Method in My Madness

I have never, until this very weekend, played Max Fog's Method in My Madness. One reason is that my spidey-sense tingles when I see the word "madness." I have a serious mental illness. I am not a person who has a major depression every few years (though that is a very real hardship), or a bipolar II who runs up the credit card every once in a while (though that is a real hardship). The federal government recognizes my mental illness to be so serious that it prevents me from sustaining employment. There is a stigma that goes with that. People don't respect it. My partner and I always think *hard* about how to answer the question "what does your husband do?" People feel pretty comfortable being weird about mental illness in public. Perhaps you've seen that around.

I may pay closer attention to representations of mental illness in media than many others because I have a lot of skin in the game.

Method in My Madness is about a person with an overpowering romantic obsession for a man named Cauchy. My initial impressions were very good! The text on-screen is arranged in a very artful and innovative way that conveys the disorganized thinking of the protagonist. Words flicker in and out. Some are horizontal, and some are rotated. Animations sometimes shift the words in interesting ways. I feel this does a very effective job of rendering the abstract situation of obsession as a sort of concrete poetics.

In an earlier time of life, I did have a hard time letting go of a romantic interest, and, while it was never as weird as what we see here, I could almost relate to it. I could see it in the distance. Romantic interest can baffle, confuse, and blind us. The protagonist goes too far, stalking Cauchy. They know when Cauchy takes the trash out, so they meet him there. The presentation of the game keeps pace with the events of the story, both making and confounding sense. It's a mixture that works very well.

However, the game--forgive my use of a tired expression--loses the plot when the unnamed protagonist appears to have a complete psychotic break, forcing themself upon him, injuring him, talking about fairies. The building may or may not burn down.

When I see this kind of story, what I think is that society has failed this person. That's the real story, but what we get is a fireworks display. It's a shame, too, because this setup would have worked perfectly well with a less explosively obsessed protagonist. I can't really recommend this story, though the design itself is of definite interest.

As another reviewer has mentioned, Method in My Madness appears to be a very rare case of timed text working out. The delays, combined with the rotating and shifting texts, are very impressive. Perhaps Max would consider sharing information about his CSS setup when he isn't busy teaching us about ZIL! I expect we'll see more innovations from Max, whose IF career is just beginning.

In this game, made for Neo Twiny Jam and the Intentionally Bad IF jam, you play as what seems to be a woman obsessed with a man, with stream of consciousness thoughts flying around the screen as events progress to the breaking point.

The main innovation here (and I believe this was meant to be intentionally bad, given where the game was entered) is having the text and links be haphazard: some words tilted, others flickering, posting sentences out of order, links slowly fading in, etc.

The words are disjointed and hard to follow at times, which gives the effect of showing obsession.

My usual scoring system doesn't work too well here. On the one hand, the author has achieved his goals of being obtuse and intentionally bad, and has put a lot of work into it in a polished way. On the other hand, I believe others may not enjoy playing for the exact same reasons.

So, I will put a 2 here on the 'official' score, but a 4.5/5 for the author for the work put into this game.

What is it?
Method in My Madness is a Twine game written for the 2024 Neo-Twiny Jam as well as the 2024 REALLY BAD IF Jam. Games in the Neo-Twiny Jam must be 500 words or less, and games in the REALLY BAD IF Jam had to be, well, bad. MMM tells the story of a woman obsessed with her neighbor through her disjointed internal thoughts, which are represented by lines of text scattered and jumbled throughout each page. (I don’t think there’s a single HTML formatting option left out!)

What I Liked
I’m going to level with you: I don’t think this is “REALLY BAD”. I think this is actually pretty good! In fact, I’m going to say something I’ve never said before…

…I liked the timed text.

No, but really! I think the timed text and the chaotic formatting have allowed the author, by deliberately throwing all the rules out the window, to find an application where they actually work well. Usually timed text is used to try and create tension by an author who doesn’t trust their work, doesn’t trust the reader, or both, but here it IS the work. MMM portrays a narrator who is desperate, chaotic, and unsure of herself in 500 words or less – no small task – and the various formatting choices do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of getting it across.

Suggestions
Of course, chaotic formatting and timed text is a give and take with the reader, and this did require some patience to see through to the end. Given its aforementioned inclusion into the REALLY BAD IF Jam a lot of this was probably deliberate! But since picking through authorial intent is generally a fool’s errand I’m going to list out the changes I would make to turn this into a “REALLY GOOD” piece of IF.

-I am afraid I don’t know what a “Cauchy” is? I assume it’s the name of the narrator’s target but it’s not a name I’m familiar with. This could absolutely be a me problem, since culture is going to have a big impact on what names any particular person is familiar with, but something more legible to the average English speaker might be a better choice here.
-The formatting and overlapping text was always going to be a nightmare (on purpose) but on my monitor some of the later links to continue were buried under other text and hard to click on (since the “top” text takes priority regardless of the presence of links). Definitely keep link text on the top unless you’re very sure there’s nothing else near it on any size monitor.
-Some of the longer pauses could be replaced by a click to continue without sacrificing anything but avoiding the user thinking the game broke.

Overall Thoughts
Rules are made to be broken, and I think this game is a fantastic example of why. Don’t use timed text in your games – unless it’s as thoughtful and deliberate as in MMM.