[IF Comp 2013] Dad vs. Unicorn
Dad vs. Unicorn, PaperBlurt, Twine
version 2013-09-29
This a story about childhood, crappy parents, gender expectations and masculinity. These are worthy topics, but for me it left a good deal to be desired.
It's a hypertext-poetry sort of thing, but I sort of hesitate to call it poetry, though it's formally free verse. But as an attitude rather than a form, 'poetry' implies a certain attention to language; this is more of a way to avoid worrying about stringing thoughtstream concepts together into the structures of prose.
There is some attractive customised presentation, a nursery-wall blue-and-white with simple friendly font and small-child-style drawings. Appropriate! Clearly a lot of thought has gone into this.
The impression you're given from the intro is that this is going to be a multi-perspective story. If that was the intention, it's a straightforward failure: the dad is also written from the perspective of the child, really, as a cartoon of a Patriarchal Ogre stomping around with an internal dialogue that is pretty much the equivalent of "HO HO HO PERPETUATE RAPE CULTURE mwhahaha POLICE GENDER NORMS grar". This sort of defeats the point of having a multiple-perspective narrative rather than, say, a Punch and Judy show.
(At points it shows signs of moving more towards exploration: the sequence about the dad's equation of love and money payouts stood out. But this is the exception rather than the rule, and it's not an exception that diverges very far.)
And the child is, from what we're presented with, nothing more than the sum of his victimisation. If victimisation is dehumanising, the purpose of dehumanisation is that we find it harder to sympathise with dehumanised subjects. It's used so much because it works. And so, in spite of myself, I found myself really not liking the kid much, frustrated at their failure to do anything other than wallow in passive misery. If fiction about victimisation serves any purpose at all, it's to restore humanity to its subjects. Unicorn didn't do that.
At the end there is an asshole unicorn that springs into the story in an incongruous sploosh of magical realism. The unicorn represents hypermasculinity and also bullying.
Together with Vulse, this was one of two games that I really didn't want to play through again in the course of reviewing; both games take the approach of piling on the unpleasantness as deep and thick as they can make it, without giving you many other reasons to stick around. Dad vs. Unicorn is vastly more coherent than Vulse, which is something.
Once again, I sense that there's a disconnect of expectations here: I'm looking for an exploration, an argument or a narrative arc, and my sense is that perhaps Unicorn is more interested in being a scream of frustration, pain and anger. Here's the thing: I'm not equipped to judge other people's screams of pain and anger. That's a function primarily for them, not their audience. I'm only equipped to talk about the thing it's been turned into.
I think it's important to have stories where the solution to bad parents is not necessarily about reconciliation, where the redemption of the parent is not treated as something that not only must be possible, but forms a duty. There are too many stories where it's portrayed as the moral responsibility of the estranged child to reconcile with the awful parent, and the insistence of the awful parent on this is portrayed as Knowing What's Best rather than creepy and stalkerish. So points there - I'd be more heartened to see this theme in stories where it didn't form the central theme, or where the parent in question wasn't a total ogre. Because I think most broken child-parent relationships - most abusive relationships full stop, really - are kept alive because the abusers are very rarely total ogres, because their victims feel that while there's some good stuff remaining it'd be wrong to shut the door. I'd really prefer to see more stories , particularly about parent-child relationships, where the moral is "fine, there are some positive aspects to our relationship, but some of this shit is deal-breaking and it's never going to change, so kindly get the hell out of my life."
There's one reading that resolves a number of these issues, although I'm not entirely sure that it's supported by the text. Read the whole piece as being a representation of the child's attitude to his relationship with his father, probably remembered from a distance of some years, and likely after the relationship has degenerated further than what we've actually been shown. The child has grown from curled-up misery into white-hot anger, and his view of his father as Patriarchal Ogre reflects that. The unicorn is the drive to turn that anger into violence - but that destroy-your-enemies attitude is itself the epitome of the tainted version of masculinity handed down by the father. And the unicorn is, let's be honest, stupid. It's a maximally-stupid fantasy being brought in to smash a Gordian knot of a problem that, in the real world, is too complex and entrenched to deal with quickly or simply. So I'm not entirely sure how to read Unicorn's attitude about anger as a response to oppression. You could read it as 'anger responses are basically irrational, mostly motivated by wishful thinking, and ultimately derived from the same violent ethos that we're meant to be overcoming in the first place.' But I don't know. The unicorn is obviously about power fantasies, but it's not entirely clear whose.
And the weird, off-key note of reconciliation in the father's death seems like a half-recognised desire - probably a doomed one - that the father would do something to redeem himself, to make reconciliation a vague, distant possibility. But if so, it's inadequately framed; the dad is so awful that we're not given any reason to have any investment in this outcome ourselves. And saving the kid isn't all that big a motivation either; I don't want the kid to die, sure, but mostly I just want to get out of here.
Score: initially I was thinking 3, but on reconsideration there's more to think about here than most of the games in that tier. So 4.
version 2013-09-29
This a story about childhood, crappy parents, gender expectations and masculinity. These are worthy topics, but for me it left a good deal to be desired.
It's a hypertext-poetry sort of thing, but I sort of hesitate to call it poetry, though it's formally free verse. But as an attitude rather than a form, 'poetry' implies a certain attention to language; this is more of a way to avoid worrying about stringing thoughtstream concepts together into the structures of prose.
There is some attractive customised presentation, a nursery-wall blue-and-white with simple friendly font and small-child-style drawings. Appropriate! Clearly a lot of thought has gone into this.
The impression you're given from the intro is that this is going to be a multi-perspective story. If that was the intention, it's a straightforward failure: the dad is also written from the perspective of the child, really, as a cartoon of a Patriarchal Ogre stomping around with an internal dialogue that is pretty much the equivalent of "HO HO HO PERPETUATE RAPE CULTURE mwhahaha POLICE GENDER NORMS grar". This sort of defeats the point of having a multiple-perspective narrative rather than, say, a Punch and Judy show.
(At points it shows signs of moving more towards exploration: the sequence about the dad's equation of love and money payouts stood out. But this is the exception rather than the rule, and it's not an exception that diverges very far.)
And the child is, from what we're presented with, nothing more than the sum of his victimisation. If victimisation is dehumanising, the purpose of dehumanisation is that we find it harder to sympathise with dehumanised subjects. It's used so much because it works. And so, in spite of myself, I found myself really not liking the kid much, frustrated at their failure to do anything other than wallow in passive misery. If fiction about victimisation serves any purpose at all, it's to restore humanity to its subjects. Unicorn didn't do that.
At the end there is an asshole unicorn that springs into the story in an incongruous sploosh of magical realism. The unicorn represents hypermasculinity and also bullying.
Together with Vulse, this was one of two games that I really didn't want to play through again in the course of reviewing; both games take the approach of piling on the unpleasantness as deep and thick as they can make it, without giving you many other reasons to stick around. Dad vs. Unicorn is vastly more coherent than Vulse, which is something.
Once again, I sense that there's a disconnect of expectations here: I'm looking for an exploration, an argument or a narrative arc, and my sense is that perhaps Unicorn is more interested in being a scream of frustration, pain and anger. Here's the thing: I'm not equipped to judge other people's screams of pain and anger. That's a function primarily for them, not their audience. I'm only equipped to talk about the thing it's been turned into.
I think it's important to have stories where the solution to bad parents is not necessarily about reconciliation, where the redemption of the parent is not treated as something that not only must be possible, but forms a duty. There are too many stories where it's portrayed as the moral responsibility of the estranged child to reconcile with the awful parent, and the insistence of the awful parent on this is portrayed as Knowing What's Best rather than creepy and stalkerish. So points there - I'd be more heartened to see this theme in stories where it didn't form the central theme, or where the parent in question wasn't a total ogre. Because I think most broken child-parent relationships - most abusive relationships full stop, really - are kept alive because the abusers are very rarely total ogres, because their victims feel that while there's some good stuff remaining it'd be wrong to shut the door. I'd really prefer to see more stories , particularly about parent-child relationships, where the moral is "fine, there are some positive aspects to our relationship, but some of this shit is deal-breaking and it's never going to change, so kindly get the hell out of my life."
There's one reading that resolves a number of these issues, although I'm not entirely sure that it's supported by the text. Read the whole piece as being a representation of the child's attitude to his relationship with his father, probably remembered from a distance of some years, and likely after the relationship has degenerated further than what we've actually been shown. The child has grown from curled-up misery into white-hot anger, and his view of his father as Patriarchal Ogre reflects that. The unicorn is the drive to turn that anger into violence - but that destroy-your-enemies attitude is itself the epitome of the tainted version of masculinity handed down by the father. And the unicorn is, let's be honest, stupid. It's a maximally-stupid fantasy being brought in to smash a Gordian knot of a problem that, in the real world, is too complex and entrenched to deal with quickly or simply. So I'm not entirely sure how to read Unicorn's attitude about anger as a response to oppression. You could read it as 'anger responses are basically irrational, mostly motivated by wishful thinking, and ultimately derived from the same violent ethos that we're meant to be overcoming in the first place.' But I don't know. The unicorn is obviously about power fantasies, but it's not entirely clear whose.
And the weird, off-key note of reconciliation in the father's death seems like a half-recognised desire - probably a doomed one - that the father would do something to redeem himself, to make reconciliation a vague, distant possibility. But if so, it's inadequately framed; the dad is so awful that we're not given any reason to have any investment in this outcome ourselves. And saving the kid isn't all that big a motivation either; I don't want the kid to die, sure, but mostly I just want to get out of here.
Score: initially I was thinking 3, but on reconsideration there's more to think about here than most of the games in that tier. So 4.