Shelter from the Storm

There's an ongoing discussion in the interactive fiction community about whether or not we're well-served by our traditional reliance on second person present-tense narration -- the kind of thing that works for

You are standing in a damp cave.

or

You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

...but not so much for

You feel overwhelmed by existential angst and break down weeping.

Shelter from the Storm bills itself explicitly as an attempt to experiment with that question: at the start of play, or at any other time during it, you may change the person and/or the tense of the narration, the better to explore your feelings about how the storytelling works.

That lead-in makes the game sound like a dull technical exercise, which it isn't: in fact, it's a suspenseful story game with light puzzles. By a few minutes into the game I'd stopped tinkering with the narrative voice options and settled in to enjoy the tale.

The story is set during the grim beginnings of the second world war. The protagonist (whether "I", "you", or "he") is a soldier on his way to a posting near Salisbury when, thanks to a storm and some bad luck with his car, he's forced to seek shelter with a bunch of people who aren't what they seem. The result plays a bit like a murder mystery -- everything turns on finding evidence and understanding what that evidence really means, and there are multiple twists before the whole thing stops. Barring a few bits where the player has time to explore at leisure, it's fast-paced, too: the NPCs are all active types and have plenty to say and do. The story never rises above the level of period melodrama, but it does that reasonably well.

But here's the curious thing: by the end of the story, I started to want that narrative voice option again, and I set my narrator to first person past tense because I was more comfortable reading/playing that way.

I'd like to discuss why I found my protagonist alienating, but to do so requires me to spoil the game. If you think you'd like to try a bit of wartime espionage IF, please stop here and play the game instead.

Playing note: Shelter from the Storm was built using TADS, an interactive fiction engine created by Michael J. Roberts. To play the game on systems other than Windows, you need to install a TADS interpreter on your machine, and download the game file. We link to TADS interpreters for Mac, Windows, and Linux above.

Those new to interactive fiction may also be interested in the introduction found here.

Now, the spoilers follow.

No, seriously, I'm going to give away the solution to the game.
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You could play the game and then come back and read the rest, you know.
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The alienation, I think, comes from the way the story itself levers apart the protagonist and the player with different motivations. Shelter from the Storm takes the risky tack of making the villain someone you don't really want it to be, someone you might be inclined to presume innocent: the refugee housekeeper who is, or at least claims to be, Jewish. Now, I suppose a spy might well take the guise of a refugee; she might well use the pity and guilt felt by others to protect herself from too close an interrogation. The fact that Hilda explicitly asks for the protagonist to treat her fairly, and implies that she fears the effects of English anti-Semitism even though she has escaped Germany: these are things that a spy in her position might well do, I suppose.

Still it's nearly impossible to read this kind of thing without bringing a wealth of baggage from every previous holocaust book or movie one has ever encountered, and it is also hard not to want to be on the side of the person most unfairly treated.

Here, I knew I the player was treating Hilda inconsiderately because the game made it impossible to go forward otherwise, but what was the protagonist's excuse? He has some claim to be acting for the good of king and country, but he goes beyond what his mission would license -- as Hilda suggests from her very first encounter with him, when he demands to be allowed into the house. Moreover, he never seems aware enough to recognize his own moments of unfairness.

The worst moment of the game for me was cavalierly cracking open the housekeeper's suitcase -- the one that might contain who-knows-what personal souvenirs -- in the presence of Angela, a so-described "English rose" who is more my social and economic equal. Angela openly expresses her suspicion about the housekeeper daring to have locked private possessions at all, and there is no way in the game (or none that I could find) to reply that the protagonist was violating Hilda's privacy only grudgingly and because he had to-- that is, under the same terms that he had searched Angela's own possessions.

In the end I preferred in the end to foist responsibility off onto a distant first-person narrator, even if the game was still depending on my commands.

I don't know how much of this cognitive friction was intended by the author. Eric Eve puts more than the usual amount of effort into creating characters who will notice and respond realistically to slights and discourtesy or respect and kindness. He gives the player the range of expression for manners to be meaningful. This is rare, even in a medium short on combat and (relative to other game styles) long on conversation.

At the same time, Eve has written several other games now -- notably Nightfall and The Elysium Enigma -- in which NPCs manipulate the protagonist, and often the player as well in the process. Disingenuous appeals for pity, sympathy, respect, etc., are common in his work, and I'm often left wondering how to feel about this. The game is appealing to the player's humanity -- "please react as you would treat a real human! be decent, and the game will notice that you're being nice!", etc. -- and then revealing that the solicited reaction of empathy and civility is actually a weakness.

One gets the sense that even after their experiences, the lead characters of Nightfall or The Elysium Enigma would continue to act essentially the same way as always. They may not be so embittered as to give up on social graces in general, but they have no way of gaining what they lack from beginning to end: viz., any intuition about others' motives, any skill at seeing a person beyond his or her formal self-presentation.

What sets Shelter from the Storm apart from the other two is the degree to which I felt the player alone was being manipulated. This time the protagonist is both less naive and less kind: it was not clear that Jack felt much sympathy for the housekeeper even when she was apparently innocent. Meanwhile, there is some incriminating evidence against Angela too, and partway through she tells some very implausible lies; yet the game doesn't encourage or even really allow the player to react to her with further hostility and suspicion.

Other people will probably read all this differently, but I came away thinking that the protagonist was, if not consciously racist, at least very much more inclined to distrust and disrespect people unlike himself. I was glad to be able to shift narrative voices to distance myself from him.