On Repeat

We are many years on from the times when Karl Rove bestrode the country as the dark impresario of the right, and the increasing degradation of the body politic since those years mean that it can be tempting to look back with a certain degree of nostalgia on the man christened “Turd Blossom” by his chief patron and friend. But for all that the depravity of the Trumpists is even worse than what came before, it’s worth remembering how absolutely infuriating his main trick could be: somehow turning the chief strengths of his opponents into weaknesses. Transforming awkwardly earnest Al Gore into a prevaricator, making John Kerry’s principled service in and critique of the Vietnam war as evidence of disloyalty… it was a species of rage-inducing black magic.

I bring this up because On Repeat manages the inverse trick – I suppose that would be white magic – by turning its weakest elements into its core strengths. This is a simple Twine game that starts out with the flimsiest of premises: you come across a new album that you’re super into, and as you go through your daily routine, and choose how to spend your limited free time out of four or so choices, no matter what else is going on in your life, the option to give it one more spin is always right there. It’s a portrait of a person obsessed, but the game is curiously lackadaisical about evoking that obsession in the player. Where something like 9 Days in a Van has loving, subjective descriptions trying to communication the experience of listening to music, On Repeat is instead content to narrate its effects and get on with things. Like, here’s a representative sample:

you pop in your headphones.

track 7 still makes you want to cry. pure poetry.

(That’s the full passage).

This brusque approach to text extends to just about everything else in the game – you can have dinner with a friend to catch up on her love life, or play with your dog, or buy a pillow online, and you’ll get a couple of sentences that give a general impression of what the activity was like, but without much in the way of incident or especially strong feelings. There are some things to enjoy along the way, like the ongoing ticker of news (it’s set in LA, during the summer of this year, so I enjoyed being reminded about the “losing candidate for mayor” – so sad that the right-wing reality tv guy get his butt kicked – and winced when the Boyle Heights warehouse fire ignited – there was one day when we could even smell it where I live, just north of the LA County line), and if you choose to stick with any of the choices you’re offered more than once, like calling your mom or playing a mobile game, you get a tiny little story arc that advances a bit each time. But it’s all decidedly low-key and unengaging.

And then it turns out that’s exactly the point. I won’t spoil exactly where the game is headed, but rest assured, there is a payoff, and while On Repeat never entirely abandons its quotidian prose, the last act of the game feels more expansive and riskier by virtue of this plot shift – a shift that would have had far less impact if the early going had been as robustly written and designed as I’d initially wanted it to be. If it’s not a portrait of music changing someone’s life, it’s at least a portrait of someone’s life changing, and music being the tool they use to make meaning of what they’ll do next