Their angelical understanding
Porpentine
Twine
[spoiler]There are already a lot of reviews and “buzz” about this, and there deserves to be. It was, for me, quite outstanding. Rather than provide an “interpretation”, I want to spend a few paragraphs explaining what makes it stand out for me, and (not to seem like a complete fanboy) the few areas where I didn’t think it worked, or where I have reservations.
The writing
I’ve been pretty impressed this year with the quality of writing, in the Twine pieces in particular. But Porpentine stands out (with one other I will come to later). She is a maker of truly fresh and beautiful phrases and images, with precise control. Take even the title. Consider the choice of the slightly strange, slightly archaic, slightly distancing “angelical” instead of the more familiar “angelic”. This sort of thing – the sort of thing I can notice, but cannot do myself – is the mark for me of a really outstanding writer.
And it’s not just good writing. It is good writing for her chosen medium. Some games, especially Twine games, are walls of words. Not here. Everything is pared down, easily grasped, and yet containing real depth. And this heavily-freighted prose, which would become cloying in an extended work of fiction works perfectly for the sort of exposition that hypertext permits.
The use of the medium
It’s not just the prose that has been thought through – so has its presentation, the way it physically appears on the screen: font, colours, the use (not overdone) of special effects, the addition of sound. Porpentine understands better than most writers how to use hypertext links in different ways: to control pace, to allow for exploration, to permit digression. She also makes sure that choices you make count. This is not just (or even mainly) about giving the player obviously momentous choices – there’s really only one of those, I think. It’s that the apparently trivial choices (what you look like, whether you travel through jungle or desert, and so on) are vivid, and they make a difference. In many hypertext games, the choice is either ignored, or dealt with perfunctorily. Here one has the impression that choices may and do matter.
The world building
Finally there is the world building. I find this aspect of the game somewhat challenging, because I am by nature and training a dissecter, classifier, straightener. So I want (as I have seen other reviewers do) to read the story as allegorical (the angels are abusers, the “nemesis” is a family member who has facilitated abuse, and so forth), or as a dream or psychotic event, or as a mixture of dream-sequences and “reality”. The game simultaneously facilitates and resists these readings. Allegorical readings work only so far, and then the game rejects them. No boundary between “reality” and “dream/fiction/psychosis” can be kept stable. The mystery insists on remaining mysterious. One consequence of this is that readings which work in a “local” setting (the angels abused you, your nemesis pretended not to notice) become problematic when extended to the game as a whole (how does the red tile game fit into this?). In this sense too the game is poetical, since it embraces and invites plural readings and insists on remaining ambiguous.
This leads me to take reluctant issue with Victor Gijsbers’ complaint in his thoughtful review that in the end the game is peddling a rather hackneyed self-help message: “Face your fears, learn to trust in your own capacity for loving, and then everything will be all right!”. I’m not saying that this is not an element of the work, but it’s more complicated than that, I think; and it is in the complication that the beauty lies. For instance (to take two points) it’s not just about facing fears, it’s about equipping yourself to do so effectively, and finding some way to do so which may involve – as the faceless training in the monastery does – depersonalising yourself. Nor is it the case that everything is all right if fears are faced: the tile game does not make everything all right – this facing comes at a price, physical, emotional, and ethical: it requires the player to become in some senses cruel. So I don’t find the simplistic self-help optimism that Gijsbers understandably takes issue with.
This also, I think, both explains and justifies why some scenes are loosely linked: this is not a piece of marquetry, where everything is supposed to fit together neatly. It has gaps, fissures, inconsistencies and discontinuities. They are vital to it, because they invite a range of different and inconsistent readings which prevent it from becoming trite.
So … any complaints
Thus far, I’ve been overwhelmingly positive – which is how I feel. But I don’t think the game is without any fault. Although it’s one of the game’s strengths that everything doesn’t end up cut and dried and tied together, there are too many loose ends. For instance, I couldn’t get the poem recited by the woman by the tower to connect clearly to other aspects of the game. In retrospect, I think it probably is intended to open a window into the mind of one who has (or is said to have, or thinks she has) allowed a child to be harmed, thereby complicating the otherwise simplistic insistence that the harm could and should have been stopped by others. But it’s placed in such a position in the story that it’s hard to make sense of it when it first happens, and so it offers a long sequence of text whose significance is unclear. More problematic still was the sequence with the many hands which had to be disposed of. It was effective in that I hated it. And unlike Gijsbers I think it’s rather clear that hands play an important part in the game (consider the tile game); but I still found it disconnected from what was around it.
Conclusion
These are quibbles. Their Angelical Understanding was, for me, a really admirable, rich and wonderful experience, and I’m sure it’s going to finish very high for me.[/spoiler]