Book and Volume is a new interactive fiction by Nick Montfort (author of dead tree book Twisty Little Passages, co-editor of New Media Reader, and culprit of ultra clever interactive fiction Ad Verbum).
Dan and I played through “Book and Volume” tonight. Which is to say: we each played through it, but passed HINTs and lists of AMUSING interactions back and forth over IM.
What’s the game about? It’s about a sysadmin in the weird, charming cyber-Gotham of nTopia who spends the last working day of his/her/its life rebooting servers and reacting to frantic pages from an unseen supervisor. (”Net extremely hoseled. Engine team being hideously masticated by this outage. Demo rapidly approaching. Get to the cages. Reboot the servers. Hasten. Do not rest. Please. All five of them.”) What’s the game really about? Knut, a resident of nTopia, pegs it:
Reality. Illusion. Theme is reality versus illusion. Must discern reality. And illusion.
It’s about spaces. Mapping. Learning. And easy pop culture / English major references.
I’d recommend this game to anybody, although it is fairly dense and telegraphic — like “Ad Verbum,” it presumes a certain amount of familiarity with nerd culture in general and interactive fiction in specific.
If it wasn’t so short, the game’s weird style would get old very fast. Stylistically, it achieves what For a Change tried to do, while supplying enough structure — if not quite significance — to reward the player’s efforts.
Brian Kerr | Search log responses for November 13, 2006 | 13-Nov-06 at 2:03 am | Permalink
[...] Book and Volume — the less you know about this before you play it, the better; if you must know something about it, here’s my Book and Volume post from about a year ago; [...]