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.