[IF Comp 2013] Their angelical understanding
Their angelical understanding, Porpentine, Twine
version 2013-10-06
This struck me as a very distilled, considered piece of craft. It's good enough that I had difficulty writing about it. This review is going to be fragmentary, repetitive, not much good as a plot summary, and overly-focused on a few particular aspects and incidents, which are not necessarily the most important part of the work. The gist of it is that I think it's the best game Porpentine's made: moving, complicated, reflective, powerful.
It's considerably more concerned with player participation than what I've seen of Porpentine's previous work. It's trying a lot of approaches, some more successful than others. Many are, formally speaking, transparent formulas for grabbing player engagement without giving anything away in return. The choices with your face are the most obvious: you can choose your eye colour and some details about light body-mods, and - as is pretty usual in this kind of character-creation-like choice - your palette is tightly constrained so as not to mess with the aesthetic that the author has in mind, and the choices you make are of very limited relevance to anything that happens thereafter. Character creation, as it generally appears in games, is a sucker trick; you spend ages fine-tuning a character with just the right cheekbones/jawline ratio and hair colour, and whom you'll have forgotten ten minutes after you finish the game, because the people creating content will ignore most of that input.
Or take the confessional mechanic. This feels like a textbook technique of a certain therapy-derived school of gaming, most heavily explored in indie RPGs, with a focus on getting players to loosen up, allow themselves to be vulnerable, and therefore to take part and to listen more effectively. It works in games that have other human players because there's an expectation of reciprocity: that it's okay to open up because, by doing so, you create a sense of trust and intimacy among the other participants. To make that work in a single-player game is not easy; it's hard to escape the sense that your chain is being yanked.
Both of these are cheap player-engagement tricks that, in a computer game, should either suck or be very limited in what they can accomplish. But in Their angelical understanding they work. I took these choices seriously and they contributed a good deal to my sense of the protagonist. That is some fuckin' craft, there. The game has a lot of this general category of thing, of stuff that is liable to be really, really crap unless you are really, really good at it, and for the most part it turns out that Porpentine is, in fact, really, really good at it. There is a fuckton of serious craft going into this thing, is my point.
But it's more than cheap tricks artfully executed: this is a game that - given that it's clearly a very personal document - actually gives you a fair degree of freedom to derive meaning from the story. You know how Twine games are often criticised for aggressively denying agency and rubbing your face in it? That's a legit technique, but when game after game uses it as its central approach to interaction, it gets very old indeed. understanding uses the technique sparingly, and is more concerned with giving the player influence and power over the text. Which is appropriate, because this is a game about coming into power from a state of powerlessness. This is most true at the climactic confrontations, both of which give a fair degree of meaningful agency: you have a fairly strong sense of what your actions are pointing towards, and the choices are meaningfully distinct - enough so that it is probably dangerous to say too much about the meaning of the piece without playing through several times. (I have probably missed crucial information in my readings below.) It's a many-aspects-of-a-thing piece, a piece about journey and process, not about conclusions.
Similarly, I'm usually not keen at all on the kinds of fancy text shenanigans that - and, indeed, some of 'em are a bit mixed. 'The sun flashes from behind a cloud' bit feels gimmicky the first time you see it. (It makes more sense after your first playthrough). But in general they're presented and deployed in ways that make them highly effective. This, again, is a seriously impressive bit of craft.
Compared to howling dogs, this is a much more self-aware, reflective kind of piece. Here's one way that you can deal with the first of two confrontations in the story:
I know you aren't the same angel. But you'll do (and you'll do is the energy fueling history, strangers obligerated by echoes).
After the first blow, it's clear that the angel is defeated, but you are required to continue brutally beating its monstrous body for far longer than anyone is going to feel comfortable with. This is not a story primarily about the pain of abuse and victimisation, nor is it really about revenge; it's about the long-term effects of abuse on identity and personality, and how that's a lot more complicated and nasty than a straightforward quest-narrative about overcoming fears and weakness.
Later:
I had to sacrifice my desire to be thought of as a good person.
On the surface of it, this sounds pretty badass.
On the second reading, it feels deeply scary, painting the protagonist as someone from The Mountain People, a monster. And on the third, it feels like an adolescent kind of self-justification, an Eminem-ish fuck-you, the kind of thing that, used in the first person, could only occur within the context of apologia - which are the best possible evidence that their utterer does care, very strongly, what people think of them. One of the core elements of power-fantasy is being someone who has no obligations to others and is above their judgement, but who is nonetheless entitled to judge and exact obligations from others - to be someone whose selfishness is irreproachable.
And then you notice the fact that this is temporary, and in the past tense. The protagonist has to be a monster for a while. The sacrifice for that is that she has to be a monster for a while. The protagonist is interested in other people, and wants to be closer to people, but there is a sense of huge distance that cannot be bridged, yet. She can only relate to other people insofar as they are themselves victims. But the game ends - the times I played it, anyway - on a generally hopeful note about the chances of self-reconstruction, of getting to a place where the world isn't a landscape of total horror which can only be opposed by anger. (The severed-hands sequence is another datapoint here -- that put me in mind of Even Cowgirls Bleed, about how anger is a hammer that makes every problem look like a nail.)
And I know the solution to getting through today won’t be the solution to getting through tomorrow.
To me, it felt thoroughly sceptical of the narrative arc - the quest that restores one's wholeness, the slaying of the monster - though that reading may involve a certain amount of self-projection. The destiny/lol transition is the most obvious hint of that. But there's also this:
A woman in a low-cut evening dress. A hideous, scaly creature peeks from her cleavage, claws scraping listlessly at her breasts.
You struggle against time to put your words in order, and the woman responds with cutting sexual contempt. So to a great degree this is a standard trope, the Enchantress, the woman who uses her sexuality as power but won't have sex with you, and who is therefore monstrous. This is jarring. It's jarring because the protagonist's suffering has generally been framed at an epic scale. And then we have this incident, where they're suddenly seeing the world like a horny teenager, all ashamed mumbling and sexual resentment.
A lot of the revenge-fantasy is about the idea that suffering makes you a serious, adult person: for much of the story I had the tendency to think of the protagonist as tall, determined, graceful, cool - all of which is to say, mature and serious. The fantasy of being ideally adult - powerful, serious, self-sufficient - is absolutely the fantasy most commonly catered-to by computer games. understanding's narrative frame is all built around this kind of epic, competence-fantasy, lone-ronin structure, but to me it seemed essentially sceptical or uncomfortable with that basic framework, undercutting it, signalling that we shouldn't take it all that seriously.
So that sequence - and, to a lesser extent, the hand sequence - is about fucking up, in small, normal, dumb-ass ways. Which is important, because the tone of a lot of the piece is very retroactive-destiny it was what I had to do stuff, about the tempting myth that going through trauma inherently makes you capable and mature.
I also liked the money-shapes thing, largely because it's fundamentally about a feeling that in the real world the way that money works is nonsensical, fucked-up and fundamentally premised on someone getting screwed over, which is a feeling that I share.
(Sidebar: when a Porpentine game says 'wear headphones' I hesitate. Thing is, entering an author's world, particularly an author as capable as Porpentine is, gives them power over you. This power varies according to the degree to which you're immersed: an artist can push your buttons more effectively if you're in a giant-screen cinema than they can with a YouTube window embedded in a blog post on a crappy netbook. Sound gives the artist another dimension to control, and headphones are downright intimate. 'Wear headphones' is, in effect, saying 'You can trust me. Relax. It'll be okay. Just close your eyes and fall backwards.' This message comes right next to an ASCII vagina and a warning that the game may trigger epilepsy, which is a little like asking someone to do trust-falls while not concealing the joy buzzer in your hand. The imperative voice - "Wear headphones", not "Sound preferred, headphones ideal" catalysed all this.
But I am readily guilt-tripped by a sense of comp-judge duty and fairness. So I fumbled around for the non-crappy headphones, and I'm glad I did, because it kept to minimal, appropriate and effective atmospherics.)
(Sidebar two: I am tempted to link it to Till We Have Faces, what with the facelessness and the sex-with-divine-being-injures-mortals/blinding light theme. If so, it's a pretty tenuous link.)
I would be happy if this won the comp. There are a couple of other games of which that's also true, and I have not yet quite figured out how to reflect that in scores, but I don't see myself giving understanding less than a 8, and that is likely be revised upwards. (Added later: in fact, I'm upgrading three games to a 9 rating, including this one.)
version 2013-10-06
This struck me as a very distilled, considered piece of craft. It's good enough that I had difficulty writing about it. This review is going to be fragmentary, repetitive, not much good as a plot summary, and overly-focused on a few particular aspects and incidents, which are not necessarily the most important part of the work. The gist of it is that I think it's the best game Porpentine's made: moving, complicated, reflective, powerful.
It's considerably more concerned with player participation than what I've seen of Porpentine's previous work. It's trying a lot of approaches, some more successful than others. Many are, formally speaking, transparent formulas for grabbing player engagement without giving anything away in return. The choices with your face are the most obvious: you can choose your eye colour and some details about light body-mods, and - as is pretty usual in this kind of character-creation-like choice - your palette is tightly constrained so as not to mess with the aesthetic that the author has in mind, and the choices you make are of very limited relevance to anything that happens thereafter. Character creation, as it generally appears in games, is a sucker trick; you spend ages fine-tuning a character with just the right cheekbones/jawline ratio and hair colour, and whom you'll have forgotten ten minutes after you finish the game, because the people creating content will ignore most of that input.
Or take the confessional mechanic. This feels like a textbook technique of a certain therapy-derived school of gaming, most heavily explored in indie RPGs, with a focus on getting players to loosen up, allow themselves to be vulnerable, and therefore to take part and to listen more effectively. It works in games that have other human players because there's an expectation of reciprocity: that it's okay to open up because, by doing so, you create a sense of trust and intimacy among the other participants. To make that work in a single-player game is not easy; it's hard to escape the sense that your chain is being yanked.
Both of these are cheap player-engagement tricks that, in a computer game, should either suck or be very limited in what they can accomplish. But in Their angelical understanding they work. I took these choices seriously and they contributed a good deal to my sense of the protagonist. That is some fuckin' craft, there. The game has a lot of this general category of thing, of stuff that is liable to be really, really crap unless you are really, really good at it, and for the most part it turns out that Porpentine is, in fact, really, really good at it. There is a fuckton of serious craft going into this thing, is my point.
But it's more than cheap tricks artfully executed: this is a game that - given that it's clearly a very personal document - actually gives you a fair degree of freedom to derive meaning from the story. You know how Twine games are often criticised for aggressively denying agency and rubbing your face in it? That's a legit technique, but when game after game uses it as its central approach to interaction, it gets very old indeed. understanding uses the technique sparingly, and is more concerned with giving the player influence and power over the text. Which is appropriate, because this is a game about coming into power from a state of powerlessness. This is most true at the climactic confrontations, both of which give a fair degree of meaningful agency: you have a fairly strong sense of what your actions are pointing towards, and the choices are meaningfully distinct - enough so that it is probably dangerous to say too much about the meaning of the piece without playing through several times. (I have probably missed crucial information in my readings below.) It's a many-aspects-of-a-thing piece, a piece about journey and process, not about conclusions.
Similarly, I'm usually not keen at all on the kinds of fancy text shenanigans that - and, indeed, some of 'em are a bit mixed. 'The sun flashes from behind a cloud' bit feels gimmicky the first time you see it. (It makes more sense after your first playthrough). But in general they're presented and deployed in ways that make them highly effective. This, again, is a seriously impressive bit of craft.
Compared to howling dogs, this is a much more self-aware, reflective kind of piece. Here's one way that you can deal with the first of two confrontations in the story:
I know you aren't the same angel. But you'll do (and you'll do is the energy fueling history, strangers obligerated by echoes).
After the first blow, it's clear that the angel is defeated, but you are required to continue brutally beating its monstrous body for far longer than anyone is going to feel comfortable with. This is not a story primarily about the pain of abuse and victimisation, nor is it really about revenge; it's about the long-term effects of abuse on identity and personality, and how that's a lot more complicated and nasty than a straightforward quest-narrative about overcoming fears and weakness.
Later:
I had to sacrifice my desire to be thought of as a good person.
On the surface of it, this sounds pretty badass.
On the second reading, it feels deeply scary, painting the protagonist as someone from The Mountain People, a monster. And on the third, it feels like an adolescent kind of self-justification, an Eminem-ish fuck-you, the kind of thing that, used in the first person, could only occur within the context of apologia - which are the best possible evidence that their utterer does care, very strongly, what people think of them. One of the core elements of power-fantasy is being someone who has no obligations to others and is above their judgement, but who is nonetheless entitled to judge and exact obligations from others - to be someone whose selfishness is irreproachable.
And then you notice the fact that this is temporary, and in the past tense. The protagonist has to be a monster for a while. The sacrifice for that is that she has to be a monster for a while. The protagonist is interested in other people, and wants to be closer to people, but there is a sense of huge distance that cannot be bridged, yet. She can only relate to other people insofar as they are themselves victims. But the game ends - the times I played it, anyway - on a generally hopeful note about the chances of self-reconstruction, of getting to a place where the world isn't a landscape of total horror which can only be opposed by anger. (The severed-hands sequence is another datapoint here -- that put me in mind of Even Cowgirls Bleed, about how anger is a hammer that makes every problem look like a nail.)
And I know the solution to getting through today won’t be the solution to getting through tomorrow.
To me, it felt thoroughly sceptical of the narrative arc - the quest that restores one's wholeness, the slaying of the monster - though that reading may involve a certain amount of self-projection. The destiny/lol transition is the most obvious hint of that. But there's also this:
A woman in a low-cut evening dress. A hideous, scaly creature peeks from her cleavage, claws scraping listlessly at her breasts.
You struggle against time to put your words in order, and the woman responds with cutting sexual contempt. So to a great degree this is a standard trope, the Enchantress, the woman who uses her sexuality as power but won't have sex with you, and who is therefore monstrous. This is jarring. It's jarring because the protagonist's suffering has generally been framed at an epic scale. And then we have this incident, where they're suddenly seeing the world like a horny teenager, all ashamed mumbling and sexual resentment.
A lot of the revenge-fantasy is about the idea that suffering makes you a serious, adult person: for much of the story I had the tendency to think of the protagonist as tall, determined, graceful, cool - all of which is to say, mature and serious. The fantasy of being ideally adult - powerful, serious, self-sufficient - is absolutely the fantasy most commonly catered-to by computer games. understanding's narrative frame is all built around this kind of epic, competence-fantasy, lone-ronin structure, but to me it seemed essentially sceptical or uncomfortable with that basic framework, undercutting it, signalling that we shouldn't take it all that seriously.
So that sequence - and, to a lesser extent, the hand sequence - is about fucking up, in small, normal, dumb-ass ways. Which is important, because the tone of a lot of the piece is very retroactive-destiny it was what I had to do stuff, about the tempting myth that going through trauma inherently makes you capable and mature.
I also liked the money-shapes thing, largely because it's fundamentally about a feeling that in the real world the way that money works is nonsensical, fucked-up and fundamentally premised on someone getting screwed over, which is a feeling that I share.
(Sidebar: when a Porpentine game says 'wear headphones' I hesitate. Thing is, entering an author's world, particularly an author as capable as Porpentine is, gives them power over you. This power varies according to the degree to which you're immersed: an artist can push your buttons more effectively if you're in a giant-screen cinema than they can with a YouTube window embedded in a blog post on a crappy netbook. Sound gives the artist another dimension to control, and headphones are downright intimate. 'Wear headphones' is, in effect, saying 'You can trust me. Relax. It'll be okay. Just close your eyes and fall backwards.' This message comes right next to an ASCII vagina and a warning that the game may trigger epilepsy, which is a little like asking someone to do trust-falls while not concealing the joy buzzer in your hand. The imperative voice - "Wear headphones", not "Sound preferred, headphones ideal" catalysed all this.
But I am readily guilt-tripped by a sense of comp-judge duty and fairness. So I fumbled around for the non-crappy headphones, and I'm glad I did, because it kept to minimal, appropriate and effective atmospherics.)
(Sidebar two: I am tempted to link it to Till We Have Faces, what with the facelessness and the sex-with-divine-being-injures-mortals/blinding light theme. If so, it's a pretty tenuous link.)
I would be happy if this won the comp. There are a couple of other games of which that's also true, and I have not yet quite figured out how to reflect that in scores, but I don't see myself giving understanding less than a 8, and that is likely be revised upwards. (Added later: in fact, I'm upgrading three games to a 9 rating, including this one.)