I have the energy to care. You can enjoy anything if you don't care. Sometimes your body needs a little more than that, and sometimes you have to settle for a little less.

But I think there's a broader question: who is making this decision? That's not the question the text asks you, but it's the one embedded in the metagame. Monica and Lisa are fighting over who owns their body, and who drives this narrative. The narrative is the body—but we embody the narrative when we play this game. We are the changeling. And maybe the point is meant to be that sometimes we have to choose who to be, but I think the medium is open to interpretation. At the end of the day, both stories share this text. Both characters share this body, share our bodies. Monica lives, and so does Lisa. If you don't think that makes sense, then welcome to the dialogue. Come up on stage and share your stories.