Being "Digital"

[krpalmer]

While I can't quite remember just how it happened, I did take notice of an "indie game" called "Digital: A Love Story." My usual long-simmering interest in "interactive fiction" made me pick up on a game revolving around dialing into BBSes "five minutes into the future of 1988" using the white-on-blue Workbench interface of an "Amie" computer, but I suppose I was also mildly intrigued by it being called a "visual novel," a term I perhaps can't altogether define but which I have heard of in connection to "anime adaptations of Japanese games." Once I'd downloaded the game, though, it did take me a while to get around to playing through all of it, and once I was finished I noticed there had already been a fair deal of discussion of it... still, it was an interesting experience, if one I feel concerned about "giving too much away" of. As "novel" might imply, there wasn't quite the wide-ranging, poking under everything, trying to find just the right command of an adventure game, but clicking "reply" to messages and gauging what that unseen response must have been from the followup was interesting in its own way; in some ways, it might be a more effective form of "interaction with characters" than a good number of adventure games. I am tempted to pay for another game by its author Christine Love, "Analogue: A Hate Story." (The immediate connection doesn't seem quite as obvious as the titles imply, anyway...)