IF Comp ’16 – Amelia Pinnola’s Take!

IF Comp ’16 – Amelia Pinnola’s Take!

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There is nothing you can’t take.

The previous sentence seriously, is the first thing I intend to take. After that, the sun.

[hold on to your blog readers because this looks like it’s going to get real nutty]

I wasn’t kidding, and neither was this game.

>take sun

You write about the impending destruction of the world by the sun. Your audience finds it thoroughly uninteresting.

 

Taken.

 

The moment you finish, a vibration buzzes from rib to temple. You split the skin on your chest.

There’s a lot of competing layers of reality happening here, but from what I can discern thus far, my survival depends on creating interesting story beats to entertain an audience. This is the kind of shit I will eat with a spoon — scratch that, I’ll tip my head back, pour it down my throat, lick the sides clean, then mail the lid in to raise money for breast cancer.

>take video

You do as you are told; you record one minute of yourself with the lure going, eyes distant, feigning thought. You watch yourself replay as the monitor picks it up; you write about that too.

I think this is a commentary about our modern practice of packaging ourselves & our opinions for mass consumption by the throng of ravenous harpies that now constitutes humanity. If I had to guess, I mean.

Now that I’m thinking about it, that is kind of what this blog is that you’re reading right now. Let’s all try as hard as we can to stop thinking about that.

You write with a conceit: the floors are the keepers of everyone’s insecurities. It isn’t a very good conceit.

How about this one: walking on floors is the ultimate in unexamined privilege. (Fuck yeah I just hot took floors!)

Pretty confused about the actuality of whatever is happening here. I’m told I am fighting people, but is that a metaphor for something else?

You write about the strange appeal of women in dank grottos. Back home it was an entire subgenre: women draped over sewage, always in some sort of ethereal flowing gown, as if simultaneously growing and wilting.

If these dank grotto women were also pushing stuck cars out of mud you could make a fortune selling fetish videos.

aaaaand Windows decided it needed to update, so I’m back in the take chamber with Amy the assistant, having started over.

You unleash a vicious rant about how ridiculous it is to name a kid Jennifer and expect her to set foot memorably on a battlefield

I think this literally every day of my life.

This game manages to fake like it’s responding to a wide range of nouns — there’s only one verb, TAKE — but in my Hot Opinion it would be improved by the addition of random generic responses to TAKE [thing not recognized as a noun]. If you wanted to maintain mimesis you could frame them as something like “Your thoughts stray from your chosen topic. Minutes later you look down and see you have written a utopian fantasy starring the eight different kinds of filth on your skin as the multiracial citizens of a floating city.”

And… I died I guess?

Chalk this up as game #2 this comp that A) is definitely trying to say something and B) I have no idea fuckin’ what. (First is Manlandia, which I will probably post later but maybe not if I don’t feel like it!)

> TAKE GAME

I feel like this game would work better for me if it was less coy about the exact nature of its dystopia. Also that great hook about needing to keep the audience interested in order to survive… that might have been an implemented mechanic, but not clearly enough that I could tell it was happening.

The game also needed better noun coverage — at least the major nouns listed in the room description should have had takes associated with them.

Conceptually I am on tentatively on board, though, assuming I actually understand what the conceit was. Which I don’t.

The end!

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October 5, 2016 at 09:48PM