Playing games with an emphasis on story.

This is a twine game in which the author (co-opting the player) has an imaginary conversation with Emma Goldman, the radical anarchist from the early 20th century. Emma asks you what's up. You explain Amazon to her, and she goes away, deeply disappointed in your subscription box addiction. There aren't really any choices in this game. In fact, you can opt out of clicking on the words in the dialog that suggest a choice entirely and click on parts of the background half the time to progress to the next scene. The only moment where it looked like I had an option (deciding whether or not Emma would want to hear you explain "subscription boxes") I clicked no only to have the game tell me that it was going to tell me anyway. That's a pet peeve for me in choice based games. If I didn't have a choice don't give me a choice, or at least hide that fact better.

The game is very short and is basically what I just described without much more to it. Considering its subject it is probably best approached in terms of its political argument, which I wasn't particularly taken with. Basically, once you admit that you order everything from Amazon and subscribe to five subscription boxes, Emma expresses disappointment and disgust over the state of the world and goes away. My two major problems with this are - I don't buy off Amazon and don't subscribe to shit, personally, and, more importantly, I don't think that such a simple thing would cause someone like Emma Goldman to just give up on the state of things and go away. The sentiment being expressed here is one grounded in a modern sort of guilt, that our effort is futile, that the corpos have won, that it's over. This seems to not take into consideration the fact that the time in which Goldman was active was also an extremely capitalistic society, one in which suppression of activists was just as if not more brutal than it is today, and there were people who still tried to make change. Nor does it take any consideration of the fact that Goldman was considered radical in her time, and that there are radicals now who are still trying hard to make change. Whether I agree with their approach or not, I thought the aw shucks, we failed and Amazon won tone of this game to not do much justice to Goldman or to modern reformers.

It's barely a five minute game so there's no harm in giving it a go. I was kind of hoping for something a little deeper though.