A dark political nightmare game about Abigail Thoreau, a campaign assistant working to elect her candidate. You are being followed.
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Musical Accompaniment
American Election (2019-2022) is a penned by Greg Buchanan the same person who wrote Paper Brexit (2016-2020), both stories use stark drab visual stimuli along with the twine engine. While a lot of other twine developers tend to prefer the quick hyperlinking of actions onto new pages and leaving the visuals of each location up to the reader, the man of the hour here prefers a much more 'cinematic' approach, rather sequencing long discussions and scenes in terms of chapters and having the player sit and wait through rather than choosing from a list of drop down actions for what they are going to do, as is more common in something more involved in actions like the work of Pourpetine ala Cyberqueen (2013) or Vesp: a History of Sapphic Scaphism (2016). Instead he has decided to focus on thoughts and spoken word, denoting a sense of powerlessness on the player. Along with this Mr. Buchanan seemed rather concerned with continuously updating his own works for much longer than most other Twine developers. For instance on his page for the Paper Brexit there's a part that says that
"[A game with the same title was released right before the original 2016 referendum. This 2020 version is almost entirely new, sharing only the setting of the cafe.]"
This may seem at the surface an odd decision to constantly be tweaking on a work in the support of a sense of 'accuracy'. However it begins to make a lot more sense when you realize this guy worked on the writing team for No Man's Sky which has changed form over the years so fundamentally in a desire to live to consumer expectations that it isn't even remotely the same. Concerns of art preservationism over such a renewal of a work aside, I bring this up because its baked into the dingy noir political thrillers of these stories themselves. The fact that the politics of empire are shifting into more desperate measures means that for the writer to feel comfortable with their own work it now needs to move beyond the speculative dynamic and worm right into social accuracy. My serious observation is that the page having this row of conspicuous awards tacked as the first thing you see when you scroll down is there to enhance the atmosphere of the text. To give it this sense of formality that we are in the world and its continuing to beckon us to smile through the formalities adjusted at us.
Now in these stories you are playing as a character close to the heart of Empire and trying to change it with the agency limited to only words and a choice of mental anxieties. You have far more control in American Election to choose between whether she believes in global warming or god than in any dynamic that changes the course of the story. It's worth mentioning that to just write this off as not having enough character agency is silly because you still have more than you would in a real life version of this scenario. Generally Abigail has litany of options at these tense response moments to be rude, polite, or quiet. Swapping these around throughout the story feels appropriate but I'm honest I don't really believe having so much control over her religious, political, or occupation motivations is appropriate at all. One thing the story does not budge on is the idea that Abigail is a lesbian, this is a choice baked very deeply into the arc of the story. However it combats with how you choose to express the characters other desires and opinions, would a person who sees rebuilding America through the Trumpian antagonist of the story Truman Glass also believe in a woman's right to choose, religious agnosticism, etc. and be lesbian? It felt to me like the story was giving me too many options to decide who my character is, but I feel like given the tone of the story doing so actually undermines it a bit.
You don't merely become a campaign assistant through a lack of principles. If there's any job in the world that would expect principles, it would be somebody who would help potentially mold the state apparatus. Even if the principle was self interest, thereby it being a job, that would still be a principle, one actually worth fleshing out. Personally I think this would have been the most realistic one given the type of character Abigail is, but that's not what I picked, I picked for Abigail to be a jingoist just to see what would happen and I was disappointed with the result. My issue here is that the story gives me too many choices to the point it feels reality warping. At one point towards the middle of the story I could choose the name of Abigail's childhood dog and its sex right in this flashback sequence. Nothing strains the fiction more than realizing you're not really playing from within a range of somebody internal 1st person internal mind but as a magician's hands that warps the story throughout the course of it. I spend so long on this complaint because for the most part it is the only one.
Words and even actions for characters of moving from one place to another or choosing to say one thing to a person over another is reasonable and realistic. Thoughts on the other hand are sporadic, principled in personal experiences, and usually outside of a persons locus of control. The only story that has allowed for a genuine dialogue within thought itself in a stabilized player character that isn't explicitly customizable to the degree of gender, race, etc. is Disco Elysium (2019) this does absolutely fucking suck for interactive fiction devs because its ruined the facade of what they do. However the fact of the matter is that Disco Elysium is not just a story but an application of specific understandings of the mind as a place of contradictions and its own form of internal dialogue conflicts to a CRPG format. There's a genuine sense in which Disco Elysium has affirmed a new accuracy about how the mind functions. We would all be too embarrassed to admit that our mental faculties are often disagreeing with us and that the inner voice is actually a lot more incoherent than we let on, but that is exactly how it works. For these devs I think the only way forward is to either accept this concept of internal psychic manifestation similar to how Disco or say Milk outside a bag of milk outside a bag of milk do it or on the other hand to keep player input entirely on the level of fixed actions rather than mental considerations. There should be more fixed motivations and vindications within Abigail beyond her just being gay to set up a plot device and revolve the story around tokenization.
The fact that I don't get to know what Abigail's religious beliefs are but instead only affirm some onto her operates as patriarchal in a form of appeasing the reader that I noted in my NEET Girl Date Night post when I said 'these options are presupposed based on how aware the player behind the screen wants their player character to be, this means that the player character knowledge is not fixed in place'. The juxtaposition of this problem onto American Election is intriguing to me because unlike that story, this one follows no pretenses of educational resonance or romantic resonance. It's only interested in the political dramas it wants to tell. In this sense I think this performs as a common denominator objectification of character to player relationship through personal beliefs themselves. That is to say that the presumption of assuming the thoughts of a character that you're only just embodying is to objectify them and to treat them as only an object in support of a goal.
Here you have a whole story built around this idea of manipulation and self interest, however even in spite of the clever piano building progressions and novel idea to show locations but not character portraits. The main character is still inoperable as a character of sympathy or resonance because we to are simply just like Glass himself merely puppeting the protagonist right down to her thoughts for our own bidding. I don't care how good the story is if the character feels too much like a toy, rather than an agent with their own personal interests that grow out of actions. As such I've essentially closed the door in my interest this hackneyed choose your own mindventure version of storytelling. Dont just hand me a character, express her to me, show her wants and fears and desires. Do not make me choose these aspects of her. That's just sloppy. It means we tokenize her as much as Glass does in doing it this way. Until interactive fiction gets its shit together though a lot of very 'formal' and 'serious' works are going to continue to replicate this dysfunction in character writing.
Also, this point is much more preferential, stories of domestic empire tending bore me regardless because nothing sympathetic or reasonable happens that far up the hierarchy anyway. It's all so droll up there. Would rather be in the shoes of the streets like in Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Heart of the Forest (2020) or even something more speculative like Metal Gear Rising: Revengence (2013). States apparatuses read to me as painfully allegorical since the rules of power tend to be so monotonous, you have to make the story feel 'accurate' up there by alluding constantly to real events and real actors. Dude didn't even bother to name swap out Obama for somebody else. Just downright hackneyed to me.
American Election (2019-2022) is a penned by Greg Buchanan the same person who wrote Paper Brexit (2016-2020), both stories use stark drab visual stimuli along with the twine engine. While a lot of other twine developers tend to prefer the quick hyperlinking of actions onto new pages and leaving the visuals of each location up to the reader, the man of the hour here prefers a much more 'cinematic' approach, rather sequencing long discussions and scenes in terms of chapters and having the player sit and wait through rather than choosing from a list of drop down actions for what they are going to do, as is more common in something more involved in actions like the work of Pourpetine ala Cyberqueen (2013) or Vesp: a History of Sapphic Scaphism (2016). Instead he has decided to focus on thoughts and spoken word, denoting a sense of powerlessness on the player. Along with this Mr. Buchanan seemed rather concerned with continuously updating his own works for much longer than most other Twine developers. For instance on his page for the Paper Brexit there's a part that says that
"[A game with the same title was released right before the original 2016 referendum. This 2020 version is almost entirely new, sharing only the setting of the cafe.]"
This may seem at the surface an odd decision to constantly be tweaking on a work in the support of a sense of 'accuracy'. However it begins to make a lot more sense when you realize this guy worked on the writing team for No Man's Sky which has changed form over the years so fundamentally in a desire to live to consumer expectations that it isn't even remotely the same. Concerns of art preservationism over such a renewal of a work aside, I bring this up because its baked into the dingy noir political thrillers of these stories themselves. The fact that the politics of empire are shifting into more desperate measures means that for the writer to feel comfortable with their own work it now needs to move beyond the speculative dynamic and worm right into social accuracy. My serious observation is that the page having this row of conspicuous awards tacked as the first thing you see when you scroll down is there to enhance the atmosphere of the text. To give it this sense of formality that we are in the world and its continuing to beckon us to smile through the formalities adjusted at us.
Now in these stories you are playing as a character close to the heart of Empire and trying to change it with the agency limited to only words and a choice of mental anxieties. You have far more control in American Election to choose between whether she believes in global warming or god than in any dynamic that changes the course of the story. It's worth mentioning that to just write this off as not having enough character agency is silly because you still have more than you would in a real life version of this scenario. Generally Abigail has litany of options at these tense response moments to be rude, polite, or quiet. Swapping these around throughout the story feels appropriate but I'm honest I don't really believe having so much control over her religious, political, or occupation motivations is appropriate at all. One thing the story does not budge on is the idea that Abigail is a lesbian, this is a choice baked very deeply into the arc of the story. However it combats with how you choose to express the characters other desires and opinions, would a person who sees rebuilding America through the Trumpian antagonist of the story Truman Glass also believe in a woman's right to choose, religious agnosticism, etc. and be lesbian? It felt to me like the story was giving me too many options to decide who my character is, but I feel like given the tone of the story doing so actually undermines it a bit.
You don't merely become a campaign assistant through a lack of principles. If there's any job in the world that would expect principles, it would be somebody who would help potentially mold the state apparatus. Even if the principle was self interest, thereby it being a job, that would still be a principle, one actually worth fleshing out. Personally I think this would have been the most realistic one given the type of character Abigail is, but that's not what I picked, I picked for Abigail to be a jingoist just to see what would happen and I was disappointed with the result. My issue here is that the story gives me too many choices to the point it feels reality warping. At one point towards the middle of the story I could choose the name of Abigail's childhood dog and its sex right in this flashback sequence. Nothing strains the fiction more than realizing you're not really playing from within a range of somebody internal 1st person internal mind but as a magician's hands that warps the story throughout the course of it. I spend so long on this complaint because for the most part it is the only one.
Words and even actions for characters of moving from one place to another or choosing to say one thing to a person over another is reasonable and realistic. Thoughts on the other hand are sporadic, principled in personal experiences, and usually outside of a persons locus of control. The only story that has allowed for a genuine dialogue within thought itself in a stabilized player character that isn't explicitly customizable to the degree of gender, race, etc. is Disco Elysium (2019) this does absolutely fucking suck for interactive fiction devs because its ruined the facade of what they do. However the fact of the matter is that Disco Elysium is not just a story but an application of specific understandings of the mind as a place of contradictions and its own form of internal dialogue conflicts to a CRPG format. There's a genuine sense in which Disco Elysium has affirmed a new accuracy about how the mind functions. We would all be too embarrassed to admit that our mental faculties are often disagreeing with us and that the inner voice is actually a lot more incoherent than we let on, but that is exactly how it works. For these devs I think the only way forward is to either accept this concept of internal psychic manifestation similar to how Disco or say Milk outside a bag of milk outside a bag of milk do it or on the other hand to keep player input entirely on the level of fixed actions rather than mental considerations. There should be more fixed motivations and vindications within Abigail beyond her just being gay to set up a plot device and revolve the story around tokenization.
The fact that I don't get to know what Abigail's religious beliefs are but instead only affirm some onto her operates as patriarchal in a form of appeasing the reader that I noted in my NEET Girl Date Night post when I said 'these options are presupposed based on how aware the player behind the screen wants their player character to be, this means that the player character knowledge is not fixed in place'. The juxtaposition of this problem onto American Election is intriguing to me because unlike that story, this one follows no pretenses of educational resonance or romantic resonance. It's only interested in the political dramas it wants to tell. In this sense I think this performs as a common denominator objectification of character to player relationship through personal beliefs themselves. That is to say that the presumption of assuming the thoughts of a character that you're only just embodying is to objectify them and to treat them as only an object in support of a goal.
Here you have a whole story built around this idea of manipulation and self interest, however even in spite of the clever piano building progressions and novel idea to show locations but not character portraits. The main character is still inoperable as a character of sympathy or resonance because we to are simply just like Glass himself merely puppeting the protagonist right down to her thoughts for our own bidding. I don't care how good the story is if the character feels too much like a toy, rather than an agent with their own personal interests that grow out of actions. As such I've essentially closed the door in my interest this hackneyed choose your own mindventure version of storytelling. Dont just hand me a character, express her to me, show her wants and fears and desires. Do not make me choose these aspects of her. That's just sloppy. It means we tokenize her as much as Glass does in doing it this way. Until interactive fiction gets its shit together though a lot of very 'formal' and 'serious' works are going to continue to replicate this dysfunction in character writing.
Also, this point is much more preferential, stories of domestic empire tending bore me regardless because nothing sympathetic or reasonable happens that far up the hierarchy anyway. It's all so droll up there. Would rather be in the shoes of the streets like in Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Heart of the Forest (2020) or even something more speculative like Metal Gear Rising: Revengence (2013). States apparatuses read to me as painfully allegorical since the rules of power tend to be so monotonous, you have to make the story feel 'accurate' up there by alluding constantly to real events and real actors. Dude didn't even bother to name swap out Obama for somebody else. Just downright hackneyed to me.
Truman Glass comes off a little too smart and dignified to be an accurate stand-in for Trump
American Election is a text based game that you can play for free on itch.io and it takes about 2 hours to finish. Incredibly written game where you play as Abigail Thoreau, a campaign assistant for obvious Trump stand-in, Truman Glass. The game utilizes the illusion of choice very well, as your character finds out that changing the system from the inside might not be as possible as she had hoped. It also deals with the ways in which a nation's fears and precariousness can be weaponized by those in power, and how they can take the values of a community and twist and corrupt them into something evil. Amongst all the late night comedy shows poking cheap fun at Trump, this game wants to take a deeper look at the man and the country, and ends up revealing the issues that go deeper and darker.