Your life merely accumulates, you've decided; it does not build.
10th runner-up (out of 53 entries) in the 2000
rec.arts.int-fiction competition
(and tied for 3rd place in that year's "Miss Congeniality" author's choice award), this moody little piece of
interactive fiction seems to inspire strong responses from those who plumb its depths - the further you get the more enjoyed - or at least
appreciated - it becomes. At first glance, it appears to be a member of the most wretched species of IF - the "Hello, World!" conversion of one's squalid abode to the fabulous world of
text adventure games, hardly worth a second glance
(especially in a competition situation) - but if the seeming choice of setting seems uninspired it's quickly offset by evidence that the author
(one Andrew Plotkin aka Zarf here masquerading under the partially-foreshadowing "Ampe R. Sand") has a certain way with words. Indeed, despite its lack of
phone booths, this so-called game manages to make considerably more use of its single room than could reasonably be expected, the player eventually coming to understand that the solitary location in which the game is set
(Winner, Best Setting, Xyzzy Awards 2000) is not so much the room in which the protagonist's body lives as a spot just behind their eyes where their mind spins, thrives and dies. The
player is not moving the character so much as inhabiting their consciousness and observing their very subjective experiences.
But how much can be said of this gamely experience without giving it all away? It starts out in an almost archetypally-straightforward manner: with some serious sleep-dep subbing in for the traditional introductory hangover, following a sip of water the protagonist realises that they have misplaced their plane tickets to the Death Valley Om - this game's cipher for the Burning Man festival. Luggage already packed and waiting by the door, your quest is clear: locate the tickets before the taxi arrives to bring you to the airport and from there, to the desert.
But once the tickets are located, it seems that perhaps the desert is coming to you. What had seemed a deadpan and realistic (if morose) approach and perspective is shaken by the gradual manifestation of a gritty Midas touch, systematically rendering your surroundings into a preview of your anticipated destination, familiar features transforming one by into dunes - until a moment of reflection restores everything to apparent normalcy. Evidently the game up until this point was some sort of mirage, all just a dream - a forbidden device for ending a story, but an exciting one to apply midway through a surreal gaming experience.
(Like) an episode of deja vu, the past now clearly untrustworthy forces all present and future experiences to be viewed through a lens of skepticism, the foundations of the observations the game describes to us being now clearly laid on shifting sands of uncertainty. Suppose we're not really in our apartment - suppose we already made it to the festival and were laid low by a tab of bad acid? Or wait a sec - didn't the radio say something about reports from the festival of lost hikers? But we were still dreaming when we heard that... weren't we?
Think back to everything you've experienced thus far in the game - the thirst you begin with, the distant sound of a helicopter flying by. Reflect upon the state of affairs that delivered you to your present situation - whatever it may be - diverting your attention from the immediate problems of your own life and investing your energies in vain towards influencing the inscrutable activities of an abstract character from inside your computer.
If you've played this game, you probably realise that you'd best find some shade to get into. If you haven't, you should have figured out by now that you'd best find Shade to get into. Written in Inform, the game can be run on a plethora of platforms, but if you want me to make it reeeeal easy for you I can just point you to the Java version playable through your web browser at http://www.eblong.com/zarf/zplet/shade.html
If you win, you win alone.