Litrouke’s “Please Answer Carefully” draws our attention to the act of seeing— the flashes of screen that make the reader feel as if their own eyes were betraying them, calls attention to the process of reading itself. One of the most profoundly broadening aspects of Twine games as Anastasia Salter points out in her article “Playing at Empathy” is there “immersive” capacity that allows a true conflation of reader/character/POV (Salter 1) . I think this is most true in “PAC” for it, more than the other games, blurs the line between text and device seamlessly through its format as a questionnaire–a pop up survey you might see scrolling on the very device you play the game on.
Particular to this Twine game are its glitches which are the earliest sign that the questionnaire is not as it appears. These glitches become a full on hacking of the survey as it is revealed to be a sort of digital entrapment from a distant stalker. What is perhaps the most unnerving, and true to the experience of stalking is the way in which the game initially makes us distrust our own vision, and our own choices, through the employment of these glitches. There’s a theme of gaslighting that Litrouke is clearly tapping into through this manipulation of medium. As readers we are made to question our own vision? Did we really see that? Or is our mind just playing tricks on us?
The sound effects egg this on, as our eyes are glued to the screen we’re made to feel suddenly entrapped in our surroundings. I’m interested to see how other members of the class felt about this game, specifically in regards to gender lines.
In this regard, I wonder how empathy can become more complicated by interactivity. I’m reminded of Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection which addresses the complication of empathy in slave narratives written by white abolitionists, and how their attempt to embody empathy was more complicated than the parameters of good intentioned activism–an in fact resulted in a promulgation of graphic trauma. In Twine games where for example we are asked to immerse ourselves in potentially problematic, racist, traumatic, etc subject matter, what is the effect of such immersion and interactivity? What are we, as reader/players, enacting? Salter talks about Twine games in relation to their capacity to enable “emotional growth” and “experimentation” but are such games always spaces for the positive processing of such emotions (Salter 2-3)?
What, if anything, are we forced to experience more viscerally than we’d like to in such games?
Work Cited:
“Please Answer Carefully” by Litrouke
Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes Of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, And Self-making In Nineteenth-century America. New York : Oxford University Press, 1997. Print.
Salter, Anastasia. “Playing at empathy: Representing and experiencing emotional growth through Twine games.” 2016 IEEE International Conference on Serious Games and Applications for Health (SeGAH) (2016): 1-8.