freedom

Freedom
by anon

This is a minimally-implemented, minimally-written game, in which our hero, "as good-looking as ever", performs a couple of dull tasks before the game's contrived ending. He buys groceries, crosses the street, visits a bookstore. Plodding through this stuff, one wonders what the point of the game is. Maybe, in reference to the "Freedom" of the title, the point is to illustrate the lack of freedom in contemporary life?

No, according to the author in the ABOUT text: the point of the game is to illustrate how he "suffers" from "social anxiety disorder". The poor thing! It seems the main symptom of this debilitating condition is that it makes the street appear four times wider than it is long. Apart from that, it tends to make people glare at you in the supermarket, and prevents you from taking your groceries into the bookstore. How awful! However, I take some consolation from the fact that the PC's anxiety doesn't stop him getting into an immediate clinch with the first random chick he meets at a party. So it can't be all bad.

Whatever suffering the PC experiences here, it isn't half the suffering of actually playing this piece of crap, even though it only lasts two minutes. The writing lacks every trace of personality and interest. If your crippling insecurity is genuinely crippling, then surely you'd have something more substantial to say about it than this? I can only conclude that your insecurity is not genuinely crippling, and you're just a malingerer fishing for sympathy. And I'm sorry, but if all your suffering amounts to a bit of inconvenience at the supermarket, then I don't sympathise, especially if you have the nerve to present it as a "worst-case scenario". Nothing the PC experiences here is unusual or debilitating.

If there's one trend I dislike about modern medicine, it's the pathologising of all our harmless personality quirks and hang-ups. What was once a trait is now an illness. People are no longer shy, but have "social anxiety disorder". People are no longer giddy, but have "attention deficit hyperactivity disorder". People are no longer self-obsessed, boring assholes, but have "narcissistic personality disorder". Along with all its good work, psychiatry has spawned a variety of spurious illnesses, with a variety of ineffective and costly treatments, and a variety of quacks to back them up.

Why not continue this trend, I wonder, and pathologise literary failings? Freedom, after all, offers plenty to diagnose. The writing and game design suffer from a severe case of "talent deficit disorder", together with "blandness syndrome", "borderline vacuity", and a deep-seated mediocrity complex. There's enough here for a whole conference!

Rating: 1

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