Colton Olds
Played 2024-09-02, IFComp 2024

A challenging reflection that maybe plays with the box a little too much.

A reflection on agency and human nature framed on the work of the fictional Dr. Jacob Balamer, author of *The Necessities of Function*, a controversial theory of meaning. We jump back and forth between a treatise on Balamer's work, and the work itself, a game designed to drive home his theories about what people have in common and how we choose to respond to it. That theory seems to suggest that our common experiences are under-studied and make us all more predictable than we believe.

Both voices are quite convincing at first, with the academic work in a dry, critical style and the game-within-a-game earnest to create moments of reflection and observe the human condition. Some of the writing is quite good. The game muses:

Somehow you've grown older, dumber, and wiser in equal measure.

…which is a great succinct take on an experience I have but rarely hear spoken. It was clear early on that I was looking at a broad and ambitious work worthy of critical thought.

Later on, this work “plays with the box” so to speak, and I didn't find this as effective, perhaps missing what it was trying to accomplish. This includes a survey that seemed too self-satisfied for thwarting my attempts to avoid taking it, and a faux-update that must be slowly “downloaded” with a typically frustrating progress bar. Was the slowness necessary to the narrative beat here? It all leads to a sort of repentance by Balamer, a rewriting of his own theory by literally rewriting the ending of the game in front of you, in a way that acknowledges your earlier, individual choices instead of (I presume) making a point about how little those choices matter. I didn't quite understand the motivation for this repentence, and if anything it's a little ironic that the rewritten conclusion acknowledging the consequence of our choices still fits the famliar-if-effective pattern of templating the player's performative choices into what is still a quite linear expeirence. Now I'm not sure what my takeaway is. I have a vague sense that the *auctor ex machina* of the ending feels a little too tidy for the earlier ambition of the work, but I also haven't gone back through it two or three times trying to do a closer critical read.

I found myself comparing this unfavorably to Repeat the Ending, which employs a more varied chorus of academic and critical voices commenting on the central game, and also wrestles in its own way with questions of agency. I wonder if even a second academic voice in this piece would have helped draw into focus which parts of Balamer's work we were meant to question, or perhaps the pressures that eventually inspire his change of heart.

For all I struggled with this piece, it blew past my usual checklist of concerns and right into thought-provoking and challenging territory. (By the way I love the presentation, a thoroughly non-default aesthetic that makes it clear which voice is speaking at any moment, while still centering the text and not interfering with the readability of the work.) It's getting a good score from me, I'm always looking for more like this.