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Number of Reviews: 7
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1-7 of 71 of
1 people found the following review helpful:
Death, social media, and burial in/by social media, January 8, 2022The Dead Account closes some of the loose ends for Weird Grief (WG), the author's other entry in IFComp 2021. You work at HiveKind, a social media network, and it has algorithms to detect if a member has died. A new update means their accounts must be closed and deleted. It's your first account, and it's pretty straightforward. The closed account, you-the-reader soon find, is Mike, whose funeral kicks off WG.
Through a list of chat logs we see people asking why Mike hasn't responded to their latest text. He's usually good about it. We find out how Mike dies, and the characters get closure for his untimely death.
I'm curious how I would've reacted if I hadn't played WG first. Learning about Mike's lifestyle later would, I hope, not have mattered. But TDA answered some questions: why Mike died, how people miss him, and what the fallout is. And it deals with some issues I've long thought about. I'd like to leave something cool on the Internet. Are my games enough? Are those game guides I wrote for my favorite Apple games enough? And how do we deal with people dying?
It wasn't a huge problem at first. But it will be as time goes by. It was certainly sad to me that Mike's death coincided with the new policy so soon after. And certainly I can empathize with the characters needing to talk to Mike. I've left comments on social media platforms to people who've probably long since left. I don't expect a response back, of course. I just need to say it, and maybe followers paying attention will be reminded of or discover someone pretty neat. Or if something pops up on Twitter saying someone lost their pet or, worse, someone they love, I leave a like. It's just important.
As for Mike himself? He's special in his circle of friends but not Someone Super Special. He's not especially brilliant. He seems to deserve a memorial, though. And I think most people at HiveKind or wherever would like to keep them up, because they will have friends they lost. Yet at the same time, disk space is finite, even as technology improves. There's going to be an upper limit, even as disk space gets cheaper. And it's not practical to resurrect stuff like GeoCities. What do we do then? This isn't as critical an issue as, say, how overpopulation may drain the Earth's resources, but it's impossible not to care about a bit. You feel as though the characters should have something, and even though they could make up their own MikeBot, it wouldn't be nearly the same as pinging his HiveKind account when they knew he wouldn't respond.
The closest I've come to this is having to get pictures from my old PhotoBucket account. I kept getting "MANAGE YOUR ACCOUNT OR LOSE YOUR PICTURES" messages. Some pictures were ten years old. I was able to download everything quickly and efficiently, just as the characters in the story got 24 hours to download chat messages to remember Mike. But I also kept getting the MANAGE YOUR ACCOUNT message even after I signed up for and canceled a membership. It took Photobucket backing off before I was finally able to hit delete for good. They were on my hard drive, but I still wanted them Out There.
TDA brought up these disturbing issues without rubbing your face in them and certainly reminded me of the things I really wanted to do. And while I wish there would've been more of a story around the moderator who made their decision whether to follow policy, I think the author is within their rights to keep the focus on Mike's circle of friends.
TDA is one of those entries where you don't have a lot to say, as Getting All Literary ruins the point. You realize these are things you think about, and these are things people quite unlike you (such as, for me, the characters in WG and TDA) think about. You're glad others do, even though they're uncomfortable. It makes other thoughts easier to face as well and removes the "I might be weird for thinking this, but ..." overhead from some of our tougher thoughts. There are plenty of entries in IFComp that give us what we wanted, and we should not begrudge them. Some, like TDA, finger stuff we didn't know we wanted to discuss, or we just forgot.
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1 people found the following review helpful:
A pinhole view of grief, November 29, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
I can’t really talk through my feelings about this one without spoiling not just it, but also my entry into this year’s Comp (Sting), so bear that in mind if you plan to read further. Bottom line The Dead Account gets some real emotion out of a premise that’s simultaneously ridiculous and all-too-plausible (you play a social-network employee whose job is to identify the accounts of dead people and delete them), and is definitely worth the playthrough.
(Spoiler - click to show)I had two conflicting reactions to the game: first, a feeling of unfamiliarity given that the social milieu of the dead character is pretty different from anything I’m directly familiar with, and even a bit of artificiality, because I didn’t see why a social network would pay money to proactively close accounts (like, wouldn’t they just wait for the next of kin to get into contact?) But then second, I also felt some incredibly sharp shocks of recognition. That’s because my twin sister passed away a year and a half ago – this is a chunk of what Sting is about, as it’s a memoir – and despite the superficial differences (we were not part of a friend group that played Apex Legends together, for one thing), The Dead Account still manages to hit on some real moments of universality. I very much found the characters’ actions and emotional responses plausible and engaging. Like, I archived all my old texts with her, and I send her an email on our birthday, though I send it to myself, not to her old account since that forwards to my brother-in-law now. Oh, and our birthday is/was December 3rd, so the fact that the software update that created this new dead-account deletion policy was version 12.3.14 was a little spooky!
This game is a small thing – there’s only the one account to assess, and there’s only really one choice to be made: whether or not to delay deleting the account at the family and friends’ request. But the choice has some layers to it – I opted to delay, but felt conflicted about it – and as one character says in their DMs to the dead person, life is made out of the small stuff.
Highlight: The game is so much of a piece that it’s hard to break off a single highlight, but I will say I did really enjoy the bee-hive themed title graphic (another point of overlap with Sting!)
Lowlight: This is very much an intended part of the experience, but reading the dead character’s messaging history felt really unpleasantly voyeuristic and I considered fast-forwarding through (though of course I wound up reading everything anyway. Games make us complicit!)
How I failed the author: I think I did OK with this one – Henry was napping really well and my brain wasn’t too fuzzy, and I managed to bang through three shorter games without too many interruptions.
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2 people found the following review helpful:
Just doing my job, November 13, 2021In this story, you have to read messages to a dead person left by their loved ones. Then, you have to contact the loved ones and ask them to verify that this person is, in fact, dead. It connects to the story of another of the author's games, "Weird Grief," which shows a lot more of the characters. I was surprised at the reactions from the characters during the group chat. This was pretty sad. I recommend playing the other game first.
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
A view of grief through a dead person's messages, November 9, 2021In this game, you are a moderator of a social media site who looks through messages to a social media account for a user who is suspected to be dead. You get to look through messages to the person to see if you think they're actually dead or not. This isn't a mystery game--it's very clear that the person in question has died. This setup allowed you to see the way grief affected people over time, without awkward time jumps. I thought that was a clever way to explore the theme of grief.
In the second half of the game, there's a (Spoiler - click to show)group chat with timers on each person's messages. I felt a little impatient with the timers, but at the same time, I thought it was a cool way to simulate a group chat. I think an animated ellipsis could have helped me to wait without worrying that something was going wrong.
Your choices don't impact much of the narrative. However, the hypertextuality of choosing what message to read really immersed me in the role of reading the messages as an outsider. This game has the same characters as Weird Grief. I preferred this game to Weird Grief. Also, if these games were inspired by real-life loss, I hope the author is doing okay.
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1 people found the following review helpful:
A game about grief, November 2, 2021This author knows how to pull at your heartstrings. Once again they use technology and online communities as the backdrop for a very personal and emotional story.
In this game you play a moderator for an online community called HiveKind, tasked with finding and deleting accounts that belong to deceased users. The server AI flags accounts that it thinks might belong to someone who has died and unlocks all their messages for you to read to determine if you agree with that assessment. That's where the core story comes into this game. Reading through those private messages, (Spoiler - click to show)that occur both before and after the account user is killed by a drunk driver, is what delivers both the back story and emotional impact.
The game doesn't really have many choices in it, though one I'm interested to hear about from others who played the game is whether they read the messages in chronological or reverse chronological order in their role as account investigator. The few choices come in at another heart-wrenching part: having to message the closest contacts of the user to get confirmation on whether they are deceased or not. How blunt are you with them about the task at hand? How much are you willing to try to bend the rules?
This game makes heavy use of timed-text. Usually I'm not a fan of it, in this game it was a mixed bag. Generally I thought it worked out okay on the first playthrough (though I encountered several times where I wasn't given enough time to read the messages I was sending to the group, but I got the gist). However, playing through a second time I wished there had been a way to turn it off so I could more easily see how different choices would affect the story. That would be another thing that missed the mark for me a bit: (Spoiler - click to show)on my second playthrough I didn't feel like making a different choice affected anything. The ending was exactly the same and given how different your tone is in the group chat I was hoping for different reactions from the friends of the deceased.
Overall though a game well worth your time.
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
A well-put-together brief story about grief and accounts, October 24, 2021This game is one of two entered by Bez in this competition, the other being 'Weird Grief', and the two tie into each other.
In this one, presented in customized Twine, you are a moderator for an online community, and have been asked to begin closing accounts of dead customers.
Gameplay is divided into two components: reading through old messages, and entering a group chat with everyone involved.
The game has illustrated avatars for each important character, as well as a few other pieces of art.
The second section of the game is all on a timer. It's not too long, but I tend to multitask while playing IF (the format lends itself well to pick-up-and-put-down play), and I tabbed away to work on other things while waiting for the text to complete, only to come back and see it had wiped the screen and started new messages. I also had to leave in the middle of some text to use the restroom, and missed a couple of other parts because of that. So for future players, I'd recommend dedicating a set amount of time to read through the second portion.
The text includes frequent strong and mild profanities and depicts traumatizing events as well as reference to sexual activities.
Overall, I found the game polished and descriptive, with an emotional impact. The nonlinear interactivity in the first half worked for me, but the second half was a little rougher, so I'd give this a 3.5, which I'll round up to a 4 for IFDB.
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4 people found the following review helpful:
A heartbreaking choice, October 17, 2021This piece follows a content moderator in an online community who faces the decision of closing out the account of a person who has recently died.
The interactivity of the game fits well with the story, as we get to browse through chat conversations that people in Mike’s life have continued using for various reasons: an outlet for anger and disbelief, a way to grieve by speaking to him, etc. The decision of whether to close the account or not is a heartbreaking one, especially if this piece is played after its companion piece and we know how much the characters are struggling with Mike’s loss.
I was expecting more of a consequence at the end for not closing the account (e.g. having to face the supervisor), which might have made the decision feel more weighty. Also, the game might have a bit less impact on its own without the context of its companion piece, "Weird Grief."
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