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Number of Ratings: 14
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1-14 of 14 - Bell Cyborg (Canada), July 21, 2023
- Edo, May 18, 2023
1 of
1 people found the following review helpful:
An innovative gamble, January 3, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp. I also beta tested this game, though I did replay it in its final form).
There are always a few odd ducks in any IF competition or festival, and Dorian Passer’s Cost of Living was a whole flock of ‘em in one in this summer’s ParserComp; using a bespoke system that required the user to type single words to fill out an ongoing dialogue between two characters discussing a public-domain sci-fi story – don’t call it MadLibs! – it occasioned some controversy, being disqualified as being IF but not really an example of a parser game, then kinda-sorta-unofficially reinstated after discussion, with the author posting some detailed notes relating the thinking behind the so-called “stateful narration” approach he’s taking and kicking off much discussion in reviews and on this forum.
This time, we’ve once again got an original story juxtaposed against a text written by someone else – here a Chekhov short story, making The Lottery Ticket a competitive runner-up to Elvish for Goodbye in the I-am-going-to-hubristically-invite-comparison-to-a-badass-writer side-comp – but rather than a peanut gallery directly commenting on the story, here what connects the two narrative strands is a bit of thematic irony: the Chekhov story is a compact fable about a man driven to selfish misanthropy by the possibility that his wife might have won a fortune, while the frame story involves a near-future office worker killing time and texting with her roommates while similarly awaiting the outcome of a lotto drawing –
– sorry, I am informed that a group of ducks is not typically called a flock; instead they can be a raft, a team, a paddling, a skein, a badling, a plump, or a brace. I regret the error but honestly, look at all those synonyms, I feel like the ducks have to shoulder their share of the blame here too.
That’s not just a bit – I’m flagging the ridiculous fecundity of the English language to highlight the potential of the sentiment-analysis approach to player input the game takes. Whereas in a traditional parser game, the game only recognizes a few standard bits of vocabulary, plus whatever else the author has laboriously taught the engine to understand, and in a choice-based game your options are constrained to picking whatever’s been programmed in, in theory a player could type nearly any English word into the input boxes offered by the Lottery Ticket and see a reasonable response.
In practice, the design doesn’t fully take full advantage of this flexibility, I think because Passer is trying to walk before he runs. While I found the frame story engaging as a work of fiction, it’s a bit thinner when it comes to interactivity. There are only four places where the player is asked for input, and the results appear to be fairly binary – half allow the player to express whether or not the protagonist attempts to play down her anxiety about the lottery’s outcome with her roommates, while the other half are about matters of taste (being bored by a roommate’s cooking, preferring light or dark coffee) that are essentially aesthetic.
Passer’s written about wanting to deemphasize players’ expectations of agency in terms of changing the plot, since that’s a promise no author can ever fully deliver, in terms of creating so-called “narrational agency” – the idea, as I understand it, is that the player doesn’t alter what happens in the story, but how the story is told. And that’s a fine theory; I don’t mind that these choices aren’t narratively impactful – expressive choice works fine, after all – but they perhaps feel too simple, too reducible to a coin flip, even if that overly facile take ignores what’s actually happening behind the scenes, and even blows past how impactful even these simple choices are. Like, it makes a big difference to our understanding of the story if the protagonist is honest with her friends or if she feels she needs to hide her nervousness from them, especially since she’s said she’ll split any potential winnings with them! Imagine a version of Gatsby where he levels with Nick about how he actually made his money, rather than flashing a fake medal from Montenegro – it’s not at all the same story.
While recognizing this, it’s hard for me to fully let go of the expectations I’ve built up from many many years of playing more traditional pieces of IF – these kinds of toggles just don’t bring the fireworks when other games engage the player in more visceral ways. Still, this seems like a surmountable problem; I’m intrigued by the idea that the engine here could add a second dimension, so that each word’s input wouldn’t be assessed on a single continuum but on two at the same time, or possibly adding granularity so that instead of a positive/negative switch, the system clearly recognized degrees as well… And what’s promising is that the system, because it just relies on an algorithmic assessment of words, could be infinitely malleable, rather than relying on bespoke simulations of particular physical situations or pre-chosen options for its ability to be responsive. This “narrational agency” approach doesn’t have its killer app yet, but The Lottery Ticket is definitely moving things ahead, and I’m looking forward to seeing what might come next.
- Pinkunz (USA), November 30, 2022
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
Collaboration Across Time, November 26, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
I love how broad the IF domain is, and in turn how foolish I was to think a two-column criteria could possibly cover that breadth. Here is the latest in my frequent review sub-series “What Do I Do With This?” I mean I am just jumping back into IF after 20+ years, cut me some slack! My parents didn’t teach ME to swim by throwing me in the deep end!
This is an experimental work, showcasing the (modern author's) "Stateful Narration" ideas. “Stateful Narration.” I, ah, ok so… hmm. Just play it then? Do I need to be checked out on the equipment first? Am I qualified to run this thing, let alone critically evaluate it? I infer this is an exercise in giving the reader ability to interject feelings and interpretations that the text will conform to naturally, but not fundamentally branch the narrative? That seemed to be my experience with it anyway. There were maybe 4 interactive entry points in the text. One felt pretty seamless, the other two pretty I guess ineffectual? The text effectively characterized my input as “faking it for my friends” which is legit narratively but felt too easy. The last one I think confounded the parser. I wasn’t trying to do that, but I wasn’t not either. I used the word ‘giddy’ and the text said “Who am I kidding? I’m very nervous. That’s why I’m digging into my fingers…” Feels like giddy connotes some level of nervous energy that compromised the answer? I dunno man, I get that this was a unique experimentation slash proof of concept, I hope the author is getting useful data out of this! Let me retreat to something I’m more comfortable with, how’d the narrative go?
My most memorable exposure to mixing Great Author works with contemporary augmentation was Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. My overriding impression there was that the original work was SO much better written than the new stuff. Notwithstanding the author’s bold attempt to match voice, it was nevertheless painfully obvious where the stitch lines were. LT instead takes the tack of treating the original text AS original text, then putting narrative around it that resonates with the story. It seems unfair to engage the Chekov portion of the narrative, so I’ll just focus on the contemporary wrapper.
It was good! It mirrored and contrasted Chekov’s stream of consciousness exploration in a fun way, but specific to our modern characters. The interactivity didn’t impose much on that path, and it built to a minor climax and amusing denouement. Even discounting Chekov, there were Sparks of Joy in the gentle mirroring. 3 out of 4 interactive instances were pretty ok, that’s a ‘C’ I guess? So Notably Intrusive? I’m pot committed to this criteria by now, so I guess that’s where I land, but hard to believe rating this thing is even close to the point of it.
Also, Chekov was a pretty good writer, huh?
Played: 10/27/22
Playtime: 15min, twice
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Notable
Would Play Again? I mean I guess I would if my data is helping.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), November 20, 2022
- OverThinking, November 16, 2022
- Karl Ove Hufthammer (Bergen, Norway), November 15, 2022
- Jacob MacDonald, November 15, 2022
Emerging tech; not enough game to show us its full capabilities, November 6, 2022
Determining if a word is positive or negative from a blank input is a much more difficult task, computing-wise, than having the player select one of two options. However, as a player, I didn't feel that blank input was any more fun than choosing between two options (especially since the result, to my knowledge, is positive or negative). I think the technology behind the game is interesting, but it needs a better-designed game to show its possibilities. Maybe the engine's mastermind could collaborate with a writer... ?
5 of
5 people found the following review helpful:
Anton Chekhov short story with lightly interactive framing story, October 24, 2022This is, I believe, the third 'stateful narration' game I've played, and the first I've figured out how to get a reaction on. Edit: It was in fact the second, I have lied.
These games have an engine where you type something in a box (the game requires it to be in its internal dictionary) and then it parsers that output.
In all the past games I pushed the boundaries of it, like typing 'fart' in every box, and the game didn't respond at all. Even this time, I used words like 'deciduous', 'petrochemical', and 'brobdingnagian', and it didn't respond at all.
So I decided to just give in and type clear words like 'happy' and 'sad'. The game seemed to understand those, as well as 'despondent'. Given a couple of similar projects I've seen recently, I suspect that what's underneath the hood is 'sentiment analysis', where there is a database of dictionary words with a score associated to them about how positive and negative they are. Or not; I could be completely wrong. But that's what it feels like.
Like the other games, this has a classic short story inserted uncut and unchanged with a framing story around it. I'm not sure why this is the pattern; the short story is interesting, but it doesn't affect my feelings about the new parts of the game. It's kind of like buying a car and entering it into a car-decaling competition and putting a realistic copy of the Mona Lisa on the hood and then adding your own work around it without altering the original in any way. I think I rather prefer remixes of originals more than juxtaposition; A Fifth of Beethoven is a great remix of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, for instance.
The framing story has some interesting elements, but I found it hard to find a narrative thread or two outside of mimicking the lottery element of the chekhov story. It's possible the main purpose of the sauce story is just to provide several opportunities for the stateful interaction that is mostly about reacting positively or negatively to something.
Fun fact: the image used in the cover art is from a picture of a baby lottery held in early 1900's Paris and featured in Popular Mechanics. Pretty wild!
For my rubric, I find this game both polished and descriptive, but the interactivity could use a little more pushback on words with neutral sentiment; my main emotional impact was from the Chekhov story rather than the surrounding material; and there's not a lot of replayability here.
5 of
5 people found the following review helpful:
Chekhov short story adaptation described as “stateful narration” , October 19, 2022The Chekhov story is framed as something someone is reading on her phone - this results in a whole lot of text, and multiple parallel storylines.
The decision-making points come in the form of free text, but not like a parser in the sense that you input commands (i.e. verbs) and seem to be largely determining mood. As far as I can tell, though, they don’t actually change the following text. Maybe the choices affect the reader more than the story…? Maybe the act of choosing is part of the game; the appearance of having an open choice changes the interaction.
The elements of this story were intriguing separately: the purple prose surrounding a meme site, a la Imgur; the lottery theme in a late capitalism-type setting. But together I didn’t know how they fit together (especially the juxtaposition of those two threads), and perhaps I missed something; I’m afraid it didn’t quite work for me.
An interesting mechanic, and I would be curious to see how it worked with different styles of story. I would have liked to see it used for more than aesthetics, and it would be even better if such an unusual mechanism tied in with the themes of the story.
- jaclynhyde, October 7, 2022
- Sobol (Russia), October 6, 2022
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