Civil Service

Some of my favorite works of IF are games where it’s part of the player’s responsibility to fit together different pieces of narrative that are intentionally presented out of order or out of context, engaging with themes, allusions, and character- or plot-based hints to create a gestalt theory of what the work is communicating. Obviously there are precedents for this sort of thing all over the arts – hello, Modernism – but it’s often an especially good fit for IF; even though we’ve long since moved beyond the genre’s puzzles-first roots, players and authors alike have been trained to think about the narrative possibilities inherent in what’s being presented, and allowing players to inhabit a story, poking and prodding at it to see how it responds, both forces players to slow down and think critically about what they’re reading while allowing for a kind of trial-and-error expectation that you can’t get just from e.g. reading Virginia Woolf. And when this approach works well, it can be amazing – I don’t think I would have gotten as much out of Metallic Red if it simply presented everything it was doing on a platter; actively engaging with it, testing out theories, and going back to earlier sections of the game to look for parallels all increased the impact it had on me.

This is a risky strategy to pursue, though. For one thing, you’re asking a fair bit of work of the player, and you need to make sure you’ve properly motivated them to put in the labor. And for a second, by leaving plenty of blanks for the player to fill in, you’re ceding control of what exactly gets put in them. And I found that Civil Service, while notionally being something I might enjoy sinking my teeth into, runs face-first into both of these dangers.

The second issue was actually the bigger one for me, but it hinges on some stuff that happens later on in the game so first things first: what does make a player willing, if not eager, to try to make sense of a fragmented narrative? Well, let’s not overthink this, it’s basically just the stuff that makes fiction compelling in the first place: if there’s an intriguing mystery plot, or there are compelling but enigmatic characters, or there’s something about the structure that compels you to find the story’s intended shape, or the prose and narrative voice are sufficiently rich that your brain naturally wants to spend more time in their world – or, if it’s a game rather than a piece of static fiction, there are gameplay mechanics that promote exploration – that’s a good start, and if you’ve got two or more you’re off to the races.

Civil Service, though, maybe checks a couple boxes halfway? The plot takes a long time to emerge: the game starts more or less in medias res, with your character, who appears to be some kind of ghost or spirit, musing negatively about offices in general and this one office they’ve started haunting in particular. You appear to have some kind of mission, with some urgency attached to it, but this is mentioned only quite obliquely, and you spend most of your time alternately focusing on the quotidian annoyances of the trio of workers you’re cohabitating with (perhaps straining your spectral powers to rattle some office supplies ominously) and zoning out to look at the business owners and passersby outside the window; then there are occasional interspersed vignettes that wrench you away from this grounded milieu and require you to make one-to-three star ratings of various things, or immerse you in flashbacks without direct linkages to the main plot. As to the office stuff, it’s grounded enough to be banal, and the other pieces are sufficiently disconnected that I rarely felt my brain tickle with an exciting insight.

Characters are even more of a bust. A day on from playing the game, I can remember that there were two male workers and one woman, and one of the guys has a dog he brings to work, and might be named Colin (the person, not the dog); they’re all kind of petty and appear to passive-aggressively dislike each other, and that’s about all I got in terms of personality. The outside-the-window people are even more thinly drawn – the narrative tries to indicate that your character feels a mysterious connection with at least one of them, which is fair enough but not especially exciting when you haven’t heard a word of dialogue from them. Meanwhile, the structure is a bit wooly – it’s structured about workdays, but Monday stretches on for quite a while, but Tuesday and Wednesday are over in flash – and the writing is fine, but largely devoted to establishing a mood of grim monotony. Like, lest you think these workers are doing anything interesting or valuable:

"An application to the state, a plea to ungodly power, through the right channels and justly made is - in my colleague’s world - a grey and spectral effort from the office printer… Tea stained, creased, worthless. These are the things they deal in."

It’s fine, but it doesn’t really compel one, does it?

Mechanically speaking, this is largely structured as a hypertext narrative, where seemingly-random words throughout each passage can be clicked and move you through the story; the narrative apparently does branch somewhat based not on anything you have the protagonist directly do, but of all things on the ratings you give in those seemingly-random Yelp-ish segments. It could work fine if the other aspects of the game were more engaging – heck, it’s not miles away from how some of my favorite games, like Queenlash and Manifest No are designed – but lacks much in the way of standalone appeal.

Now, having said all this, there is one vignette – I think a flashback – that I did find grabbed me: it’s quite disconnected from everything else in the game, narrating a holiday-gone-wrong that sees a caddish character snubbing his new girlfriend’s attempts to make their relationship something special. You get a sense of the boyfriend as an actual human being, with (admittedly awful) desires and a personality, and the writing is noticeably more energetic as for once it’s got events that fit together into an actual conflict to narrate. Unfortunately, it comes quite late in the game, perhaps 2/3 or ¾ of the way through, and it’s not directly built up to, or followed up on, in the rest of the plot: I have a theory or two about how those characters relate to the main story, but even if I’ve guessed right these connections feel like something I’ve imposed on an arid text, rather than noticed organically growing out of the piece.

I worry that the above comes off more negatively than I intend it. Really, most of the game is fine; I was mildly disengaged as I clicked through it, but it’s more mediocre than actively bad, and there is that one bit that’s good; I wasn’t super excited to think rigorously about what all the stuff it was slinging at me meant, but it got me to at least do the minimum. And here is where we get to the second issue I mentioned above, because I found the theory I developed about the game’s key mystery completely ridiculous.

Throughout the game, you’re cued to think of the three office-workers as bad people: you alone can tell that their environment is spiritually corrupted and they snipe at each other under a cloak of politeness, but there are intimations that there’s some deeper crime they’re complicit in, some offense they’ve committed against a capitalized She. And then among the seemingly-random bits of prose that get dropped in your lap, there’s this:

"Fifty three miles away at the
bottom of a ravine
Her veins chill"

So clearly these bad people like murdered someone, maybe because they’re embezzling or otherwise up to no good and were trying to cover up the crime? That would be a bit cliched, I suppose, but a reasonable enough motivating incident and fit the downbeat mood of the game. But no, I’m quite convinced the truth is something different: (Spoiler - click to show) there are repeated references to something terrible happening at an office morale-building event, and that the trio of jerks paid so little attention to Her they didn’t even remember her name. In the event, it appears that they all were brought together to do a ropes course and She slipped doing a trust fall or something, fell into a ditch, and the other workers were so self-involved they didn’t notice.

While respecting the sanctity of the spoiler-block, I’ll just say that this feels more like a cut subplot from a late-season episode of the Office than the stuff of drama; I suppose you could suspend disbelief about the unrealistic aspects of it, but you’re still left with a plot twist more likely to elicit hilarity than any other response, and the rest of the game sure doesn’t seem to indicate that it’s a comedy. And then the fact that (Spoiler - click to show)She isn’t actually dead yet, and manages to cling to life at the bottom of the ravine for the better part of a week until your white-out related antics somehow trigger an ending where She’s suddenly remembered and rescued just adds an additional note of slapstick.

But while I’m pretty sure I’ve got the basic sequence of events right, these tone issues also make me quite sure that there’s a version of all of this that looks quite different in the author’s head. Alas, she didn’t write it, or provide sufficient prompts to make my brain fill out the paint-by-numbers in the right way. Trust the player/reader, authors are often told, so I think this failure must have come out of a noble impulse – but I, at least, needed a bit more hand-holding to see what the author wanted me to see, and feel why all of this was worth caring about.

The protagonist of Civil Service appears at first to be a naive positive-thinking type taking a job in a dysfunctional government agency. It soon becomes apparent that something else is going on, and you are instead playing as a ghost who’s been tasked by a set of three unspecified supernatural entities (tripartite goddess? Three witches?) to (Spoiler - click to show)save a woman who fell down a ravine on a company outing and was left there to die by her apathetic coworkers, who didn’t notice she was gone.

The game bills itself as dynamic fiction, so I was expecting no meaningful choice, but this was not the case—not only are there multiple endings, but you can miss entire plot-important scenes by clicking the wrong link. The problem is that the import of the link you are clicking is in no way clear before you click it. For instance, there’s a passage early on with two links, one on a mention of a tin of biscuits in the office and one on a mention of the need to smile. The former gives the reader a scene that provides the first intimations of what you’re really here for, while the latter just skips over that and moves to the next “main” passage. But there’s no indication that the biscuits are particularly significant until you click on that link, and a player who clicks on “smile” hoping to get some elaboration on that idea (which they will not get) will never know what they missed. Sometimes the digression is just a single short, nonessential passage, and sometimes both links in a passage seem to lead to the same passage, but there seems to be no way to even guess at when that’s the case and when you’re missing whole scenes. Early on, I made ample use of the back button to make sure I was getting the most out of my experience, but this got a little tedious and took me out of the flow of the story, so after the first in-game day or two, I gave up.

(I did like that the cycling links were a different color from the links that move the player forward, though!)

Once I stopped hitting the back button so often and started letting the experience carry me along, I was entranced by Civil Service’s prose-poem-like writing and its effectively dreary atmosphere with occasional flashes of hope, and I was excited to further explore its premise, which is exactly the kind of weird that I enjoy. As a commentary on modern office culture, though, it has some sharply observed details, but leaves the bigger picture kind of fuzzy, and doesn’t seem to have much to say about what underlies workplace dysfunction other than individuals being jerks.

So I was intrigued and often charmed by Civil Service, and on the whole I would say I enjoyed it, but I’m not sure the way it was using interactivity was to its benefit, and it ultimately feels a little less than the sum of its parts.

This is a short, atmospheric Twine game with two endings.

It's hard to describe, so I'll go with what my first impressions were, then what I built up afterwards.

It starts talking about returning to another choice, with three voices whispering to you. Having recently done some surface-level study of Hinduism, I wondered if it was related to the cycle of rebirth and the Trimurti, although I didn't find much evidence of that later.

Then the game starts going through a week at an office one day at a time. No one really pays attention to you, and you mentally rate things from 1-3 stars when you see them (maybe you can do 4 or 5 if you wait long enough for timed text but I never saw a choice to pick those, only having one chosen for me). You have a crush on a guy you see outside the window whom you hope you can see, too.

Things change near the end; there's an interlude on Wednesday night involving a trip (to Italy, I think?) where your persona seems to change, but it's gone the next day.

After finishing the game and replaying, here's what I think's going on:

(Spoiler - click to show)
You are a spirit. No one can see you, except animals. The deaths of animals gives you more physical presence on a limited basis proportional to the complexity or size of the animal.

You are here because the three people in the office with you left a woman to die in a ravine after a team-building exercise. Your job as a ghost is to bring that fact to their attention.

The three at the beginning have given you similar tasks before, and ask you to do this one with positivity. Whether you are positive or not throughout the game leads to the two endings. I believe the 1-3 star ratings control that positivity.

I'm still not sure who the three are (Christian trinity? Greek fates?) or who you are (Jess's spirit? an angel?) or what the Italian interlude is (is that you in a past life?).


Overall, the color and atmosphere were good. Timed text was used occasionally and was just infrequent enough not to be annoying. It felt like the plot was resolved, although I had trouble feeling out consistent themes or patterns in the different threads.

There were several minor typos, usually a letter or two wrong. If the author were to do a post-comp release, I'd suggest going to Twinery and using the Proof button in the Build tab to get a dump of all text in the game and to run it through a spellchecker; I've done that before because I've made numerous typos in my own games and books.

I liked this game, and would play more from this author.