COMPLETE: Weird Grief
Oct. 20th, 2021 02:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kjorteoIFComp 2021 continues.
Weird Grief by Bez is a side story, a companion piece meant to be played alongside The Dead Account (which we covered previously.) Rather than playing from the perspective of a Hivekind messenger employee investigating the case of Mike Stanvinci through flagged messages and profiles and group chatroom interfaces, Weird Grief assumes the role of one of Mike's partners and is a presented as a much more standard narrative that doesn't try to dress itself up as anything fancy.
We are... conflicted. On one hand, there are enough "choose what you say in response to this conversation" choices that it technically qualifies for the competition, I guess, but never before have I looked at an IFComp game and even considered bringing out the dreaded 1 score. (We take their guidelines very seriously and try to follow them, and per those guidelines, 1s are for entries that shouldn't even be in this competition because they're not IF.) I don't think we're going to do it, though; there are enough "choices" here to get in on a technicality. Still, we cannot in good conscience call this a "game" so much as a long textual story with a couple variations of certain scenes.
On the other hand, I have played IFComp games I absolutely hated and the lowest score we've given a game to date--the score we gave what we currently consider the worst IFComp game we have ever played--was a 3. And--and this is the important thing--we actually like Weird Grief. A lot. It's barely interactive as a story, but it's a good story. It touches on some deep themes. It has a sense of authenticity to it that makes it a refreshing departure from your typical "Hollywood Heartbreak" narratives.
It is incredibly pornographic. (We're used to adult content warnings in IF games because people swear a lot and maybe mention sex or imply it in a sort of fade-to-black way, but this has multiple sex scenes with the kind of intense focus one normally only sees in actual smut fics.) The pornography itself is used in a refreshingly honest way, as a seldom talked about part of the grieving process. This is an important lesson that not nearly enough people realize: brains are weird, and grief and shock take people to completely unpredictable places. Some people have breakdowns and sobbing fits, others go numb. Some feel angry or relieved or annoyed or heartbroken or all of the above, all at once. Some feel horny. There's a lot of awkward self-consciousness about this--"should I really be feeling this so soon after...? Does this make me a bad person?"--and I wish there wasn't, because that happens sometimes, not always but definitely sometimes (grief is an unpredictable beast.) It happened to me after my last breakup. Therefore, I know that this is an authentic reaction, the confusion over it is also an authentic reaction, and I wish we had more stories like this so that people experiencing feelings like this had more representation and more examples that could help them feel less alone, less like there's something wrong with them because this is where the complete chaotic RNG that is your brain in this whole process happened to land that day. I love that this story went there. I love that this story exists.
But is it an IFComp game?
I...
Look. The Dead Account is fantastic, probably our favorite one we've played so far this year as of this writing. Weird Grief is also fantastic, and it deserves to be here so that people can experience more of this story. Where one game goes, the other should follow. They're a matched set. One of them does a lot better job with the actual rules of IFComp submissions than the other, though. And so we may have to find ourselves downvoting a story we loved on sheer principle.
But I'm not going below a 3, because I refuse to let the current "lowest scored IFComp games we've ever played" entries off the hook, especially for something like this.
Weird Grief by Bez is a side story, a companion piece meant to be played alongside The Dead Account (which we covered previously.) Rather than playing from the perspective of a Hivekind messenger employee investigating the case of Mike Stanvinci through flagged messages and profiles and group chatroom interfaces, Weird Grief assumes the role of one of Mike's partners and is a presented as a much more standard narrative that doesn't try to dress itself up as anything fancy.
We are... conflicted. On one hand, there are enough "choose what you say in response to this conversation" choices that it technically qualifies for the competition, I guess, but never before have I looked at an IFComp game and even considered bringing out the dreaded 1 score. (We take their guidelines very seriously and try to follow them, and per those guidelines, 1s are for entries that shouldn't even be in this competition because they're not IF.) I don't think we're going to do it, though; there are enough "choices" here to get in on a technicality. Still, we cannot in good conscience call this a "game" so much as a long textual story with a couple variations of certain scenes.
On the other hand, I have played IFComp games I absolutely hated and the lowest score we've given a game to date--the score we gave what we currently consider the worst IFComp game we have ever played--was a 3. And--and this is the important thing--we actually like Weird Grief. A lot. It's barely interactive as a story, but it's a good story. It touches on some deep themes. It has a sense of authenticity to it that makes it a refreshing departure from your typical "Hollywood Heartbreak" narratives.
It is incredibly pornographic. (We're used to adult content warnings in IF games because people swear a lot and maybe mention sex or imply it in a sort of fade-to-black way, but this has multiple sex scenes with the kind of intense focus one normally only sees in actual smut fics.) The pornography itself is used in a refreshingly honest way, as a seldom talked about part of the grieving process. This is an important lesson that not nearly enough people realize: brains are weird, and grief and shock take people to completely unpredictable places. Some people have breakdowns and sobbing fits, others go numb. Some feel angry or relieved or annoyed or heartbroken or all of the above, all at once. Some feel horny. There's a lot of awkward self-consciousness about this--"should I really be feeling this so soon after...? Does this make me a bad person?"--and I wish there wasn't, because that happens sometimes, not always but definitely sometimes (grief is an unpredictable beast.) It happened to me after my last breakup. Therefore, I know that this is an authentic reaction, the confusion over it is also an authentic reaction, and I wish we had more stories like this so that people experiencing feelings like this had more representation and more examples that could help them feel less alone, less like there's something wrong with them because this is where the complete chaotic RNG that is your brain in this whole process happened to land that day. I love that this story went there. I love that this story exists.
But is it an IFComp game?
I...
Look. The Dead Account is fantastic, probably our favorite one we've played so far this year as of this writing. Weird Grief is also fantastic, and it deserves to be here so that people can experience more of this story. Where one game goes, the other should follow. They're a matched set. One of them does a lot better job with the actual rules of IFComp submissions than the other, though. And so we may have to find ourselves downvoting a story we loved on sheer principle.
But I'm not going below a 3, because I refuse to let the current "lowest scored IFComp games we've ever played" entries off the hook, especially for something like this.