{"id":18748,"date":"2017-07-18T14:09:11","date_gmt":"2017-07-18T18:09:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=18748"},"modified":"2017-07-18T15:40:33","modified_gmt":"2017-07-18T19:40:33","slug":"anachronist-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=18748","title":{"rendered":"Anachronist review"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Anachronist<\/a>\u00a0is my interactive novel. Several readers have posted reviews of it on the Interactive Fiction Database<\/a>. (If I may say so, the one person who gave it a low quantitative rating had a complaint about a technical issue that I’ve fixed since then.) A reviewer called CMG makes some helpful and valid critical points, but in the interest of blatant self-promotion, I’ll quote from the good parts of the review, which nicely summarize my intent:<\/p>\n

You play as a woman about to be burned at the stake for witchcraft. She is lashed to it when the story starts. It is being lit. But she doesn\u2019t burn just yet. She has been apprenticed to an alchemist, and has gleaned the art of memory. This allows her to retreat into her own mind and escape the fire — temporarily.<\/p>\n

A single moment expands to encompass days, weeks, years, lifetimes as she plunges deeper and deeper into her memories. …<\/p>\n

Time obviously goes out the window. Anachronism isn\u2019t a mistake: it is the truth. The more time decomposes, the more we understand as we come to learn the circumstances surrounding the present moment. It\u2019s a complex little plot, with conspiracies and double-crosses. Bit players enlarge to take central roles as our protagonist\u2019s focus sharpens. Structurally, this means that the story is based around increasingly dense\u00a0telescopic descriptions<\/a>. We have a scene, we concentrate on a detail, that detail becomes another scene, we concentrate on another detail in that scene\u2026<\/p>\n

More than any other interactive fiction I\u2019ve played, this feels like a novel. …<\/p>\n

I faced the hardest decision I\u2019ve had to make in a choice-based game in this story. At multiple points, you can break your concentration and return to focusing on the stake, the rising fire. I didn\u2019t do that. I stayed in the protagonist\u2019s head (or maybe the protagonists\u2019 heads). And finally I reached a point where I had been reading for hours, for days, while the stake was still burning, and the game confronted me: what was I accomplishing by living in my memories? Shouldn\u2019t I focus on the fire, what\u2019s\u00a0actually<\/i>\u00a0happening?<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t know what to do. After playing for so long, I really felt as though I was avoiding the story\u2019s reality. I had stretched out my time on the stake\u00a0in real time<\/i>\u00a0by reading the text. It was absurd. I should\u2019ve been burnt to a crisp. Here was the story\u2019s most glaring anachronism, and I was the anachronist enabling it.<\/p>\n

What I chose to do next doesn\u2019t matter as much as the fact that the game created this situation in the first place. This isn\u2019t a story whose strength rests on making the \u201cright\u201d choices. Its strength comes from how its themes are reflected in the reader\u2019s own experience, which can only happen because it\u2019s interactive.<\/p>\n

In this sense, it\u2019s some of the strongest interactive work I\u2019ve seen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Anachronist\u00a0is my interactive novel. Several readers have posted reviews of it on the Interactive Fiction Database. (If I may say so, the one person who gave it a low quantitative rating had a complaint about a technical issue that I’ve fixed since then.) A reviewer called CMG makes some helpful and valid critical points, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fine-arts","category-uncategorized","category-verse-and-worse"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18748"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18752,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18748\/revisions\/18752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}