I wish I hadn’t waited a month after finishing Digital: A Love Story before writing about it: I don’t think I had a lot to say about it when I finished it, but I had something to say about it then, or at least I had something to say in/after the VGHVI Symposium on the game that Dan led?
I guess what I remember is my uncertainty of how to approach the game. I see a choice of people with whom to exchange messages, and one sequence of those message involves increasing emotional closeness. And I that (or that plus my past history) put me in a BioWare state of mind, expecting some sort of romantic choice to unfold?
Which isn’t entirely crazy: the game’s subtitle is “A Love Story”, after all. But it’s a different sort of love story than I’m used to in games; a quieter one, certainly.
And one that, refreshingly, isn’t about love as conquest. In a major sense, the game isn’t even about you at all. (It just ain’t your story?) On which note, the picture the game draws of the player character is quite unusual: you don’t see the messages you send, you just see how other people react to them. So it’s a sort of picture drawn in negative space, in a negative space formed by subjective and situated reactions. A game that, in its own idiosyncratic way, goes farther towards defining you in terms of your relations than any other art work I can think of?
Post Revisions:
- November 5, 2013 @ 21:28:15 [Current Revision] by David Carlton
- November 5, 2013 @ 21:28:15 by David Carlton
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I ended up stealing most of our combined thoughts on it for my own post. All of the stuff about — what you wrote too — the performance “gap” between picking who to talk to and then seeing their response. You, as player, are never quite the character. It’s always situated in the simulation.
That’s something, the more I have played the other games by Christine Love (both Analogue and It Just Ain’t Your Story), that I really like and maybe doesn’t get written about as much: the interface is part of the story. It’s not just playing a game, but actually using the interface as an /interface/ itself in the game. Not to mention the wonderful moment of ‘crashing’ the interface in Digital too. Few games are willing to do that.
It’s something I think doesn’t get used much. So much of the GUI in most games is just information dump for the player, separated away from the character.
11/6/2013 @ 12:13 pm
Yeah, the interface was surprising and great, I totally agree. Well, not great great – it got really repetitive some of the time – but definitely an interesting change of pace.
11/9/2013 @ 9:17 am