The Stack

The interesting experiments aren’t always the successful ones. This piece is, in my opinion, not a successful experiment, but it’s an interesting one to look at and describe why.

The story is nothing more than a chase sequence: you on a white motorcycle, trying to deliver a briefcase to the docks while the police try to stop you. An emphasis on speed and quick reactions in the text. My first few attempts were baffling, in that they all failed without, as far as I could tell, my ever having been offered any opportunity to affect the outcome at all. There was just a sequence of passages, each ending in a single text button, the final one saying “It could have been different…”

On maybe my fifth try, I looked at the game’s itch page¹This game is hosted on itch.io, and the comp’s download for it is simply an HTML page with a link to the itch page. There’s no obvious reason for this. As far as I can tell, it’s just HTML5 without any functionality that wouldn’t work locally and offline. So, as usual, I’m complaining. again, and saw the advice “Keep your eyes on the road”, which was enough of a hint to make me realize that the little picture of a motorcycle at the top of the screen was important. At each step of the story, it moves forward for a little while, and the outcome depends on whether you let it come to a stop or pressed the button to advance to the next story fragment first. (It’s possible that there’s more granularity to it than stop or go, but if so, it was too subtle for me to notice.) I had failed to notice this partly because my eyes were generally at the bottom of the screen, where the text comes in. I speculate that putting the motorcycle below the text instead of above it could aid comprehension.

So, now I know there’s time limits on advancing through the story. The result is that I’m no longer really reading the story; I’m skimming it for just enough information to decide whether I need to keep up my speed or come to a sudden stop. I honestly couldn’t tell you what happens towards the end, because it never really passed through my head, apart from a handful of words. This strikes me as not ideal for IF.

Okay then, says my cantankerous brain, what about Wheels of Aurelia? That also forced you to split your attention between reading text and driving, and you thought it worked really well. What’s the difference here?

The difference, I think, is that in this game, the text is about the driving. In Wheels, you’re splitting your attention diegetically: the player character is both driving a car and participating in a conversation, so if you sometimes neglect the conversation to pay attention to the driving, it’s appropriate. It just means she’s doing the same. Here, however, both the text and the little motorcycle on the screen represent the same thing. So you’re trying to read about what the motorcycle is doing, but you can’t, because you keep on being distracted by what the motorcycle is doing. This is as unnatural as it is frustrating.