TOITŪ

Something I've noticed about some more arty, literary IF works is that they'll often incorporate interactivity in a way that's underexplained (or completely unexplained) and quite confusing. What am I doing when I'm clicking a link? Am I seeing something optional or moving the story forward in a definitive way? Is there branching? Does the state of a cycling link when I move on to the next passage matter, or is the purpose of the cycling just to gradually reveal various facets of a single description? These are the kinds of questions I want to know the answer to when I'm engaging with a work of interactive fiction, and it can be frustrating when the answers remain out of reach.

I get the impression that people who make more literary IF sometimes don't pay a lot of attention to this facet of their work because they're not making a game, it doesn't have mechanics, so why should it matter if interaction works in a vaguely consistent way, and why should you take the audience out of the fiction by trying to explain or demonstrate to them how the interaction works? But I think it pays to have a clear idea of what purpose interactivity is serving in your work, and then to find a way to convey its workings to the audience so that they're not distracted from whatever you're trying to get across narratively or poetically by flailing around in confusion about how to move through the work.

TOITŪ is a poetic Twine work about colonialism in New Zealand and about the PC trying to find themself or find a place in the world through reconnecting with nature. Its literary ambitions and distractingly confusing interaction style reminded me in some ways of Civil Service from IFComp 2024. Unfortunately, however, it was less compelling to me, in part because it made even less of an attempt to communicate what was going on with its interaction style (no obvious distinction between cycling links and links that move you to the next passage here!) and in part because I just didn't like the writing as much. For example, if I'd realized that the cycling links for the PC's various body parts at the beginning were setting a permanent description, I would not have left the one for "toes" as "tensing and releasing the world from beneath their fingerly maw", which I find clunky as a phrase and muddled as an image. First of all you've got the excessive layers of figurative language---toes are like a mouth which is like fingers---and then you've got the fact that all three layers here are body parts, two of which are already quite similar to each other. I can think about it for a moment and get what it's trying to evoke, but it all feels a little overcomplicated and inelegant.

The prologue was the most frustrating part for me, with its intentionally circular nature making it sometimes hard to tell when I was in a loop on purpose versus when I was just not clicking the correct links to proceed. (This was not helped by the correct links sometimes being offscreen due to having many blank lines above them; I'm not sure if this was intentional or not.) The main body of the work was a bit better (both in being able to tell when I was accidentally going in circles and in terms of formatting), but the lack of clarity surrounding the purposes of each link remained.

All this being said, I did enjoy learning about the city of Dunedin and the works of the writer Janet Frame, and this is probably not something I would have ever thought to explore on my own, so I appreciate the game for that.