Take (review)

"Take" is an interactive fiction by Amelia Pinnolla, written for the 2016 interactive fiction competition.

There isn't very much I can say about this game without spoiling it so I'll cut break.
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"Take" reminded me of last year's competition entry "The Friend Zone" by Brendan Vance. Both use allegory to describe the angst felt by a PC who is single and arguably insecure. In "Take" the metaphors are more subtle, and poetically more heart-rending, although if you possibly missed the point, the author hits you over the head with a post-game reveal. The only real difference is that "The Friend Zone" is written from the perspective of a single young man (at least as I read the story) who wonders why "nice guys can't get laid." and this one is written from the perspective of a single young female, who regards most of the men in her life as only interested in rough sex. No wonder the dating scene is so unpleasant, if these are really accurate representations of the agendas of the people involved. But I think these games have more similarities than differences.

We see some of the same metaphors...swords as organs, violence, the sense of always being watched and evaluated by others. One memorable image in "The Friend Zone" is a dance hall with an eyeball beneath the floor. In "Take" the protagonist wears a device which records and broadcasts her every intimate thought to the world, à la "Twitter". Keep that in mind for a moment.

Is the protagonist really obligated to broadcast her thoughts to the world, every hope, every heartbreak, every wound?  Does she really have to doll herself up with cosmetics and pretense? The text tells us that is so, but removing the metaphor from reality, nobody has to post that shit on Twitter. I had to look up the word "Fameball", which appears in the blurb. It's what we used to call an "attention whore", though it is much easier to achieve this status the world of social media. There are young people who feel trapped in a cycle of posting increasingly provocative material in order to get "likes" or "retweets".

I criticized "The Friend Zone" for its failure to recognize that the protagonist is a self-pitying loser. As a straight man, I don't feel nearly as qualified to remark on the experience of a single female. I'm sure there are women who feel like the protagonist in this story (and I know there are men who feel like the protagonist in "Friend Zone"). But both characters seem equally immature. There are "nice" men out there, and "nice" women who defy the stereotypes in these works of fiction.

The best thing about this game "Take" is the amount of reflection and discussion it has generated in blogs and reviews. This is a game which you will continue to think about afterwards, and might feel the desire to discuss its meaning with others.