The Olive Tree

Interactivity makes this short story more powerful.

Online, I've heard some commenters ask, mostly in bad faith, why Palestinians who had the option to move wouldn't simply move. These commenters seem not to be able to imagine what could be worth staying for. Playing the role of something worth staying for makes this point elegantly.

You can probably get to the end just guessing water/leaves until you reach your current season's goal, but there's also an interesting randomized optimization puzzle here, too. (I got lucky once and generated more than 30 lbs of olives.)

A bug report: At the end, it gives you a standard menu, "Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, QUIT or UNDO the last command?" But if you try to undo, it says that "undo" is forbidden. But save/restore work, so I'm not sure it's meaningful to forbid undo. Might as well just allow undo, IMO, or block save/restore also, if you insist.

I can certainly see what the intent of this work is, but for me it wasn’t very successful. It wants to humanize the suffering that’s happening in Palestine, but it speeds through multiple generations so quickly and perfunctorily that I never felt like any of the characters were real people. It’s just a sketch of a family, with 100% predictable story beats--a house and land passing down from one generation to the next, young love, an aging parent, a tragic death. The game wanted to elicit emotion from me, but it didn’t do enough to earn that. If it had slowed down and developed its characters as individuals, and really explored the circumstances they find themselves in instead of skipping from one major development to the next, I think it would have been a lot more effective.

I thought this was a touching game. I have listened with anxiety to news reports of famine and destruction of homes in Palestine over the summer, and fervently hope and pray for peace.

In this game, you are an olive tree that needs to be nourished in order to produce. You add more water and leaves to balance your growth, and then use it up to produce. Expending some energy to survive, and more to create the next 'generation'.

Simultaneously, outside of your control, a story plays out of a Palestinian farmer helping you grow and passing you on to his daughter. Like him, you experience hard times and lack of the resources you need to live. Each 'season' is actually a large amount of years.

Like the olive tree in the name, being a symbol of peace, I hope for peace for both Palestinians and Israelis.